With the sudden spinning motion of the airship, it was hard for Johnnie to walk without stumbling into walls, making it harder to search for Charlie. Still, Johnnie bumped his way to the port promenade, the galley, and all the staterooms. Charlie’s song was coming through the vents, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. Meanwhile, below, they had already sailed halfway across the deadspot.
Finally Johnnie climbed up through a ceiling hatch, from the passenger compartment, and into the airship’s massive aluminum structure. There, on a narrow catwalk sat Charlie. He wasn’t singing anymore. And he was holding the bucket of coins, as if protecting it.
“What the heck are you doing here?”
Then Charlie pointed up. Johnnie looked to see the airship’s massive hydrogen bladders, like giant internal balloons all around them. Static electricity sparked through the entire space, coursing over the bloated bags of hydrogen… and wasn’t it static that brought down the Hindenburg to begin with?
“It can’t blow up again, right?” said Johnnie. “This is Everlost.” But there was something about this deadspot that made anything seem possible. He grabbed Charlie’s hand. “C’mon, we’re getting out of here!”
He practically dragged Charlie down from the infrastructure and back to the starboard promenade, opening a window. “I know it’s scary,” Johnnie said. “But we have to jump. We’ll probably just bounce anyway.”
But suddenly the air changed again, and the static sparks stopped, and when Johnnie looked down, he saw the border between the deadspot and the desert moving away from them. They had missed their chance. They were out over the living-world desert again.
“Nooooooooo!”
The airship stopped spinning, and went back to its normal drift-although the interference from the deadspot had shifted its direction by a few degrees to the south-but otherwise, their predicament was exactly the same as before.
Johnnie-O curled his big fingers into oversize fists. “Why couldn’t you have stayed put! We could be out of here!”
But Charlie just smiled and sang, “Camptown ladies sing this song; Doo-dah! Doo-dah!”
Johnnie-O peered sadly, longingly, out of the window at the huge, perfectly round, gray deadspot as it receded on the horizon.
Funny, but from this angle, he couldn’t help but notice how it resembled a giant Everlost coin.
CHAPTER 19
Roadkill
T hree weeks.
Allie lived the sordid life of a coyote for three weeks-although to her, the time was immeasurable. All she knew was that the days were many. Each moment was a nightmare for her because she never forgot who she was, or what she needed to do-but the senses and biological demands of the animal’s body held her in an iron grip.
Allie had never suffered from an addiction. Yet as she suffered through this, she’d come to know what it must be like; how a person could be unable to resist, knowing full well the depth of the consequences, yet still traveling that path to one’s own doom.
She had always been a willful person, but resisting this was like trying to stand firm against a tsunami. Humbling couldn’t begin to describe it. She didn’t think Jix intended this when he gave over the coyote for her to skinjack. How could he have known that the animal’s base instincts were stronger than her will to resist them?
As the first few hours passed on that first day, she knew that she would be permanently stuck inside the coyote if she stayed much longer-for no skinjacker can separate themselves from their host if they stay there too long-and yet the desire to hunt, to eat, to howl at the moon, made everything else feel trivial. Soon it was too late. After the first day in the animal, she knew she was bound to that mangy, flea-ridden body for the rest of its life. Perhaps someone else-someone with a canine kind of soul-would have enjoyed this, but that wasn’t Allie.
The feral spirit of the coyote would occasionally surface in her mind. It had grown used to its new reality, but Allie knew she never would, and when she gathered with other coyotes, they all bared their teeth and kept their distance, knowing she was not one of them.
Day after day, she suffered the living hell of this existence, until late one night she chased a rabbit across the highway, and was hit by a truck.
The coyote was killed, and Allie was painfully ejected from its body. The animal’s faint spirit leaped into its own particular light, presumably going off to dog heaven, or wherever it is that roadkill coyotes go, and Allie was back in Everlost, sinking butt-first into the living world.
She pulled herself out of the ground, but it wasn’t so easy to pull herself together. Now that she was herself once more, she was wracked with sobs, and she couldn’t stem the tide. She was not a girl given to tears, but this had been too much even for her. Life inside the coyote had been by far the worst experience of her life and afterlife, and such an experience deserved to be exorcised by a violent wave of emotion washing it from her soul.
She let her tears flow until the storm within her calmed. Then, when she was done, she got her bearings and made her way back to the train-or at least where the train had been. She found the spot as dawn began to light the eastern sky. The only sign that anything had happened there was the strange sight of the parlor car on top of the mansion.
She was free now. She could go back to Memphis and find herself, skinjack her own comatose body, returning to her life and putting all of this behind her… But how could she do that now? She had no idea if Mary was still a danger to the living world.
Feeling more alone than she ever had, Allie sat down on one of the rails, trying to decide what to do. For a moment she thought she smelled chocolate, and it reminded her of Nick.
Poor, poor Nick. He had lost his battle with the chocolate that plagued him. In the end it had completely consumed him, and he dissolved, leaving nothing but a bubbling brown puddle at Graceland. Allie knew it was Mary’s doing. She had lured him to the Graceland vortex, knowing it would accelerate Nick’s strange condition. Even if Allie had been able to escape from Milos, there was nothing she could have done for Nick. In the end, he was just one more of Mary’s casualties… and if Mary had her way, there would be many, many more. Mary would bring indescribable grief to the living world-and for what? So that Mary could reign over more and more children, becoming queen over this lonely, bittersweet world between life and death.
… Bittersweet…
Again, that scent of chocolate came to Allie, and although she was sure it was just her imagination, she looked around her in the growing light of dawn, trying to find its source. There, on a railroad tie was a brown footprint-then another, and another! She knew there had to be some logical explanation for this. She refused to allow herself to hope that maybe, just maybe…
She reached down and touched one of the prints, and brought the tip of her finger to her mouth. It was chocolate!
Could it be?
Was it possible?
Could Nick somehow have risen from that molten miasma he had become? Yes! There was only one Nick; only one “Chocolate Ogre.” These prints could be made by no one else!
Allie followed the footprints to where the chocolate pooled thicker. He had stopped here for a few moments. There were others who had stepped in it as well, leaving tread marks of different textures and sizes on the railroad ties. Was he attacked here? Were the other tracks from friends or foes? Perhaps he had been captured by the invading Afterlights-she had no way of knowing.
She found his last footprint on the iron of a railroad track and then nothing. He had stepped off the tracks and onto living ground, which left no footprints behind, so there was no way to track him. All she had was the direction of his final step: south, toward a city in the distance. San Antonio. Allie set off toward the city with renewed passion, and a strong sense of hope.
CHAPTER 20
Home Body
A llie did a systematic search of the city, traveling between locations by skinjacking, then peeling back into Everlost to look for signs of Nick. As muc
h as she despised Milos, she had to admit he had taught her well. Her skinjacking skills were cutting-edge, better even than his own. She could surf her way through a crowd, relaying body to body like an electric charge. On a busy day downtown she raced a speeding car and estimated she could travel at close to sixty miles per hour if there were enough fleshies in the street to conduct her spirit.
She found Nick’s telltale chocolate footprints in the Alamo, and was thrilled at first, until she realized it was a vortex, and feared it might have dissolved him again. Then she saw a trail of his prints leaving. She was relieved, and although she couldn’t track him from there, she knew he couldn’t be too far away. It appeared that he wasn’t a captive-and there were plenty of others who tracked his chocolate around the old mission. Who was he traveling with? Had he found himself more followers? Was he still trying to bring Mary down? Did he even know that Mary was in hibernation and would stay that way for months?
Allie knew the Neons had to be around somewhere too. She didn’t fear being captured by them. Now that she was in a bustling city, no gang of Afterlights could capture her. If they tried, all she had to do was step into a fleshie and she’d be a whole world away… Unless, of course, the Neons had skinjackers of their own, and she doubted that. Still, just to be safe, when she skinjacked, she always made sure that her subjects were in good physical condition in case she had to run.
She had chosen a girl in the living world to be her home base. Or “home-bod,” as Allie came to think of it. She was about fifteen, and reminded Allie of herself in some ways, and in some ways not. Her name was Miranda Womack, and she lived downtown with her family in a historic brick home on a street lined with massive old magnolia trees. Allie had found her sleeping over her homework at a nearby Starbucks, and was quick to discover that Miranda was somewhat narcoleptic-that is to say, she fell asleep at the most inopportune times, probably because she stayed up all hours of the night, much like Allie used to. Allie realized that her own body had caught up on all that lost sleep as it lay in a coma somewhere for the last four years.
Four years! It suddenly occurred to Allie that her sleeping body would be eighteen years old. She would not even recognize herself, if and when she finally chose to go back.
Well, at least when she skinjacked, she could be the age she felt.
Whenever Allie skinjacked Miranda, the girl never knew that Allie was there, because Allie was such a masterful skinjacker. She only jacked when Miranda was drowsy, putting her instantly to sleep. She always freed Miranda in the same place she started, and never spent more than half an hour within the girl’s body at any given time. After each skinjacking, Miranda simply assumed she had nodded off again.
“Honey, you really need to get more sleep,” her mother would say, and Miranda would always protest, saying things like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and such. The irony was that most of the dead-at least those in Everlost-rarely slept at all.
Allie used Miranda to take care of living-world business, such as creating a map of all the Everlost deadspots she found, and all the places she had explored in her search for Nick. She couldn’t create such a map in Everlost, since on the rare occasions that she found paper and pen, she would always use them for something much more important: refuting the things that Mary had written in her self-serving and deceptive books. Allie had no idea if anyone read the “books” she herself wrote, but all the same, she always left them in highly visible deadspots for anyone who might find them.
Each day Allie searched Everlost for clues of the whereabouts of Nick, Mary, and even Milos and his cohorts-for if the Neons hadn’t pushed them down, they could still spell trouble in any number of ways. Yet each day, Allie spent less and less time in that search. The more she skinjacked, the more compelling the living world became and the less important Everlost seemed to be.
Even observing the daily activities of Miranda Womack become obsessive. The girl’s life was so full of ridiculous drama, it was like watching a soap opera; fairly inane, but totally mesmerizing. Like the time her boyfriend, a somewhat sincere but woefully hormonal boy, confessed to kissing one of her friends at a party and tearfully asked Miranda for forgiveness. Apparently this was not the first time it had happened. Well, Miranda might have been forgiving of a multiple offender, but Allie was not-and saving Miranda from herself was the least Allie could do in payment for the use of her body. Allie skinjacked Miranda just long enough to tell him to go grow a spine, and she broke up with him. Then Allie skinjacked Miranda in school, and flirted a bit with a boy who Allie had already scoped out and knew was much more worthy. He asked Miranda out, they became the perfect couple, and that was that. In this way Allie had cast herself as the girl’s fairy godsister.
After all Allie had been through, delving into the ordinary was like submersing herself in a warm bath. It was comforting, and it made her want to put aside the heavy responsibility that came with being a skinjacker, and knowing the things she knew. Milos had tempted her with the craving every skinjacker had to skinjack. He spoke of the joy of it and she could not deny how wonderful it was, how powerful she felt-not just to be whoever she wanted to be, but to be able to change the course of people’s destinies by taking over just the right person at just the right time. She began to wonder if perhaps this was the true purpose of skinjacking. Maybe the world was full of such spirits, tweaking the living like spiritual mechanics, getting into the works of their lives and fixing whatever was broken.
… And these days, there was so much that was broken. One needed only to look at the news to see it. San Antonio alone had enough heartache. The twenty-car pileup on the interstate, the horrible high school fire, and half a dozen other disastrous events. Allie could not prevent the disasters, but as a skinjacker, she had the power to ease the pain of a troubled world.
For instance, the day after the deadly fire at Benson High School, she had gone into the homes and into the minds of grieving parents. She didn’t put them to sleep, however. Instead, she spoke to them loudly and clearly within their minds in the guise of an angel, telling them that their son or daughter had gone into a bright and welcoming light. These people heard her voice and were powerfully comforted.
When Milos had showed her this trick, he had called it terminizing -because he had gone into terminally ill patients, to ease their minds. He did it just to show off-she doubted he used the skill much. He also taught her justicing, which was much more aggressive and even more intrusive. It involved going into the mind of alleged criminals to find out if they were guilty or innocent. Allie had no real desire to go justicing; it was far too much of a violaton. And yet, there was one situation that she couldn’t get out of her mind no matter how much she tried: the case of the boy accused of starting the school fire.
His name was Seth Fellon-a very unfortunate name under the circumstances. Seth was a sixteen-year-old high school dropout who worked at a gas station near Benson High. His mug shot showed a pierced eyebrow, nose, and lip. There were also violent tattoos up and down his arms. Allie knew this because he was all over the news. They were calling him “the Benson Burner,” and although he insisted he was innocent, the evidence was incriminating. Word was that he would be tried as an adult.
If there was one thing that Allie had, it was insight into the soul, having seen through the eyes of so many people-and every time they showed Seth Fellon on the news, there was something about him-something about the whole situation-that didn’t sit right with her. She couldn’t say why.
“They ought to give him the death penalty,” Miranda’s father said while watching the news one night. “Lower the age for capital punishment, and be done with him.”
It was Miranda herself who gave Allie a crucial bit of insight. Allie was there in the room, observing but not skinjacking at that particular moment, so the thought was Miranda’s all on her own.
“I think he’s innocent,” Miranda said.
“That’s only because you think he’s cute,” her brother teased.
Allie couldn’t help but be a little bit proud of Miranda; she was absolutely right!
In her book Caution: This Means You!, Mary Hightower says this about the hazards of entering living-world buildings.
“Don’t. Plain and simple. Don’t enter a living-world building unless you have no other choice. Living-world floors are deceptively thin. Stand on a wood floor, and you may just find yourself sinking through to the basement too quickly to escape the relentless pull of gravity. Step into a living-world elevator, and you may just find it rising to higher floors, leaving you behind to plunge down the shaft.
Do not be tempted by curiosity, and do not accept a dare. Limit yourself to buildings that have crossed into Everlost. They are the only buildings worthy of our attention anyway.
CHAPTER 21
The Benson Burner
I t was a simple matter for Allie to get into a high security detention center, walking right through every security door as an Afterlight. Unlike most Afterlights, she didn’t have to worry about sinking through living-world floors, because she simply jumped inside of living hosts, piggybacking rides inside of them, hiding behind their consciousnesses, rather than taking them over completely. Such “half-jacking” made it easy for her to get around without being noticed. First she half-jacked a correctional officer on his way to the main cell block, hanging on to the edge of his thoughts as he went about his business. Then she jumped to another, and another and another, until she had a good sense of the detention center’s layout, and had gotten some inside info about the Benson Burner, who was the subject of quite a few conversations.
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