Everfound s-3

by Neal Shusterman

  Allie knew there was no time to lose. She leaped out of the fifth-grade girl and began the most important relay race of her life. She hurled herself to another child, then to a pedestrian on the other side of the fence. She body-surfed her way from fleshie to fleshie, until she was in the construction site, then she paused just long enough to get her bearings. She was a construction worker, and the workers around her were already looking up, wondering why the I-beam load had swung so wide.

  Allie turned to leap again, determined to make it up into the crane rising above the tower’s highest floors, but she came face-to-face with Milos in the body of one of the other workers.

  “Don’t forget I am better at this than you,” he said, and he grabbed her. “I taught you everything you know!”

  Instantly Allie leaped into the worker behind Milos, then to his right, then to his left and back again, creating a pattern of four-moving faster and faster until she was skinjacking all four men. Then she swung at him: identical punches from four different directions, powerful enough to bring Milos to his knees.

  “Not everything!” she said in four voices. Then she pulled herself together, and leaped away, leaving Milos reeling from the blows.

  Allie launched into a construction worker on the second floor, then to one on the fourth, the seventh, the tenth, up and up, relaying it in leaps and bounds as if the building was a skinjacker jungle gym. It was just as she had done at the Grand Ol’ Opry so many months ago when Milos taught her to body-surf this way, swinging from fleshie to fleshie as quick as lightning. They had tied that first race, but this time Allie had to win.

  Twentieth floor, twenty-third, twenty-sixth. It was hard finding construction workers now to leap to and the most she could leap through was three floors at a time in the living world. Finally she found herself in the body of a welder on the top floor. Up here, the building was nothing more than a steel frame. It was windy and treacherous… and hanging in space before her, almost parallel with her line of vision, was the load of girders nearly in position above the playground. Far below, kids were desperately trying to climb the playground fence to escape. Had it been a chain-link fence, they might have done it, but it was wrought iron-vertical bars with spiked tips-and the kids couldn’t get a foothold. No one was getting out.

  Allie looked up to where the spine and horizontal boom of the crane met. That’s where the control cab was, still far above her. There was no way to leap that far. She would have to climb the ladder in the body of the welder-but just then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  It was Milos. He was in a lean and sinewy worker. He looked like a man whose body knew how to fight. “I’m sorry, Allie, but I can’t let you ruin this…” And he elbowed Allie in the jaw. She felt excruciating pain as the welder’s jaw shattered, and she fell to the naked beam, which was barely a foot wide. She tried to scramble away, but the pain from the broken jaw made her weak and unable to focus. Fortunately they were both tethered to a safety cable… but unfortunately Milos unhooked their safety wires.

  “More interesting this way, yes?”

  As he moved in for the fight, Allie thrust her legs out, kicking Milos, and knocking his feet out from under him. He landed on top of her, pinning her to the beam. His face was just inches away from hers. She could smell the remains of a rancid cigar on his fleshie’s breath.

  “If you were in a different body,” Milos said, “I might kiss you again. But then, no. Mary is a much better kisser.”

  And then Milos did the unthinkable.

  Holding on to Allie, he rolled off the girder, taking Allie with him, and they began a thirty-story plunge.

  “No!” Allie felt that horrible falling sensation, a roller coaster without a track. The whole world spun around them. In just a few seconds, their fleshies would be dead and their own spirits would be injected deep into the earth by their momentum. But when Allie met eyes with Milos as they fell, all she saw were the eyes of a horrified construction worker. Milos was gone… and right beside them a construction elevator carried Milos, in a freshly-skinjacked worker to the top floor.

  Now in the last few moments of the plunge, Allie did the only thing she could do. “I’m sorry,” she said to the two doomed men. “I hope you get where you’re going.” Then, just before impact, Allie peeled out and leaped up and away like a pole-vaulter, putting all the force of her will behind the leap. She shot through the Everlost void searching for flesh, anyone’s flesh, to give her safe harbor, and – don’t sweat don’t sweat / and stick to more buzzwords upward trend / target demographics and if you get lost point to the graph Allie forced full control over whoever’s body she was in, and found herself staring at a dozen dark-suited people in a conference room, pointing to a graph. It was such a total disconnect from the moment before, she thought she must have actually died, or at the very least lost her mind. It took her a moment to realize that she had leaped so powerfully, she had landed a block away, in an entirely different office building.

  “Go on,” said the man at the far end of the table, obviously the boss. “What was that about our target demographics?”

  Then, one of the executives at the table stood and looked out of the window. “Hey, did you see that? I think two people just fell from the Last National Life building!”

  Everyone got up to look, but only Allie noticed the load of girders still hanging thirty stories above the playground. She was relieved the load hadn’t been released yet, but had to wonder why.

  At that same moment, Moose sat in the control cab of the sky crane in full control of his fleshie, staring at the release button. He had been staring at it for at least a minute now. The load of girders was positioned exactly where it was supposed to be, but he couldn’t hit the button. He thought back to the part he played in the concert disaster. It had been hard to make himself set off the sprinklers at the Rhoda Dakota concert.

  “She is for you,” Milos had told him. “When she wakes up, she will be yours.”

  Although Moose was thrilled at the idea of just meeting Rhoda Dakota, much less a date-after-death with her, knowing he was responsible for ending her life made it all seem a little bit dishonest, didn’t it?

  And now this.

  In all the other disasters, his acts were just a small part of a larger whole… but this time, it was all him. He would be releasing the load of deadly beams. Not Squirrel, not Milos-him.

  And so he stared at the button.

  The girders were still dangling from the end of the cable when Allie body-surfed her way out of the nearby office building, and down the street toward the playground once more, but since her eyes were on the load of girders, she wasn’t watching the fleshies she surfed. She miscalculated, overshot the fleshie she was aiming for, and stumbled to the ground.

  She was back in Everlost again, still down the street from the school. But something had changed. To Allie’s surprise, there were Afterlights running all around her-Milos’s Afterlights-and they were running away from the playground. Allie saw Lacey and caught her. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “It’s horrible!” Lacey said. “You have to run before it eats you!” And she raced off with the others.

  Then Allie saw it. It was perhaps the most horrific thing she had ever seen: a puke-green creature covered with scales as sharp as razors. Its head was a giant bloodshot eyeball sprouting tentacles instead of eyelashes, and at the end of each tentacle was a hungry tooth-filled mouth.

  … And at the sight of the horrible beast, Allie’s afterglow flushed purple with a deep and powerful love.

  ***

  The journey of Mikey and Clarence to San Antonio was not an easy one. Suffice it to say that it involved many unorthodox methods of travel in two different worlds.

  It was Nick’s sweet aroma that had led Mikey and Clarence to the playground. Without it, they would have wandered the streets of San Antonio as Allie had, no closer to solving the mystery of the psycho-jackers than she had been all these weeks. But once Nick came out into the
open, without even knowing it he became a beacon for anyone trying to find him.

  They found Nick right about the time Allie and Milos battled on the thirtieth floor. When they saw Nick, and the many Afterlights waiting in the playground, Clarence was hesitant. He had never seen so many “ghosties,” in one place. Mikey, however, went straight to Nick, who looked at him, bewildered.

  “Mikey?” The change in Nick’s face was almost immediate. The unnatural roundness of his head took on a more defined shape.

  “Have you found Allie?” Mikey asked, never realizing that her spirit had just shot past them, and into the office building a block away.

  “Allie!” Nick said with intense joy. “That’s her name.” Now eyebrows formed, and lids that blinked over brown eyes.

  “Of course that’s her name. Have you seen her?”

  Nick shook his head. “No. But I remember her now. We crossed together, didn’t we? In a forest.” And when he smiled, there were now teeth where just a hollow hole had been.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Clarence, who pointed with his Everlost hand to the playground. “These children are trapped.” At first Mikey assumed their screams were the sounds of play, but they were screams of terror. Kids futilely tried to squeeze through the bars and climb over the spikes of the wrought-iron fence, while all around them the Afterlights just stood there, as if waiting for something to happen.

  “Nick, what’s going on?” Mikey asked.

  Nick pointed up, and for the first time, they saw the load of I-beams hanging directly over the playground. “They’re reaping souls,” Nick told them. “But I don’t think it’s right. Do you?”

  Mikey didn’t need to answer him. The answer was right on his face.

  Clarence, still a rescue worker at heart, sprung into action first. “I’ll help the living, you go do something about those freaking ghosties.” Then Clarence smashed the driver’s window of the nearest parked car, popped the trunk, and grabbed a crowbar in his living hand. In an instant he was racing toward the playground gate, where he pounded the bicycle lock with the crowbar over and over.

  Mikey knew he had no power to help the living, and the only weapon he had against the Afterlights was fear. So digging deep into the darkest pit of his imagination he drew forth the most frightening miscreation he could dredge up and transformed himself into a foul-looking, fouler-smelling tentacled thing, the likes of which had never been seen in this or any other world. Then he threw himself into the playground roaring, turning the tips of his tentacles into tooth-filled mouths, each of which roared in a different dissonant pitch.

  One look, and all the Afterlights scattered in terror, abandoning their mission, but that didn’t do a thing for the living children still trapped in the playground-and no matter how hard Clarence hit that lock, it wouldn’t break. So instead he used the crowbar to pry the gate from its hinges…

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  The sky-crane control booth had flown open and Moose was faced with a furious construction foreman.

  “I… I…”

  “Why haven’t you dropped them?”

  Moose quickly realized that it was Milos, but he was no more relieved. “Maybe we shouldn’t do it, Milosh. I mean, itch jusht a bunsh of little kidsh.”

  “We need all ages, you idiot! Mary would expect no less.” And when Moose made no move toward the control panel, Milos said, “Either you do it, or I will.”

  “Okay,” said Moose. “Then you do it.”

  Milos glared at him. Then, without the slightest hesitation, he reached out, pushed the button, and released the entire load.

  Mikey, still in beastly form, frightened the last of the Afterlights away, then turned to see Clarence pry the gate off its hinges, just as the girders above them began a thirty-story drop. A flood of living children escaped from the playground as the girders fell, and just then Mikey heard a voice behind him.

  “Mikey, is that you?”

  It was Allie! The sound of her voice chased the beast back to the depths of Mikey’s mind in an instant and he became himself once more. She ran toward him, but before they could embrace, a crash exploded in the living world violent enough to feel in Everlost.

  No matter how strong the climbing starship was, it could not hold off a crushing onslaught of tempered steel. The load of falling girders didn’t just destroy the jungle gym, it shattered it. Fragments of plastic exploded in all directions, and even the ground beneath it fractured from the weight. The principal and teachers, who were the last out of the gate, were hit by plastic and asphalt shrapnel, and although those wounds were painful, they were not deadly-and their larger bodies shielded the escaping children.

  The playground was destroyed but the children were saved.

  Then as Allie and Mikey looked to the spot where the climbing starship had been, they saw something amazing. The space-age jungle gym was gone from the living world, but in Everlost a strange swirl of ectoplasmic smoke, almost alive with purpose and design, began to condense and change color resolving from green to shades of blue and gray. It took shape as if the cosmos itself had breathed into a huge invisible mold the exact size and shape as the jungle gym. For a moment it shimmered like a mirage, and then became solid. The entire playground, lost to the living world, was now a part of Everlost.

  “Wow” was all that Mikey could say. In all his years in Everlost he had seen many things but had never witnessed a place cross into Everlost. Finally he turned to Allie, ready for that long-overdue reunion, but Allie’s eyes were still locked on the jungle gym, because she saw something he had not yet seen. Not all the children were saved

  … because crawling out of the newly crossed jungle gym was a little boy who Allie recognized. It was the blond boy Milos had skinjacked. Milos must have put him to sleep so soundly that when Milos left his body, the boy remained unconscious within the starship tunnels and was still there when the steel came crashing down.

  “There’s always one,” said a man’s voice Allie didn’t recognize. “No matter how many you save, there’s always one.” There, standing just a few yards away from Mikey, Allie saw a man who seemed half in Everlost and half out-but before she could process what she saw, something else stole her attention. A brand-new tunnel now opened before the boy, much different from the climbing tunnels he had just crawled out of… and the light at the end of this tunnel was blinding.

  That’s when Milos barged furiously past her. “I will not leave this place empty-handed!” He ran, determined to tackle the boy out of the tunnel, and trap him in Everlost-but out of nowhere a brown blur launched itself at Milos, knocking him to the ground before he could get to the boy.

  “This ends here,” said Nick with such fury that his chocolate ran as dark as tar. “Let the boy go!” Even as he said it, the blond boy’s eyes lit up and a smile filled his face. He reached a hand toward the tunnel, it drew him in, and the tunnel vanished. Whatever his destination, he got there without any further interference.

  Everyone was speechless. The only sounds now were from the living world; the creak of settling steel, the cries of all the kids who survived, the soothing voices of adults trying to comfort them, and the distant sound of approaching sirens.

  Milos, now smeared with tar-dark chocolate, pulled himself away from Nick and looked hatefully at everyone around him. In his mind he was the only one wronged here. He was the only victim. Even Moose had betrayed him, and was still up in the sky crane bawling his eyes out like a baby, just because Milos dropped the load of steel. Well, at least he still had Squirrel, who now came up beside him. Then he saw Clarence, and froze.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” said Squirrel with a terrified warble in his voice. “Do you know what that is?”

  “I know.” Milos had heard the scar wraith legend, but he had never believed it was real. He figured it was the Everlost version of a fairy tale, a story meant to frighten little children into obedience. Yet here before them was the real thing. Then he realized who had brought it.
He turned to Mikey with the kind of disgust usually reserved for the times he was a monster.

  “You brought a scar wraith?”

  “A what?” said the wraith. “What did you just call me?”

  Mikey kept his eyes on Milos and smiled. “The killings stop now,” Mikey told him, crossing his arms. “Surrender, or be extinguished.”

  “Run, run!” said Squirrel. “We gotta skinjack and run!”

  But Milos stood his ground. He thought about Mary, and how she could stand in the face of anything, how she would never retreat. If he were ever to be an equal in her eyes, he would have to learn that kind of courage, that kind of commitment. Maybe then, he would earn the kind of respect she commanded. Maybe then, he would feel worthy of her. “We will leave here, and you won’t stop us,” Milos said, forcing himself to look fearlessly into the scar wraith’s Everlost eye. “I don’t care what evil you threaten us with!”

  “Evil?” said the wraith. “What do you mean ‘evil’? I just saved all those children!”

  “You condemned them!” Milos screamed. “Condemned them to live! I offered them salvation. I am the one Mary chose to see her vision through. Me. And I will not let any of you stop that vision.”

  “What is wrong with you?” the scar wraith snapped. “Are you the one who caused all this?” Then he advanced on Milos.

  “Clarence, wait!” said Mikey, but Clarence was too worked up to listen.

  It would be easy to say that what Milos did next was out of selfishness and cowardice-but at the moment, he wasn’t thinking of himself. Instead, he was thinking about Mary and her children. If he were touched by the scar wraith and extinguished, who would lead them? Moose and Squirrel? They couldn’t lead themselves out of an open grave. Without Milos, it would be over. Mary’s dream would die and when she awoke she would be alone, with nothing. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

  And so when the scar wraith approached him, he took a diagonal step backward putting himself behind Squirrel like a king retreating behind a pawn.