Everfound (38 page)

DAMON McDANIEL

Rotsie and Moose went off with the four kids who had the most trouble soul-surfing, and left Jill with the boy who always raised his hand, earning him the nickname “The Teacher’s Pet,” or just “The Pet,” and a Korean kid they called “Seoul-Soul,” but that quickly became “SoSo.”

Luke Nguyen

The problem with having these two was that they were too focused. As Jill explained partialing, they watched, and listened, and Jill suspected they would constantly be peeling out of their practice hosts, seeking her approval. What she needed were a few solid moments with nobody watching her.

“We need to get out of the street,” Jill told them, “and find a place where people aren’t moving so much.” She looked down a row of shops, and said, “There—that gift shop. It’s the perfect place.”

But The Pet raised his hand. “Uh, excuse me, but won’t it be easier if people are sitting down? Like maybe in the Starbucks next door?”

“Why would I want to make it easier?”

They walked right through the glass front of the gift shop, a store full of china figurines, and leftover Christmas decorations at half price. The floor was thin, and they had to struggle to keep themselves from sinking. Jill pointed to two fleshies in line. “Half-jack those two,” she told them. “Hide behind their minds without taking them over,
then focus on one hand, and make that hand take something and slip it into their pocket without them knowing.”

“That’s shoplifting,” said The Pet.

Sebastian Var]ner

“Are you a skinjacker or aren’t you?” snapped Jill.

“I hate to tell you this,” said SoSo, “but I stink at half-jacking. Most of the time they know I’m there, and they freak out.”

“Practice makes perfect,” said Jill. “Now do it before you sink!”

SoSo looked at the fleshie, clenched his fists, and leaped inside. The Pet did the same to his fleshie, and both disappeared.

The moment they were gone, Jill made her move, jumping right through the wall into the Starbucks—which wasn’t just full of people sitting down, it was full of people with computers. Without a second to lose she jumped into the closest one—a fat guy with way too much facial hair, and the instant she was inside—

—
Down twenty points, stupid stock market, sell sell sell—

Jill knocked him unconscious and took over his body. It had been a long time since Jill had used a computer, and they had changed considerably. The keys were smaller, the screen bigger, and the maddening touchpad was nothing like a mouse.

She managed to close the stock market window, and found a mail icon. She clicked it, played around with the menu until she opened a new blank e-mail. Then she got to work typing out the names—but when she looked at her hands, she saw only her two index fingers extended, and she couldn’t make her other fingers touch the keys. This idiot didn’t know how to type! He could only hunt-and-peck, and
although Jill knew how to type—she had learned as a child from an old Mavis Beacon typing program—her own ability could not override the fat guy’s lack of muscle memory.

C’mon! Faster! Faster!
But no matter how quickly she tried to type, she kept having to correct errors, and find the right keys. Jill calmed herself down and concentrated, knowing that frustration would only make it worse.

Maril;ou DiLuzio

Six names. Twelve words. And yet it took almost two minutes to type them. Finally she was done, and she went to the top of the screen, filling in the e-mail address.

[email protected]

Then she hit send, made sure that the e-mail uploaded, then peeled out of the fat guy, jumping back through the wall and into the gift shop.

In the living world SoSo was having trouble with his fleshie. The poor woman was screaming and flailing her arms, knocking things off shelves and breaking them like the proverbial bull in a China shop. Finally SoSo pulled out. “See,” he told Jill. “I told you I suck at half-jacking.”

The Pet peeled out a moment later. “Maybe we should try this in a place where things won’t break.”

“Forget it,” Jill said. “You’re a couple of screw-ups. We’ll try partialing some other time.” Then they left, with Jill confident that her mission was accomplished—and it would have been, had there not been a typo in the e-mail address.

B
ad luck, bad karma, and plain old human error.

There was no other way to explain what happened in Eunice, New Mexico, just west of the Texas border. Until today, the town was little more than a spot on the map: a quiet and unremarkable place, with a population of about twenty-five hundred. In terms of industry there was a single factory that employed more than half the population: a plastics facility that manufactured lightweight components for fighter jets and smart bombs.

Protests were occasionally staged by activist groups who claimed that the people of Eunice were complicit in the creation of machines of death, and that the town would eventually get what was coming to it. Karma, the protesters said, would come a-calling.

Of course, no one took the protests seriously. It wasn’t like the people of Eunice were warmongers—and besides, the plastic fittings the plant produced were not destructive in and of themselves: They were just small parts of larger puzzles assembled a thousand miles away.

Under the circumstances, it was very difficult to piece
together the unlucky string of events that befell the town of Eunice, but it all began with a tanker truck. Such trucks rolling in from Odessa were a regular site at the plant, since the plant needed regular shipments of trimellitates, polybutane, and other raw materials needed to make their particular type of plastic.

One tanker truck, however, never made it to the plant. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the driver lost control of the wheel while approaching the town. A heart attack was suspected. The tanker truck plowed into an electrical station and ruptured, and as the electrical station blew, a dense cloud of fumes billowed into the air. While burning polybutane would have been a health hazard and general nuisance, it would not have been deadly. However, due to some clerical error back at the chemical company in Odessa, the tanker was full of methyl isocyanate instead, a chemical used in pesticides that’s only marginally safe to begin with, and when tossed into a fire, the resulting gas cloud would be lethal to anything downwind . . .

. . . Which was the entire town of Eunice.

The gas cloud caught everyone unawares, and in half an hour had taken out the whole population.

Bad luck, bad karma, and plain old human error.

What no one could explain, however, was how every building in town—even the ones that were nowhere near the accident—had been burned to the ground.

“We were unable to stop this tragedy,” Mary told her children, “but somehow we must find joy within the sorrow.”

Mary chose not to tell her children that the “accident”
was caused by her own skinjackers. Jill and Moose were sent to make sure that precisely the wrong chemical came to Eunice at precisely the wrong time, while her other skinjackers were sent to set roadblocks in and out of town—believing their efforts would stop the disaster. Instead, they succeeded in keeping the population from escaping.

Her children didn’t need to be troubled with the details. As the living who dined on fine steaks shunned all thoughts of the slaughterhouse, Mary’s children needed only to consider the plate before them . . . and theirs was a plate of compassion and of salvation.

The moment the cloud began to spill forth in the living world, and it was clear that there was nothing that could be done to stop it, Mary sent forth her children to catch the dying as they crossed. Those who were older, and could not be unbound from their path, were simply left to get where they were going. However, every child and teenager was grabbed at the precise moment of crossing and brought into Everlost.

With so many children at work, the final tally would clearly be impressive. Countless souls were now in transition, sleeping on the small deadspots where their living bodies had expired. They needn’t sleep for nine months, though, for Mary had come up with a plan to use the very force of evil that threatened her. She would lure the scar wraith into another extinguishing moment at the time of her own choosing, and create yet another Great Awakening. As to who would be extinguished, it didn’t really matter. She knew that most of her children would be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice if she asked.

“This place must be purified,” Mary told her skinjackers, once the toxic cloud had done its damage and had dissipated. “Purified by fire.” And she sent them out to burn the dead town of Eunice to the ground.

Now the fire raged all around Mary’s children. Some walked right into the flames just to know how living-world fire would feel. They could sense the intensity of the heat like a faint fever, but nothing more. Soon the living world had been burned away like so much chaff, revealing the treasures of the town of Eunice.

“Eternity will preserve what it will,” Mary told her children. “That which is worthy, that which is loved, will be blessed into Everlost.”

The little round gazebo in town hall park crossed. So did a statue erected to honor World War II veterans. A church with beautiful stained glass windows and a corner café were now a part of Everlost too. Not many homes crossed, but particular objects from them did. A stuffed animal here, a bicycle there. A clarinet, a rocking chair. Everlost was now littered with odds and ends resting on tiny deadspots and the occasional larger structure. And of course, there were the souls in transition.

When all the sleeping Interlights were gathered, they were laid on the benches of the church and counted. A hundred and seventy-eight in all.

Satisfied, Mary turned to Little Richard, whom she had taken on as her personal assistant. “Let every Afterlight go forth and find an object of desire,” she told him.

“Huh?”

She sighed. “Just tell everyone to pick one thing that’s
crossed over—but only one. I will not condone greed.”

“Yes, Miss Mary.” Then he went out to spread the word.

Emergency vehicles had begun arriving from every direction in the living world, and the skinjackers abandoned their hosts, returning to Everlost. Each of them carried with them the smell of smoke and the exhaustion of the living bodies they had inhabited.

Moose was the only one who had not yet returned, but Mary was not too concerned. He was easily distracted. More than likely he was either scavenging for crossed objects, or watching the town burn.

Mary, always an insomnoid, looked out from the beautiful, freshly crossed gazebo at the wonderful ruins of Eunice that night. All her children had found deadspots around the center of town, and either slept, or were engaged in various activities. Only the church was off-limits, for it was full of Interlights.

Mary had assigned two Afterlights who seemed content to tell knock-knock jokes to each other, to be the sentinels of the church.

“When the rest of us leave, you will stay here to guard the ones who sleep,” Mary told them. “And when they awake, you will be in charge. But always remember that it is I who am in charge of you.” Then she had given them a volume of her newest book, penned by hand and painstakingly copied for them by a girl with perfect penmanship who Mary had chosen as her personal scribe.

“Read this,” Mary had told the two jokesters. “Read it daily and when these new souls awake, please have them read it too.”

This was a key part of Mary’s plan. In each place she went, in every location she tore free from the living world, she would leave a team of Afterlights to tend to the sleeping Interlights left behind. Then when they awoke they would have a town to call their own, and would be welcomed into Mary’s extended community.

Yet 178 new Afterlights was just a tiny drop in the bucket. There were more than six billion people in the living world, and one-fifth of those were young enough to be saved by Mary. Even if she did this every single day it would take thousands of years to complete the job. That simply wouldn’t do. The war she had spoken to Milos about simply had to happen: The living had to be turned against one another, but she was still not exactly sure how to bring that about.

As she stood, looking out from the gazebo, a wind blew in the living world, dragging the smoke from the smoldering town westward. Mary could feel her own westward pull as well, stronger now than ever before. The answer to everything lay in that direction, just ahead of her, just past the horizon. Somewhere out there was the center of this strange gravity, and when she found it, when she stood right in the middle of it, she would know exactly what to do.

As she pondered the days ahead, looking out at the smoke, and her Afterlights shining through it, she saw one Afterlight coming toward her. One who wore a helmet. Moose had finally returned, and hopefully with a good excuse as to what had taken him so long . . . but as he got closer, Mary could sense that something was very, very wrong.

* * *

It had been a pretty bad football accident that landed Mitchell “Moose” Moessner’s body comatose in a Pittsburgh convalescent hospital, paralyzed from the neck down. Wilted flowers attested to the fact that he was visited regularly, but no one was visiting him at the moment that Allie “the Outcast” Johnson put his physical self to rest. Unlike Milos, he had not suffered brain damage. In fact, Moose’s brain should have been functioning normally, and yet he had never come out of his coma. It made perfect sense to Allie; consciousness could not exist here while his consciousness was elsewhere.