Everwild (31 page)

Allie clutched the bear to her chest, and felt herself becoming emotional. She blamed it on the boy's physiology— after all, little kids are quick to turn on the waterworks—but who was she kidding? These tears were all hers. She sat down, and let the tears flow gently and quietly.

Why had she come back here? Did she really think she could just walk into her parents house in the body of this boy, and talk to them? And yet she was already angling on ways to return tomorrow—perhaps in the body of someone selling alarm systems. Would that be her life now? Returning each day in a different body, pretending to be someone else, just so she could be near her parents?

She curled up on the bed clutching the bear—a remnant of a life that was lost. Then something happened that she wasn't expecting. She should have realized it could happen, because, after all, it was the middle of the night, and she was
in the body of a small, exhausted child. As she held tightly on to the bear, her thoughts began to swim together, and in an instant, without warning, Allie fell asleep.

Allie awoke at 7:45 in the morning.

Unfortunately the boy she was skinjacking had woken up at 7:41. It's amazing what can happen within the span of four minutes.

“It's all right, don't worry—it will all be all right. We'll get you back home.”

It was her mother's voice. She was in her mother's arms. They were rocking back and forth. She was out of breath, her vision was blurry, her chest was heaving, and a God-awful wailing sound was coming out of her. Allie's whole body was shivering with the force of her own sobs. What was going on here? Where was she?
Who
was she?

“I wanna go home,” she heard a child's voice say. It was all nasal and stuffy so it came out “
I wadda go hobe.”
Then she realized it was her own mouth speaking those words. All at once it came back to her—she was in the body of a boy she had skinjacked. She was in her parents' home, in her own room. Her mother was holding her, her father was standing nearby, phone in hand.

“I wadda go hobe!” the boy wailed again—he had no idea how he had gotten here. Then Allie realized a moment too late that she wasn't hiding behind his consciousness— she was out there in the open, right in the middle of his mind. Now that she was awake, the boy knew she was there, and he screamed in terror.

“Who are you?” the boy wailed. “Go away! Go away!
Get out of here!” Allie's mother backed off, thinking he was talking to her. “I don't want you here! Get out of me!”

This was a bad situation that was only getting worse. The best Allie could hope for now was damage control. She struggled to seize the boy's body, and send him back to dreamland, but now that he knew she was there, he didn't go easily. He went kicking and screaming all the way, until finally his thoughts fell in upon themselves and he was unconscious.

Allie was in control, but the boy's body was still full of fear and heaving with sobs. She looked to her father who was holding the phone in one hand, and in his other hand … in his other hand …

…
he had no other hand.

His left arm now ended just past the elbow. As Allie tried to process this, she saw that his left hand was shifting the phone in his palm, preparing to dial with his thumb. He was poised over the 9 button.

Calling 911 was definitely not part of Allie's damage control.

“You're calling the police?” Allie screeched, using the boy's wild state to her advantage. “I don't want the police! I don't I don't I don't!” She screamed as loudly as she could, and her father looked helpless.

“Put down the phone, Adam!” her mother ordered.

“All right, all right!” He dropped it on the desk like it was about to explode. “There, I've put it down.”

Allie stopped screaming, and took a minute to calm the boy's body down, allowing her mother to hold her. Allie hugged her back, and took more comfort from it than her
mother could possibly know. The convulsive sobs eased until they were nothing more than shallow sniffles. “Can you tell us your name?” Allie's father asked.

Allie did know his name, because if there's one thing that little kids fill every thought with, it's their identity.

“Danny,” she said. “Danny Rozelli.”

“Well, Danny,” said Allie's mom, “I think you did a little bit of sleepwalking last night.”

“Yeah,” said Allie, “sleepwalking, yeah.” She was always impressed by her mother's ability to be logical against all reason.

“Could you tell us where you live?” Allie's father asked.

She knew where Danny Rozelli lived, but wasn't ready to share that information, so she shook her head, and said, “Something street.”

Her parents sighed in unison.

Allie looked at the stump of her father's arm. There were indentations in the skin that must have been from a prosthetic arm, but of course he hadn't had time to put it on before finding little Danny Rozelli screaming in their dead daughter's bed.

“How'd that happen?” Allie asked, realizing that a seven-year-old's lack of tact was an asset now.

Her father hesitated for a moment, then he said, “Car accident.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Ouch.”

Her father also had a scar on his forehead and cheek. So the accident had taken his right arm, and left him with scars. None of it was pleasant, but it could have been a whole lot
worse. Then again, it
was
worse, because they had also lost a daughter.

Allie longed to tell them that they hadn't lost her at all— that she was right here in front of them, but she couldn't find a way to do that as the cat woman, and she couldn't as Danny Rozelli, either.

“Do you know your phone number, at least?” her mother asked. “We really should let someone know you're here— your parents must be worried sick.”

Allie didn't have much sympathy for parents who would eventually get their child back. She didn't know the number anyway, and that was fine. She was finally here with her own parents, and they were treating her with love and kindness. This was the closest thing she might ever have to true family time with them.

“I'm hungry,” she said. “Can I have something to eat?”

Her parents glanced to each other, her mother threw her gaze to the phone, her father nodded and he left the room. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he was going to call the police from another room. Allie thought of throwing another hissy fit, but realized she couldn't stall the inevitable much longer. She would make the best of the time she had.

“Can I have Apple Jacks?” she asked. “Apple Jacks in strawberry milk?”

She could have sworn her mother turned a previously unknown shade of pale.

“Never mind,” said Allie. “You probably don't have that.”

“Actually,” said her mother, “we do.”

Her father rejoined them in the kitchen, giving a secret nod to his wife. He must have made the call. Allie figured
they had about five minutes before the police arrived.

Allie savored every spoonful of her cereal while her parents sat with her at the kitchen table. She tried to trick herself into believing this was just a regular family breakfast.

“Sorry if they're a little stale,” her mother said.

“No,” said Allie, “they're fine.”

“Our daughter liked Apple Jacks,” her father said. “She liked them with strawberry milk, too.”

“A lot of kids do,” Allie told him—although she didn't know anyone else who ate them that way. She dipped the spoon into the pink milk and let the last applejack float in like a lone life preserver.

“More, please.”

Her mother poured a second bowl. Allie pushed down the orange cereal circles with the back of her spoon, coating them with milk.

“I guess that was your daughter's room I was in, huh?”

Her mother nodded, but didn't meet her eyes.

“Something happened to her, didn't it?”

“Yes, Danny, something did,” her father answered.

“You don't have to talk about it,” Allie said, realizing this was going too far.

“No, that's okay—it was a long time ago,” he said.

Not that long
, Allie wanted to say, but instead she said, “I'll bet she loved you very much.”

She should have left it there, but she could see a police cruiser pulling up to the curb outside, and then a second one. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now.

“Sometimes people go away,” Allie told them. “They don't mean to, but they can't help it. It's nobody's fault. I'll
bet if she could, she'd want to tell you that it's okay—that
she's
okay. I mean, people die, but that doesn't always mean they're gone.”

Then her mother and father looked to each other, then back to Danny Rozelli with moist eyes, and her mother said, “Allie's not dead.”

Allie grinned. It was so like her parents to see things that way. “Of course she's not. As long as you remember her, I guess she'll never really be dead.”

“No,” her father said. “We mean that she's still alive.”

Allie slowly lowered her spoon into the bowl, staring at them. “Excuse me?”

“She's just asleep, Danny,” her father said. “She's been asleep for a long, long time.”

Comatose.

Nonresponsive.

Persistent vegetative state.

All complicated words used by medical specialists to label a patient who remains unconscious. You would think that the labels mean something—that doctors know exactly what's going on in the brain of a comatose patient. But the truth is, nobody really knows anything. A coma can actually mean a whole range of things, but at its heart, all it really means is that someone simply won't wake up.

Allie Johnson had suffered internal injuries and severe head trauma in a head-on collision. She flew through the windshield, into another boy who was on his way through his own windshield. Nick was, of course, killed instantly, but Allie was quite a fighter. Her heart continued to beat. It was beating as they rushed her to an emergency room. It was beating as they hooked her to a dozen different life-support machines. It was beating as they worked on her on an operating table for five hours to repair her massive wounds, and it was still beating after all the operations were done.

Thanks to medical science, and a body that simply would not give up, Allie did not die. Although her wounds were severe, her damaged body eventually healed, and her brain still showed a hint of basic brainwave pattern, proving that she was not entirely brain-dead. Brain-dead would have been easy. It would have given everyone a reason to just throw in the towel. But now Allie's parents were both blessed, and cursed, with the smallest fraction of hope.

“I won't try to sugarcoat this for you,” the doctor had told her parents several weeks into Allie's coma. “She could wake up tomorrow, she could wake up next month, next year, or she might never wake up at all—and even if she does, there's a good chance she won't be the girl you remember. Her brain might be too damaged for higher cognitive functions—right now we just don't know.” Then, in that compassionate yet heartless way that doctors have, he told Allie's distraught parents this: “For your sake, I hope she either wakes up the same girl you knew, or dies very quickly.”

But neither of those two things happened. And now in a hospital somewhere, in a room somewhere, in a bed somewhere, Allie Johnson lies asleep unable to wake up …

… because her soul is in Everlost.

Little Danny Rozelli was having a bad day. It began with waking up in a strange house, and now many hours later, things weren't getting any better. He was talking to himself, twisting and turning in bed—everything short of spinning his head around and vomiting pea soup. In the olden days, people would have said the boy was possessed, but modern science knew better. Danny was just sick. Very, very sick.

“Get out of me!”

—I can't!—

“Get out of me!”

—Just calm down!—

“Mom! Make her get out of me!”

—Will you stop saying things like that out loud! They already think you've gone crazy!—

Danny Rozelli was a willful little kid, who was still too teed off to be reasonable. He had already discovered the trick of thinking out loud. It gave him more power over his own body—it helped him to stay in control. Unfortunately,
when you think out loud, people can hear you.

“Danny, honey, it's all right—everything's going to be all right.” But clearly Danny's mother didn't believe this, because she turned to her husband and cried, “What do we do? What do we do?”

Allie fought against the boy, and regained control of his body long enough to say, “Nothing's wrong with me. Everything's fine,” but Danny fought back, his body went into convulsions, and he wailed, “Make her LEAVE!”

It was all Allie's fault. If she hadn't fallen asleep in his body, and skinjacked him for seven whole hours, none of this would have happened.