Текст книги "Everfound"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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CHAPTER 26

The Angels of Life

The Chocolate Ogre was confused.

It would have been fine if he hadn’t known the depth of his confusion, but he was fully aware of how confused he was. He knew, for instance, that he was being used by Milos, and yet, Milos was so very kind to him. According to Milos, he and the Ogre were best friends now. He seemed so sincere, it was easy for the Ogre to believe it. Sometimes.

Then there was the Ogre’s alleged devotion to this girl named Jill. He had no memory whatsoever of her, and yet Milos, Moose, and Squirrel all insisted that he and Jill were in love and that if Jill ever showed up he should sink with her to the center of the earth, so they could be together until the end of the world. It all sounded very romantic. And yet, not.

In his mind, the Ogre had a memory of two girls. One all dressed in green whom he loved, and another who he believed may have crossed with him into Everlost. Milos just laughed when the Ogre suggested that.

“You did not cross into Everlost,” Milos told him. “You are the Chocolate Ogre; you have always been here.” There was a distinct possibility that it was true, but the Ogre only believed it once in a while.

Milos was certainly clever—there was no doubting that. He was very good at planning exciting excursions for the Afterlights in his care. “Angels of Life,” he called them. Their excursions made special places—and people, too—cross into Everlost.

This did not sit well with the Ogre. There was a powerful sense in him that these excursions were wrong.

One day as they sat in the crossed bank building that they called home, the Ogre brought his concerns to Milos. “You’re killing people,” the Ogre pointed out. “Even if it’s for their own good, I don’t think you should be doing it.”

Milos dismissed his concerns as if he were a small child. “Words like ‘killing’ and ‘dying’ are living-world lies. The living fear crossing because they do not know we are waiting here for them, to save them from the light.” Milos looked out over his Afterlights. “Do you think any of them are sorry to be here? And when the souls we have reaped awake, do you think they will despair, and despise us for having cared enough to bring them into Everlost? No!”

Well, that remained to be seen. There would be no way to gauge their gratitude until they awoke. So far the souls they had reaped were sleeping out their hibernations in the bank vault. According to Milos, they belonged in a vault, because they were treasures. Gifts for Mary, if and when they found her.

The thought of Mary made the Ogre flutter a bit inside, as it always did—but now he knew the feeling was just the devotion all good and true Afterlights had for the girl sent to Everlost to care for them. At least he thought that was it. He wasn’t really certain about anything except the knowledge that he was uncertain.

As for Mary, they were no closer to finding her. There had been no further sign of the Neons and every time it was mentioned, it was a reminder to everyone of how badly Milos had screwed up.

“My mistakes only make me stronger,” Milos said whenever it came up. “Stronger and more determined to make a better world for Mary when she awakes. It is like they say, ‘We burn from our mistakes,’ and now I burn with more determination than before.”

Once in a while Milos would send Moose and Squirrel out alone for smaller missions—the ones that didn’t involve people, just real estate. So far Moose and Squirrel had caused a coffee shop, a bowling alley, and a post office to cross. The post office had been an accident. Now, however, they received a daily supply of dead letters to read, and some were highly entertaining.

Things took a definite turn for the worse when Milos announced his plans for the concert. Certainly the so-called “Angels of Life” wanted Rhoda Dakota among them—who wouldn’t? But they weren’t convinced that reaping fans at a concert was a good thing.

“Of course it is a good thing,” Milos told them. “It is what Mary wants, and when she returns I will make sure she knows who did their job and who did not.” That seemed to convince some, but not all of them . . . and so Milos offered them something else. “For all of you who do your duty, you will get as much chocolate as you want.”

This was news to the Ogre.

“Uh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” the Ogre whispered to Milos.

“Nothing to worry about,” Milos told him. “You have more than enough to spare, yes?” And so, in this way, Milos convinced all forty-three Afterlights to go to the concert. The Ogre didn’t go. He never went because his hands were too slippery to prevent crossing Afterlights from getting where they were going. The Ogre was glad he couldn’t reap, because he didn’t know whether he had the heart to do it.

When they all came back from their mission at the concert, the Ogre saw that it must have been successful, because Moose came into the bank holding Rhoda Dakota herself, asleep in his arms, followed by every other Afterlight, each carrying a sleeping Interlight.

The Ogre did not expect what happened next.

After depositing an Interlight in the bank vault, one of the Angels of Life went straight for the Ogre, and thrust his hand into the Ogre’s side. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel all that good, either.

“Milos said we could have some,” the kid said, “and after what I had to do today, I deserve a whole handful. No, I deserve two handfuls!” Then he thrust his other hand into Nick as well and went off with two fistfuls of fudge.

Until now the kids would only dare to touch a finger to him once in a while, to get a taste of chocolate. That had been fine with the Ogre—after all, he oozed the stuff like thick, dark perspiration. He did have, as Milos said, plenty to spare . . . but every resource has its limits.

After the first Afterlight exacted his pound of fudge, a second Afterlight came, then another and another. One grabbed his shoulder, another stripped chocolate off his leg. Before he knew it, the returning Angels of Life were mobbing him, and taking pieces of him away. He screamed, but they ignored him. He fell to the ground, and tried to crawl. But mob mentality had taken over, and there were too many of them to fight off.

Finally Moose pushed his way in and yelled, “Shtop!”, pulling the Afterlights off of him. The Ogre tried to rise off the floor, but he couldn’t. Then he looked at himself, and was terrified by what he saw. There was barely anything left of him. He was like something you might find on Halloween, a chocolate skeleton. Finally Milos arrived, shooing everyone away and helped the Ogre into a chair where he just shook, barely able to hold himself in a sitting position.

Milos didn’t apologize, he only said, “Perhaps this was not the best idea.”

“Maybe,” the Ogre said to him, “you’ll burn from this mistake too.”

The weakened Ogre was left in the care of a girl with wide eyes and untied laces. She was one of the few who didn’t partake of the feeding frenzy.

“I’m sorry about what they did to you,” she said to the Ogre. “But at least you’re getting better.” And indeed he was. Slowly chocolate began to grow on him again, oozing out from that sweet spot in his soul. He had, however, lost most of his ogreishness. He was now just a slender chocolate boy, much less intimidating than he had been before—but also more human. He liked that. Even though his face only had the barest hint of a form, at least now he could think of himself as something other than an Ogre.

Seeing himself as a boy made him remember a few more things. He was now certain that he had crossed over from the living world, and had not been here forever. He knew he once had a name, although he could not recall what it was. He was fairly certain, though, that it had begun with an N.

Knowing that much about himself made him bolder, not so easily manipulated. Milos, he finally concluded, was not his friend—and Milos probably knew a lot more about the Ogre than he was admitting . . . so the Ogre gave him a simple, but firm, ultimatum.

“Tell me my name, or I’ll breathe chocolate so deep into your soul that it will make you too heavy to skinjack. So deep that your Afterglow will turn brown.”

Milos looked at him with fear, and something far from friendship, and said, “Your name is Nick.”

“Nick . . .” He nodded. “Thank you.” Nick reached up and brushed his fingers through his hair. It was the first time he realized that he even had hair. “I’ve decided that I’m going on the next mission with you. I’m going to watch what happens, and if I don’t like what I see, I’m leaving.”

Milos looked guarded. “That is, of course, your choice. But remember, if you leave you will never find Jill.”

“I don’t know anyone named Jill,” said Nick, realizing that it was true, and for the first time realizing that everything Milos had told him from the moment they had met, had been a lie.

CHAPTER 27

Last National Life

It would soon be one of the tallest buildings in San Antonio. It was still months from completion, but one could already see how impressive it would be. Just the kind of high-profile office building Last National Life Insurance Company needed.

. . . And across from the construction site sat Blue Harvest Academy, a very private, very expensive school, preparing the next generation for whatever future their parents left them. Blue Harvest boasted the best teachers, the best computers, and an awesome jungle gym. The one-of-a-kind play apparatus was a blue and gray starship made of the newest polymer plastic, guaranteed not to fade in the sun or crack under the abuse of countless children. Filled with slides, tubes, and climbing bars, as well as a “landing gear” swing set, it was easily the coolest playground in San Antonio—maybe the coolest one anywhere.

Since no nearby play-places had crossed into Everlost, Milos had decided one was needed for the Afterlights in his care—and this was the one he chose. Since playgrounds were much loved, causing it to cross would be a simple matter; the trick was bringing a fresh harvest of souls along with it. But Milos had that covered too.

Thanks to Lacey’s tip, Allie arrived long before the so-called “Angels of Life.” In fact, she had been waiting for them since dawn, hiding within walls of nearby buildings, and slipping in and out of people to keep herself concealed from Everlost eyes. She had spent much of her time since the concert disaster going into the minds of grieving families to comfort them. She knew it had to be done, yet she couldn’t help but feel that cleaning up the emotional mess Milos had left behind somehow made her an accomplice.

Miranda wanted to help, but Allie worried that it might put her in danger. She didn’t want her to become an “accident” victim as well. Allie came to Miranda one last time, visiting her in a dream to tell her good-bye. Allie could no longer justify using her, even if Miranda was willing. It made Allie feel dirty. It made her feel like Milos.

Now, on Friday morning, Allie scoped out the spot where Lacey had said the next reaping would happen. Finally, halfway through the morning, while a group of schoolchildren were out in the playground for recess, Allie saw Afterlights approaching—but it wasn’t what she saw that stopped her cold, it was what she smelled.

The unmistakable aroma of chocolate.

She saw Nick almost immediately, walking side by side with Milos, Moose, and Squirrel. The last time she had seen Nick he was a bubbling mess of molten chocolate, without form whatsoever. Now he looked unusually thin, but at least he had something resembling human form. She wanted to leap out and call to him, but she fought the urge. First things first. She didn’t even know why Nick was with Milos. Certainly not as a coconspirator. No matter how much Nick had changed, he couldn’t have changed that much. Even when he had served Mary, Nick had known enough to quickly switch sides—even if he was in love with her.

Allie lingered, peeking out from behind trees in a street-corner Christmas tree lot. She watched as Milos directed dozens of Afterlights to position themselves all around the school playground. The living moved through them, never knowing that almost fifty invisible spirits were there, waiting. Lacey was among them and she looked around conspicuously, obviously waiting for Allie to show up and stop them—but Allie couldn’t reveal herself—not even to Lacey. Allie also noticed that Nick did not join them; he waited across the street.

“It’s time,” Milos said. Moose rolled his shoulders and stretched as if he were a linebacker coming off the bench for a big game. Squirrel rubbed his hands together, which was a nervous gesture, but in a way was also threatening, like a burglar getting ready to pick a lock. Then the three skinjackers vanished into pedestrians, taking over three living bodies.

Allie quickly made her move, knowing she could lose them if she didn’t quickly skinjack. She leaped into a woman who was picking out a Christmas tree and—

—Too small / too tall / too dry / too expensive

the fake trees are looking better and better—

Allie quickly put her to sleep and hurried off the lot. She looked at the street in front of the school, searching for anyone who seemed to have a moment of sudden disorientation. Three people were standing still among the other moving pedestrians: a mailman, a well-dressed woman, and a jogger in shorts that were too bright for his pasty legs. They nodded to one another, then split up: The mailman and the woman went into the school, while the jogger trotted across the street toward a busy construction site.

Allie had no idea who was who, or which of them it would be best to follow. She chose to go into the school. If need be, she could pretend to be a parent picking up a child.

Once inside, the mailman turned right and went into the main office, but the woman continued on. Again, Allie had to decide who to follow—but even before she could make a decision, the well-dressed woman was stopped by a portly teacher with a gray goatee.

“Excuse me,” he told the woman, “but you’ll have to check in at the office first.”

“Right, right,” said the woman—but then both the woman and the teacher seemed to change. The woman reached out to the wall for balance and looked around, disoriented, while the teacher suddenly looked . . . well . . . squirrelly. Then he turned and hurried off down the hallway.

Allie leaped from the tree-lot woman, and skinjacked a passing school janitor. She quickly gathered her senses, and continued down the hall, keeping a distance behind the bearded teacher. The teacher turned a corner, but when Allie caught up with him, the man was just standing there bewildered.

“Strange,” he said. “Very strange . . .”

Clearly Squirrel was gone, but there was no one else in the hallway he could have jumped into.

“Damn it!” said Allie, and the teacher, forgetting his confusion, looked to her, appalled.

“Watch your language, Mr. Webber,” the teacher told the janitor. “After all, this is a school.”

Meanwhile, through the wall, and in a classroom that opened to a different hallway, a somewhat squirrelly student excused himself to go to the bathroom . . . but his real destination was the bicycle racks.

The fourth graders were let out into the playground for recess, then, just a few minutes later, the fifth graders came racing out of the school as well, immediately commandeering the plastic starship. Mixing grades in the playground was not the usual routine, and when the principal stepped out behind the flood of fifth graders, one of the teachers on duty was quick to ask what was going on.

“I thought they could use a little bit of extra playtime,” said the principal.

This was odd, because the principal of Blue Harvest never came to the playground unless he was showing it off to prospective families, and never suggested more playtime for anybody.

The teacher looked toward the space-age climbing apparatus, which now held an overabundance of Starfleet personnel. “Do you really think this is a good idea?” she asked. “It’s so crowded—someone’s bound to get hurt with all those bodies.”

“Well,” said the principal, “it is like they say, ‘The morgue, the merrier.’”

Allie had no idea where Squirrel had gone, and so she decided to go out into the danger zone itself. Still in the body of the janitor, Allie found her way out to the playground where kids were fighting over the elaborate equipment. To her right, a teacher was having a heated discussion with a man in a suit who must have been the principal.

“Yes, you did,” said the teacher. “You said the fifth graders needed extra playtime, so you brought them out here.”

“I most certainly did not!” the principal insisted. “What would ever possess me to say such a thing? I don’t even remember coming out here.”

Then Allie noticed a boy in the middle of the playground who was not playing with the others. He was looking up. She followed his gaze to the skeletal skyscraper across the street. The construction site was filled with activity, with workers welding and hammering on almost every floor.

Allie looked down at her janitorial uniform, to remind herself who she was, then knelt down to the boy.

“What is it?” she said, in a gruff male voice. “What do you see?”

The boy never looked at her. “Nothing,” he said. “Just the building.” And then he added, “It is big, yes?”

Allie recoiled. This was Milos! He must have skinjacked the principal, and was now skinjacking this boy—but he was too absorbed in his mission to notice that the janitor had been skinjacked too. Milos then ran off into the starship, disappearing into the many tunnels . . . and the moment he did, a shadow crossed over the playground.

Allie looked up to see a load of steel beams being raised by a huge sky crane high above the construction site. Allie realized with a sinking feeling that the crane had an arc wide enough to swing out over the playground, if that’s what the crane operator—or the person controlling the crane operator—wanted to do.

“We have to get out!” said Allie. “Everyone! We have to get out of here now!”

But nobody listened. After all, the janitor had little authority over children in a school. Allie quickly leaped out of the janitor and into the teacher closest to the door, and tried to open it. The door wouldn’t budge. Then when she turned toward the side gate, which was the only other way out of the playground, she saw a kid securing it with a bicycle lock, so that no one could get out. This time something about the way he moved allowed her to see right through his disguise.

“Squirrel!” she yelled.

He looked up at her and ran. She knew she had given herself away, but that didn’t matter now. All that mattered was getting those kids out of there. Moose must have already been in the sky crane, because as the massive load of girders rose higher and higher, the crane began a long, slow arc toward the school.

The principal called to the students, not yet realizing what was going on. “Enough playtime,” he told them. “Everyone line up by your teachers.” The kids all grumbled but immediately abandoned the starship until Milos, skinjacking a scrawny blond boy, poked his head out from one of the tunnels.

“Look, everyone! There is money in here.” Then he held out a few dollar bills. “This is why they sent us out here, to find Christmas money!” Suddenly the kids ran happily back to the starship against their principal’s orders.

“I found a dollar!” said one.

“I found five!” said another.

It was an easy trick to pull off. Allie wondered how many kids Milos had skinjacked just long enough to empty their pockets into the tunnels. They were all finding their own lunch money. Allie peeled out of the teacher and took over a girl climbing through the starship. She found Milos, and pushed him against the curved tunnel wall with a thud.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” she said.

Milos recognized her right away, and smiled. “Allie!” he said in that little-boy voice. “I thought you had sunk. So good to see you.”

She pushed him against the tunnel wall again. “This isn’t going to happen,” Allie told him. “I won’t let it.”

But Milos lost none of his composure. “You cannot stop it now. Why don’t you sit back and enjoy it. It will be quite a spectacle.”

She would have pounded him through the wall if it wouldn’t hurt that poor boy he had skinjacked.

Meanwhile the adults in the playground were beginning to realize that the sky crane across the street was being very careless with its load. “If it doesn’t change its trajectory,” said the principal, “that load of girders will be right above us. What is the crane operator thinking?”

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.