Everfound (48 page)

Beyond that were dozens of ghosties, all doubled over, moaning in pain. The doctors had said the ghosties weren’t real, and in his confused state, he thought that maybe they were right. He knew how to make them go away, though.
All he had to do was cover his dead eye with his dead hand and he couldn’t see them anymore.

He stood up, feeling dizzy, as if he were in a fun house and the world was shifting beneath his feet. With his dead eye covered, all he saw was a massive plain of fused sand with clear skies above it, but the angry swirling maelstrom of a hurricane raging beyond the perimeter. A few yards to his right was a dead soldier with a gun in his hand, and far away, straight across the patch of fused sand, was a jeep.

Clarence didn’t know very much at that moment, but he did know this was not a place he wanted to be. So, with his dead eye covered and his good eye to lead the way, he staggered across the dark expanse of fused sand toward the jeep.

At that same moment, Allie was incapacitated by the pain, but she knew it gave her an advantage. While the others were doubled over, Allie stumbled over to the Afterlight who had handcuffed her, and thrust her hand into his pocket, retrieving the key. Ignoring the pain in her gut, she jammed the key into the small keyhole, turned it, and freed herself from the handcuffs, dropping them on the ground.

“What have I done?” she heard Mary wailing as storm clouds began to billow beyond the deadspot. Allie tried to advance on Mary, but the pain ended as abruptly as it had begun and everyone began to recover. Allie would not make the same mistake twice: Hurling herself at Mary now would result in the exact same situation she had been in a moment ago. She saw that Clarence was gone, and if she escaped, there would come another time, and another place, to battle Mary. Maybe next time luck would be on her side. And so
Allie retreated, running along the edge of the deadspot, until she heard a sound peaking above the surge of the storm. It was the drone of engines. Something was approaching, still unseen behind the storm, and she knew it was headed her way.

High up in the catwalks and deep infrastructure of the
Hindenburg
, the crowded souls of Chitchén Itzá went about their perpetual party, for they had known nothing else for so very long. The mourning pang hit with such unexpected ferocity that they were broken out of the rhythm of revelry, and it took several minutes for them to get things going again. The warriors, crammed like sardines into the passenger promenades, used the pang to help fuel them for battle. “It is a strike against us by the Eastern Witch,” they told one another, “but we shall strike back with twice the force!”

Johnnie-O was at the helm—not because he could fly the thing, for he had never even been in the control room before, but having been trapped aboard for so long while the airship was adrift, it gave him “squatters rights” to pilot it now. Besides, his large hands appeared very confident on the wheel. King Yax had been with him for most of the trip, because the views from the control room were spectacular, but the king must have lost interest, because Johnnie-O hadn’t seen him for over a day. Instead, Nick, Mikey, and Jix were in the control room with Johnnie, getting their first glimpse of the Trinity vortex ahead, when the mourning pang struck.

“That was worse than before,” said Jix, understating the obvious, as he recovered.

“Do you suppose it was Mary who was extinguished?” Nick said, trying to mask his concern.

“No,” said Mikey with authority. “Remember, she’s my sister and we crossed into Everlost together. If she was extinguished, I’d feel it.”

None of them wanted to guess who might have been the victim of this extinguishing, for any speculation led them to answers they didn’t want to consider. Then, as if to give weight to their worries, a sudden rainstorm in the living world hid the view before them and penetrated the ship, pouring through their spirits with such severity it made them shiver. And yet, they could also hear the rain on the Ship’s skin.

“No es possible!”
said Jix. “The storm is in both worlds!”

And the
Hindenburg
began to violently lurch in the raging wind.

In the clear eye of that swirling storm, at the southern edge of the deadspot, Mary and her children had all recovered from the mourning pang, but a sense of dread still filled every soul. Although she was far from the cluster of beds where her latest batch of Interlights had been laid, she knew that they had awoken in this second Great Awakening, and she would soon know how many of them were skinjackers.

The living-world sands just beyond the edge of the deadspot had become inundated so quickly by the rain that it looked like an ocean out there, rather then a desert. Even if they wanted to leave now, they couldn’t, for the living-world sand had become so soft and wet that they would all sink after only a few steps.

“The storm covers the whole world,” someone said.

“Nonsense,” said Mary. “It will pass like all storms.”

The immediate order of business was to locate Allie, but before Mary could organize her Afterlights into a search posse, something within the storm stole their attention. Some children pointed, some even fled, but most took their cues from Mary, and stood their ground as an impossibly huge object emerged out of the blinding sheets of rain, like a planet plunging from the heavens toward them.

Mary instantly knew it was her airship—and it was coming in too fast and too low. The
Hindenburg
’s nose pushed forth into the airspace of the deadspot, then the low-hanging control gondola, and the ship’s entire underbelly, hit the ground hard, scraping along, knocking over everything in its path until finally it came to rest like a massive beached whale.

When Mary looked into the windows of the passenger compartment, she saw faces—hundreds of faces. All of them angry. All of them foreign. Then, when she lowered her eyes to the windows of the control room, she saw, standing beside the pilot, three spirits she never thought she’d see again.

Mikey, Jix, and Nick.

Mary turned to her children, who all looked to her for strength and solace, and she said to them, “Run!”

N
ow,
that’s
what I call an entrance,” said Johnnie-O. Then, with his flight mission accomplished, he immediately climbed the ladder up from the control room, and into the hull of the ship, to fight his way through the crowds to the gangway. Mikey, Jix, and Nick, however, who were less linear in their thinking, simply jumped out of the control room window, and were the first ones off the ship.

Everyone expected King Yax to lead the advance against the Eastern Witch, but the king was still nowhere to be found. With so many souls packed within the higher reaches of the airship’s aluminum skeleton, it was very possible that the king was wedged in with all the humanity, and had yet to make his way out. No one knew for sure.

Without the king to order his subjects about, command of the siege was left to Jix. This was fine with him. While Mikey could play the occasional deity, and Nick could be their conscience, Jix was, and always would be, the hunter. True, he was not a pack hunter, but he did not mind having more than a thousand warriors under his command. Jix had
seen fear in Mary Hightower’s eyes when they landed, and for the first time in a long time, he felt the excitement a jaguar feels the moment it smells blood.

With Mary and her children in full retreat, Jix ordered his warriors to pursue them, subdue them, and force Mary’s surrender. There were several problems, however:

1) The gangway stairs were designed for the leisurely departure of first-class guests, not for an entire Mayan civilization;

2) The warriors had to avoid touching the statue of the king on the way out, lest they accidentally make a more permanent exit, and;

3) The belly-flop nature of their landing left only one of the two gangways in a position to open, forcing the furious fighters to exit single-file.

Thus, Jix had to wait until he had enough warriors to lead, so it wasn’t exactly like storming the shores of Normandy.

With Jix in charge of the battle, Mikey’s mission had narrowed to a single objective.

“Allie!” he called.

Let the others face his sister. He had motivated the king to bring them here, and he didn’t need a monstrous transformation to frighten Mary’s children, since they were already running away, so Mikey’s job was done.

“Allie!” He could sense that she was here somewhere, and the feeling was so strong, he knew she must be close! “ALLIE!” But all he heard in response were the war cries of the exiting warriors and the rain and winds of the two-world storm.

* * *

Allie, it seemed, was destined to be restrained in one way or another. First on the face of a train, then bound to the body of a coyote, then cuffed and gagged by a girl bent on destroying the world. Once she had freed herself from the handcuffs and recognized the sound of the approaching engine, she thought she could guide the
Hindenburg
in, but the ship came in so fast, no one in the control booth saw her directly in its path.

Now she was pinned to the ground beneath the airship, and with the clatter of warriors coming down the gangway stairs, and the roar of the storm, and Mikey bellowing her name, her own cries fell on ears deafer than the king’s artists.

When Nick had seen Mary through the control room window, he felt more himself than he ever had before—but the old feelings surfaced in him in full force. He knew Mary was his weakness, but seeing Mary’s face told him something crucial: He was Mary’s weakness as well.

Now, as he strode through the piles and random objects filling the Trinity deadspot, he could feel more and more of the chocolate that plagued him flaking away. It was now just bits of a hard shell on the outside, rather than the thick mud that used to fill him. His tie was still caked with the stuff, but his shirt was mostly white now, and his pants mostly gray. His face only had brown patches here and there. He knew that as long as he held on to himself and stayed in the company of those who knew him, he would be fine.

He once dreamed of reforming Mary—perhaps not in the same way that Mikey had re-formed him from the blob
of molten chocolate he had become—but he
had
hoped to change Mary from the inside out, opening her eyes to a better way of existing. He had wanted to show her a new concept of “right.” Now, however, Nick’s hope was much more humble. He just wanted to stop her, and render her powerless. If he could even just make her doubt herself, it would give them an advantage.

He wondered what she’d say to him when she finally faced him. . . . But he was more curious as to what
he
would say to
her
. Regardless, he sensed this confrontation would be the last time he would ever face Mary Hightower, whatever the outcome.

Finally Jix and the first wave of warriors—perhaps a hundred or so—went racing past Nick, their weapons raised, and Nick turned to look back at the great airship behind him. Was it his imagination, or had the
Hindenburg
begun to move?

Speedo, hiding behind a pile of furniture, was the first to see the
Hindenburg
unexpectedly start to rise, because he had his eyes trained on it from the moment it landed.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” he shouted, and ran toward it. The
Hindenburg
was his. He had traded for it fair and square long ago—but like everything else, somehow it became Mary’s and he had become a mere chauffeur, piloting her around. Well, he let his airship go once, he wasn’t going to let it get away again.

He raced for the gangway stairs as the engines grew louder. Oddly dressed warriors were falling from the gangway, having not expected the ship to suddenly lift off. As the
ship rose higher, Speedo climbed on the roof of a Cadillac, and leaped to the gangway stairs, clinging with the tips of his fingers. Speedo was not a particularly strong boy, but in Everlost physical strength is less about physique, and more about determination. He pulled himself up to the bottom step of the gaping gangway, and climbed into the ship. Pushing his way past agitated warriors, he made his way straight to the control room.

“Get out of my cockpit,” he yelled at a figure adorned in gold, at the ship’s helm.

Then, when the figure turned to him, Speedo recognized him from his earliest days with Mary, and he stared in disbelief.

“Vari?”

“Don’t call me that!” said Vari. “I am His Excellency, the Supreme King of the Middle Realm. Hear my name and revel.”

Sadly, King Yax K’uk Mo’ was no longer a passenger on the
Hindenburg
. He had only himself to blame for putting his trust in his power-hungry vizier. Vari knew the jig was up the moment Nick and Mikey arrived. The king was likely to throw him into the Cenote for lying about his connection to “the Eastern Witch.” Vari couldn’t stay under the rule of the king, and didn’t want to go back into the service of Mary, who treated him like the small child that he was, so Vari went into hiding. Then, when the king ordered all his subjects onto the airship, Vari hid in the ship’s air vents, waiting and watching.

The king spent most of his time in the control room with
Johnnie-O, enjoying the view below. When there was no one he had to impress, the king often removed the heavy, restrictive gold adornments he wore, all the way down to the ragged little loincloth he had died in a thousand years ago. Although the huge windows of the control room offered spectacular views, this was not one of them. Johnnie-O’s interest in seeing the king in his underwear was as close to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, that Johnnie-O ever cared to get, and so he left the airship on autopilot, going off to brief Nick, Mikey, and Jix on their progress, until such time as the king made himself decent again.