“If you don’t go, what I do to you will be much worse,” said Milos. No one else gave him an argument.
They crossed the plaza, then stepped into the main building, a stone church full of arches and iron chandeliers called “the Shrine.” The ground felt strange beneath their feet; one moment soft, the next moment solid.
“We shouldn’t be here. . . . ,” complained the complainer.
It was midday, and there were way too many tourists for Milos’s taste. He had been denying himself his skinjacking pleasures, putting the search for Mary ahead of his own desires, but having so many living, breathing bodies around him was insanely tempting. “We need to clear this place out,” Milos told Moose. “Go skinjack someone and pull a fire alarm.”
Then a living woman, blueberry-plump in a cranberry pants suit, looked at Milos. Not through him as if he wasn’t there, but at him—and she screamed. The vortex had made at least a part of his face visible for an instant. It was a complication he did not need.
The alarm began to blare before she stopped screaming, and guards ushered the living out. Milos was startled by the woman, but he could not be deterred from his mission. Vortex or not, he was finding the Neons.
After the living left, it was easier for Milos to move through the Alamo grounds and look for signs of Afterlight activity. Unfortunately, the alarm masked any sounds that hiding Afterlights might have made. He sent teams into every building, and through each courtyard and garden of the compound—and while voices in the Long Barracks were promising, they turned out to be the trapped words of soldiers, spoken more than a hundred and fifty years ago. A vortex could be annoying that way.
When the fire threat was determined to be false, the alarm was reset, and the living were allowed back into the building—including the cranberry woman who was as loud as she was large, and demanded that security be on the lookout for ghosts. She insisted that a ghost had probably pulled the alarm. Security, however, had already nabbed her nephew as a suspect, an obnoxious boy with a history of lies and mischief. The woman insisted that Ralphy had been possessed.
Milos could not stand listening to her endless nattering. “Will you go skinjack her,” Milos told Moose, “and make her shut up?”
“Do I have to? She’s really not my type.”
“Just do it!”
Reluctantly, Moose jumped into the woman, and she immediately stopped talking. Then, commandeering her body, Moose took her out into the middle of the courtyard and started her doing the Hokey Pokey. By the time she was putting her left arm in, other tourists had begun to join in the spontaneous fun, until about a dozen Alamo visitors were doing the Hokey Pokey in the courtyard. Not to be outdone, Squirrel skinjacked an elderly gentleman in the Arbor Garden, and started doing the Chicken Dance, but nobody joined him.
Milos went back into the Shrine, and saw the Chocolate Ogre standing beneath a stone arch, looking at a series of historic Texas flags. He seemed thoughtful—which worried Milos. He did not want the Ogre thinking too much.
“People died here,” the Ogre said. “A hundred and fifty of ’em.” And he pointed to a full-fledged deadspot in a small grotto that didn’t shift in and out of phase like the rest of the building. “Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett, William Travis . . . I did a report on the Alamo once. . . .” And as he remembered, his shapeless face started to change. “I wonder if I could find the spot where Bowie died. . . .” The memory was strong enough to bring form back to his face. Cheekbones and a jawline.
“But what about Jill?” Milos said quickly. “Remember. That’s why you’re here; to find Jill.”
“Right,” said the Ogre, losing his focus. He looked around as if coming out of a trance—never realizing that this was the trance. “Well, she’s not here,” the Ogre said, then strode out to search another building.
Milos walked the grounds’ inner perimeter, getting increasingly frustrated—and then he heard something. Music—and it didn’t have the hollow timbre that living-world music had to Everlost ears. It was coming from the gift shop!
By the time Milos had gotten to the gift shop building, the music had stopped. Now the only sounds were the inane conversations of the living.
Milos stood in the middle of the gift shop and called out, “I know you are here somewhere, and I won’t rest until I find you!” Then he wandered the room, listening for something, anything. Finally he heard whispering. Yes, he was sure of it! It was coming from behind the southern wall. Then he heard the distinctive sound of a slap.
He leaped at the wall.
The first time, he bounced off of it, so he waited until the wall shifted out of phase with Everlost, and he leaped at it again, this time going right through it and out into the courtyard where Moose was still leading tourists in the Hokey Pokey. Milos jumped back through the wall again and again but found nothing—no secret passageway, no concealed Neons, just stone, several feet thick. He tried to leap through in another spot, and just as he passed through the wall, it began to shift into phase again. He felt it solidifying around him—but he was out of the wall an instant before it became solid. He didn’t want to think what would happen to him if he was caught within the wall the moment it solidified. Would he become a permanent part of the wall? He didn’t want to find out, and he knew he couldn’t risk it again.
A sudden fury filled Milos like a rush of adrenaline, spiking his anger. He wanted to battle, he wanted to defeat the Neons and he wanted to do it now. He knew the sudden surge must have been an effect of the vortex—but it was serving him, and as long as it served him, he had no need to fear or fight it.
He knew what he had to do.
While Moose, still as Madame Cranberry, put his whole self in, Milos decided to do the same. He went to the gift shop entrance and skinjacked the guard who stood there. A sudden rush—the beat of a heart, the taste of a mint, and—
—uniform’s tight / gotta lose weight / gotta work out / when’s lunch?—
Milos felt a moment of vertigo as he took hold of the man’s body, and the thrill of skinjacking once more. He listened to the man’s thoughts for a moment, then he sent the man to sleep.
Milos, now wearing the body of the security guard, looked around him. To the living, nothing appeared unusual about the Alamo. The living felt a sense of history, and a sense of power to the place, but they did not see it shifting in and out the way Afterlights did. If there was a secret passage within the walls, a living body was the only way to find it. A living body, and brute strength.
“Something wrong, Wayne?” the girl behind the counter asked him.
“Yes,” Milos said. “But it will all be fine soon.”
Then he went over to a display of Alamo chess sets against the wall and began to knock them to the floor, ripping out the whole shelving unit. People gasped and the cashier called for other guards, but Milos didn’t stop. Shelf after shelf—mugs, T-shirts, pewter figurines. Tourists raced out in a panic, then another guard came in.
“Wayne, what the heck—” He tried to grab Milos, but Milos shoved him into a glass display case, shattering it. Milos destroyed everything against the western wall, ripping out bookshelves, looking for the telltale signs of a passageway hidden behind them, but there was nothing but the same coarse stone walls.
He began to doubt himself. Maybe the voices had come from the living after all. Maybe the Neons were elsewhere—the mirror maze or the wax museum. Or maybe that escaping Neon ran to a different part of the city entirely.
Just as he was about to rip down a shelving unit full of paperweights, three more guards came in, grabbed him, and pinned him to the ground. Milos peeled out of Wayne the wayward rent-a-cop, leaving the man to deal with the aftermath of Milos’s rampage.
Filled with furious, yet exhilarating, determination, Milos gathered all the Afterlights in the Shrine where the effect of the vortex was its greatest—knowing he could use the vortex’s power to help rally them.
“The Neons are not here,” he announced. “But we will find them, and when we do, we will show no mercy because they showed no mercy to us!”
And they all cheered, the battle fury of the vortex filling them. “Remember the Alamo!” Squirrel shouted, and Moose smacked him.
“So what do we do until we find them?” someone asked.
And all at once Milos realized what they needed to do. All this time Milos had resisted, but now he was ready to accept his mission—his purpose. He had lost nearly a thousand of Mary’s children. Well, by the time Mary woke up, he would make absolutely sure that there were at least twice that many; maybe three times; maybe ten. It could be done, if they all worked hard enough.
“Mary made it very clear what she wanted us to do,” Milos said.
“Go west?” someone shouted.
“No,” said Milos. “We stay here. We stay here until we find her. And in the meantime we increase our numbers . . . by reaping.”
Milos never enjoyed reaping, but maybe that was because Jill had done it in such a cheap, sleazy manner. But with nearly fifty Afterlights waiting in Everlost to catch crossing souls, Milos’s reaping extravaganzas would not be sleazy at all. In fact, they would be nothing short of epic.
PART THREE
The Gates of Grief
High Altitude Musical Interlude #2 with Johnnie and Charlie
She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes . . .”
Johnnie was more than ready to hurl himself out of the Hindenburg window.
“She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes . . .”
More than once, he thought they were actually beginning to settle back to earth, and he got his hopes up . . . but it wasn’t them coming closer to the ground, it was a living-world mountain rising to meet them.
“She’ll be comin’ round the mountain, she’ll be comin’ round the mountain . . .”
The problem was, in spite of Charlie’s inane singing, they weren’t comin’ round the mountains at all: they were going directly through the mountains. Over and over they were forced to suffer an unpleasant violation of granite and limestone as they traveled sideways through living-world mountains—which wasn’t all that different from sinking into the earth except that you came out on the other side.
“She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes!”
And beyond the mountains and the plains there was always another vast expanse of sea. Johnnie had no idea there were so many oceans, so many seas. Then, when they finally hit land again, he realized that there was something a little bit too familiar about the coastline.
Finally he spotted a landmark in the foothills. A sign on a mountainside said HOLLYWOODLAND, although the LAND part was clearly in Everlost.
“No!” wailed Johnnie-O. “Are you telling me we’ve gone all the way around the world?”
To which Charlie responded, “She’ll be ridin’ six white horses when she comes . . .”
It was enough to make Johnnie-O cry. He knew the world was round, but in his mind it sort of went on forever before coming back around on itself again. There was no telling how many times they had circled the globe and no way to know if it would ever stop.