the train squealed to a reluctant stop, just a dozen yards before the tracks vanished. 'Lucky I saw it!' Charlie said. 'If we went off the end, this whole train woulda sunk, with us still in it.'
Charlie etched the end of the line on the map he was making on the engine bulkhead. 'There was a spur that went off west, maybe twenty, thirty miles back. We could back her up and see where that track goes…'
'Maybe later,' Nick told him, and turned to Johnnie-O. 'We'll walk the rest of the way.'
Johnnie-O did not seem pleased. 'Rest of the way where?'
Nick didn't answer him. 'Charlie, you stay with the train.' He thought for a moment, then added, 'You'll wait for us, right?' 'Sure
… unless those Atlanta kids show up.'
Nick nodded his understanding, and he and Johnnie-O went south, pushing through dense living-world brush that tickled their insides as they walked.
In time they came to a two-lane highway that ran east and west, cutting through the flat, forested Florida terrain. Nick turned east, and they followed the road, which was easier to walk on than the marshy earth.
'Are you ever gonna tell me where we're going?' Johnnie-O finally asked.
Nick didn't look at him. 'We follow this road east until we reach the shore.'
'Why?' asked Johnnie-O. 'You want me to be your bodyguard and all, then I got a right to know why we're doing this.'
'I never said you were my bodyguard. If you don't want to come you don't have to.'
'Why can't you just answer the question?'
Nick stopped and turned to him, thinking about how much he should say, if anything. 'When did you die?' Nick asked him.
'What's that got to do with anything?'
'It just does.'
Johnnie-O looked down, shuffling his feet. 'I can't exactly remember.'
'What do you remember?'
Johnnie took some time to rustle up what memories he could. 'When I died, The Whistler was my favorite radio show,' he said.
Radio, thought Nick. That would probably place Johnnie-O in the 1930s, maybe '40s. 'The place we're going is part of my history, but part of your future-and anything I tell you will just make you ask more questions that I don't want to answer.'
Nick turned and continued walking.
'I'm really starting not to like you,' Johnnie-O said. 'Not that I ever liked you to begin with.' But still he followed Nick east.
Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.
On a sunny Tuesday-for it seems so many awful things happen on a Tuesday-six astronauts and one schoolteacher attempted to pierce the sky. Instead they touched the stars.
Ask anyone who was alive at the time, and they will still remember where they were the moment they heard that the shuttle Challenger blew up just seventy-three seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The shape of that terrible explosion became burned into human consciousness like the shape of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.
The world mourned the lives lost, as well as mourning the loss of an idea, for although space flight had always been, and would always be a dangerous endeavor, there was a certain unspoken faith that human ingenuity, and the grace of God, would keep our ascent to the heavens safe. But the universe is nothing if not balanced. For every Apollo Thirteen, there would be a Challenger. For every miracle, a tragedy.
But look away now from that fiery forked cloud in the sky, for history cannot be undone. Instead look to the Cape, where you will see a spacecraft pointed eternally heavenward, preserved in Everlost, in that perfect moment of glorious anticipation. Its countdown is forever frozen at one second before liftoff, for that is the last moment a launch can be aborted. It is the moment that stands on the edge of hope and doom.
Seven valiant souls got where they were going that morning, and while eternity opened its gates to welcome them, Everlost opened its gates to welcome the majestic vessel that took them where all men have gone before.
'What is that, some kind of castle?' asked Johnnie-O, looking across the lagoon to the towering marvel.
Nick forgave him his ignorance. What would have been the point in trying to explain this earlier? It was best to let him see it for himself. 'It's a spaceship.'
'Do you think I'm an idiot?'
Nick didn't push the issue; instead he led them both across the narrow causeway to the Cape-a much longer journey than it looked, and as the massive craft loomed before them, Johnnie-O could no longer deny the truth of what it was.
'So it is a spaceship!' And then he looked to Nick, both hopefully and doubtfully. 'Can we make it go?'
'I don't think that's a good idea,' Nick told him. 'Anyway, that's not why we're here.' And before Johnnie-O could ask any more questions, Nick said, 'What do you know about Zach the Ripper?'
Johnnie-O stopped walking and instantly began to sink, but he didn't seem to care. 'You're crazy! You're crazier than Mary and the McGill put together!' 'You're probably right.'
'If Zach the Ripper is here, then this is the one place in Everlost I don't want to be!'
'So go back,' Nick told him simply, and kept moving forward. Johnnie-O pulled his feet out of the ground and followed, grumbling all the way.
Like any other Everlost legend, Nick knew there was no telling how much, if anything, about Zach the Ripper was true, but he knew that dealing with a ripper was dangerous business. Isaiah wasn't the first one to speak of Zach the Ripper's ability to inflict permanent damage on an Afterlight. If you were decapitated by Zach the Ripper, you stayed decapitated, and you'd be stuck having to carry your head around in a backpack, or under your arm, or dangling from the end of your hand by your hair. Whether or not you'd feel the pain of it was unknown-for although Afterlights weren't supposed to feel physical pain, all bets were off when it came to an ecto-ripper.
For this reason, Nick was terrified as he approached the great spacecraft, but he didn't show his fear to Johnnie-O. Johnnie-O was scared enough already. Somewhere in the distance, a stray dog in the living world began to bark, but they both ignored it.
'Look at that thing!' Johnnie-O said, staring at the massive craft. 'It's just standing there in midair!'
The orbiter and its rocket assembly were indeed floating about a hundred and fifty feet in the air. Nick knew there had once been a launchpad beneath it, but the shuttle launchpad was on tractor treads, and had long since been rolled away. 'It's resting on the memory of a launchpad,' Nick told him.
'Wonder what Mary would have to say about that.'
Nick put on his best Mary voice. 'In all things postmortem, the stubbornness of memory outweighs the so- called laws of physics. Best to report any antigravitational sightings to an authority.'
Johnnie-O stared at him. 'You're scary.'
A closer inspection of the suspended spacecraft revealed that there was a rickety scaffold right beside it, just a few feet wide, and randomly pieced together. It looked more like a vertical beaver dam, stretching up to the engines, and clinging to the craft itself, all the way up to the orbiter's hatch. There was also something else on the huge deadspot beneath the suspended craft. Something that shouldn't be there at all.
'That's… a dog…' said Nick.
'Well, I can see that.'
But Johnnie-O didn't quite get it. The dog had been barking nonstop for the past few minutes. Nick was used to tuning out barking dogs, just like most other sounds of the living world. But this dog wasn't part of that world. It was here in Everlost. It was barking at them.
The dog was some kind of unholy mismatched genetic mutt. Something like Rottweiler, crossed with Pomeranian. It was both huge and annoying at the same time.
'Wait a second!' said Johnnie-O, one beat behind. 'That dog's in Everlost!'
The Pomerrott mutt was chained to a spike in the middle of the deadspot. Which meant someone had to put it there. Johnnie-O still couldn't wrap his mind around it. 'But… but, there are no dogs here. You know what they say, 'All dogs go to heaven,' right? Right?'
