Just then, an elevator door opened before them-and there was a single fleshie inside. Allie hesitated, pretending she didn’t see the man in the elevator, and the assassin threw himself forward toward the unsuspecting man. This was exactly what Allie was hoping the assassin would do! The moment he crossed the elevator threshold, Allie launched over him and skinjacked the man in the elevator first!
Now, ensconced in flesh, and seeing only the living world, Allie couldn’t see the assassin skinjacker anymore-but she could feel him trying to get inside, desperately fighting to grab hold, but he couldn’t get in. Allie had him exactly where she wanted him.
“Mission accomplished,” she said. Then she hit the button for the top floor and the elevator began to rise.
Rotsie was furious. This girl had played him for a fool and now he knew he was in serious trouble. The fleshie in the elevator had already been skinjacked and the moment the elevator began to move, Rotsie realized the extent of his folly…
… because when the elevator went up, he didn’t.
With nothing to grab on to, the living world elevator rose away from him, and he found himself plunging down a dark elevator shaft. He hit bottom, but didn’t stop, because the living world could not provide enough resistance to catch his plummeting spirit. He found himself falling through the bottom of the elevator shaft, then through the basement, then through the first parking level, then the second.
Finally the thick cement floor of the second parking level caught him, but he was embedded all the way to his neck. He could feel the concrete of the building’s foundation in his chest-not painful, but thick and oppressive, like heavy congestion. He could feel poles of iron rebar passing through his gut like skewers, and he could already feel his feet in the densely packed earth beneath the foundation. As much as he tried to pull himself out, each movement just pulled him farther down until his chin was in the concrete as well, then his mouth, then his nose, then his eyes, then his scalp, until the surface world was history and everything around him was darkness and he knew the only place he was going from now until the end of time, was down.
Allie, rather than feeling traumatized by her run-in with Mary’s assassin, was filled with even more determination to stop her. She skinjacked a girl waiting at a bus stop, and met up with Clarence in a coffee shop. He was scouring newspapers, getting every last detail of Mary’s latest disaster.
Clarence was beside himself when he heard what happened at the hospital. “I knew I shoulda come with you,” he said. “I’ll stay here in Memphis and protect your body, ’cause if I don’t…”
“No,” said Allie. “Mary doesn’t know her assassin failed, so she won’t send out another one for a while. That buys us some time.”
“But when she does…”
“Then I’ll deal with it,” Allie told him. “If it happens, it happens-but while I can skinjack, I need to stand against Mary any way I can.”
“In that case, have a look at this.” Then Clarence showed her the latest headlines.
Allie thought it would be more on the toxic gas cloud, and fire in the town of Eunice-clearly Mary’s hand at work-but instead it was something new. The town of Artesia, New Mexico, about seventy miles west of Eunice, had suffered a deadly tainting of the water supply. Being that Artesia was so close to Roswell, nut jobs were already coming out of the woodwork, insisting that it was aliens.
“It’s ghosts, not aliens,” Allie said. “People need to get their conspiracy theories straight.”
“Read the next part,” Clarence said, pointing to the bottom of the page.
Allie read on. Apparently the death count was relatively low… which, if this was Mary’s doing, didn’t make much sense… until Allie saw how many people had been hospitalized… and were still in comas…
Allie dropped the newspaper on the table as if it were also tainted.
“My God! She’s making more skinjackers!”
Clarence took back the newspaper with his good hand and pondered the article, but it was clear he was pondering something else entirely. “I said I would never want to extinguish another soul,” he said, “but if there’s one spirit I’d be willing to wipe out of existence…”
He didn’t need to finish his thought for Allie to know who he meant. “Whatever the consequences?” asked Allie.
Clarence nodded. “Whatever the consequences.”
Allie took a deep breath. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
An hour later they were on a flight headed toward New Mexico and Mary Hightower.
PART SIX
Ruin Nation
Historical Interlude with Angry Gods and Insufficient Sunscreen
T he living see only ruins. They see crumbling temples and a stepped pyramid rising out of a dense forest that, year by year, struggles to consume it. To the living, the place is ancient history, full of colorful custom, furious gods, and countless vendors selling trinkets-all very interesting, but irrelevant to a modern world. Still, the many touristts who come to the great Mayan city of Chichen Itza can’t help but feel a sense of mystical presence within the ruins that transcends time and space. No one who has ever visited Chichen Itza will ever forget they’ve been there, and those who wander the ball court, and the great field that surrounds the pyramid, aside from getting a nasty sunburn, can’t help but sense a spiritual connection to something unseen. They leave knowing they’ve had some inexplicable experience, never realizing that they have just crossed through a crowded, bustling city of seventeen thousand invisible souls.
CHAPTER 43
The City of Souls
From: memphisbelle95@yahoo. com
To: stopmarynow@gmail. com
Subject: 2 down
Hi, it’s Allie skinjacking. Milos and Moose are dead. Jill, are you there? We need those other names! Jix, I hope you made it to the City of Souls, and that you’re all okay. Tell Mikey and Nick hello. And be careful, all of you!
Allie
B ack on New Year’s Eve-the same day that Allie and Clarence first boarded the plane to Baltimore-Nick, Mikey, and Jix sailed for Chichen Itza. They took the smallest of the Everlost racing yachts from Corpus Christi Marina, solemnly passing the hull of the doomed boat, which still floated upside down. They sailed southwest across the Gulf of Mexico, toward the Yucatan Peninsula. That first day, and all through the night, Mikey stood at the yacht’s bow. The sun rose to his left at dawn, and he felt it shine through him, adding golden accents to his natural afterglow. Their boat did not pitch and roll with the motion of the sea; rather it glided as if skating on ice, regardless of what the living sea did around it, leaving no wake to mark their passage. Their journey offered no bursts of sea spray, no bow lurching to meet the waves. It was an indignation of Everlost that ocean voyages were stripped of their drama.
This was the first time Mikey had been at sea since his days as the McGill, and he couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic. Back then, his greatest pleasure was to be miserable in every possible way. Things were so much better now, but he did occasionally have an urge to wallow. This sleek sailing yacht was nothing like the dank rusty bulk of the old steamship, the Sulphur Queen. He couldn’t say which he liked better: the rude character and brute
