Everfound

CHAPTER 49
The War of Souls

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.

Once Johnnie-O was gone, Vari, who, had been watching from an air vent, made his move.

As King Yax looked out of the open window, Vari dropped into the control room, catching his former boss off guard.

“Vizier?” said the king, for King Yax knew no one’s actual name. “What are you doing here?”

“Saying good-bye,” said Vari. Then he reached down, grabbed the king’s bare feet, and flipped him out of the window, enacting a quick political coup de drop. Once the king had been dispatched, Vari retreated into the air vent again with all the king’s gold, planning to bide his time until he could get Mikey, Nick, and Jix off the airship as well.

The king was understandably outraged as he fell from the sky, and swore all manner of retribution against his vizier, once he solved the predicament of falling a thousand feet with no deadspot to land on. Although there were many, many things he could unremember to get himself out of this situation, the king was not the brightest bauble in the headdress. He concluded that if there were no such direction as “down,” then he couldn’t possibly fall, could he?

“I don’t remember there being a ‘down,’” King Yax said. “I don’t remember it whatsoever.”

The problem with that particular unmemory is that it instantly transported him to the only place on earth where “down” does not exist. Namely, the very center of the earth, where the only direction is “up.”

Thus, King Yax K’uk Mo’ avoided many long years of sinking, and promptly became the central-most soul in a very different party than he was used to.

“Mikey! Over here!”

Mikey heard Allie call out to him the moment the Hindenburg began to rise. The great airship lifted off the ground, and he saw her rising to her feet from beneath it. He ran to her, wrapping his arms around her, and he found himself growing another set of arms, and another and another just to hold her. He could not embrace her enough.

“I thought you had been extinguished,” Mikey said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of it.”

“It was Milos,” Allie told him. “Your sister made him do it.”

Mikey shook his head and said something he’d been feeling for quite a while. “She’s not my sister anymore,” Mikey told her. “Megan McGill’s been gone for a long, long time.”

Mikey held her in his multiple embrace, and although he wanted to make this moment the only moment that mattered, he knew he couldn’t. So he pulled in his extra sets of limbs, and said, “Nick thinks the first atomic bomb is at the center of the vortex.”

Allie looked at him, horrified, finally realizing what this place was. “Well, it can’t go off, right?” she said. “I mean, this is Everlost-it can’t be destroyed.”

“Unless,” he reminded her, “its purpose was to be destroyed…”

In the Hindenburg control room, Speedo still stared at Vari in a gold skirt, trying to wrap his mind around it. “The Supreme who? The king of what?”

Then the ship hit the double-world storm, and the Hindenburg ’s nose began to drop. Vari looked at the controls around him, baffled, so he turned to Speedo. “I command you to take me to the City of Souls!”

“You command squat,” said Speedo, finally sticking up for himself against those who would order him around. “This is my airship, and you are just a passenger. Got it?”

The nose dipped farther, and Vari nodded nervously.

Speedo, who had been a true master of the airship’s helm, quickly took the controls, adjusting the elevator wheel until the inclinometers were level and the ship had stabilized. He paused then, but only briefly. He now had his ship back-and although it meant abandoning his claim on the deadspot, he resolved not to return to Mary. Not now, not ever.

“We need to get more altitude, and we can’t do that in this storm,” Speedo told Vari. “We’ll go back over the deadspot-it’s quiet in the eye. Then, by the time we reach the far side, we’ll be high enough to make it through the storm.”

Speedo turned the ship around, and it began to rise as it crossed back over the deadspot.

Jix knew something had gone terribly wrong when he saw the Hindenburg soaring overhead with its gangway still open and the occasional warrior tumbling out. He looked back to take stock of the limited number of warriors with him now. There were thousands upon thousands of souls to fight Mary Hightower, but that meant nothing if they all were aboard an airship that was flying away.

Now, Mary’s children were coming out of hiding all around Jix, and there were lots of them-many more than the warriors who actually made it out of the airship. It looked like Mary’s children realized that too, because they didn’t seem frightened anymore. In fact, they were closing in.

Johnnie-O never got to the gangway before the ship took off. He got close, but something along the way stopped him. It was the statue of the king. Johnnie remembered how, when he and Charlie had first flown over the deadspot nearly a month ago, the airship had filled with sparks and silent lightning. Now, however, all the electrical charges seemed to be focused around the statue, creating pleasing patterns of light. Pleasing, at least, to him. Johnnie-O found himself mesmerized, unable to look away, and while the warriors had been frightened by it, sticking close to the stairwell wall on their way to the gangway, Johnnie could not stop looking at it.

Old thoughts began to play in his head. “It’s gotta mean something, don’t it, Charlie? The fact that I’m not a complete blithering idiot like you?” Although Johnnie-O didn’t know what the meaning was, he couldn’t help but think that his destiny, like Charlie’s, was somehow tied up with this statue.

He was so enthralled by it that he never even felt the ship leave the ground. It wasn’t until he heard a commanding yet whiny voice behind him that he broke out of his trance.

“Why are you staring at that statue?”

He turned to see what at first he thought was the king, but quickly he realized it was Vari wearing the king’s clothes.

“None of your business,” said Johnnie-O. “Get lost.”

Vari took a step forward, trying to look taller than he was. “I am your king now. All who disrespect me shall be cast down to Xibalba.” Then Vari looked at the statue. “When we return to the City of Souls, we will find your bucket of coins in the forge, and make a new face for the statue. My face.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And as punishment for your disrespect, you will be made to do it, by dipping those big fat hands of yours into the molten metal.”

That was all Johnnie-O had to hear. Suddenly the sparking statue didn’t look beautiful to him, it looked hideous. “You know what? I got a better idea.” Then he grabbed the statue’s obsidian base with those same big fat hands, and knocked it over.

“No! What are you doing?”

Then Johnnie kicked it down the gangway stairs.

“Stop! I order you to stop!”

“Sorry. I don’t take orders from obnoxious, snot-nosed twits.”

Now the statue lay half in and half out of the airship, wedged against the gangway stairs’ support strut. With the airship halfway over the deadspot, and still gaining altitude, that last step off the gangway was a very long one.

“Don’t you dare!” said Vari.

“What are you gonna do about it?” He kicked at the base until the statue became unstuck and began to totter.

“No!” Vari hurried to save it, but Johnnie-O stuck his foot out, Vari tripped over it, and he went flying into the statue.

“Nooooo!” The second Vari touched the statue, he vanished in a rainbow twinkling of light, getting to where he was going, whether he liked it or not-and the force of his momentum tipped the statue off its precarious balance. It fell from the gangway, plunging to the deadspot far below.

“Ha!” said Johnnie-O. “That’ll show him. Xibalba, my butt!”

Then Johnnie, happily humming “Anchors Aweigh,” climbed back into the ship, and sat down, leaning against the stairwell wall. He knew that in those brief moments something had changed… because there was now nothing in the world he wanted to do more than to sit there and have his own private sing-along.

Clarence covered his dead eye, but he couldn’t cover his dead ear enough to drown out the sounds all around him-and the various burned parts of him kept bumping into things that weren’t there, making his trek to the jeep slow and difficult. His dead ear heard children calling to one another, and orders shouted in other languages. There were sounds of battle, and the roar of engines high above. And then there came a heavy, decisive thud very close to him.

Still dizzy, still foggy in his thoughts, Clarence began to remember things. He remembered that the ghosties weren’t in his mind, they were real. There was an invisible war going on-and he was a part of that war. He remembered a boy with a face like a cat. Jix. Jix had told Clarence that he had a purpose-but the sounds around him were so chaotic, at that moment it was hard to imagine anything had a purpose at all.

Far far ahead, sat the Jeep-but with all these sounds crashing around him, he couldn’t stop himself from taking a peek with his dead eye. Immediately the barren desert wasn’t barren anymore. What he saw didn’t make any sense, though, because it was the exact same thing he saw before he covered his dead eye.

A trophy and a martini shaker.

Only this time, they were both huge. He made his way closer to the strange objects. The trophy was not a trophy at all, but a statue, and it was sparking wildly with multicolored electricity. The other object wasn’t exactly a martini shaker. It was shaped like one, but a bit stouter-and it wasn’t silver; it was dull green, with lots of wires. It was also upside down, and standing on its head, but closer observation revealed that it was hovering just above the ground.

There was something missing from this picture, wasn’t there? Yes! There had been a playing card between the trophy and the shaker!

Then, all at once everything that was missing in his mind came back to him. He knew where he was. He knew what that green thing was. He had seen pictures of it as a child. And now, as he approached the very center of the deadspot-the heart of the vortex-he realized that Jix had been right all along. Clarence did have a purpose! There was a reason why he was the way he was-why he had to suffer through the ridicule of living this half-life of suffering-because what needed to be done today could be accomplished only by him: someone with an unnatural presence in both worlds. Ever since the day his flesh was seared and he was given his vision of Everlost, every thought he had, every phrase he uttered was somehow incomplete. He was incomplete, but today in this place, at this moment, completion was finally at the tips of his fingers. The playing card was missing, but it was only a placeholder-a reminder that he was the one-eyed jack between the here and the hereafter.

With his Everlost hand, he reached to his left, gripping the statue firmly. Then, with his living hand, he reached to his right, toward the bomb. He didn’t touch it, for his living hand could not touch an Everlost bomb. Instead his living hand reached right through it, as if it wasn’t there. He stretched his fingers out as far as he could, and when his fingertips reached the core of the device, an electrical charge ran from the statue of fused coins, through Clarence, and into the memory of the bomb. And in that moment of infinite possibility, the statue, Clarence, and The Gadget all did exactly what it was their purpose to do.