Everfound

CHAPTER 42
Sense and Sensibility and Skinjackers

W olf River Convalescent Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, overlooked Wolf River Lagoon, Mud Island, and the Missisippi River beyond, but the patients in the long-term maintenance ward had no interest in the view. They had no interest in anything at all.

The nursing staff knew better than to remove the offerings of loved ones unless they became a fire hazard. Mylar balloons, potted plants, and all sorts of bright decorations filled the many rooms of the ward, as if it were a perpetual party… but nothing could mask the oppressive silence of the place.

Allie Johnson hadn’t begun her convalescence here-but when the family moved to Memphis, they had Allie brought here, so they could still be close to her. The thought of abandoning her in the New Jersey facility was unthinkable. They had last come to visit on Christmas-the busiest day of the year, when relatives came out of the woodwork to sit in the lonely rooms, making them a little less lonely for a while.

On Christmas Day, just as on other special occasions, Allie’s family lavished love upon her comatose body in every way they could. Her older sister trimmed and painted her nails, both fingers and toes, while playing Allie’s favorite music. Her mother brushed the tangles out of her hair and gave her a haircut. Her father did the hard work of massaging her knotty muscles, softening them for the day they might be used once more. According to the doctors there was no brain damage-no reason why she shouldn’t wake up. Except that she hadn’t for four years.

Then her mother sat down and read yet another chapter from Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility. She believed it was Allie’s favorite book, but that was entirely untrue. Allie just thought the guy who starred in the movie had been cute. Then, after the reading was over, the melancholy began to set in as it always did, until it became too potent, and they decided it was time to leave. Her mother gave Allie a gentle kiss on her forehead, affixed a Christmas card to a bare spot on a wall already full of greeting cards, then promised to return on Valentine’s Day.

As evening fell, families poured out the front door, no more comforted than when they came but at least feeling they had done the right thing. The ghost of Christmas present soon became the ghost of Christmas past, and silence descended in each room once more, punctuated only by the beeps and whirs of the machines that monitored and pumped and infused and labored to keep dozens of people existing in this strange state of living death.

“I’m not afraid of dying,” Allie told Clarence, as they stood in front of the hospital, in the middle of the day, more than two weeks after her parents’ Christmas visit. “For more than three years I thought I already was dead. I just want to know how bad off I am.”

“Sounds like you’re a little afraid of living.”

“The only thing that scares me,” said Allie, a little bit brusquely, “is a world ruled by Mary.” Then she skinjacked a passerby.

“I’ll be back soon,” Allie said.

“If you’re not, I’ll understand.”

“I said I’ll be back!”

Then she turned and strode into the hospital.

Five minutes later she was in the body of one of the long-term care nurses, moving through the ward to room 509, which, according to hospital records, was where Allie’s body lay in repose. “Repose”-that’s what they called it here. A nice word for a terrible state. She waited until the other nurse on duty was occupied, then she took a deep breath… then another… then a third, as if she were about to go underwater. Then, still skinjacking the nurse, she stepped into the room.

Furniture was minimal. The greeting cards on the wall added a nice touch, but some of them had fallen, and now lay haphazardly on the ground, making it clear that decorations were not a high priority for the staff. Well, why should they be? There was no need for comfortable amenities here. The two soft chairs and the hotel-grade painting on the wall weren’t there for the patient, they were there for visitors, to make them feel comfortable. None of it mattered to the living dead.

Allie forced herself to look at the figure in the bed before she lost her nerve. The sight took her breath away, as she knew it would.

It was bad, but not that bad.

It was shocking, but not all that shocking.

The girl in the bed was remarkably close to her memory of herself. Still, it was chilling. It was like seeing a ghost before you actually believed in them.

“Hello, Allie,” she whispered.

Allie-in-the-bed did not respond. A feeding tube ran into her nose, but she had expected that. Her skin was pale, almost translucent. She had expected that, too. What she didn’t expect were the painted nails and the state of her hair-not a gnarled mess, but brushed back from her face. A series of machines beeped and clicked and whirred. One machine had fat tubes stretching to each of her extremities, and pumped up rubber bladders of air, then let them go flat again with a slow hiss. Allie realized it was to help her circulation, but it gave the illusion that her arms and legs were moving ever so slightly.

The car accident had left its mark on her. There was a long, jagged scar across the right side of her forehead that went down her right cheek, and seemed to go under her hairline-but it was long healed. Other than that, her body and face were intact.

As she stepped closer, she began to feel the pull, like a secret undertow, tugging her forward. The closer she got, the stronger it became.

“ Come home,” her body silently said to her. “My flesh is yours. I ache for you. I long for you to come home, dear sweet Allie, and make us both whole again.”

And now, in the presence of herself, she finally realized what she feared above all else. She feared the call of her own flesh.

“Come back to me, Allie. Be me, Allie.”

The call of her body was now a riptide so strong she felt she would abandon the struggle against Mary just to leap inside it and be whole again. Would she leave Mikey, to grow up and grow old without him? And if she did, would she be able to live a normal, fulfilling life, knowing of all the things that existed in the places she couldn’t see? Or would she spend her life trying to find the rabbit hole that would get her back to her own peculiar wonderland?

“You want this. It’s right. It’s natural. Leave this unnatural state while you still can…”

But the voice wasn’t coming from the bed at all, it was coming from her mind. And yes, everything it said was true, but some things were more important than fixing her own divided self. So she stood there within the nurse, keeping her spirit away from her body. It was painful. It was heart-rending. But still she resisted the riptide until she knew she could resist it as long as she had to.

Now she finally understood why she had to come. Until she faced herself, she was only running away… but to look at her own unseeing, half-open eyes and choose not to see through them again-that made her stronger and more determined than she’d ever been before. If there was a time to return to her body, it could not be now. If there was a time to go home, that time would have to wait. Allie still had work to do.

“Something wrong?”

Allie was startled by the voice behind her. She turned to see the other ward nurse standing in the doorway. Short cropped hair and a tired smile. “I saw that you weren’t at your station,” the other nurse said. “Is there a problem with this patient, Daisy? Do you need some help?”

“No, no,” said Allie, and she knelt down. “I was just picking up some of the cards that had fallen. It’s a shame-she’s so young.”

The other nurse sighed. “There’s no rhyme or reason to these things. All we can do is make her comfortable.”

“Right. And who knows, maybe she’ll wake up someday.”

The other nurse gave her that tired smile again. “Stranger things have happened.” Then, seeing the tears in Allie’s eyes, she said, “Go back to your station, Daisy. I’ll pick up the rest of those cards.”

Allie left, but she didn’t go back to the nurse’s station. She walked straight to the elevator, and took it down to the lobby. She would be happy to be out of this place, and in a different body-one that didn’t remind her of hospitals. She looked down at her nurse’s uniform, where the name “Daisy” was brightly embroidered on her breast pocket, and she resolved to skinjack the first nonmedical person she saw once she stepped out of that elevator… but the only person there when the elevator door opened was another nurse getting in. That’s when Allie noticed something…

The name “Daisy” was on the other nurse’s uniform too.

As the elevator closed behind her, Allie realized that Daisy wasn’t her name at all; it was the name of the company that manufactured the uniforms. Any other nurse would have known that.

Unless that nurse was being skinjacked.

Rotsie didn’t like being in a woman’s body, but it was the only one available, and a good soldier uses every resource at his disposal. He had never met Allie the Outcast, but his image of her had been larger than life. Yet here, lying on the bed before him was an ordinary girl. She was not larger than life at all. She was fragile, and easily put out of her misery.

It had all been easy enough until now. He had learned of her location by simple trial and error. He located the original accident report, and by skinjacking various people in various accounting offices, he followed the paper trail from an emergency room, to a hospital in New Jersey, to this hospital in Memphis.

At first he thought he might use a weapon-something suitable for an execution-but, although he would never admit it, he wasn’t too keen on the sight of blood. In the end he decided a simple suffocation would do the trick. No mess, no noise. He leaned over Allie’s body, took a pillow from behind her head, fluffed it a bit, then pressed it down over her face, already imagining how he’d announce to Mary that his mission had been accomplished.

The elevators were too slow, so Allie raced up five flights of stairs. The nurse she was skinjacking was not in the best of shape, and she was out of breath and dizzy by the time she reached the fifth floor. Allie could feel something happening to her, and she couldn’t tell whether it was the nurse’s body reacting to Allie’s own panic or the feeling of her real body dying.

She burst out of the stairwell and raced down the hallway to room 509. In the room, the nurse who had sent her out was suffocating Allie with a pillow. The body in the bed was bucking and quivering, but at least that meant she was still alive!

Allie didn’t waste a moment. She let loose an angry wail and hurled herself at the nurse, knocking her over and taking her down to the ground. The pillow went flying. They struggled on the ground, but Allie had an advantage, having caught her by surprise. She hit the woman over and over until the murderous nurse’s eyes went from steely anger to confusion and panic. Allie instantly knew the skinjacker had left her.

Then, before Allie could reassess, she was lifted off the ground by a very big, very bald male orderly who had the same look of determination the nurse had a moment ago.

“Mary wants you dead,” the skinjacked orderly said, and pushed her up against the wall. “And I always complete my mission.”

Allie didn’t answer him. Instead she leaned forward and bit his nose so hard that he screamed. The pain was enough to knock him out of the orderly. Allie peeled out as well, to get a good look at the true face of Mary’s assassin.

He was a tall kid in some sort of military uniform. Right now he was ankle-deep in the thin floor, trying to keep from sinking through. They made eye contact, but only for a moment.

Then they both heard the footsteps of hospital staff running toward the room, drawn by the commotion. In the room around them, the two nurses and the orderly still wailed and whimpered in their own personal shock and awe.

The assassin skinjacker staggered, slogging through the ground, struggling to keep from sinking, and reached toward an approaching guard, hoping to skinjack his way back into the living world.

Well, if this tool of Mary’s thought he could out-skinjack Allie, he had something else coming! Allie focused on the fleshie he was reaching for and leaped, zooming right past him, and skinjacked the fleshie before he could. She felt him try to get in, but couldn’t because Allie was already there. He just bounced off like a pinball. Now Allie leaped to the next closest fleshie, and again she got there before the murderous skinjacker. And then she did it again, out-racing, out-jacking, outsmarting him every single time.

Finally, as she neared the elevator, she peeled back into Everlost to see where he was. Each one of Allie’s preemptive skinjackings had left the assassin mired deeper in the floor. Now he was in the green linoleum tiles to his knees, and was near panic as he tried to keep himself from falling right through.

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.