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Mary had assigned two Afterlights who seemed content to tell knock-knock jokes to each other, to be the sentinels of the church.
“When the rest of us leave, you will stay here to guard the ones who sleep,” Mary told them. “And when they awake, you will be in charge. But always remember that it is I who am in charge of you.” Then she had given them a volume of her newest book, penned by hand and painstakingly copied for them by a girl with perfect penmanship who Mary had chosen as her personal scribe.
“Read this,” Mary had told the two jokesters. “Read it daily and when these new souls awake, please have them read it too.”
This was a key part of Mary’s plan. In each place she went, in every location she tore free from the living world, she would leave a team of Afterlights to tend to the sleeping Interlights left behind. Then when they awoke they would have a town to call their own, and would be welcomed into Mary’s extended community.
Yet 178 new Afterlights was just a tiny drop in the bucket. There were more than six billion people in the living world, and one-fifth of those were young enough to be saved by Mary. Even if she did this every single day it would take thousands of years to complete the job. That simply wouldn’t do. The war she had spoken to Milos about simply had to happen: The living had to be turned against one another, but she was still not exactly sure how to bring that about.
As she stood, looking out from the gazebo, a wind blew in the living world, dragging the smoke from the smoldering town westward. Mary could feel her own westward pull as well, stronger now than ever before. The answer to everything lay in that direction, just ahead of her, just past the horizon. Somewhere out there was the center of this strange gravity, and when she found it, when she stood right in the middle of it, she would know exactly what to do.
As she pondered the days ahead, looking out at the smoke, and her Afterlights shining through it, she saw one Afterlight coming toward her. One who wore a helmet. Moose had finally returned, and hopefully with a good excuse as to what had taken him so long . . . but as he got closer, Mary could sense that something was very, very wrong.
* * *
It had been a pretty bad football accident that landed Mitchell “Moose” Moessner’s body comatose in a Pittsburgh convalescent hospital, paralyzed from the neck down. Wilted flowers attested to the fact that he was visited regularly, but no one was visiting him at the moment that Allie “the Outcast” Johnson put his physical self to rest. Unlike Milos, he had not suffered brain damage. In fact, Moose’s brain should have been functioning normally, and yet he had never come out of his coma. It made perfect sense to Allie; consciousness could not exist here while his consciousness was elsewhere.
Moose could have skinjacked his own body if he had chosen to . . . if he had, he would have woken as a quadriplegic with no hope of motion below the neck, and no hope of even breathing for himself. Still, he could have done it, reclaiming some version of his old life. Now, however, that was out of the question.
There were many things that Moose feared: hell, the scar wraith, but God help anyone who witnessed the fury of Mary Hightower. As far as Moose was concerned, her anger was the most frightening thing in the universe—and for the first time ever, he was glad he was wearing a helmet, because he truly believed her rage could make his head explode.
“How could I have been so stupid?” Mary seethed. “How could I have been so blind to not know the truth from the moment Milos lost his ability?”
“Maybe itch a coincidench?” Moose’s eyes were full of tears, but fortunately his face mask hid them, and Mary was not looking too closely.
“If you think that, then you’re a more of a fool than I thought you were.”
He had lost his ability to skinjack only minutes after crashing the tanker truck into the electrical station. And since then he had been hiding, afraid to come back.
Mary paced back and forth in the gazebo. “This is Allie’s doing—I’m sure of it—and it’s all Milos’s fault! He should have sent her down the moment she was captured instead of making her the blasted figurehead of the train. He brought this on all of us!”
“Not really,” said Moose, trying to defend him, because Milos was beyond any ability to defend himself. All of his attention was now on a deck of cards he had taken from one of the other kids. Milos spent all of his time shuffling it, and looking for one-eyed jacks.
“What I want to know is how she found your bodies,” Mary said. “She must have known your true names!”
“Not neshisharily . . . ,” said Moose.
“Stop contradicting me!” Mary paced with such a storm of emotion, Moose half expected lightning to crash all around them. Finally Mary turned to look at Moose and saw the tears in his eyes. She softened just a bit. “I know this isn’t your fault. It’s unfair that you have to be the one to suffer.”
Moose nodded and the tears started to flow more freely, no matter how hard he tried to hold them back.
“You may go now,” she told him. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
He left sobbing in tears that were as great as the day that Squirrel was extinguished. But his tears were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of joy. Although he was always a team player, the weight of being a skinjacker in the service of Mary Hightower was more than he could bear. He didn’t care if he lost his memories and his mind the way Milos had—in fact, he would prefer it. As he left Mary, he could already feel it all slipping away, so he went forth into the ruins of Eunice, searching among the crossed odds and ends, until he finally found himself a football . . . because the prospect of throwing and catching a football from now until the end of time was Mitchell “Moose” Moessner’s idea of heaven.
Mary gathered the remaining skinjackers. They numbered seven now, including Jill. “We are under attack,” Mary told them, “and we must strike back with full force as quickly and severely as possible. We must find the body of Allie the Outcast, and we must send that body to the grave.”
No one answered immediately. These new skinjackers had no frame of reference, no idea who she was talking about. It just infuriated Mary even more.
“Her coma would have begun after a car accident, north of New York City, not quite four years ago. That is where we will begin our search. I will need a volunteer.”
Rotsie immediately raised his hand, and Jill gave him a look of utter disgust. “Don’t be stupid,” Jill said. “You don’t even know what she looks like.” Then she turned to Mary. “If you need someone to do some pest control, it might as well be me.”
This gave Mary pause for thought. It was out of character for Jill to volunteer for anything . . . but then perhaps Jill’s hatred of Allie rivaled her own. Or perhaps it was because Jill knew that she would be next on Allie’s list.
“Sorry,” said Rotsie, “but I think I’m better equipped to handle something like this.”
“Yeah, right,” said Jill dismissively, then turned back to Mary. “Even if you wanted to send him, you couldn’t—you need Damon to lead the group, don’t you?”
