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“Someone moved it here,” Milos informed him. “Someone lifted it up, carried it all the way around the lake, and put it down right in our path.”
“Milos gets a gold star!” said Allie.
Then Milos, always one to blame the messenger, turned on her in fury. “You keep your mouth shut or I will find some duct tape and tape it closed!”
To which Allie calmly responded, “Duct tape never crosses.” Which was true. Things that cross into Everlost are usually loved, and nobody loves duct tape. Its use is, at best, an a
“If it moved once,” Milos said, “it can move again.”
“You . . . you want us to move it back?” asked Speedo.
Allie snickered, which only made Milos more irritated.
“We don’t need to move it back, just off the tracks. Understand?”
“Oh,” said Speedo as if it were a grand revelation. “I get it!”
Milos lined up the Afterlights on one side of the church. Then, on Milos’s command, they began to lift and release, lift and release, over and over until the church began to rock back and forth. Even with fifty Afterlights, the church was so heavy, it took forever until they were able to build any sort of momentum.
Up above, the steeple wavered like a metronome, cutting a wider and wider arc across the sky. By now all the rest of Mary’s children had come out to see what was going on. Moose and Squirrel watched like it was prime-time TV, Jill crossed her arms and feigned complete disinterest, and Jix observed stoically, without revealing how he felt about it either way.
The anticipation of all those assembled built as the church rocked on the tracks, until finally the building reached the edge of its balance, slid off the tracks, and tumbled over on its side, landing unbroken on the ground beside the train. Without a deadspot to rest on, the church began to slowly sink into the living world.
The Afterlights all cheered, giving Milos all the credit for clever thinking—although he knew it wasn’t his cleverness that had solved their predicament. It was Allie’s.
“Load up the train,” Milos commanded. “And stoke the engine.”
“What about me?” asked Allie. “Will you take me down from here now, like you promised?” Milos looked at her, thought for a moment, then said to Moose and Squirrel, “All right. Untie her from the train.”
Allie relaxed, fully ready for freedom until Milos said, “Take her down, then tie her back to the train again. This time, upside down.”
“What?”
Milos climbed up to her, getting right in her face. “All this time you knew, and you left us like sitting geese.”
“Sitting ducks,” Allie corrected, and then wished she hadn’t.
“Did you think that whoever put the church here would attack the rest of us and set you free?”
Allie didn’t answer him . . . because that’s exactly what she thought.
“I am sorry,” said Milos, “but you are far too useful as a scarecrow for me to put you anywhere else.” Then he turned to the others. “I want everyone who sees us coming to know that we are not to be trifled with. I want everyone seeing this train to fear it—to fear us. I want them terrified.”
“Them?” asked Speedo. “Them, who?”
“It took fifty of us just to knock over that church,” said Milos. “How many do you think it took to move it all the way around the lake?”
Speedo said nothing, clearly not wanting to consider the answer.
Allie struggled against Moose and Squirrel but it was no use. “Do you think that tying me up like that will scare them? Whoever they are, they’re not scared of us, and they don’t want us trespassing.”
Milos responded by turning to the crowd and a
With Allie tied back onto the grille upside down, the train continued forward . . . while beside it, the church lost its battle with gravity and, like a foundering ship, sank into the quicksand of the living world.
PART TWO
The Wraith and the Warriors
High Altitude Musical Interlude #1 with Joh
There is no wind in Everlost. At least none that occurs naturally. No nor’easters heralding winter, no gentle summer zephyrs. Even Everlost trees that rustle in the wind are only going through the motions, moving with the memory of a breeze long gone.
That is not to say that Everlost has no atmosphere; it does. The air of Everlost is a direct result of the living, and is a blend of many things. The first breath of a baby and the last breath of a life well-lived. The charged air of anticipation that fills a stadium before the start of a game, and the electrified air of excitement when a band takes the concert stage—these all cross into Everlost. Every passage of gas that someone laughed at, every sigh offered up to a glorious sunset are here . . . but so are the screams of victims and the sobs of those who mourn.
Not every breath, but every breath taken and expelled with purpose, be it good or bad, are not forgotten by the universe. These things all blend and make up the air that Afterlights occasionally choose to breathe; air rich with emotions and with memories not entirely lost.
And since these moments are at peace with eternity,they do not bluster and blow. One may ask, then, without a jet stream surging in the sky, how did the Hindenburg—the largest zeppelin ever built and burst by mankind—how did such a massive airship drift across the Atlantic Ocean? The answer is quite simple; one does not need a natural wind to be blown eastward, when there’s an u
“I’ve been working on the railroad, all the live-long day!”
On the day that Mary defeated Nick, and her army took over his train, Mary’s former mode of transportation, the giant airship Hindenburg, was set adrift into the sky over Memphis. There were only two Afterlights aboard: the juvenile train conductor known as Choo-choo Charlie, and Joh
“I’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away!”
The control room of the airship was empty, sealed by a lock with no key—which meant there was no way to pilot the craft. Its engines were off, its rudder was stuck, and it would stay that way.
“Can’t you hear the whistle blowing, rise up so early in the morn?”
That first day, they sat across from each other with a bucket of Everlost coins between them. Both Charlie and Joh
“Can’t ya hear the captain shouting, ‘Dina blow your horn.’”
But neither of them had taken their coins. At the time, Charlie was just plain scared, and Joh
When their journey had first begun, the u