Everwild (27 page)

The suggestion just made Zin mad. What, was he stupid? Ripping stuff out was one thing, but putting something back? Whenever Zin ripped, she always kind of felt like a midwife, helping someone give birth. To her, the living world was truly that—a living thing, that could feel everything that happened to it. You don't put back stuff that gets born. “Sir, you can't take sumpin' that crossed into Everlost and shove it back into the living world—that ain't the way it's done.”

And then the Ogre asked, “Have you ever tried?”

Zin was about to explain to him just how ripping worked, but her words caught in her throat, because she
realized that she never had tried. The idea of putting something back had never occurred to her. Why should it? It was all about taking.

“No, I ain't never tried that,” said Zin. “But what if puttin' sumpin' back is one of them weird scientifical things that blows up the world?”

“If you blow up the world,” the Ogre said, “you can blame it on me.”

Which was good enough for Zin. He was, after all, her superior officer. If and when she got to the pearly gates, she could always claim she was following orders.

“Well, all right, then.”

She steeled herself, then held the sucker in her ripping hand, and tried to shove it through, into the living world.

It was not an easy thing. Just opening a hole into the living world was different now that her intentions were different. It was like picking a lock. Then when the portal finally began to open, the living world resisted.

“It won't work, sir,” Zin insisted. “I think the livin' world's got all the stuff it can stand, and don't want no more.”

“Keep trying.”

Zin gritted her teeth and doubled her efforts. As she tried to force that sucker through, she felt a powerful battle of wills between her and the living world. The question was, did the world want to keep the sucker out more than Zin wanted to put it in?

To Zin's surprise, she won the battle: The living world relented, and took the sucker back. When Zin was done, it sat on a counter in the candy shop, its bright colors faded and slightly out of focus, just like everything else in the living
world. Zin pulled her hand back, and shivered.

“You did it!”

“Yeah,” said Zin, pleased, yet troubled by this newly discovered power. “I felt like I done something wrong, though …”

“It's only wrong if you use it for the wrong things,” the Ogre said.

“But the world don't like it, sir.”

“Did the world like you ripping when you first started?”

Zin thought back to her earliest days in Everlost. Ripping wasn't easy when she first began. The world held on to stuff like a kid holds on to toys. “No,” Zin had to admit. “It was hard at first.”

“But the world got used to it, right?”

“I guess …”

“It got used to ripping, so it'll get used to …
cramming
… as well.” They both looked at the half-eaten sucker on the living world counter until the candy store cashier noticed it and eyed it with disgust. He then picked it up, and dropped it into the trash.

“I want you to practice this,” the Ogre told Zin. “Practice cramming every chance you get, until you can do it as quickly and as smoothly as ripping.”

Then Zin asked the million dollar question. “Why?”

“Does there have to be a ‘why'?” asked the Ogre. “Isn't knowing the full extent of your powers reason enough?”

But if there was one thing Zin had come to learn and respect about the Ogre, it was his strategy as a general … and the fact that everything he did was always a single move in a much larger campaign.

Doris Meltzer had led a long and productive life. At the age of eighty-three, she knew she didn't have much time left, but she was satisfied with the life she had lived.

For her entire adult life, she wore her wristwatch on her left wrist, but would always glance at her right. She would gently rub it, and convinced herself it was just a nervous habit. The truth of it lay below the threshold of her understanding. At times she touched upon the true meaning of it—at the moment of waking, or the instant before sleep set in—the two places where one's spirit comes closest to Everlost. Never close enough to actually see it, but close enough to sense its existence.

It all began the night of her high school prom. It was a momentous occasion, but not in the way anyone had expected. Her date was a boy named Billy, and she'd had a crush on him since grade school. She had dreams they might be married—and in those days marrying your high school sweetheart was more the norm than the exception.

Billy had just learned to drive and was proud to be
doing it, taking her to the prom under the capable control of his own hands and feet, even if he was driving his father's clunky old DeSoto.

He gave her a wrist corsage of yellow roses.

It was a beautiful thing that matched her lemon chiffon dress. She wore it on her right wrist, and lifted it to her face, inhaling its rich aroma all night long. Even then she knew that, for the rest of her life, when she smelled roses, she would think of this night. She would think of Billy.

The prom was spectacular, as a prom should be. It was after they left that everything went wrong. It wasn't Billy's fault. He had obeyed all the traffic laws, but sometimes none of that matters when someone else has been drinking. Such was the case when a car full of drunken classmates ran a red light at the corner of Severance and Blithe.

Billy never felt a thing.

He was gone before the car stopped flipping. He had sailed instantly down the tunnel and into the light. There were no pit stops in Everlost for him—for at the age of eighteen, the walls of his tunnel were already too thick to allow an unexpected detour. For him, his exit from the living world went exactly as it should.

Doris, however, had a harder time of it, for although she also saw the tunnel, it wasn't her time to make the journey. She was merely an observer, watching him go. She awoke in the hospital days later with her family by her side, all of them thanking God for a million answered prayers. She was alive, and would recover.

As for the corsage, it perished in the crash along with the boy she might have married.

Doris's spine was severed at the L-4 vertebrae, and she never walked again—but in all other aspects she lived a full and exceptionally happy life. She married, had children, and had her own antique business in a time when a woman's place was still considered to be the home.

She had no way of knowing that the corsage of yellow roses didn't entirely perish.

Because of what it meant to the boy who gave it to her, and because of what it meant to Doris, the corsage crossed into Everlost unscathed. Sixty-five years later, it was still as fresh and bright as the evening she wore it.

In fact, it was still right there on her wrist.

It moved with her, unknown and invisible, holding her right wrist in a gentle grasp, secretly giving her comfort when she needed it. This was the cause of that strange urge to look at her wrist, and to caress it, yet she never made the connection.

Then one day, a boy who had half turned to chocolate noticed the corsage.

He was merely passing by when he spotted it. He was out searching for Afterlights to gather, but instead he found the cluster of yellow roses and baby's breath. So vibrant, so bright—it was clearly an artifact of Everlost, and yet it clung to the arm of an old woman in a wheelchair sitting on a porch.

Nick had never seen anything like it. He had always assumed that when items crossed, they fell free from the living world, but here was a corsage that still clung to the hand of its living wearer, even though it existed only in Everlost.

Nick remembered reading about a sort of spirit that
becomes attached to the living. An
incubus
it was called. He had never met or even heard of a spirit like that in Everlost— but this corsage—it was a floral incubus, refusing to leave its beloved host behind.

Refusing, that is, until Nick reached out, and plucked it right off the woman's arm—an easy thing to do, as it was part of Everlost.

Doris knew something had changed the moment it happened, but she couldn't tell what. She wheeled around the porch searching every corner. Surely she had lost something, but what could it be? That's how it was with so many things these days. Half-finished thoughts, forgetting even what she'd forgotten. It was no picnic getting old. She looked to her right wrist, rubbing it, scratching it, wishing the uncanny feeling of loss would just go away.

Meanwhile, in Everlost, Nick went to fetch Zin.

“This corsage crossed into Everlost,” he told her. “I think it happened a very long time ago.”

“So?” said Zin. “What about it?”

“I'd like you to put it back into the living world.”

Zin had been practicing the art of “cramming,” as the Ogre had called it, but she sensed that this was a little bit different. She couldn't say why.

She turned the corsage in her hand, put it on her own wrist for a moment, inhaled its rich fragrance—and then it finally struck her why this was different than any of the other things she had crammed back into the living world.

“These flowers are alive… .”

She thought she caught a hint of a smile on the clear side of the Ogre's face. “So they are,” he said. “Or as alive
as anything can be in Everlost. Now I'm ordering you to put that corsage back into the living world.”

She instinctively knew that dealing with something “alive” would be a whole new level of cramming.

“I don't know if I can do that, sir.” She didn't always remember to call him “sir,” but she did whenever she was basically telling him “no.”

“You won't know until you try,” he told her, because the Ogre never took no for an answer.

They returned to the porch where Nick had seen the woman, but she was no longer there, because the living are rarely so convenient as to remain where you found them. Nick, however, wouldn't rest until he had tracked her down. Although the living appeared blurry to those in Everlost, a woman in a wheelchair wouldn't be too difficult to spot.

Doris was not at home because she had called her teenage grandson, and asked him to come take her for a walk. She was feeling unsettled. Not quite panicked, but very unsettled.

“Something's missing,” she told him.

“I'm sure you'll find it,” he said, not for an instant believing that anything was missing at all. Doris's children and grandchildren all thought she was far more senile than she really was, treating everything she said as if it were coming from someplace hopelessly foggy. It annoyed her no end, and they took her crankiness as further evidence of dementia.

Her grandson rolled her through the streets of the town, and when they came to a corner, she chanced to look up at the street signs.

They were at the corner of Severance and Blithe.

Although she had passed this intersection a thousand times since the accident, the spot was only painful when she paused to think about it, which she rarely did anymore. But today she felt a strange need to pay her respects, and so she had her grandson pause at the corner before crossing.

It was as she sat there, tallying the cost of a single tragic moment, that she felt a strange gripping sensation on her right wrist. She looked down to see that a yellow rose corsage had been slipped onto her hand. Not any corsage, but
the
corsage. She knew nothing of Everlost, or of Zin, who had just successfully crammed it into the living world, and had slipped it onto her hand—but Doris didn't need to know. There was no question in her mind that this was the same corsage. In a sudden moment of intuition, Doris came to realize that the corsage had always been with her, then was briefly taken away, only to be presented back to her fully and completely. All these years it had been unable to live, but unable to die. Now it would do both.

Her grandson didn't notice its appearance—his attention had drifted to two girls his own age farther down the street. He only noticed the corsage once the girls had turned the corner.

“Where did that come from?” he asked once he saw it.

“Billy gave it to me,” Doris said honestly. “He gave it to me the night of the prom.”

Her grandson glanced momentarily at the trash can on the corner beside them. “Of course he did, Grandma,” and he left it at that, making a mental note to keep her wheelchair a little farther away from trash cans.

By nightfall the corsage had begun to wilt, but that was
fine. Doris knew it was the way of all things, and each falling petal was a gentle reminder that soon—maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next year—her time would come too. The tunnel would open for her, and she would make her journey into the light with a mind as crystal clear as the star-filled evening.

Nick could tell there was something wrong in Nashville.

A city this big should have had Afterlights, but there was not a single one to be found. They did find an abandoned Afterlight den—a crossed factory, filled with evidence of Afterlight activity, but not one soul remained.

“Maybe they all found their coins, and got where they were going,” Johnnie-O suggested.

“Or maybe they were captured by Mary,” Charlie said.

“Or maybe sumpin' worse,” said Zin—and by Kudzu's reaction, everyone suspected she might be right. The dog wasn't exactly a bloodhound, but his senses were more acute than human ones—and the second he and Zin got close to the factory, Kudzu began to back off and howl. He wouldn't get near the place.

There was definitely a strange feeling in the air—the residue of some bitter circumstance. It called for a visit from the Sniffer.

The Sniffer was a kid they picked up in Chattanooga, whose sense of smell was so good, he could smell things
that didn't actually have an odor. Like the scent of someone thinking too hard (smells like a burning lampshade) or the aroma of confusion (smells like rotisserie chicken). One might think he'd have a monumentally distorted nose, and yet he didn't. It was a dainty little upturned thing.