Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

“The combination!” he insisted. “Hurry.”

Jill sighed. “Thirty-two–nineteen–twenty-eight—but you’re wasting your time!”

He ran off toward the caboose, repeating the numbers in his head.

The caboose lay on its side, already halfway into the earth but the door at the very back of the caboose—the one with the combination lock—was still aboveground. The kids that had been trying to keep the caboose from sinking had either been pulled away by the Neons, or had scattered to save themselves. Using his own afterglow to light the numbers, he spun the lock left, then right, then left again. He tugged. Nothing happened. For a moment he thought that Jill had lied to him, but then on the second tug, the lock came loose. He pried open the sideways door and threw himself inside.

To his surprise, there were already Afterlights in there—about a half dozen of them. They must have climbed in through the skylight, but the skylight was now underground.

“Have you come to join us?” one of them asked.

Mary was still asleep in her unbroken glass coffin—she must have been tossed about by the crash, but these kids had put her back in, smoothing out her hair, keeping her the very image of peace.

“We don’t have very long,” Jix said. “We have to get her out.”

But the kids didn’t move. “Out?” one of them said. “But the maniacs will get her if we take her out.”

“We’re going down with her!” said another, gently rubbing a hand across the glass of the casket. “Then when she wakes up, she’ll tell us what to do.”

Jix roared with such frustration he surprised himself by the force of it. It got their attention. “Do you think she’ll reward you for letting her sink? She’ll hate you! She’ll punish you! Better to be in the arms of the enemy than in the bowels of the earth! Now move!”

They didn’t need a second invitation. They grabbed Mary’s coffin, and, like pallbearers, moved her clumsily toward the door, which was quickly beginning to submerge.

o;Ooooh, this is bad,” Speedo wailed. “It’s worse than just bad, it’s really really bad.” The door of the engine cab was now almost entirely submerged in the earth as it sunk into the living world. With no time to lose, Speedo squeezed himself through the gap at the last possible moment. The fact that he was wet, for once, was helpful, because it made it easier to slip out. Then Speedo ran off into the night, and didn’t look back.

Mary, as well as all the Interlights in the sleeping car, remained asleep through the whole thing, and the kids in the prison car had grown so uninterested in the outside world, they were barely aware of the crash. They felt the jolt as the prison car rode over the car in front of it and toppled to the side, but they had no idea what had caused it. “Earthquake?” one of the kids inside said, and since no one was quite sure, they just went on with their conversations.

Everywhere kids were scrambling to get out of the train cars before they sank. How successful they were depended on how their car had landed. There were only two cars that were not sinking—the parlor car, which had been launched clear over the engine, and had landed on the roof of the mansion, and the sleeping car, which had landed sideways across the tracks.

“What a mesh,” said Moose as he climbed out of the parlor car and surveyed the situation below, happy that the parlor car was on the mansion roof, away from the worst of it.

“Nice one, Milos,” said Jill, shouting down to wherever he might be. “Maybe next time you can just hurl us all into the Grand Canyon.”

Milos heard her, but at the moment was too preoccupied to respond. He was now beneath the sleeping car, pinned to the rails, and struggle as he might, he could not free himself. What made it worse was that none of the kids running past him were willing to lift a finger for him.

“You!” he would command. “Come over here and help me!”

But they just glanced at him and hurried off without even answering.

Then, like thunder after the lightning strike, the invaders arrived—and they were so excited by this turn of events that their war cry degraded into random whoops and shouts of triumph. They had strange makeshift weapons. A skeletal umbrella at the end of a spear gun. A boomerang attached to long strips of flypaper—all items meant for snagging and catching Afterlights—and their bright war paint brought terror to all of Mary’s kids.

“Get their coins!” one of them screamed. “Get their coins and send them downtown!” Little did they know that these Afterlights had already surrendered their coins to Mary. Not even the ones who slept had coins, because those never appeared until after one awoke in Everlost. If coins were what these invaders wanted, they would come up empty-handed, and be very, very angry about it.

Allie heard the battle, but couldn’t see it. The engine had tilted straight up as the back end sank into the earth, so now her only view was of the stars and the moon.

“Someone out there had better untie me!” she yelled. She did not want to spend eternity like this. Going down to the center of the earth was bad enough. She would not go down tied to a stupid train!

Sure enough, someone climbed up to her—but it wasn’t one of the invaders. It was Jix, his nose and fledgling whiskers twitching.

“So are you going to free me this time?” she asked. “Or are you just here to chat?”

He immediately began to pull at the bonds that held her there, but they were too tight to undo. He paused, but only for a moment. “You’re a skinjacker,” Jix said. “So skinjack. That’s how you can get out of this.”

“There aren’t any living people here,” Allie reminded him. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“I don’t mean people.”

It took her a moment, but Allie finally got it. Still it made no difference. “Oh, so do you think a longhorn or an antelope will come bounding out of the bush on cue, and stand where I can skinjack it?”