Everlost (Skinjacker 1)

“Nick!” she called. But Nick was too busy fighting off two boys who were struggling to hold him as well.

“What’s your problem?” Nick shouted. “Who are you? What do you want? “

“We ask the questions,” said the boy who was apparently in charge. He was smaller than the rest, but clearly the toughest of the lot. He wore baggy knickerbockers, not much different from Lief’s, and from h.is lip dangled a cigarette that never got smaller and never went out. But by far the strangest thing about him was his hands. They were the size of a man’s hands, big and knobby, and when he curled them into fists, they seemed as large as boxing gloves.

“I think they’re Greensouls, Johnnie-O,” said one kid with a weird mop of candy-apple-red hair that made him look like a Raggedy Andy doll. “A week old, maybe less.”

“I can see that,” Johnnie-O said. “I’m not stupid, I know a Greensoul when I see one.”

“We’re Afterlights,” Nick shouted out, “just like you, so leave us alone.”

Johnnie-O laughed. “Of course you’re Afterlights, idiot. What we’re saying is that you’re new arrivals. Greensouls. Get it?”

“They might still got stuff,” said Raggedy Andy. “Greensouls always got stuff.”

“Welcome to Everlost,” Johnme-O said in a voice that wasn’t welcoming at all.

“This here’s my territory, and you gots to pay me for passage.”

Allie gave the boy holding her a punch in the face to get him to let go. “Is this how you always greet visitors?” Allie said.

Johnnie-O took a suck on his cig. “Visitors ain’t always friendly.”

Nick shrugged off the two boys who were holding him. “We don’t have anything to pay you with.”

“Yeah, so I guess you’ll just have to kill us,” Allie said snidely, and added, “Oh, sorry, guess you can’t.”

“Turn their pockets,” Johnnie-O ordered, and his goons reached into Nick and Allie’s pants pockets and turned them inside out. Mostly they got lint, but Nick had a couple of things he had forgotten were in there. There was that old coin, which must have been a nickel, although the face had worn off. The tough kids weren’t interested in it, and flicked it back at him. He caught it and returned it to his pocket.

It was the other object in Nick’s pocket that got their attention.

“Look at this,” said a funny-looking kid with dark purple lips, like he had died while sucking on a grape jawbreaker. He held up a hard little object that had fallen out of Nick’s pocket, which Nick quickly recognized as a piece of what is commonly referred to as “ABC” gum, wrapped up in its original wrapper. His mother always complained that he left his chewed gum in his pockets and it got all over the clothes in the wash.

The purple-mouthed kid held the hard, cold wad of gum and looked over at Johnnie-O, hesitating.

“Hand it over,” said Johnnie-O. His voice was commanding for a boy of his size.

He opened up his huge, beefy hand.

Still Purple-puss hesitated. “We can cut it into pieces,” he suggested.

“I said hand it over.” Johnnie-O held his upturned palm right before the boy.

wasn’t sure he ever wanted to get used to an eternity of longing.

They also discovered their spectral bodies didn’t actually require sleep, but, as with food, it didn’t change the craving for it. Nick and Allie had agreed that they would take time to sleep, as they would have if they were still alive.

It was a connection to the world of the living that they did not want to lose.

The simple act of resting, however, couldn’t be done just anywhere.

“How can we sleep if we sink?” Nick had asked on the first evening. The road-shoes they wore did their job while Nick and Allie walked, keeping them mostly on the surface of the road, but if they stood still for too long, the ground began its slow swallow. They couldn’t find a way to keep from sinking that first night, and so they kept walking.

It was on the second day of their journey that the solution came. When the mountain road became treacherous, they began to find odd little patches of asphalt that weren’t like the rest of the road. They were solid! The patches were never more than a few feet wide. It was Allie who figured it out when they came across one that was marked with a small white wooden cross.

“I know what this is!” Allie said. “I saw them when we visited Mexico. They put little crosses by the side of the road where people died in car accidents. I never thought to look for it here in the States, but I’ll bet there are people who do it here, too.”

“So the passing of a spirit must leave a permanent mark on the spot where it happened, turning it into a dead-spot!” Nick had to admit it was an exciting, if somewhat morbid discovery.