PART FIVE
Stealing Life
Philosophical Interlude with Arnie, the Grand Inquisitor
How easy is murder when one calls it by a different name? How much easier is it for the conscience to condone “reaping” than “killing”—and when one knows that death isn’t the end, does it stop the killing hand for fear of retribution, or does it simply make it easier to kill, because, if life continues, how can murder be murder at all?
“Kill them all, for the Lord knoweth them that are His.”* That was the creed of the medieval crusaders, cutting down everyone in their path, the good and the bad, content in the knowledge that God would sort them out in the hereafter. They believed themselves holy warriors, bringing glory and reward with every bloody slash of their swords.
Mary Hightower, a girl from a more civilized age, needed no sword to do her holy work. Her weapons were much subtler. Her weapons were skinjackers, and the body of anyone on earth she wanted them to possess. And since her skinjackers could possess anyone, that made Mary Hightower the most powerful, and most dangerous person on earth, living or dead.
Was that a tap on your shoulder? Do you sense some unseen spirit whispering in your ear, announcing the end of everything you know? If you do, then Mary is close by, waiting for you with a loving smile, and her hordes are there as you fall, ready to catch you, and hold you, and keep you. Forever.
But not yet . . .
CHAPTER 36
Holding Patterns
On New Year’s Eve—the same night Mary first arrived in Odessa—Allie was arriving in Baltimore. Travel in Everlost took forever, but all it took for Allie to get from south Texas to Baltimore was a fleshie, a plane ticket, and a connecting flight. All it took to get Clarence into a first-class seat was a skinjacker who could provide him with cash, and an expensive suit to make him look the part.
Allie was never proud of using skinjacking as a method of stealing. But if there was anyone who needed a spiritual Robin Hood, it was Clarence.
“You make me feel like a person again,” he told Allie before they boarded that first plane. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
Allie had skinjacked a well-dressed middle-aged woman who very well could have been Clarence’s wife. As Clarence no longer had any ID, she had to skinjack a couple of security guards to get him through. Easy as pie.
As they circled the airport waiting to land in miserable weather, the turbulence became so severe it nearly knocked Allie out of her host.
“Sorry to ruin New Year’s Eve for all you good folks,” the captain announced, “but I guess the old year is hurling hailstones at Baltimore. I promise to have you down before the ball drops.”
Allie could feel the tension filling the living—even the seasoned travelers. Allie felt tense as well, but it had nothing to do with the rattling of the jet. Her turbulence would start after they landed.
Time was of the essence, but the task was daunting. So Allie did something she rarely did. She took care of herself. After they landed, Allie skinjacked a wealthy woman with nowhere to go. Then she lavished upon herself and Clarence the finest New Years’ dinner Baltimore had to offer. Afterward they retired to their respective rooms in a penthouse suite.
But while Clarence slept, Allie did not. She opened the laptop of her host, and spent the night scouring the Web for information—and when old news reports proved insufficient, both she and Clarence hit the streets in the morning, hoping to dig up all the facts they could on the tragic tale of a Russian immigrant boy who was not entirely dead.
Vitaly Milos Vayevsky.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of eleven. Fell from the roof of a five-story apartment building at sixteen. A tree broke his fall. But not entirely.
He suffered massive internal injuries and a subdural hematoma that left him one step short of brain-dead. He spent more than a year in a long-term care facility, and then, when insurance and money ran out, the decision was made to take him off the machines that monitored his faint life signs.
Prognosis: grim.
The doctors gave him just a few weeks to live in such a nonresponsive vegetative state. His parents brought him home, for his mother was determined to make her son’s final days peaceful. However, those days turned to weeks, turned to months, turned to years. And now, in a bedroom, in a fourth-floor apartment, in a working-class neighborhood of Baltimore, the body of Vitaly Milos Vayevsky slept . . . while his soul journeyed in a world between life and death.
Each day, the drip, drip, drip of the intravenous feeding tube marked time for the family. His younger sister went off to college, graduated, married, and had a son that she named for him. Milos was an uncle, but he would never know.
From time to time, when the sight of him brought too much pain, his father would suggest they turn off the feeding tube so that he could quietly fade away. No one would ask questions, and maybe it would be best that way. Each time it was suggested, however, Milos’s mother would flatly refuse. This, she knew, was her penance; her punishment for allowing Milos to play with those boys on the roof that day. And so she would change the bedpan, and sponge him down, and clip his nails, and treat the bedsores, always holding on to the faint, faint hope that one day her boy might wake up.
Eight a.m. A Baltimore boulevard lined by low-rise apartment buildings, and covered with a fine dusting of snow that threatened to stick. Trash trucks already rolled down the street, pounding a week’s worth of waste in their hoppers, and collecting dry Christmas trees from the curb. It was the first Monday of the New Year, and at the very same moment that Mary and her horde waited in the streets of Odessa for a gas explosion, Allie and Clarence stood on a Baltimore street corner, on the brink of a very different mission.
Clarence wore a long cashmere coat, looking like a million bucks. His stylish leather gloves hid the burns on his left hand, and protected Allie from his touch. While his retro fedora didn’t exactly hide his facial scars from the living world, it cast them behind a bold new fashion statement. Beside him Allie inhabited a FedEx delivery girl, whose flimsy coat did not protect her from the cold. She held a small package.
“I know I’m here for moral support,” Clarence told Allie. “But I wish there was something more I could do.”
Allie offered him a slim, shivering smile. “It’s all right,” Allie told him. He had been invaluable in tracking this place down, but she knew from the beginning that she’d have to go in alone.