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 announcing in his loudest, most commanding voice: “I hereby claim this territory in the name of Mary Hightower!” and the crowd cheered even more loudly than before. “Now they are the ones trespassing,” Milos told Allie. “Whoever they are.”
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 Johnnie and Charlie
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 unnatural one.
“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 Johnnie-O; two kids loyal to Nick and caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“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 Johnnie-O knew what the coins were for. Holding a coin would pay the passage into the next world. The tunnel would open before them; they would remember who they were in life, and then they would be gone down the tunnel, and into the light. After all these years, they would get where they were going . . . if they held a coin.
“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 Johnnie-O knew he wasn’t ready. Something deep inside Johnnie told him he had more to do in Everlost.
When their journey had first begun, the unnatural wind blowing them back from the Mississippi was powerful enough to give them an eastern momentum. The Everlost air offered them no friction, no resistance, nothing to stop their drift, and so a few days after leaving Memphis, they passed the eastern seaboard and were out over the Atlantic Ocean. That ocean seemed endless. Each day Johnnie would look out of the window to see yet more ocean around them, to every horizon.
That’s when Charlie had begun to sing. At first he’d just hum to himself, then he’d mumble the words, and soon he’d become lost in the endless verses.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”
For weeks Charlie had been singing the same song over and over again.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”
He sang it twenty-four hours a day, with that same vacant, cheerful tone.
“Dinah won’t you blow your hor-or-orn?”
He kept the beat with his head, endlessly banging it against the hallway bulkhead.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”
Johnnie-O, who had very little patience to begin with, would have pulled out his hair, were it possible for an Afterlight’s hair to come out.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”