Halfway out the door, the casket got stuck.
“Push!” said Jix, and, already up to his knees in the ground, he put all of his energy into pushing the coffin through, until finally it dislodged from the door and slid out into the night. Jix was right behind it, getting out at the last second.
Then, when he looked back, he saw there was still another boy in there. Jix locked eyes with him. The earth was up to his neck, and the doorway was now only a sliver above the ground. The boy was trapped. Still, Jix reached for him, and grabbed his hand, holding it tight, pulling—but someone wedged that deeply in the living world could not be pulled out, even by a strong Afterlight.
“Save her,” the boy said, before his head sunk under. Even after the boy was completely underground, Jix held on to his hand. It was pulling Jix down too—he was in up to his elbow . . . but then the sinking boy squeezed Jix’s hand to wish him a silent good-bye, and then let go. Jix pulled his hand out of the ground and when he looked up, the caboose was completely gone.
There were few things more humiliating to Milos than being pinned beneath a train car, and having no one—not even the ones he called his friends—willing to help him. He knew that they were out there; he had heard Jill call to him, as usual pointing out his shortcomings as a leader. Until this journey he had always considered himself quite a good leader. Why, then, was he such a failure here? He knew the answer. It was Mary. Even asleep, she was larger than life, dwarfing him, and as much as Milos loved her, he resented that he would never have the same commanding presence. Still he had to believe that there was something missing in her that only he could complete, and that together they would be greater than the sum of their parts. Now his greatest anguish was not knowing whether or not she had been saved from sinking.
He could see only the smallest glimpses of the battle, but he could hear everything. The shouts of the invaders were so confident, and the cries of Mary’s children were so desperate, he knew they were losing. Then, when he heard Jill shout out the “secret” combination to the caboose, he was glad she actually knew it. He had no idea who was going after Mary, or if they would be able to get her out, but at least now he had hope.
Finally one of the invading Afterlights came up to him. Milos spat his best ecto-loogy at him, not caring what the kid would do in retaliation. The one good thing about being pinned between the train and the tracks was that they couldn’t push him down into the living world while he was trapped there.
“Give me your coin or else!” said the kid.
“Idi k chertu!” Milos said. It gave Milos a little bit of satisfaction to be able to curse him out in a way he could not understand.
The kid kicked him in frustration. “How come you’re all so useless!?” he yelled. “How come none of you got no coins? We gotta feed him coins or he won’t tell us nothing—don’t you get it?”
Milos looked at the face-painted boy like he was the one talking a foreign language. “Feed who?” Milos asked, but the kid just ran off to take his frustration out on someone who could fight back.
The sounds of battle diminished. All the other train cars had sunk. Then, with a dread that crushed him almost as fully as the train, he began to realize that if Mary had been pulled from the caboose in time and they managed to keep her above the surface, when she awoke she would never forgive him for this.
Moose, Squirrel, and Jill had the best view of the battle. The roof of the mansion was a fortress for them; they could look down from their shingled battlements and see exactly how bad the situation was. There seemed to be only about a hundred attackers, but they were so aggressive, and so well-organized, that Mary’s kids didn’t stand a chance. Some were captured, some never got out of their trains before they sank. But most of them simply scattered, running from the disaster as fast as their legs could carry them.
The Neons tried to get up to the mansion roof, but the doors and windows were all locked—and although one resourceful Neon managed to climb up the drainpipe, Moose hurled him right off and into the living world, where he sank as if hurled into pudding. After that, no one dared to climb to the top of the mansion again.
They watched as the Neons lay all the sleeping Interlights on the tracks to count them.
“Milosh is down there shomewhere,” Moose told Jill. “I can’t shee him, but I heard him.”
Squirrel wrung his hands like an old woman. “What do we do? What do we do?”
“We save our own hides,” Jill said. “That’s what we do.”
Unfortunately, Jill had trouble taking her own advice.
Jix found that his own exotic look had given him an advantage. Instead of being corralled with the other prisoners, he was brought directly to the Neon’s leader. The kid was no older than fourteen, and beneath the streaks of war paint, he had bad skin with a whole host of whiteheads that yearned to pop, but never would. His greasy black hair looked like it had been cut by his mother, and his braces were caked with whatever he was eating when he died. Could be Oreos. All in all, he was definitely the kind of kid that got picked on while he was alive—but now, he got to be the bully.
Jix stood before him with beefy Neon guards holding him on either side, all of them shuffling their feet to keep from sinking into the living world.
“What are you?” Zit-kid asked.
“I am a son of the jaguar gods,” Jix announced, trying to be intimidating. “And you have angered them.”
Zit-kid was not concerned. He looked to the glass coffin that several of his Neon Nightmares now carried.
“Who’s the girl in the glass box?” he demanded.
Jix considered how he might respond, and one of the kids holding Jix smacked him. “Avalon asked you a question! Answer it!”
Jix growled, but held his temper. “She’s the one with the answers,” Jix told Avalon.
“What answers?”
“The answers to all of your questions. She is the all-knowing Eastern Witch.”
Avalon, the zit-kid, was still unimpressed. “Never heard of her.” He scratched his volcanic face, smudging some of his war paint. Jix noticed that his paint was slightly different. In addition to the bright streaks, he also had a silver W on his forehead.
“We already know all the answers,” he said. “At least, we will when we have enough coins. You gotta coin?”
Jix shook his head.
“All right, then.” Avalon motioned to his comrades. “Keep the girl in the box, and send the cat-kid downtown.”
The two Neon guards began to push on Jix’s shoulders, forcing him into the earth, making it very clear what they meant by ‘downtown.’
“No!” someone shouted off to their right.
Jix turned to see Jill climbing down from the top of the mansion and she ran to them. One of the Neons tried to grab her, and she elbowed him in the nose, then made a beeline to Avalon.
“I’ve got a coin!”
“Don’t!” yelled Jix. “They won’t bargain—they’ll just take it.”
But she ignored him. “I’ll trade you. My coin for his freedom.”
“Search her,” ordered Avalon, but she didn’t give them a chance. She pulled the coin out of her pocket and held it up to Avalon. He looked at it with suspicion, then cautiously took it from her, holding it by the tips of his fingernails, then dropped it into the pocket of his T-shirt.
“All right, then,” he said. “Send them both downtown.” Then he turned and walked away.
“Push me down, and you’ll never find the other coins!” Jill said. That caught his attention.
“You’re lying.”
“Oh, yeah? I can get you another coin right now.”
He hesitated—and even Jix wondered if she were bluffing, but he decided not to interfere with Jill’s scheme. He watched and waited to see how it would play out.
“Show me,” said Avalon.
The guards plucked Jix, who was down to his knees, back to the surface, and Jill led them all toward the sleeping car, still lying sideways across the tracks.
“That car is empty,” Avalon told her. “We already got all the sleepers out, and none of them will have a coin until they wake up anyway.”
“Not in it,” said Jill. “Under it.”
They all went around to the other side of the car, to see Milos still helplessly pinned.
“Hello, Milos,” said Jill, far too pleasantly to actually be pleasant.
“Switching sides, Jill?” he said. “I am not surprised.”
“He’s got a coin,” Jill announced. Avalon looked at the train car, then at his mob.
“Check his pockets.”
“You don’t have to,” Jill said. “It’s not in a pocket. He keeps it wedged in the laces of one of his shoes.”
Milos moaned, and Avalon pointed at Jix. “You. Go check.” Jix knelt down and reached under the train for Milos’s shoes. Milos kicked and struggled, but Jix was able to get a good hold on his shoes with his sharp nails. He checked the laces of both running shoes and found the coin wedged in the right laces, just as Jill had said. He pulled it out, spared a quick glance toward Jill and held it out to Avalon, holding it in his palm.
“Hey,” said Avalon, “how come you can hold it and not get sucked into the light?”
“Because I’m a skinja—” But Jix stopped himself. Could it be that these Afterlights didn’t know about skinjacking? If they didn’t, he wasn’t about to tell them. “I guess it’s because I’m just not ready,” Jix told them, then he gave it to Avalon, who carefully put it in his shirt pocket, holding it by his fingernails, just as he did the first one.
“All right, then,” he said. “Where are the other coins?”
“Not here,” Jill told him. “But there’s a bucket that’s so full of coins you can barely carry it.”
Avalon glared at her, baring his Oreo-clogged dental work. “You think I’m an idiot? You’re making that up.”
“She’s not,” called one of the other kids that had been captured. “I saw it. The Chocolate Ogre’s army had it when we fought them. But I don’t know where it went.”
“I do,” said Jill, and she refused to say anything more.
Jix grinned like the Cheshire cat. Jill’s ploy was cunning and clever. And to think she had done this for him!
“All right, then,” said Avalon. “But you’ll have to tell me eventually.” Then he ordered the Neons to send all the other prisoners downtown. “Two coins saves you and your cat,” he told Jill. “I got no use for the others.”
Jix tried to help them, but he was held back. In the end all he could do was watch as more than twenty kids were pushed into the earth. Then the Neons left, taking their two prisoners, all the Interlights, and Mary in her glass coffin, while behind them Milos spewed Russian curses at all of Everlost.
CHAPTER 15
Memory Makes the Man
Moose and Squirrel waited a good long time after the Neon Nightmares left before dredging up the nerve to come down from the mansion roof. Around them other kids were coming out of hiding as well—but just a handful.