“All right,” said one of guards. “Back to your cell.”
But Allie handed him a clipboard. “Not until you fill out the accident report.” Then she excused herself to the restroom where she promptly left the nurse’s body asleep in a stall.
In the examining room, Seth watched as the guard filled out the report. “See,” the guard said. “Doing that to yourself was a waste of time.”
“And,” added the other guard, “it’ll hurt even worse in the morning.”
Seth kept waiting for Allie to return, but she didn’t. Then as the two guards led him out of the infirmary, the one on his left said, “You’d better not try anything funny; this place goes into computer lockdown the second you try to escape. With technology like that, who needs snipers in high towers?” Then he said, “Come on. The warden is waiting.”
The other guard looked at him strangely. “We’re taking him to the warden?”
“You know our orders. If anything unusual happens to the Benson Burner, we’re supposed to take him straight to the warden.”
The other guard wasn’t convinced. “That’s not protocol.” He pulled out his walkie-talkie. “Let me call it in.”
Allie leaped out of the left-hand guard, through Seth, and into the right-hand guard just before he pressed the button to talk—but she had leaped so suddenly that the first guard—who she had put to sleep while skinjacking him—was jarred awake. He didn’t even stumble.
“Hey,” he said reaching for his weapon, knowing something strange had happened. “How’d we get in the hallway? What’s going on?”
Damn! Allie leaped back again into the left guard—she never even had the chance to put the right guard to sleep, and he knew something had been possessing his body.
“Something’s wrong here!” he said.
There was no time to think now, so Allie tried something she had never done before; she leaped from one guard to the other and back again, over and over, back and forth, staying just long enough to keep them from doing anything she didn’t want them to. Faster and faster she bounced, until she was seeing double—two separate images from two pairs of eyes. She kept increasing the speed of her jumps, images flickering like a projector getting up to speed, until she couldn’t tell whose body she was in anymore. Then she realized that she was skinjacking them both at once! Allie settled into the rhythm of this alternating current. It was exhausting, but she had no choice.
“What’s going on?” Seth asked.
“Move it,” she said and found that the words came out of both men’s mouths simultaneously. Striding in unison, they came to the first set of security doors, and punched in the code, bringing them one step closer to escape.
They needed to be buzzed through the next door, and the guard on duty asked,
“Where are you taking this prisoner?”
Both guards said in unison, “Prisoner transfer.”
The guard on duty chuckled at the apparent coincidence, and buzzed them through. Allie realized that both men were sweating profusely, but she couldn’t do anything about that. They were also fully awake, and knew everything that was happening to them—and although they struggled to get control of their own bodies, they had no experience with such a thing. As long as she kept hammering them down, she would stay in control.
They made it through one more door without incident. Ahead was one more guarded door, then they’d be in the prisoner admissions area—kind of like a criminal’s lobby. After that they would be home free.
But before they got through that last security door, from an adjacent corridor came a small, bald man with an unforgiving face.
“What are you doing? Why isn’t this prisoner in his cell?”
Allie’s hearts sank. This was the warden. She couldn’t bluff her way past him, because any transfer would have already gone through his office, and he would know about it. And so she did the only thing she could. She began leaping into him as well, turning her two-step dance into a waltz.
One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three . . .
The warden tried to speak, but it came out as a stutter. “Uh . . . Uh . . . Uh . . .”
Left-right-forward, left-right-forward . . .
And in a moment, Allie was seeing through three sets of eyes instead of just two. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. It was like juggling, body-juggling, and if she bobbled any of them, it was all over. But perhaps it was worth the risk, because the guard at the admissions door wasn’t going to question the warden.
“Good evening, sir,” said the guard as they approached the door.
All three skinjacked men nodded, and the guard buzzed them out to the deserted admissions area, watching with only mild interest as they strode out the front door into the chilly night.
“I’m gonna get shot now! I know it!” Seth said in a panic.
Allie had all but forgotten Seth, the single member of the foursome she wasn’t skinjacking. “Quiet!” she said in a three-voice chorus. It took even more energy to speak with three sets of vocal chords under her command, so conversations had to be kept to a minimum. She reached into her pocket, all three men mimicking the same exact motion. While the guards came up empty-handed, the warden had his car keys in his hand. He hit a button and the Lexus in the warden’s parking space unlocked.
Seth, who took the passenger seat, mumbled to himself all the things that could go wrong as they drove out into the city, and Allie simply could not deal with the distraction. “Stop! Talking!” her three voices told him.
She hadn’t lived long enough to get her license, and on top of it, it was near impossible to drive when she had three points of view, but with the aid of the warden’s muscle memory she managed to keep the Lexus on the road, and mostly in her own lane. Soon she was able to narrow her focus, and make the warden’s eyes her primary ones, although the two guards in the backseat perfectly copied the motions of the warden’s hands on the wheel.
She drove down a frontage road, afraid to get onto the freeway. Then, when they were about ten miles out of the city, she turned onto a residential street, dead quiet at this time of night. She pulled over to the curb, turned to Seth, and struggled to say, “Get! Out! Good! Luck!”
Seth hesitated for a moment. “Right here? But—”
“Go!”
He didn’t need another invitation. “Well . . . Thanks. I mean . . .” And since there was nothing he could say that would be adequate, he gave her a genuine smile, then opened the door and ran, disappearing into the dark neighborhood.
Once he was gone, Allie turned off the headlights, turned off the engine, and continued to jump. Guard to guard to warden; guard to guard to warden.
There would be a manhunt. Seth would be hunted down like an animal—and with those bandages on his face he’d be easy to spot . . . but Allie suspected he was streetwise, and much smarter than people gave him credit for. With any luck, they’d never catch him. And if they did, she could free him again.
Why did I do this?
Why do I care?
She knew the question was important, and her answer crucial—but she couldn’t think about that right now.
One-two-three, one-two-three, guard-guard-warden. The three men were drenched in sweat but she kept them under her firm control for almost an hour, making sure she gave Seth a substantial lead. Then, when she could juggle no more, she let all three men go.
One guard began to scream, the other began to pray, and the warden pounded the steering wheel in frustration. Allie knew these three men would face the full wrath of the judicial system, and their claim of being spiritually possessed would be laughed at. Perhaps, Allie thought, I could skinjack the judge at their trials, and get them off. And it occurred to her that every event changed in the living world through skinjacking required even more skinjacking to offset the consequences.
Allie didn’t linger to watch what the men made of their experience. Now that she was back in Everlost, she felt as if her soul had been shredded. She was so weak, she could barely lift her feet and found that she was beginning to sink deeper and deeper into the living world because she couldn’t move fast enough to keep it from taking her down. She knew she would sink over her head if she didn’t do something soon, so she made her way to the nearest home, practically crawling, and skinjacked the first person she came across, just to escape from sinking. A woman, home alone, watching the home shopping network. Once Allie was inside, and had taken control, she instantly knew that the woman was drunk. Very drunk.
Between the fleshie’s blood alcohol level, and all the turmoil in her own soul, it was more than Allie could stand. She stumbled into the bathroom and retched into the toilet. She could have found a neighbor to skinjack, but she didn’t. She stayed there retching until there was nothing left to purge. . . .
. . . Because now that it was over, now that she had done the deed, she knew why she had to free Seth.
Seth had no memory of the fire—but it was more than that. He also had no memory of leaving the gas station and going into the school. Somehow all the evidence pointed to him, and there were witnesses who swore they saw him start the blaze.
How was that possible?
How could a person have no memory of something their own body did?
The answer had been in front of Allie all along, but she had refused to see it until now.
Seth Fellon had been skinjacked.
There could be no denying it. So Allie heaved over the porcelain bowl, hoping she could flush away the truth.
CHAPTER 22
A Balance of Power
It had taken two weeks of endless tweaking and tinkering until Mikey McGill finally picked the lock on the cage he was trapped in. Then, once he was free, he immediately set off on the railroad tracks, following Nick’s prints. If nothing else, Nick was single-minded; each footprint was spaced exactly the same distance apart. Nick had marched like a machine, slow and steady, but he had a two-week lead on Mikey now.
When Mikey reached Little Rock, he ventured into the city, hoping to find Afterlights he could convince to join him. His ability to become a monster was impressive enough to get their attention, and if he played it right, they would respect him instead of fear him. Fear was easy, but it had gotten tiresome. He would much rather have Afterlights who joined him because they wanted to, not just because they were afraid not to.
Mikey found no Afterlights in Little Rock, or anywhere else west of the Mississippi, for that matter. He pondered this as he rested on a sizable deadspot in a hotel lobby. He didn’t even want to guess how the deadspot had gotten there. In the living world, a TV played a twenty-four-hour news network. Someone was being interviewed about a car wreck. Mikey didn’t pay much attention until he heard—
“It’s bad, it’s bad. I’d never seen so many cars piled up!”
Mikey’s eyes snapped to the TV. There was something familiar about that voice. The focus was blurry, like everything else in the living world, but he could make out two middle-aged men being interviewed.
The second man said, “Yeah, I never shaw shush a bad crash.”
