Once Johnnie-O was gone, Vari, who, had been watching from an air vent, made his move.
As King Yax looked out of the open window, Vari dropped into the control room, catching his former boss off guard.
“Vizier?” said the king, for King Yax knew no one’s actual name. “What are you doing here?”
“Saying good-bye,” said Vari. Then he reached down, grabbed the king’s bare feet, and flipped him out of the window, enacting a quick political coup de drop. Once the king had been dispatched, Vari retreated into the air vent again with all the king’s gold, planning to bide his time until he could get Mikey, Nick, and Jix off the airship as well.
The king was understandably outraged as he fell from the sky, and swore all manner of retribution against his vizier, once he solved the predicament of falling a thousand feet with no deadspot to land on. Although there were many, many things he could unremember to get himself out of this situation, the king was not the brightest bauble in the headdress. He concluded that if there were no such direction as “down,” then he couldn’t possibly fall, could he?
“I don’t remember there being a ‘down,’” King Yax said. “I don’t remember it whatsoever.”
The problem with that particular unmemory is that it instantly transported him to the only place on earth where “down” does not exist. Namely, the very center of the earth, where the only direction is “up.”
Thus, King Yax K’uk Mo’ avoided many long years of sinking, and promptly became the central-most soul in a very different party than he was used to.
“Mikey! Over here!”
Mikey heard Allie call out to him the moment the Hindenburg began to rise. The great airship lifted off the ground, and he saw her rising to her feet from beneath it. He ran to her, wrapping his arms around her, and he found himself growing another set of arms, and another and another just to hold her. He could not embrace her enough.
“I thought you had been extinguished,” Mikey said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of it.”
“It was Milos,” Allie told him. “Your sister made him do it.”
Mikey shook his head and said something he’d been feeling for quite a while. “She’s not my sister anymore,” Mikey told her. “Megan McGill’s been gone for a long, long time.”
Mikey held her in his multiple embrace, and although he wanted to make this moment the only moment that mattered, he knew he couldn’t. So he pulled in his extra sets of limbs, and said, “Nick thinks the first atomic bomb is at the center of the vortex.”
Allie looked at him, horrified, finally realizing what this place was. “Well, it can’t go off, right?” she said. “I mean, this is Everlost—it can’t be destroyed.”
“Unless,” he reminded her, “its purpose was to be destroyed . . .”
In the Hindenburg control room, Speedo still stared at Vari in a gold skirt, trying to wrap his mind around it. “The Supreme who? The king of what?”
Then the ship hit the double-world storm, and the Hindenburg’s nose began to drop. Vari looked at the controls around him, baffled, so he turned to Speedo. “I command you to take me to the City of Souls!”
“You command squat,” said Speedo, finally sticking up for himself against those who would order him around. “This is my airship, and you are just a passenger. Got it?”
The nose dipped farther, and Vari nodded nervously.
Speedo, who had been a true master of the airship’s helm, quickly took the controls, adjusting the elevator wheel until the inclinometers were level and the ship had stabilized. He paused then, but only briefly. He now had his ship back—and although it meant abandoning his claim on the deadspot, he resolved not to return to Mary. Not now, not ever.
“We need to get more altitude, and we can’t do that in this storm,” Speedo told Vari. “We’ll go back over the deadspot—it’s quiet in the eye. Then, by the time we reach the far side, we’ll be high enough to make it through the storm.”
Speedo turned the ship around, and it began to rise as it crossed back over the deadspot.
Jix knew something had gone terribly wrong when he saw the Hindenburg soaring overhead with its gangway still open and the occasional warrior tumbling out. He looked back to take stock of the limited number of warriors with him now. There were thousands upon thousands of souls to fight Mary Hightower, but that meant nothing if they all were aboard an airship that was flying away.
Now, Mary’s children were coming out of hiding all around Jix, and there were lots of them—many more than the warriors who actually made it out of the airship. It looked like Mary’s children realized that too, because they didn’t seem frightened anymore. In fact, they were closing in.
Johnnie-O never got to the gangway before the ship took off. He got close, but something along the way stopped him. It was the statue of the king. Johnnie remembered how, when he and Charlie had first flown over the deadspot nearly a month ago, the airship had filled with sparks and silent lightning. Now, however, all the electrical charges seemed to be focused around the statue, creating pleasing patterns of light. Pleasing, at least, to him. Johnnie-O found himself mesmerized, unable to look away, and while the warriors had been frightened by it, sticking close to the stairwell wall on their way to the gangway, Johnnie could not stop looking at it.
Old thoughts began to play in his head. “It’s gotta mean something, don’t it, Charlie? The fact that I’m not a complete blithering idiot like you?” Although Johnnie-O didn’t know what the meaning was, he couldn’t help but think that his destiny, like Charlie’s, was somehow tied up with this statue.
He was so enthralled by it that he never even felt the ship leave the ground. It wasn’t until he heard a commanding yet whiny voice behind him that he broke out of his trance.
“Why are you staring at that statue?”
He turned to see what at first he thought was the king, but quickly he realized it was Vari wearing the king’s clothes.
“None of your business,” said Johnnie-O. “Get lost.”
Vari took a step forward, trying to look taller than he was. “I am your king now. All who disrespect me shall be cast down to Xibalba.” Then Vari looked at the statue. “When we return to the City of Souls, we will find your bucket of coins in the forge, and make a new face for the statue. My face.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And as punishment for your disrespect, you will be made to do it, by dipping those big fat hands of yours into the molten metal.”
That was all Johnnie-O had to hear. Suddenly the sparking statue didn’t look beautiful to him, it looked hideous. “You know what? I got a better idea.” Then he grabbed the statue’s obsidian base with those same big fat hands, and knocked it over.
“No! What are you doing?”
Then Johnnie kicked it down the gangway stairs.
“Stop! I order you to stop!”
“Sorry. I don’t take orders from obnoxious, snot-nosed twits.”
Now the statue lay half in and half out of the airship, wedged against the gangway stairs’ support strut. With the airship halfway over the deadspot, and still gaining altitude, that last step off the gangway was a very long one.
“Don’t you dare!” said Vari.
“What are you gonna do about it?” He kicked at the base until the statue became unstuck and began to totter.
“No!” Vari hurried to save it, but Johnnie-O stuck his foot out, Vari tripped over it, and he went flying into the statue.
“Nooooo!” The second Vari touched the statue, he vanished in a rainbow twinkling of light, getting to where he was going, whether he liked it or not—and the force of his momentum tipped the statue off its precarious balance. It fell from the gangway, plunging to the deadspot far below.
“Ha!” said Johnnie-O. “That’ll show him. Xibalba, my butt!”
Then Johnnie, happily humming “Anchors Aweigh,” climbed back into the ship, and sat down, leaning against the stairwell wall. He knew that in those brief moments something had changed . . . because there was now nothing in the world he wanted to do more than to sit there and have his own private sing-along.
Clarence covered his dead eye, but he couldn’t cover his dead ear enough to drown out the sounds all around him—and the various burned parts of him kept bumping into things that weren’t there, making his trek to the jeep slow and difficult. His dead ear heard children calling to one another, and orders shouted in other languages. There were sounds of battle, and the roar of engines high above. And then there came a heavy, decisive thud very close to him.
Still dizzy, still foggy in his thoughts, Clarence began to remember things. He remembered that the ghosties weren’t in his mind, they were real. There was an invisible war going on—and he was a part of that war. He remembered a boy with a face like a cat. Jix. Jix had told Clarence that he had a purpose—but the sounds around him were so chaotic, at that moment it was hard to imagine anything had a purpose at all.
Far far ahead, sat the Jeep—but with all these sounds crashing around him, he couldn’t stop himself from taking a peek with his dead eye. Immediately the barren desert wasn’t barren anymore. What he saw didn’t make any sense, though, because it was the exact same thing he saw before he covered his dead eye.
A trophy and a martini shaker.
Only this time, they were both huge. He made his way closer to the strange objects. The trophy was not a trophy at all, but a statue, and it was sparking wildly with multicolored electricity. The other object wasn’t exactly a martini shaker. It was shaped like one, but a bit stouter—and it wasn’t silver; it was dull green, with lots of wires. It was also upside down, and standing on its head, but closer observation revealed that it was hovering just above the ground.
There was something missing from this picture, wasn’t there? Yes! There had been a playing card between the trophy and the shaker!
Then, all at once everything that was missing in his mind came back to him. He knew where he was. He knew what that green thing was. He had seen pictures of it as a child. And now, as he approached the very center of the deadspot—the heart of the vortex—he realized that Jix had been right all along. Clarence did have a purpose! There was a reason why he was the way he was—why he had to suffer through the ridicule of living this half-life of suffering—because what needed to be done today could be accomplished only by him: someone with an unnatural presence in both worlds. Ever since the day his flesh was seared and he was given his vision of Everlost, every thought he had, every phrase he uttered was somehow incomplete. He was incomplete, but today in this place, at this moment, completion was finally at the tips of his fingers. The playing card was missing, but it was only a placeholder—a reminder that he was the one-eyed jack between the here and the hereafter.
With his Everlost hand, he reached to his left, gripping the statue firmly. Then, with his living hand, he reached to his right, toward the bomb. He didn’t touch it, for his living hand could not touch an Everlost bomb. Instead his living hand reached right through it, as if it wasn’t there. He stretched his fingers out as far as he could, and when his fingertips reached the core of the device, an electrical charge ran from the statue of fused coins, through Clarence, and into the memory of the bomb. And in that moment of infinite possibility, the statue, Clarence, and The Gadget all did exactly what it was their purpose to do.
