One tanker truck, however, never made it to the plant. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the driver lost control of the wheel while approaching the town. A heart attack was suspected. The tanker truck plowed into an electrical station and ruptured, and as the electrical station blew, a dense cloud of fumes billowed into the air. While burning polybutane would have been a health hazard and general nuisance, it would not have been deadly. However, due to some clerical error back at the chemical company in Odessa, the tanker was full of methyl isocyanate instead, a chemical used in pesticides that’s only marginally safe to begin with, and when tossed into a fire, the resulting gas cloud would be lethal to anything downwind . . .

. . . Which was the entire town of Eunice.

The gas cloud caught everyone unawares, and in half an hour had taken out the whole population.

Bad luck, bad karma, and plain old human error.

What no one could explain, however, was how every building in town—even the ones that were nowhere near the accident—had been burned to the ground.

“We were unable to stop this tragedy,” Mary told her children, “but somehow we must find joy within the sorrow.”

Mary chose not to tell her children that the “accident” was caused by her own skinjackers. Jill and Moose were sent to make sure that precisely the wrong chemical came to Eunice at precisely the wrong time, while her other skinjackers were sent to set roadblocks in and out of town—believing their efforts would stop the disaster. Instead, they succeeded in keeping the population from escaping.

Her children didn’t need to be troubled with the details. As the living who dined on fine steaks shunned all thoughts of the slaughterhouse, Mary’s children needed only to consider the plate before them . . . and theirs was a plate of compassion and of salvation.

The moment the cloud began to spill forth in the living world, and it was clear that there was nothing that could be done to stop it, Mary sent forth her children to catch the dying as they crossed. Those who were older, and could not be unbound from their path, were simply left to get where they were going. However, every child and teenager was grabbed at the precise moment of crossing and brought into Everlost.