Then, through the dust blasting into his face, Dillon saw and heard hideous things. Sinewy gray tentacles reaching for him through the dust cloud—blue flaming hands around his neck, sharp claws digging into his chest, fangs, and eyes—so many angry eyes!
It must be my imagination, he thought in a panic. It can’t be real, yet even so, he felt a tentacle wrap itself around his ankle and dig in. Dillon clawed at the ground to get away, he gripped a stone in the wall, but something stung his hand.
Choking from the concrete dust filling his lungs, Dillon could swear he felt hot breath on his face and heard a sound in his mind louder than the collapsing building.
Knocking.
Many hands knocking on a door—a furious horde demanding to be let in. Anything! thought Dillon. Anything to stop that horrible knocking in his brain. He opened his mind as easily as opening a door, and the creatures were gone, leaving only the blinding dust in his eyes.
As the dust around him began to settle, Deanna appeared in front of him.
“Dillon! What’s happening?” she asked desperately.
Dillon coughed out another lungful of dust. And forced himself not to think about the monster-hallucination. Instead he let himself feel the wrecking-hunger feed on the collapse of the Dakins building. But that was only a first course.
“Listen,” said Dillon. “Listen, it’s wonderful!” The relief filling him soon grew into joy, and then ecstasy.
The first building had come down far above them, but the roaring had not stopped. From the right came another rumble, just as loud as the first, and then another, further away, and then another until they couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.
Deanna sank to the ground, shivering as if it were the end of the world. “It’s like a war out there,” said Deanna.
Dillon beamed a smile far too wide. “Oh, it’s much better than that!”
His dim flashlight went out, but that was all right. Dillon didn’t want Deanna looking at him right now, because something was beginning to happen to him. He was beginning to change; he could feel it all over.
Dillon closed his eyes, imagining the beast he had learned to ride so well . . . only now when he tried to picture it, he saw a whole team of beasts instead: a wave of dark horses teamed together by a single yoke carrying him along at a breakneck pace.
There in the dark, his flat stomach began to slowly swell, and his many freckles began to bulge into a swarm of angry zits.
IN THE DIM LIGHT of this awful morning, the foreman of the demolition crew could do nothing but watch as his well-orchestrated detonation became a nightmare.
It should not have happened. The way the explosives had been set, the building should have come straight down . . . but it didn’t. Instead the entire building keeled over backward and landed on Jefferson Place—an office building across the street that had been evacuated as a precaution. The old office building shifted violently on its foundation, and keeled over to the left . . .
. . . Where stood the Hoff Building—a city landmark.
No one had thought it necessary to evacuate that one.
The Hoff Building took the blow, and for a moment it looked as if it was only going to lose its eastern face. But then it, too, began a slow topple to the left, its domed tower crashing into the Old Boise Post Office.
Dominoes, thought the foreman. They’re going down like dominoes. It was impossible; it would take a pattern of incredible coincidences for each building to hit the one beside it with just the right force to bring it down as well . . . but the evidence was here before their eyes.
Debris struck the capitol building, which seemed to be all right . . . until the pillars holding up its heavy dome buckled and the dome crashed down and disappeared into the building, hitting bottom with such force that all the windows shattered.
And it was over.
Seven buildings had been demolished.
Beside the foreman, his explosives expert just stood there, rocking back and forth, and happily whistling “Twist and Shout.” Another crew member was screaming at the top of his lungs.
They’re insane! thought the foreman. They’ve completely lost their minds. And finally, the combination of everything around him was exactly enough to make the foreman snap as well. As he felt his own mind slipping down a well of eternal madness, he realized that the destruction he had just witnessed was somehow not over yet. In fact, it was just beginning. In a moment he started laughing hysterically. And he never stopped.
MICHAEL LIPRANSKI NOW UNDERSTOOD death. It was blind, cold, and dusty. It was filled with a loud ringing in one’s ears that didn’t go away. Death was oppressive and choking.
These were the thoughts Michael was left with after having died. There were, of course, many questions to come, but the one question that was foremost in his mind was this: Why, if he was dead, did he still feel like coughing?
Michael let out a roaring hacking cough and cleared concrete dust from his lungs. He opened his eyes. They stung, but he forced them open anyway. Around him were three other ghosts . . . or at least they looked like ghosts. They all began to stir, and as they sat up, a heavy layer of white dust fell from them.
“What happened?” asked Winston.
And as they looked around, the answer became clear. They were still on the seventh floor . . . or at least what was left of it. Just a corner really. The rest of the building was gone. So were quite a few other around it. It looked as if downtown Boise had been hit by a small nuclear bomb.
“He did this,” said Winston.
“He, who?”
“The Other One . . . the fifth one. I told you I saw him!”
“He saved our lives?” asked Tory.
“I don’t think he meant to,” said Winston.
They looked out at the devastation once more. Lourdes, her death-wish forgotten, stood and walked to the jagged edge where the seventh floor gave way to open air. The rest of the building had shorn away and had turned to rubble. Had they been anywhere else on that floor, they would have been part of the rubble . . . but they weren’t anywhere else, they were right here . . . and Lourdes began to wonder idly what sort of intuition had made her collapse in the north corner rather than the south corner, or was luck so incredibly dumb that it didn’t even know an easy target?
Tory looked stunned. “I guess it takes more than a few thousand pounds of explosives to get rid of us.”
“Lourdes, you’re standing!” Michael approached Lourdes at the jagged edge of the concrete floor. Indeed, she had found the strength to lift her weight again . . . or was there less weight to lift? “Is it my imagination . . . or do you have one less chin?”
The others came closer. The change was almost imperceptible . . . but the others were able to notice.
Tory looked at her hand and flexed her fingers. Her skin was still as awful as before, but the swelling that had come to her joints was fading. Tears came to her eyes, and the salty tears didn’t even sting, for her sores were slowly beginning to close.
They looked at each other, afraid to say what they now knew, for fear that speaking it would somehow jinx it. Finally Tory dared to utter the words.
“They’re gone . . . ,” she whispered. It took a few moments for it to finally hit home. Then, in the midst of the devastation Tory’s voice rang out from the top floor of the ruined Dakins building, a clear note of joy in the midst of sorrow.
“We’re free!”
THE JAGGED BROKEN WALL provided them with a treacherous path down to the rubble below.
There was chaos around the scene, but not the chaos one might expect. People screaming, crying, wandering like zombies—it was as if the shock wave of this event had driven everyone around it completely insane.
Winston looked around him and fumed. The redheaded boy had created this wave of destruction. The physical wasn’t enough for him—he had to destroy the minds of the survivors. It made Winston furious . . . furious at himself for having seen him and not trying to stop him! No
t even the knowledge that his own parasite was gone could calm his fury.
Winston approached a policeman sitting on a fire hydrant. He was staring into the barrel of his own gun with a blank expression. When he saw Winston, he turned to him, pleading.
“Am I in trouble?” asked the officer. “Am I gonna get a whooping?”
Winston reached out and gently pulled the revolver out of the man’s hands. The officer buried his head in his hands and cried.
“How did he do this?” asked Winston, as they stumbled their way through the nightmare of insanity.
“How?” said Tory. “How many thousands of people could you have paralyzed if you wanted to? How many plague epidemics could I have started? The only difference between him and us,” she said, “is that we didn’t want to.”
About three blocks away from the wreckage, sanity seemed intact. People gawked and chattered and paced, but not with the same mindless chaos that surrounded the site of destruction.
As they left the insanity circle, it was Lourdes who took a moment to look back. In the midst of the rubble, the only thing left standing was the seven-story sliver that had been the corner of the Dakins storage building.
“Clutch player?” Michael suggested with a grin.
“Maybe,” said Lourdes. “I was thinking that it looks like a tower. A tower that was struck by lightning.”
As the sound of approaching sirens filled the air, Tory turned to the others. “I don’t think those things died,” she told them. “I mean if we’re alive, then they’re probably alive, too. I think they bailed because they thought they were going to get blown up. The explosion scared them out . . . but that doesn’t mean they’re gone for good.”
Tory touched her face, to make certain that the pain there was still slipping away. “We still may have to fight those things,” she said. “But maybe when the six of us are together—”
“When the six of us are together,” said Winston, feeling the weight of the revolver in his pocket, “I’m gonna send that redheaded son-of-a-bitch where he belongs.”
12. SHROUD OF DARKNESS
* * *
AT THE EDGE OF THE WRECKAGE, A MAN WITH NO MIND stumbled away from his Range Rover. It was just one of many cars left idling in the middle of the road. Deanna and Dillon used it as their ticket out of Boise, and in a moment they were careening wildly northwest.
Deanna, who had never been behind the wheel of a car before, gripped the wheel and taught herself to drive at ninety miles an hour on the straightaway of I-84.
“How many people died?” she demanded. She would not turn her eyes from the road, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Dillon sitting beside her. He seemed completely absorbed in his map, pretending not to hear her.
“How many?” she demanded again.
“I don’t know,” said Dillon. “I can’t tell things that exactly. Anyway, what’s done is done,” he said, and spoke no more of it.
Things were changing far too quickly for Deanna to keep up. What had begun for both of them as a cleansing journey, filled with the hope of redemption, had become nothing more than a mad rampage with no end in sight. It made her want to get out and run . . . if only she could bear the fear of being on her own. Stepping out of that car and leaving Dillon would have been like stepping out of an airlock into space. She needed him, and she hated that.
She glanced at Dillon as he pored over the Triple-A map. He tossed it behind him and pulled another from the glove compartment.
“I won’t keep running like this,” said Deanna.
“We’re not running, we’re going somewhere,” he finally admitted.
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet . . . ,” he snapped; then said a bit more gently, “I’ll tell you as soon as I know, I promise.”
“We were wrong,” said Deanna. “We should find The Others—”
“The Others are dead,” he said.
Deanna knew this was a lie. It was the first outright lie he had ever told her.
The road ahead of them was straight and clear, and Deanna dared to take a long look at Dillon. He had changed since she had first seen him in that hospital room. There he had been a tormented but courageous boy who had whisked her from her hospital bed. He had been a valiant, if somewhat disturbed, knight in shining armor. But now his courage had turned rancid. There was no armor, just an aura of darkness flowing around him like a black shroud—as if his body could no longer contain the blackness it held.
It was more than that, though—his body was changing as well. Had he gained weight? Yes, his slender figure had begun to bloat. She could see it in his face and hands—in his fingers, beginning to turn round and porcine. His skin, too, had changed. It began to take on an oily redness marked with whiteheads that were appearing one after another. He’s beginning to look on the outside what he’s becoming on the inside, Deanna thought, and shivered.
“Damn it!” said Dillon, hurling the map behind him. “I need more maps! These don’t tell me what I need to know!” He took a deep breath to calm himself, then rubbed his eyes and said, “There’s a town—when we get to the Columbia River—a good-sized population.”
“Why does the population matter?” Deanna couldn’t hide the apprehension in her voice.
“Because it means they’ll have a decent library,” Dillon answered. “And a decent library will have a decent almanac, and an atlas. A world atlas.”
“And?”
Dillon rolled his eyes impatiently as if it were obvious. “And when I see what I have to see, I’ll know where we have to go.”
She heard him take another deep, relaxing breath, then he gently put his hand on her neck. It felt clammy and uncomfortable. She could feel that aura of darkness. How revolting it felt.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything’s gonna be great.”
This too was a lie, but she knew that Dillon believed this one.
“When we get where we’re going,” Deanna asked, “is this all going to be over? Will it end?”
Dillon nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Once we get there . . . everything will end.”
BURTON, OREGON. POPULATION 3,255. In the center of town, a harvest festival sent bluegrass music wafting toward Main Street, where all was quiet. The library was empty today, except for Dillon and Deanna.
Dillon piled the large wooden reference table with volume after volume of atlases and almanacs. The librarian was delighted to see a young man so involved in his studies. Deanna, as curious as she was unsettled, helped him pull down heavy volumes describing the people and places of the world. First he stared at the maps—the way roads connected and wound from city to city, state to state, nation to nation. Then he looked at numbers—endless lists of numbers, graphs, and charts. Populations—demographics; people grouped in whatever ways the researchers could find to group them; by race or religion; by economics; by profession; by politics; by every imaginable variable.
“What are you looking for?” Deanna asked. But Dillon was so engrossed in his numbers he didn’t even hear her. He was like a computer, taking in thousands of digits, and processing them through some inner program.
Then, one by one Dillon closed the books. The atlas of Europe, and of Asia. The books on Australia and South America. The studies of Africa, the American Almanac . . . until he was left with the map of the northwestern United States. He stared at the map, drawing his eyes further and further northwest, his finger following the tiny capillaries of country roads until he stopped. Dillon’s master equation had finally spit out an answer.
“There.”
His finger landed in the southwest corner of Washington state. “This is where we have to go.”
“What will we find there?” asked Deanna.
“Someone.”
“Someone we know?”
Dillon shook his head. “Someone we will know. Someone important.”
They left, not bothering to shelve the books.
THEIR COURSE OUT OF town took them rig
ht past the harvest festival. They had no intention of stopping, but the Rover needed gas. The gas station was right across the road from the festival, where most everyone in Burton was spending this fine day.
Dillon, who was driving now, got out to pump, while Deanna scrounged around the messy car, finding dollar bills and loose change to pay for the gas. It was when she looked out of the window at Dillon that she knew something was wrong. The old-fashioned mechanical pump clanged out gallons and racked up dollars, but Dillon wasn’t watching that. Instead, he was looking at the pump just ahead of them, where a tattooed, beer-bellied man stood pumping up his run-down Trans Am. His equally unattractive wife stood beside him.
It seemed that Dillon had caught the wife’s attention, and she was staring at him in a trance. Dillon stared right back. Then this woman in high heels and decade-old tight pants stepped over the gas hose and began to approach Dillon, but her husband, sensing something out of the ordinary, held her back.
He scowled at Dillon. “Got a problem?”
Dillon looked away, shook it off, and the episode was over . . . but it lingered in Deanna’s mind. There were many strange twists and turns on the roller coaster the two of them had been on, but in some way those other turns were consistent. This seemed to take the coaster wholly off its track. She turned to Dillon again and noticed the beads of sweat beginning to form on his forehead. She knew what that meant, and she began to panic. What happened in Boise should have satisfied his rapacious hunger for a good while. She knew she had to get him out of town, so she quickly paid the attendant in crumpled bills and loose change—but when she turned, Dillon had already disappeared into the crowds of the fair.
IT WAS TWILIGHT NOW. The lights had come up on the Ferris wheel, and the Tilt-a-Whirl spun its merry victims past one another in flashes of neon blue and red.