Scorpion Shards

  “Stay dry?” suggested Tory. “Keep warm?”

  “I promise,” said Michael, “no more storms.” But even as they turned to go, Michael could feel a cold wind blowing, as nature itself reacted to the growing chill he felt within.

  14. FEAR IS AN ICY WIND

  * * *

  THE DRY BRUSH OF EASTERN OREGON SLOWLY BECAME GREEN, then turned into dense woods as I-84 cut a tireless path west. With Michael behind the wheel, the four kids tried every exit off the interstate, in search of anything that didn’t seem right. It was a slow and painstaking task, but it gave them the time they needed to talk.

  “So now you two are Rain-man and Mrs. Clean?” said Lourdes to Michael and Tory. “I wonder what that makes me—Squirrel-girl?”

  “It might not seem like much,” said Tory, “but we’ll need every skill we have if we’re gonna stop this guy.”

  Tory looked at Winston, anticipating his usual reaction. “I know it’s a big stretch,” she said to him, “but these talents are for real—you have to believe us!”

  Winston looked at her, insulted. “Why shouldn’t I believe you?” he said. “It makes sense—I just wish I knew what mine was.”

  Michael laughed. “Nice stretch, Winston. Maybe you’re a bungee cord after all!” Michael jokingly tugged on Winston’s arm, as if it would stretch like plastic-man. It didn’t of course, and Winston tumbled out of his seat belt.

  “Hey watch it!” said Winston, only half angry. “Before I grow some teeth and bite you!”

  BURTON, OREGON, WAS SIX miles off the interstate, in a densely forested valley. About a mile down Old Burton Road, Michael stomped on the brakes, and they all tumbled forward.

  An object loomed before them—something so bizarre that they could only stare at it, trying to make their minds accept what they were seeing. It was huge and blue, lying half on the road and half off. It looked like a giant metallic Q-tip that had crashed from the heavens and taken down a dozen trees with it.

  “Water tower,” said Lourdes.

  Tory swallowed hard. “I think we found the town where he stopped.”

  The word “Burton” was still visible on the toppled water tower. Its bulbous tank had ruptured, sending its full load of water flooding the forest around it, turning it into a swamp.

  “If I read the sign right,” said Michael, “there’s more than three thousand people in this town.”

  He turned to Tory, but Tory turned her eyes away. They were all thinking the same thing. The demolition of downtown Boise, as bad as it was, had only a quarter-mile radius . . . . But if the redheaded kid had found a way to shatter the people of this town . . . it meant that the range of his ability had grown, and the human wreckage would be unimaginable.

  The car itself seemed to shudder.

  They slowly navigated the gravelly shoulder of the road down the long, slender cylinder that had once held up the water tank. At its ruined base sat a burned-out eighteen-wheeler with a crushed grill.

  Across the road, in the drenched undergrowth, a woman sat knitting, wearing nothing but the strands of clashing yarn that draped over her and into the mud.

  Lourdes casually pushed down her door lock. It engaged with a dull thud. It was echoed by the thud of the other three doors being locked as well. Michael eased onto the gas pedal, and they pressed cautiously forward.

  The first homes came into view—lonely homes set back from the road, about a hundred yards apart. In the first house, a shadow leered from an upstairs window, staggering back and forth. On the porch of another home, a woman in a rocking chair let out a ghostly sound.

  “We still have three miles to go till we get to the center of town,” reminded Tory.

  Winston nodded. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  And it did. A car was parked through a living-room window. Several homes were smoldering ruins . . . then all at once, Michael slammed on the brakes as a local kid no older than them, screaming and bloody, dashed out in front of them. He was stalked by a band of teenagers, as if the prey of some awful hunt.

  They watched as the mob disappeared up the hillside.

  “I’ve had nightmares like that,” said Tory; then added, “Whoever he is, I hope he wakes up.”

  Lourdes mumbled something in Spanish and let out a groan of grief. She grabbed Michael’s hand; he held Tory’s shoulder; she gripped Winston’s leg; he reached back until he found Lourdes’s wrist, completing the circle of four. They took a deep breath and tried to force out the grim images that assaulted them from outside.

  “Nothing can hurt us,” said Tory. “Nothing can hurt us when we’re like this.” But it wasn’t true. Yes, they were stronger, but they weren’t invincible—and the sum of the horrors outside their car was far greater than the sum of the four of them.

  “We shouldn’t look at what happened here,” said Lourdes. “You should never look when you’re passing through Hell.” And with that in mind, Michael gritted his teeth until his face began to turn red.

  “What are you doing?” asked Winston.

  “Making the sky fall,” was his answer.

  Up above the dense cloud-cover began to ripple. “If I can make myself feel fog on the inside, it’ll happen on the outside.”

  “How do you feel fog?” asked Winston.

  “Fog is confusion,” said Michael, through clenched teeth. “Just like anger is a lightning storm, and hopelessness is a rain of sleet.”

  In a moment the clouds descended into the valley, sinking over their windshield until the entire town of Burton was shrouded in fog. Then an icy wind that could only be Michael’s fear hit them from behind, whistling past the car, and blowing the fog before them. The wind left a tunnel through the fog that followed the road to the center of town.

  DOWNTOWN BURTON HAD BECOME a ghost town. The mad had long since disappeared into the woods—their anguished cries echoing across the valley like a thousand dispossessed souls. Michael slowly drove the van into the heart of havoc, but the fog could not hide everything. Through the mist, shadows of the dead seemed to stretch in all directions off the side of the road. The town’s firetruck lay on its side. Shattered window glass crackled beneath the wheels of the van.

  At one point Winston got up on his knees and looked out of the window, toward a gas station, which could barely be seen through the fog. “Stop the car!” he said. Michael did, and they all watched as Winston pressed up against the car window, not daring to open it—as if the very air of this town was poisoned. Finally, Winston said, “He was there . . . then he crossed the street . . .” Winston pointed into the fog. “But where did he go from here?”

  “Feels like he went straight on through town,” said Tory.

  “I feel that, too,” concurred Lourdes.

  They turned to Michael, but his struggle to maintain the fog didn’t leave room for him to feel much of anything else.

  IN ANOTHER MILE, MAIN Street faded behind them, and Michael lost control of the fog. The wind shifted the haze away through the woods, revealing a narrow country road ahead. They all breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the worst was over . . . until the road took a blind curve and they almost broadsided a pickup truck that sat diagonally across their lane.

  Michael hit the brake, sharply turned the wheel, and the van spun out of control, tires squealing, until they spun to a stop, narrowly missing the pickup.

  It was the moment the van stopped that they began to feel a sense of presence that was so strong it bristled their neck hairs like static electricity.

  “He’s still here!” said Tory. “Somewhere nearby!”

  They quickly unlocked their doors and got out.

  Once outside, the smell of smoke was strong and pungent. From the woods they could still hear the distant wails of the wandering mad, chasing each other through the timberland maze.

  In front of them, the pickup truck barred their path; beside the truck lay a man, face-down in the mud, very much dead. In his hand he held a bloody fence picket. A
crude arrow had caught him right in the jugular.

  Michael turned away and leaned against a tree, gasping for breath. “I think I’m gonna puke,” he said.

  “Don’t,” said Tory. “We might get hail.”

  It was Lourdes who was able to get a sense of direction. She turned to the right and pointed to a house about a hundred yards further down the road.

  “There . . . ,” she said. “I think he’s in there.”

  They took action instantly. Lourdes stalked forward, ready to rely on her bare hands, but Tory had her own ideas. Grimacing, she grabbed the dead man’s picket from his stiff hand.

  “Maybe if I stake him through the heart, it’ll sanitize his soul,” she said.

  Michael pulled a crowbar from the pickup truck. “Maybe I can use this as a lightning rod,” he said.

  Winston, still not knowing his hidden talent, reached into his coat and pulled out the revolver, taking off the safety. “No maybe’s about what this’ll do to him,” he said.

  The dwelling seemed very innocent as they approached. Just a two-story country house.

  “What if he’s armed, too?” said Michael. “What if he shoots us?”

  “Then we die,” said Winston. The thought of dying in this town did not sit well with any of them. It would be better to die anywhere else but here.

  The front door was slightly ajar, and they stood there on the porch for a quick moment, then burst in. Tory held her stake high, Michael gripped his crowbar in both hands, the sky already rumbling with his fury, and Winston aimed his gun at anything—anything that moved.

  Inside the living room, a figure stood silhouetted against a window, holding something large and heavy in its arms.

  Winston, his hands shaking, leveled the gun at the figure’s head.

  The figure stepped closer, Tory and Michael froze, and Winston hesitated.

  “Shoot!” shouted Lourdes. “Shoot now!”

  Winston almost did, he pulled his finger back on the trigger halfway . . . but then hesitated . . . because there was something he suddenly remembered.

  The figure stepped out of the shadows. It was a girl with long, black hair, and slightly Asian eyes.

  There are six of us, thought Winston. Six! . . . and this one was not the destroyer.

  Winston lowered the gun. Michael dropped the crowbar with a clang.

  The girl held a young boy in her arms—about seven or eight years old. He wore a toy Indian headband on his head, and he clung to her as she approached them.

  The girl glanced at Winston’s gun, but didn’t seem intimidated by it at all. In fact, she didn’t seem frightened by any of them. “Could one of you go into the kitchen and get a towel?” she asked calmly.

  There was a foul smell in the air, and from the smell, they knew that the boy in her arms had soiled his pants. Tory put down the picket and hurried to find the towel.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” said the girl. “Dillon said you were dead, but I knew he was lying.”

  “Dillon? That’s his name?” asked Winston. “The guy with red hair?”

  “Yes. I’m Deanna.”

  They introduced themselves as Tory returned with the towel. Then Deanna put the boy down on the sofa, cleaning him the way a mother would clean a baby—with tender care and patience.

  “Who’s the kid?” asked Michael.

  “Just a boy from town,” said Deanna. “He doesn’t seem to know his name, so I call him Carter, since that was the label on his shirt.”

  When the boy looked up, they could see how truly terrible his eyes were. One of his pupils had closed down completely, and the other one was open wide and black.

  “They all look like that once Dillon is done,” explained Deanna. “There’s not much we can do for them.”

  She told them the story of how she met Dillon—the things they had done together, and how she finally broke free. She explained how the boy’s father was going to kill her with the bloody picket, but just before he brought the deadly spike down upon her chest, the man was hit by the arrow.

  “I got him!” said the boy. “We were playing cowboys and Indians, and I got him good.”

  Deanna cleaned the boy, and dressed him in oversized pants she found lying around the house. Tory took the soiled towel from Deanna, held it tightly in her hand, and the stench quickly vanished.

  “You thought you were going to die, didn’t you?” Tory said as Deanna washed up. “You thought you were dying, so the thing living inside you panicked and ran away—the same thing happened to us—they got scared out of us!”

  “I saw it,” said Deanna, calmly. “It was like a snake . . . . No . . . more like a giant worm.”

  Everyone else shuddered, but Deanna didn’t seem bothered by the memory at all. She seemed rather fearless about the whole thing. “Anyway it vanished through the woods, heading west.”

  Carter wandered around the living room and found his bow and arrows. He set to work removing the rubber suction-cup darts, and sharpening the wood with a pocket knife, as he had done with the first one. Lourdes went over to watch.

  “Do you have a car?” asked Deanna.

  “Just down the road,” answered Michael.

  “We have to get going . . . . I knew you’d be coming, so I stacked some supplies by the door—I know where Dillon is headed.”

  “Look!” said Tory, and they all turned to catch sight of Lourdes at the other end of the room with Carter. Lourdes had gained the boy’s attention now—he had put down his knife and arrow. Together they seemed to be playing some sort of game—a mirroring game, where the boy would copy whatever Lourdes did.

  “Lourdes, this is no time to be fooling around!” said Winston.

  “Shh!” said Tory, sharply.

  Lourdes kept her eye contact with the boy. She raised one arm; so did he. She raised the other arm; so did he. Only this wasn’t a game, and he wasn’t simply mimicking her, his actions were too perfect, too exact.

  “She’s controlling him like a marionette!” said Michael, staring in wide-eyed disbelief. “She’s controlling every movement of his body!” Each motion Lourdes made was exactly duplicated. She wiggled her fingers; so did he. She rolled her neck; so did he. Was it just the boy’s muscles, or did it go beyond that? Could she control his heartbeat? His breathing? His very metabolism? Until yesterday, she couldn’t control her own grotesque physiology, but now the physiology of others seemed within her grasp!

  Lourdes looked at the boy, and the boy’s ruined eyes began to close. He nodded off to sleep.

  Lourdes turned to the others. “Did you see that?” she said, just as surprised as the rest of them. “I think I did that!”

  They all just stared at the sleeping boy in wonder, realizing that the title of “Squirrel-girl” for Lourdes didn’t quite hit the mark.

  “Those creatures turned our strengths into weaknesses!” said Tory. It was becoming clearer to each of them now. Michael’s ability to affect nature had been used to wreak havoc in the very nature of people around him; Tory’s cleansing touch had been turned into a touch of disease; Lourdes’s ability to control the metabolism of others had been used to draw the flesh out of their cells and add it to Lourdes’s.

  Tory turned to Winston. “We can figure out what your strength is now!”

  “I already figured,” said Winston uneasily. He looked around, then asked Michael to bring down a potted plant from a shelf Winston couldn’t reach. Winston put the plant down on a coffee table, took a deep breath, then grasped the stem in his hand and concentrated. Right before everyone’s eyes, the plant grew until it had doubled in size and flowers bloomed. Winston smiled. It was the first time any of them had seen him really smile.

  “Looks like we got a flower-child,” said Michael, with a grin. “What are you gonna do, beat Dillon with a corsage?”

  Winston shrugged. “Ain’t my problem if you can’t see the possibilities.”

  “You’ll find a good use for it,” said Deanna. “Don’t worry.”
br />   And indeed it seemed that Deanna was not worried. By anything. Her fearlessness was a powerful strength. It gave them focus; it gave them clarity. She told them how Dillon had changed in the end, making it horribly clear where all their beasts had gone—and it seemed likely that Deanna’s beast had found him as well.

  “He’s stronger than all of us,” said Tory. “If he can survive with all six of them inside him.”

  “You said you knew where he was going?” asked Michael.

  Deanna nodded, and picked up sleeping Carter, refusing to leave him alone in this awful town, and they all headed back to the car.

  “There’s still time to stop him, but it will take all of us to do it,” said Deanna.

  “Stop him . . . from what?” asked Lourdes.

  “Don’t you know what he wants to do?” she asked, looking at each of them. Only Deanna had the courage to say the words aloud.

  “He’s going to shatter the world, the same way he shattered this town . . . and once it starts, we won’t be able to stop it.”

  15. RESONANCE

  * * *

  JAGGED SPIRES OF DEAD WOOD STRETCHED THROUGH THE morning mist. Thousands upon thousands of trees had once blanketed the steep hills, stretching toward a distant mountain . . . .

  . . . But now every last tree was dead.

  Wind, rain, and rot had eaten away their branches, leaving vast acres of wooden monoliths standing in a mulch of peat and heavy gray ash. This forest had died long before Dillon Cole got to it, and the cause of death was still there on the horizon, breathing steam like a fire god asleep.

  The sheer power of it, thought Dillon as he drove from life into the miles of death that surrounded the northern face of Mount St. Helens.

  The smell of decay within this realm of desolation blended with the rich, dark smell of volcanic ash, creating an aroma that was at once both clean and vile, like the awful smell of a sulfur spring.

  As he drove into the volcanic wasteland, fear began to writhe in his gut, but he beat it down. The fear had descended on him shortly after Deanna had left him. Terror had suddenly coiled itself around his gut like a serpent, making him feel paranoid and claustrophobic in the cab of the Range Rover as he left the dying town of Burton. He had fought it down until it wasn’t so overpowering, but still the fear kept coming back, urging him to drive faster and more recklessly to his final destination.