Scorpion Shards (19 page)

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.”

A
T 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.”

B
URTON
, O
REGON
. P
OPULATION
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.

T
HEIR COURSE OUT OF
town took them right 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.

I
T 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.

Deanna searched everywhere for Dillon, in every dark corner, in every crowd, but he seemed to have completely dissolved into the mob.

Finally she spotted him on the midway. He was walking . . . no, wandering, down the hay-strewn path with the aimlessness of a zombie. He was drenched in sweat.

Deanna ran toward him, but stopped when she saw him once more lock eyes with another girl, just as he had with the woman at the gas station. This one was sixteen—maybe seventeen. She ate cotton candy and watched her muscle-bound boyfriend launch rubber frogs into the air with a sledgehammer, trying to win her a prize. The boyfriend grunted as he swung the hammer and didn't seem to notice as the girl dropped her cotton candy, crossed the midway to Dillon, and then, for no apparent reason, leaned forward . . . and kissed him.

Deanna just stood there gawking.

Clearly this girl had never met Dillon before . . . and here she was launching herself into his arms with the same passion that her boyfriend launched his rubber frogs.

Deanna watched as Dillon brought up his arms and pulled this girl closer, kissing her in a powerful way—a way in which he had never kissed Deanna. It was not an embrace of love, or even lust—it was passion turned rancid. It was everything that a kiss should not be.

But it wasn't a kiss, was it? It was more like a bite.

The girl's arms turned white from the tightness of Dillon's grip, and she gave in to his embrace completely. Deanna's mind swarmed with powerful, conflicting emotions—jealousy not the least of them.

Although she never wanted him to steal this kind of kiss from her, she didn't want to see him steal it from anyone else, either.

How could a kiss be so evil—and what had possessed the girl to step into it? It couldn't have been Dillon's looks—not anymore. What once had been an attractive face was now
puffy and infected. His dark eyes had become an icy, unnatural turquoise.

Here he was kissing another girl—right there in front of her, and he didn't even care! The sense of betrayal was unbearable.

Dillon squeezed the girl against him, and Deanna could see his dark aura stretch around her—then Deanna saw—no—she
felt
something invisible pass from the girl to Dillon.

The boyfriend, who had just won a pink dinosaur, turned and gawked with blinking idiocy at his girlfriend, kissing this sick-looking kid.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

At last Dillon moved his lips away from the girl's, and she looked into his eyes. This time his touch had not scrambled her thoughts.

The boyfriend stepped in and delivered a right hook that sent Dillon's head snapping to the left. Dillon recovered quickly . . . but not the boyfriend. He gasped and looked at his hand, where it had touched Dillon's chin. His knuckles were locked. Not just that, but his whole forearm was locked in a muscle spasm that caused his sinews to bulge like ropes from his elbow to his wrist.

The boyfriend stumbled away, forgetting the girl, staring at his paralyzed arm. As for the girl, she just wandered off wide-eyed, and Deanna sensed that something had been stolen from her—something very important that she would never get back.

Dillon just grinned dumbly.

“Why did you do that?” Deanna demanded, overwhelmed with disgust.

“I don't know . . .”

“You really enjoyed it, didn't you?”

“Yes . . . no . . . I don't know.” He put his hand to his temples, as if keeping his head from blowing apart. “Deanna, what's happening to me?”

She had no sympathy for him now as she locked eyes with his, and scrutinized him.

“Deanna, don't look at me like that . . .”

Deanna peered deep into his eyes, searching as she always did . . . seeking the glimmer in the darkness. She looked long and hard, through the rank and fetid decay that encased his body and soul . . . and finally Deanna realized that the light in him was gone. The part of Dillon that had shone so brightly in his darkness all this time had been wrapped in so many shrouds of evil that she could not find him anymore.