Dread Locks

by Neal Shusterman

  To which she answered, “They are.”

  I didn’t have time to think about what that might mean for her solidified sisters, because a sudden engine roared up behind me.

  “Parker! Step away!” a male voice said, but before I could move, an angry gray slice of steel passed before my vision. It was a blade. A chain-saw blade. It came down inches away from me—but I quickly realized it wasn’t meant for me—it was meant for Tara. She backed away in a flash, just missing the buzzing blade.

  I turned to see Mike Fisher, the sculptor, wielding his chain saw like a broadsword.

  “Sculptures with fingerprints? Reports of kids turning to stone? At first I thought there had to be another explanation, but no matter where I looked, it all kept coming back to you.”

  He swung the blade again but missed, because he wasn’t looking at her. He couldn’t risk that she’d take off her glasses and use her lethal gaze on him. “If I had any doubts, they’re gone after what I just heard.” He pulled the blade back for the next swing, and it came dangerously close to me.

  “Move away, Parker,” he said. “We both know what she is. We both know she has to be destroyed.”

  “You’re crazy! She can’t be killed!”

  “There’s one way to kill a Gorgon,” he said. “If the myths are right, the only way to kill a Gorgon is to cut off its head.”

  Yes! He was right! The myths said that Perseus had done it—although now I knew that Perseus had never gotten his sword near her neck.

  Tara seethed in this standoff against the artist. Her anger flared in her curling tendrils of hair, which now squirmed in fury.

  “How could something as vile as you exist?” Mike said. “How many people have you destroyed? For how many years?”

  “More than I can count for longer than I can remember,” she said, and I knew it was not just a boast, it was true. The statuary of museums and palaces around the world must have been filled with her victims—not carved by the hands of men, but hardened by the eyes of a Gorgon. “You will be just one among thousands,” she told the artist. “You’ll die like Perseus, and I will spit on your cold stone face.” She tore off her sunglasses and hurled them to the ground, but Mike turned his gaze downward, toward her feet, refusing to meet her gaze.

  “Take off your glasses, Parker,” she demanded. “He’s got to look at one of us sooner or later.”

  I just shook my head.

  “I said, ‘Take off your glasses.’ ”

  Mike seemed confused for a moment, until he took a good look at me. “She’s made you like her! She’s turned you into one, too!”

  “Take off your glasses now.” The command was almost impossible to resist—still, I fought the urge to obey and kept the glasses on.

  She glared at me, but I knew better than to meet that gaze.

  “You don’t want to be like her,” Mike said. “I know you don’t. Death is better than that. Let me end it for you right now.” Then he revved the chain saw.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how unafraid of death I was. Perhaps because I now knew something worse than death. I had not bled when I had crashed from the cliff. Was I now completely like Tara? A bloodless creature of darkness? No. I would not be that monster.

  Mike came straight for me. I didn’t move, didn’t flinch—but Tara stepped in front of me with supernatural speed. As the chain saw came down toward me, she grabbed Mike’s hand, deflecting it. Then Tara tore the chain saw away from Mike and hurled it with such force that it disappeared over the trees. She grabbed him by the neck, lifting him from the ground. He tried to turn his eyes away, but couldn’t. For a brief instant his eyes met hers, and that’s all it took.

  Tara had said that when you were angry enough, you could turn someone to stone in a matter of seconds. I watched in breathless disbelief as veins of gray spread out from his eyes, along the surface of his skin. His chest rose and fell once as he tried to scream, but then it solidified. His heart hardened. The artist petrified head to toe before my eyes. When the last bit of pink bleached from his fingertips, I knew it was done. Then Tara dropped him. He landed on his feet, but then tipped over like a felled tree, hitting the ground with such a heavy thud, the earth shook.

  Tara scowled at me as I stared at the stone body of the artist. “You stupid, stupid boy,” Tara said. “You would rather die than be my companion?”

  I didn’t answer her—I just stared down at the sculptor’s petrified form. When I finally looked up at Tara, her glasses were back on.

  “Don’t you understand, Parker?” she said. “We’re all we’ve got. You’ll never be free of me, and I’ll never be free of you.”

  She was right. As hard as it was to accept, she was right ... and I knew what I had to do.

  I stood up, turned to Tara, and dug within myself for the worst feeling I could muster. Hatred. Black, festering hatred. Hatred was the core of a Gorgon’s power, and since I was now one myself, I knew I had that within me.

  I pumped up from the deepest pit of my soul the most lethal of feelings, then I tore off my glasses and stared Tara in the eye.

  She gasped and took a step away. “No!”

  It was the first time I had ever caught her off guard.

  I had drawn my weapon, and so she quickly drew hers in response; she pulled off her glasses, leaving us both staring into each other’s horrible eyes.

  There is no way to describe what I saw in her eyes. The myths of Medusa speak of an ugliness so overwhelming it transmuted flesh into stone. No one could survive the ugliness betrayed by those eyes.

  Her fury was like molten lava: hot and horrible, stone in its most dangerous form. “I freed your brother and sister, and this is how you repay me?”

  “You don’t belong in this world,” I told her. “And now neither do I.” Whatever ugliness she had, I now had it, too, and knew I could match it. This moment did not call for a delicate, slow turning of flesh, but a sudden detonation, just as she had done to the artist. No eating of sand and drinking of milk, but a quick and devastating alchemistic transformation.

  My hideous curls quivered as I forced the newfound bitterness of my soul through my eyes into hers, even as she did the same to me. Triggering her change was like trying to throw a heavy steel switch—the kind Dr. Frankenstein used to bring lightning down to his monster. I felt the weight of her resisting the change, but she had been weakened when she had cut those two curls from her head. A moment more, and I felt the change sweep through her like wildfire.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done!” I heard her say. “You don’t know wh—” and then her words stopped. I tried to open my mouth, but could not. I no longer had the ability to speak—and I knew that what I had done to her, she had done to me as well. Just like her sisters had done, we had destroyed each other.

  With my eyes fixed forward, locked on Tara’s eyes, I watched her flesh turn gray, her eyes turn gray, and finally her tangle of twisted hair turn gray, from the roots to the very tips. I could feel it in myself as well. A growing numbness. My toes and fingers, my elbows and knees, everything locking in place, never to move again. I breathed in, then my breathing stopped. My heart stopped. I could feel nothing beneath my neck.

  I awaited the moment of my death as the numbness spread up my neck, through my jaw, ears, and face, and finally along the thick strands of my own hair until I could feel nothing. Nothing at all. But where was death?

  I held out for the release of my spirit from the stone vessel of my body, but the release never came. Then, with growing and terrible awareness, I realized the truth.

  I was immortal.

  I was solid stone, but still, I could not die.

  Dimly, through my stone eyes, I could still see Tara’s solid form in front of me, the expression of fury and shock still on her marbleized face. I could feel her spirit there, as trapped as mine, never to turn another person to stone. Never to look away from each other.

  I had won! I had saved the world from the likes of her. Of us.
My victory was all I had now, and so I savored it as best I could, as I stared into Tara’s eyes.

  And I’m staring still.

  No one ever found us. No one ever comes to our hidden oil field, and I now measure time not by days, but by the passing years. The path to this place must have choked with weeds long ago, and if the night brings stars, I cannot see them, for all I see is her. Tara. My friend. My enemy. My victim and my destroyer—our eyes fused in a frozen gaze until the rains erode the stone of our bodies ... until our hardened flesh is turned to sand and carried off, grain by grain, by the wind.

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  darkfusion novel,

  Red Rider’s Hood

  1

  RED AS FRESH BLOOD

  It’s a jungle out there. Buildings grow all around you out of the cracking pavement, blocking out the daylight, making you forget the sun’s there at all. Those buildings can’t block out the moonlight, though. Nothing can block that out. Trust me, I know.

  I can’t tell you my name, because then you’d be in danger, too. I got enemies, see, and the only reason I’m alive right now is because my Mustang convertible—red as fresh blood, and as powerful as they come—is faster than anyone, or any thing, can run. You can call me Red. Red Rider. It’s what they called me back when I had my old Radio Flyer wagon as a kid, and it’s what they call me now.

  As for the Mustang, I found it in a junkyard when I was thirteen, and spent three years nursing it back to health. Call it a hobby. By the time I turned sixteen—which was on the last day of the school year—it was ready for me to drive. Little did I know what I’d be driving myself into that hot and horrible summer.

  See, when you ride out into these streets, you never know what you’re in for. Good or bad; thrilling or dangerous. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both. It’s not that my neighborhood’s an awful place, but it’s crowded. We got every culture here: Hispanic, African-American, white, Vietnamese, Armenian—you name it. We’re this big melting pot, but someone turned up the heat too high, and the stew started to burn. Gangs, crime, fights, and fear are now a regular part of our local stew.

  It all started the day I had to deliver some “bread” to my grandma. That’s what she calls money, because she’s still stuck in the sixties, when money was “bread,” cops were “fuzz,” and everything else was “groovy.” Don’t even bother telling her it’s a whole other millennium. Going to her house, you’d think the sixties never ended. There are love beads hanging in doorways, Jimi Hendrix playing on an old record player, and a big old Afro on her head. It really ticks people off in movie theaters, because when Grandma sits down, there’s nothing but hair for the people behind her. And the funny thing is, she’s not even black. She married a black man, though, and their daughter married a Korean, and that’s how they got me. I guess I’ll marry a Puerto Rican girl or something, and fill out that gene pool swimming inside me.

  Anyway, Grandma didn’t believe in banks, because her father lost all his money in the crash of 1929. Grandma made our whole family swear by cast-iron safes hidden behind paintings. For some reason, our house became the main branch.

  “You take this bag to your grandma first thing in the morning, and don’t stop for anything on the way,” my mom instructed me. She knew how much I enjoyed running errands in my Mustang. But she also knew I liked to take the long way to get where I was going. Driving was still new enough to me that I enjoyed every second behind the wheel—even in traffic.

  “Promise me you’ll go straight there.”

  “Cross my heart,” I told her.

  She wanted me to leave at dawn, before she went off to work. If I had, the whole nasty business might have been avoided, but as it was, I slept late. The sun was already high in the sky by the time I hit the street, where the neighborhood girls had been playing hopscotch, probably since the break of dawn.

  “Hey, Red Rider, we like your new wheels,” the girls said as I passed them on the way to where the Mustang was parked. “Who’s gonna get your bicycle now that you got a car?”

  “Who says anybody’s going to get it?” I told them, “Some days are bicycle days; some days are Mustang days.”

  I hopped into the car and little Tina Soames took a moment away from her hopscotch game to lean in the window.

  “Betcha it gets stolen,” she said, and smiled with a broken front tooth that would never be fixed, because her parents didn’t care enough. “Betcha it gets stolen real soon.”

  If anybody was going to steal my car, it would be her brother, Cedric. Cedric Soames: a rich name for such a lowlife—and believe me, life didn’t get any lower than him. He was a year older than me. He rarely showed at school, but he got good grades anyway, because even the teachers were afraid of him and his gang.

  “So, Tina,” I asked, “is that a warning, or a threat?”

  She shrugged. “A little bit of both, I guess. I know you built the thing up from a pile of junk, so I would hate to see you lose it. But then again, my brother sure does bring home nice things.” Then she skipped away to continue her game of hopscotch.

  I started the car, listened to the purr of the engine for a few seconds, then tore out, heading across town toward Forest Boulevard, where Grandma lived. I couldn’t get the thought of Cedric out of my mind. He wasn’t just mean, he was unnatural—definitely one of the burned ingredients in our neighborhood melting pot. And some things are best never scraped from the bottom of the pan.

  It was a hot July day. You could see steam from the morning’s rain rising from the asphalt. The humidity made you feel like you were breathing bathwater, and my shirt stuck to my skin like it was painted there. I was still thinking about Cedric Soames when I came to the intersection of Andersen and Grimm—one of the busiest corners in my neighborhood, with a traffic light that always took too long to change. I sat at the intersection, waiting for a green light, when some guy dressed in rags put a squeegee to my windshield and started to wipe it clean, even though it was clean to begin with.

  “Hey, man,” I said through my open window. “I don’t have change for you, so you might as well forget it.”

  “So pay me next time,” he said. “For now, just consider it a public service.”

  The light changed, but he was still leaning over the windshield, so I couldn’t pull away. Cars behind me started honking.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” I yelled at him. “Can’t you see the light’s green?” I honked the horn. “C’mon! Out of the way!”

  He leaned even farther over the hood like he was trying to look into my car, but I figured maybe he was just studying the glass, because he said, “Look at that—some bird did its business right in the middle of your windshield.”

  He was right—I hadn’t seen it before. Must have been an owl or something big like that. Meanwhile, the cars behind me were honking like this was my fault, but what was I supposed to do, run the dude over? He finished and I looked up. The light changed from yellow to red.

  “You owe me big next time, you hear?” says the beggar. And then he flashes me a smile I recognize. He had a single gold tooth—not one of the front ones, but the sharp one. His canine tooth. The one on the left.

  “Marvin Flowers?” I said.

  “In the flesh,” he answered.

  “But ... but ... what are you doing here?”

  Marvin Flowers, or “Marvelous Marvin,” as he was better known, was the best high school quarterback Madison-Manfred High had ever seen. He had left town a year before, with a college scholarship and a winning gold-toothed smile, waving good-bye to all of his friends at Mad-Man. He said he was going places.

  “What are you doing here washing windows for spare change?” I asked.

  “Had to drop out of college,” he told me. “Family problems.” The sun disappeared behind a cloud, casting a shadow over Marvin’s already dark expression.

  “You know,” he said, his voice making me feel cold in spite of the heat, “this city can get ahold of you and
pull you back no matter how hard you try to climb out. Like a grave.”

  It was such a weird thing to say, I laughed nervously and looked to the traffic light, which was still stuck on red, almost as if it was waiting for Marvin’s signal.

  What am I afraid of? I said to myself. This guy is just a street beggar now. Feel bad for him, sure, but don’t fear him.

  Then Marvin smiled again and the sun returned to its normal glare. Maybe it was just to get rid of him, or maybe I really did feel sorry for him, but whatever the reason, I reached over to the little sack next to me on the seat and pulled out a bill from my grandma’s stash of “bread.” To my surprise, it was a fifty. I looked in the sack and couldn’t find anything smaller. There had to be thousands of dollars in there. I took a deep breath. I wasn’t just bringing Grandma the bread, I was bringing her the butter, and a golden knife to spread it!

  Marvin leaned into the window and raised his eyebrows. He had seen what was in the bag, too. I wanted to peel away, but still the light stayed red.

  “Just something for my grandma,” I told him, tossing the bag to the floor of the car.

  “Very nice.”

  “Here.” I handed him the fifty. “Great job on the window.”

  “Thank you very much.” He pocketed it. Then, I figured out of appreciation for the fifty, he said, “You know ... my sister likes you.”