Scorpion Shards

by Neal Shusterman

  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.

  The moment she realized that, was the moment she knew she had to run—to get as far away as she possibly could. She instantly turned without pause for another thought and abandoned the shell that had once been Dillon Cole, racing into the crowds—but Dillon desperately pursued.

  “Deanna!” he screamed. “Don’t go!”

  She couldn’t stop herself from glancing back as he chased her, and what she saw made her run even faster.

  Dillon was pushing through the crowds just as she was, and everyone he touched fell from him with hideous afflictions. Some collapsed in paralysis, others lost their minds, others seemed to deflate as if their chests had been crushed inward, and still others turned red and diseased. “Deanna!” he screamed, not even noticing the people he had destroyed.

  She broke free of the crowd and scrambled away from the fair, to the top of the hill.

  “Deanna, come back!”

  When she reached the top of the hill, she dared to look back once more. Dillon was still standing there at the edge of the crowd. He stared at her a moment more . . . and finally with a scowl on his face, he turned and defiantly grabbed the first girl in sight. She came to him like he was a gift from heaven, and he kissed her, stealing her soul away with his kiss. Then he turned and headed back into the crowd.

  From the top of the hill, Deanna watched him go, the living darkness now cloaked around him and trailing behind him. He stalked his way to the center of the crowd around the bluegrass band. He looked left, then right, until he finally found The Right Person—a matronly woman clapping her hands happily to the beat. Then Dillon whispered something into her ear.

  And the crowd detonated.

  From where Deanna stood, she could see how it happened. It began with people becoming irritated, then irritation built into anger, anger into fury, fury into rage, until the entire crowd thrashed in a chaotic screaming tarantella—a dance of destruction, wild and insane, spreading outward like a shock wave. The music stopped and was replaced by wails of anguish and pain. In five minutes the townsfolk had turned into chaotic, murderous fiends, their sanity wiped from their minds by Dillon the destroyer.

  Deanna turned and ran, screaming, into the woods.

  WOODS ARE A RIPE place for fears, and Deanna’s were thriving on the branches and shadows that surrounded her. She had refused to feed on the terror Dillon had unleashed, so now every shape was a threatening demon, every shadow a portent of pain. She stumbled over and over as she raced through the lonely woods, not knowing where she would go.

  At last she came to a road and tumbled to the gravel, skinning her knees through her jeans. She sat up on the empty asphalt, breathless, her voice ruined from all her screaming.

  Finally a pickup truck swerved to stop in front of her.

  A man got out—a middle-aged, family-looking man. There was a boy in the back of the pickup, all dressed up in an Indian outfit.

  It seemed normal, and Deanna just wanted to dissolve into this man and his family, forgetting who she was and what was happening.

  “I have to get out here,” Deanna rasped. “So do you! You have to get away from this town!”

  “Now hold on, there,” said the man warmly. “Let’s just calm down.” He looked her over as he stepped from the cab of his pickup. “You’ve had some fright,” he said. “I know just the thing for you.”

  “Please,” begged Deanna, “you don’t understand . . .”

  “Now just wait a second,” he said, with a calm and soothing voice. “I’ll be right back.” He reached into the back of his pickup and grabbed something, then turned back toward her, revealing what he held. It was a piece of a white picket fence, broken so that the white wood came to a sharp point.

  And then Deanna noticed the man’s eyes. One pupil was closed down completely, the other wide and wild. This man had already been to the fair.

  “We’ll take care of you,” said the man. “Fix you up real good.”

  Dea
nna could now see that the tip of the picket was already covered with blood.

  In the pickup, the boy mindlessly sang a single line from a nursery rhyme over and over like a broken record, lazily rolling his head from side to side, as he watched his father throw Deanna to the ground.

  “This won’t hurt but a bit,” the madman said as he raised the picket above his head and pointed it at Deanna’s heart.

  Deanna would have screamed if she still had a voice.

  13. TURNING NORMAL

  * * *

  TUFTS OF WHITE SPECKLED A RICH BLUE SKY ON THE IDAHO–Oregon border. It was a weak legion of clouds that could not even block out the sun.

  Michael could not remember blue sky; there were always clouds and storms tormenting the heavens, and when the storms slept, there was always a rumbling fog keeping the sky an everlasting gray.

  But not today.

  Michael lay on a brushy hillside staring up at the glorious sky. Beneath them lay Huntington, Oregon. They were barely a hundred miles out of Boise, but to Michael, what they left behind in Boise was a million miles away.

  “What do they look like?”

  Michael turned to see Tory come up beside him.

  “That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Looking for shapes in the clouds?”

  “I was just looking.” Michael sat up and glanced down the hill, where the town spread out before them. Changing leaves glimmered in afternoon sunlight turning the town to gold. The air was neither hot nor cold, but temperate. Nice. Normal.

  They had spent an entire day and night in and around Boise, spiraling outward from the epicenter of Chaos, searching for The Others, or, more specifically, the redheaded boy who was at the core of the nightmare. But they had also wasted time as they reveled in this new feeling of freedom now that the beasts were gone. It had taken until the next morning for them to feel the slightest pull northwest, and they realized he had left town long ago.

  Now they had driven into Oregon and, somewhere in the town below, a tireless Winston was searching for signs of ruin, but he was the only one. Here on the hill, Lourdes lay on her back, asleep, with every exhalation breathing out another ounce of fat, and he and Tory just looked at the clouds.

  Michael glanced at Tory and smiled.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Your eyelashes,” said Michael. “The way you were before, I could never see them.” What he didn’t tell her was that he never really looked at her face before. It had been so hideous. He could not bear the sight. But now the sores had closed, and bit by bit the swelling was going down.

  Tory gingerly touched her face. “There’ll be scars. They’re always scars from bad skin conditions, you know?”

  “Maybe not,” offered Michael, wondering about the scars his own condition might leave behind.

  Michael lay back down and turned his eyes on the clouds again, his mind finding their shapes. An angel. A unicorn. A tall sailing ship. He had always played this game as a child. He was very good at it.

  “Can I tell you something, Tory?”

  “Shoot.”

  “I don’t think I’m as brave as the rest of you.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Michael kept his eyes on the drifting clouds. A wind seemed to fill the sail of the tall ship. “Well, take Winston, for example; he feels this in his gut. He knows he has to go out there and take care of this bad kid. And you—you were the strong one, who pulled the rest of us all this way . . . and if it weren’t for Lourdes, I would have given up a long time ago . . .”

  “I was ready to call it quits lots of times,” said Tory.

  “How about now?” He turned to Tory, but Tory didn’t answer. “I saw that horror in Boise,” said Michael. “I know what that other kid is capable of . . . I know what I was capable of too . . . but now I’ve come out of the nightmare, Tory. Maybe there’s some blood-sucking Hell-thing driving him to do what he does—but the one that was inside of me is gone! The problem is, it was living in me for so long, I can’t remember being any other way. I don’t know how to feel about anyone or anything, you know?”

  Michael looked away. “Tory . . . I don’t have any of the feelings I used to have. Feelings for girls, I mean.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “I mean I don’t know what I mean. I don’t know anything.” Michael took a deep breath. “It’s like everything inside me has been locked in a vault since I was eleven, and now that same eleven-year-old kid is coming back out. I’ve got to learn how to feel all over again, because right now I don’t feel anything either way.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s something you can figure out in one day. If we make it through this, we’ll have our whole lives to deal with the regular stuff, but right now we’ve got other things to think about,” reminded Tory. “Our friendly neighborhood Hell-pets are still out there—they can still come back . . .”

  “If they’re not back already, then maybe they’ve found a better place to be,” said Michael. “Anyway, I don’t want to go looking for them under stones. I just want to go home, figure out who I am, and how I’m supposed to feel . . . and then be normal. I don’t even care what shade of normal it happens to be. Any kind of normal would suit me just fine.”

  Michael turned to see Tory dab a tear from her face.

  “I don’t think we get to be normal,” she said. “We’re Scorpion Shards, remember?” Then she took his hand. “Come here, I want to show you something. It’s sort of a . . . magic trick.”

  She led him over the hill to a burned-out campsite—a place with torn mattresses and soggy cardboard. It reeked of urine and rot, and it reminded Michael of the type of world they had traveled through to get this far—to get into the light of this pleasant day.

  “Find me something disgusting,” said Tory. “The most disgusting thing you can find.”

  There were plenty of disgusting things around to choose from. Michael settled for a sopping rag, so rank it had turned black. It smelled like death on a bad day. He picked it up with his fingernails—just touching the thing made his body shiver in disgust.

  “Now give it to me,” requested Tory.

  Michael held it in her direction. “What are you going to do?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She took the disgusting rag and, to Michael’s horror, used it to wipe her hands, then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she brought it to her face and wiped her face with it. Michael had to look away. Finally, when she was done, she held the rag back up to Michael.

  “Take it,” she said.

  Michael reluctantly held out his fingertips and grabbed the corner of the rag. The rag was still wet, but that’s all it was. A damp rag, perfectly clean, as if it had just been taken out of the washer. Even the smell was gone.

  “Kills germs on contact,” said Tory. “I’m better than Listerine.”

  Michael smelled the rag again, amazed. He wiped his own face with it and felt its cool sterile dampness on his face.

  “Everyone’s got a hidden talent,” said Tory. “I suppose ours are a bit more interesting than most. Our talents are less . . . normal.”

  Tory glanced up at the puffs of clouds blowing across the sky. “An angel,” she said. “A unicorn . . . and that one’s a schooner ship.”

  Michael glanced back at the clouds, wondering how on earth she had seen the exact same things he had seen. The reason became clear in an instant, and Michael couldn’t believe his eyes.

  The clouds had become like soft, white figurines, hovering in the sky. The wind had carefully sculpted the clouds into exactly what Michael had seen them as!

  Tory smiled. “You make nice clouds,” she said. “Or at least you do when you’re head’s screwed on straight.”

  MICHAEL STARED AT HIS clouds for a good ten minutes, but then they were finally torn apart by powerful crosswinds. He tried to create them again, but found he didn’t have the concentration. As he watched them dissolve, Michael began to wonder how many of the storms on their trip h
ad been of his own creation.

  Meanwhile, Lourdes had woken up and was staring at a dead squirrel . . . only it wasn’t dead.

  “I was talking to it gently—coaxing it closer,” she told Michael. “And then it just keeled over and fell asleep. What could possibly make it do that?”

  Michael looked at the silent squirrel, realizing that this could be the first hint of Lourdes’s “hidden talent.” Then suddenly the squirrel snapped open its eyes and scampered off.

  “Isn’t that weird?” said Lourdes.

  Michael chuckled as he imagined Lourdes surrounded by animals like Snow White . . . but it wasn’t about animals, was it? This was just a trick—like Tory’s rag, or Michael’s sky sculptures. As with all of them, Lourdes’s talent had many layers to be discovered, and it took Michael’s breath away to think of the possibilities.

  “We need to talk,” Michael told Lourdes, and she began to look worried.

  “About what?”

  Michael smiled and gently touched her arm, which was not quite as massive as it had been that same morning. “Good things,” he assured her. “Only good things.”

  Just then Winston came bounding up the hill, out of breath.

  “The redheaded kid didn’t stop in this town,” he announced. “We gotta keep moving.” Michael noticed that Winston’s pants, which they had cut down to match his diminishing stature, were already an inch above his ankles. Then Michael caught a glimpse of the revolver Winston had taken from that crazy cop in Boise. He kept it with him in his inside jacket pocket.

  Michael imagined the days ahead of them now, and the joy he had felt only moments ago began to dissipate as quickly as his clouds in the windswept sky. He knew what they had to do. Stop the destroyer. Stop him at all costs, before he . . . before he what? It was hard to imagine anything worse than what they had seen in Boise.

  As they gathered their things, Tory came up to Michael once more. “Still thinking of going home?” she asked.

  Michael shook his head. “What would you do without me?” he said.