Shattered Sky

by Neal Shusterman

  “I don’t know. It’s as if their intrusion triggered something. Like an alarm.”

  “Or an immune system,” offered Drew. It was an offhand comment that almost slipped by. It took a moment for both of them to really latch onto it. Drew turned to face Winston, and Winston caught an intensity in his eyes. Excitement, fear, both beginning to blossom together. “Like an immune system,” Drew said again, slowly, like a spell. Winston could feel the spell open a door, and the scope of what was beyond it gave Winston vertigo.

  A shadow moved in the dim service lights of the closed concession deck. They turned to see a figure approaching, something terribly wrong with the face. Only as the figure got closer, did they realize that he was wearing a latex mask over his head. The mask, a Halloween staple, featured a bloody, lopsided face, cleaved down the middle by a rubber hatchet. He smelled the part—a stench of organic decay as if he hadn’t washed for weeks.

  “You boys looking to score some dope?” said a muffled voice behind the mask. “I got something for whatever ails you. Only the good stuff, guaranteed.”

  “Get lost,” said Drew.

  “C’mon, I got your number,” said the drug dealer. He turned to Winston. “You boys are looking to shoot up. Let me inoculate you against your pain.”

  “Get the hell out of here before I put a real hatchet in your head,” Winston said.

  The dealer put up a pair of dirty hands, and backed off. “Suit yourself. If you change your mind, I’ll be around.” Then he strolled off looking for fresh customers.

  Sign of the times, thought Winston. When the dust finally settled, the only ones left would be the cockroaches and the drug dealers. Winston looked out over Dallas. There were more fires on the horizon now. The distant echo of fire engines blended with the sounds of the stadium behind them. A handful of firefighters, battling to break a fever raging out of control.

  “Do you know how an immune system works, Drew?”

  Drew shrugged. “The marrow and spleen kick out white blood cells. The white cells surround the foreign body, and kill it. Hey, man, didn’t you ever see Fantastic Voyage?”

  “There are also antibodies,” Winston reminded him. “Different kinds, each with their own specific properties. Their own special charm. They lie dormant until triggered by either a disease, or a vaccination.”

  Let me inoculate you against your pain.

  Winston glanced around for the split-faced drug dealer, but he was nowhere. He shivered, holding the thought in abeyance. “The thing is, it takes more than one antibody to do the job. To fight the most dangerous threats to the body, it takes specific types, in specific quantities working together.”

  Drew considered it, and nodded a deeper understanding. “A quantity of six, maybe?”

  “Maybe.” A roar from the crowd signaled that one of the two teams had scored, but neither Winston nor Drew ventured onto the field to find out which one. Winston scanned the deserted space around them, until spotting the nearest ramp leading down. “I do believe we have to find ourselves a drug dealer.”

  THE HATCHET-FACED DEALER HAD left the upper concession level, and they did not spot him on the lower levels either. He could have taken off his mask and vanished into the crowd, but somehow Winston doubted that.

  “The guy was dog crap on bad news,” Drew reminded him. “Why are we looking for him?”

  Winston chose not to answer that. Instead he asked, “Are you familiar with fractal theory?”

  “No, but I’m sure you are.”

  “Only what I’ve read.” Of course, they both knew the library locked in Winston’s head had grown rather extensive. “The theory says that the smallest particle of something is just a smaller version of the whole.”

  “You lost me.”

  “A boulder on a mountain will, on some very basic level, contain the pattern of the entire mountain inside it. The way an acorn holds the pattern of the oak. The way every living cell contains the pattern of the whole organism.”

  “DNA.”

  “Right. But what if it doesn’t stop there? What if the organism is the blueprint for the species? And what if the species is the blueprint for the cosmos?”

  Drew laughed the idea away. “Winston, I don’t doubt that you see yourself when you look at the stars.”

  With the fourth quarter winding down, and their masked marauder nowhere in sight, they headed out into the parking lot.

  “All I’m saying,” Winston continued, “is that if a star can be alive, and its death be the birth of six souls here on earth, what else might be alive out there? How much bigger is the picture?”

  “And what does all this have to do with a ballpark pusher?”

  Winston slowed as they neared their car. “I think we’re about to find out.”

  Drew turned and caught sight of it, too. The elusive drug dealer sat on the hood of their car. The parking lot lighting cast a dark shadow of the rubber hatchet across one side of his face. Half in shadows, the mask was even more menacing.

  Drew grabbed Winston’s arm. “I don’t like this. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “He’s on our car,” Winston reminded him. “Where are we going to go?” The hatchet man watched them, his face like a portrait that always held one’s gaze. They stopped a good five yards from the car.

  “Leaving so soon?” the dealer said.

  “Looking for you,” Winston answered, reigning back his own fear. “We were wondering what you had to offer. And what it might cost.”

  “It just so happens I’m running a special today,” the dealer said. “Crystal Nova. Powerful stuff. Just a small piece of it is guaranteed to grow hair on your chest—and just about everywhere else, for that matter.”

  Winston took a step closer to the car. “Take off the mask.”

  The “dealer” slowly reached up, and peeled off the latex mask to reveal the sickly face of a Hualapai Indian nowhere near as beautiful as it had been a year before. The voice had lost its musical timbre, but the face was unmistakable. It was Okoya.

  Winston should have warned Drew, for now Drew’s fear spiked suddenly. “Oh, crap—I thought Dillon took care of that thing.”

  “Dillon did take care of me,” Okoya said. “He took care of me so well that I had no choice but to come back.”

  “You have five seconds to start making sense,” demanded Winston.

  “It will all make sense soon enough. Trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Drew took a step forward, his initial shock transmuting into rage. “You left four hundred people worse than dead, and left Dillon to clean up after you. He might take the blame for what’s going on in the world, but you’re the one who caused it.”

  “Me, responsible for what’s going on in the world?” Okoya mocked. “I’m flattered you think me capable of such large-scale atrocity.”

  Drew lunged at him, but Winston held him back. “Save it,” he told Drew. “Save your anger until we need it.”

  Okoya hopped off the car. Winston could see his body was frail, barely clinging to life.

  “Drew has more reason to hate me than you realize, Winston. You could say Drew and I have an intimate history.”

  “You have a sick definition of ‘intimate,’ ” Drew said.

  “I tore his soul from him during that unpleasantness at Hoover Dam last year,” Okoya explained.

  Winston turned to Drew, shocked by this disclosure, but before he could jump to conclusions, Okoya continued.

  “Oh, he got it back, of course. When I tore his soul from him, I didn’t feed on it myself, I tried to serve it to Michael. But instead of devouring it, Michael gave Drew back his soul.”

  Winston could feel Drew shudder.

  “Rest easy,” Okoya told Drew. “While it was personal for you, it was tactical for me. However, troubling with you now would serve me no purpose.” Then he threw a mischievous gaze in Winston’s direction. “It’s more likely that Winston would chop off your arm, than I would devour your soul.”

 
Winston had to look away, and it made Okoya laugh. How long had Okoya been shadowing them? How close had he been? “No matter what you choose to do, and not do,” Winston said, “we’ll never see you as anything but evil.”

  The smile quickly drained from Okoya’s sallow face. “If so, I am the least of many evils. There are three creatures out there—I’m sure you’ve seen them in your mind’s eye. They prey on souls, but are much more powerful than I ever was. If you send me away, I promise you, this world—this universe—will fall into their hands.”

  “Why would you help us?” Winston asked.

  Okoya held out his hands, palms up. “I’ve made an enemy of them. I have no choice but to side with you.”

  Winston nodded. A matter of necessity. Practicality. For once Okoya’s unfailing self-interest gave them the upper hand, and had turned him into a staunch, if somewhat sinister ally. The question was, did Winston have the stomach to deal with the devil?

  “What would you want in return?” Winston asked.

  “The right to exist. Nothing more.”

  “And devour souls?” asked Drew.

  Okoya sighed. “I’ve found I can get by on other forms of subsistence in this world, if I must. The modest life-force of animals, plants.” And then a broad smile. “Perhaps I’ll become a vegetarian.”

  Drew threw up his hands. “He’s playing us for fools. You know that, don’t you?”

  Winston kept his eyes on Okoya. “All I know is that the immune system is failing. Isn’t that right, Okoya?”

  Okoya raised his eyebrows. “I’m impressed. Figured that out by yourself, did you?”

  “Drew did.”

  Okoya threw Drew a smirk. “An insightful soul. But I already knew that.”

  While Drew didn’t exactly warm to Okoya, he seemed to step down his defenses a bit. “How do we know you won’t start feeding your old hunger?”

  “When I broke through into this world, I had to feed once,” Okoya told them, “just to survive the shock of passage. Since then I’ve abstained. You could say I’ve been testing my newfound virtue.” He grinned, but no matter how mollifying he tried to be, his grins had all the warmth of a crocodile.

  Winston dared to step close to him. He looked Okoya over, Winston’s nose clogging from the stench. Okoya’s muscles had atrophied, leaving swollen joints, and a belly beginning to distend. Apparently without his feasts of souls, he could not sustain his host body. “You’re starving that body,” Winston told him. “You’ll need to feed it to survive. Our kind of food.”

  “I’ve been neglectful in that area,” Okoya admitted.

  “What’s the matter,” taunted Drew, “afraid you’ll enjoy our primitive tastes?”

  “There was no such nourishment where I’ve been. And lately I’ve been too busy tracking Dillon and the two of you to bother serving needs of the flesh.”

  “Dillon?!” It was Winston’s magic word. “You know where Dillon’s at?”

  “That depends,” said Okoya. “Do we have an understanding?”

  Winston looked to Drew for support, but Drew wouldn’t meet his eyes. “We’ll see what your help is worth,” Winston answered.

  Okoya considered it, and accepted. “Yes, I do know where Dillon is,” he said. “We’ll talk about it on the way to California.”

  “He’s in California?”

  “No—but there’s something we’ll need before I lead you to Dillon.”

  We, thought Winston with a wave of discomfort. He talks as if he’s one of us now.

  “You really want to do business with this thing?” Drew asked quietly, but not so quietly that Okoya couldn’t hear.

  “I can’t see as we have any more choice than he does,” Winston answered.

  Okoya took a step closer. “This universe is about to be infected by hundreds of thousands of my kind,” Okoya told them. “But sometimes an ounce of the disease can be the cure.”

  23. GRAVITY

  * * *

  CAYMANAS PARK WAS HERALDED AS THE PREMIER HORSE racing track in the Carribean. Nowhere near as exotic as the flamingo-laden turfs of Florida’s Hialeah, Caymanas was like most everything else in Jamaica: functional, but badly weathered by tropical storms that came one after another.

  The track was frequented by locals, made up of native Jamaicans and America retirees, as well as tourists who had had their fill of palm trees and tropical beaches. They would all come to wager on thoroughbreds whose bodies frothed in the oppressive Jamaican humidity. The racing season at Caymanas never ended—there were races every Wednesday and Saturday, as well as holidays, but without the luxury of night lighting, races always ended at dusk.

  By Saturday’s ninth race, the last of the day, the sky was already bruising the colors of sunset. The horses paraded a loop on the homestretch, studied by a crowd that had gathered on the asphalt apron between the track and the grandstand. The apron filled up as post time closed in, and the horses were led to the gate. For many, part of the thrill of the race was pressing up against the homestretch railing and feeling the thunder of hooves in their own bodies as the horses powered toward the finish line.

  Within that crowd was one American girl of Hispanic heritage, whose interest was not in the horses at all. Her interest was in the crowd.

  Although no one noticed, by the time the gate crashed open and the race began, everyone standing up in the homestretch was breathing in unison, and their hearts followed the same adrenaline-pumped beat. Although everyone shouted different things, exhaling various words of encouragement and dismay at their respective horses, there was a silence on the inhale, leaving the shouts to come in a strange wave pattern.

  The horses came out of the clubhouse turn, and flew down the backstretch. A bay horse named Eagles Dare had the lead by a length. With tight attention on the distant pack of horses, no one noticed as the American girl closed her eyes, finding her center in the midst of turmoil. The horses went into the far turn, the lead horse falling back, surpassed on the outside by a spotted stallion with an aggressive jockey, whipping his horse into the lead.

  That’s when Lourdes Hidalgo lashed out, imposing herself on the crowd.

  It began with the people immediately around her; a man waving his racing form in the air suddenly found his arm heavy by his side; a woman screaming for Calliope to move up from last place suddenly found her mouth no longer forming the words; a man with a cigar stub in his hand found he couldn’t discard it even as it began to sear his index finger.

  The horses came out of the turn, hoofs pounding, dirt flying. By now the crowd at the rail had fallen eerily silent, and the grandstand quickly followed suit. Even the announcer, who barked the race like an auctioneer, found himself, for the first time in his career, speechless as the horses came into the homestretch.

  A powerful impulse swept through the crowd, latching onto each nervous system, usurping control. It was an impulse to move. To gather. The spectators found themselves turning from the race, becoming a circle pushing inward toward the girl who had suddenly become their center of gravity.

  For Lourdes, it was like screaming into darkness, for the place was so dense with bodies, she had no clue what the response would be. She feared her bid for control would be so diluted, it wouldn’t take hold. But as more and more faces turned to her, she realized she had succeeded in seizing them, just as her three “angels” had instructed her to do. She thought it a victory, until she realized that the crowd wasn’t just focused on her. They were pressing toward her, tighter and tighter—and it wasn’t just the crowd standing by the rail.

  On the track, as the horses tore past the tote board, they veered from the finish line, bearing right, following a new command. Lourdes could see the wild eyes of the animals; neither the horses nor their jockeys able to control their tons of flesh. Like the curl of a breaking wave, the horses hurdled the rail and came down on the crowd. Spectators were trampled beneath their hooves, and crushed beneath the weight of their falling bodies.

  Lourdes panicke
d, struggling to release the crowd from her grasp, but she had gripped them so tightly, she could not release them. A woman in front of her pressed up against her. Squeezed by the crowd behind her, the woman began working her mouth, trying to draw a breath of air, but her chest had collapsed under the pressure of the crowd. Lourdes, constricted and unable to move, craned her neck toward the grandstand, where people found themselves climbing down over rows of seats against their own will until reaching the front. Dozens upon dozens of people hurled themselves from the upper level like lemmings, their bodies obeying the command to draw close to Lourdes, even if that command resulted in death.

  This was not what she wanted. She had meant to call the mob to crisp attention, but instead they were moths drawn to her flame.

  “Stop!” screamed Lourdes, her voice a faint warble. She could barely breathe now within the growing pressure of the crowd. “Help me!” She knew the angels were somewhere watching, but if they heard, they did not lift so much as a finger to help her.

  The woman who pressed painfully against Lourdes’s breast now showed no signs of struggle, although her eyes were open, there was nothing there. She was dead. The men to her left and right were dead. She was surrounded by a minion of corpses crushed by the press of the crowd, unable to fall. In less than five minutes a simple day at the races had become an ordeal surpassing her worst nightmare, and although she tried to scream her terror, she found her own breath squeezed out of her.

  Then she realized there was a way to stop this. She had pulled the crowd to her, and she couldn’t simply turn off that physical impulse: it had to be replaced by another impulse equally persuasive. So she closed her eyes and pushed forth to everyone under her control a simple physiological imperative: the irresistible urge to sleep.

  It took hold immediately, and bodies began to drop. Soon the pressure around her eased, and the dead pressed so tightly against her slid to the ground, like petals falling from a flower. She gasped a deep breath, filling her lungs over and over again until she was dizzy from hyperventilation.