Scorpion Shards

11. Ground Zero

At 4:30 a.m., Mountain time, Lourdes Hidalgo decided it was time to die.

It had been two days since that night in the ice storm. With little money, and even less time to spare, they had searched for a trail—any sign of the missing two. Nothing turned up along I-80, and nothing in Big Springs, but in Torrington, Wyoming, they found a newspaper article that led them to a devastated farm. It reeked of something unnatural.

Once they found the farm, they knew they were on the right track, because the presence of the fifth and sixth shard was as strong as a scent on the wind. What they had feared was now confirmed; those other two had lost con­trol and had set off on a mad rampage to feed the para­sites that were strangling their souls. Intuition told them that number five was the dangerous one and that number six probably fed on the aftermath of destruction like a vulture fed on a lion’s kill.

After that, following their trail was like following the ashen trail of a burning fuse. News reports had led them in the ruined neighborhood in Idaho Falls, which seemed ten times worse than what they found at the farm. They were only a day behind as they headed deeper into Idaho, terrified of what they would find next.

They rested in Boise, finding a cheap hotel for the night. It had been a major effort for Lourdes to haul herself out of the van this time, and each footstep felt like it would be her last.

Like everywhere else their journey took them, this hotel was right in the armpit of town, where old decrepit build­ings loomed ripe for the wrecking ball.

Lourdes could see one such building from the hotel window, across the expanse of a vacant lot: a concrete warehouse seven stories tall, with slits for windows and a big faded sign painted on the side that said “Dakins Worldwide Storage.” The building’s few entrances were boarded over, and the abandoned property was fenced in. Apparendy Dakins had found better worldwide storage elsewhere.

While the others slept, Lourdes kept vigil and watched that solitary, lonely building, feeling a strange affinity for it as she pondered the short time remaining to her own life. Few buildings on earth could be as unloved as this one.

In the five days since they had banded together, they had witnessed wonders and had watched each other dete­riorate. Winston’s dignity was the first casualty, for his body had grown so small he couldn’t see out of the van’s windows when he sat, and he had to eat soft food because all his teeth were receding. Tory, who had been a driving force all along, was slowing down, as her disease turned inward, swelling her joints with painful arthritis . . . and Michael . . . well, rather than allowing his passion to wreak havoc on the soul of every girl he encountered, Mi­chael had turned his mind to a dark lonely place within himself and seldom came out. Brooding and silent, with dark, wan eyes, he looked like he was dying of cancer.

As for Lourdes, there were no mirrors large enough to present her full image. She could feel the weight on her bones growing, building density, like ice on the branches of a tree. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, fighting to force blood through clogged arteries. She could feel her bloated self, ready to burst through the shell that contained her, and knew that it could happen at any moment.

So she stayed awake . . . and at 4:30 a.m. one of the many seams on her blouse tore so violently that the blouse itself literally burst in two.

That’s when Lourdes decided that it was time to call it quits.

Outside, the rain had let up a bit, and Lourdes could see the warehouse more clearly. There were people mill­ing about the building, and it seemed odd to Lourdes that such a lonely place would be the center of anyone else’s attention but hers, so she watched and wondered. In a few moments, things became very clear to her, and she knew exactly what she was going to do.

“Michael, Winston, wake up!” Tory shook them both, dragging them out of a deep sleep. “It’s Lourdes! She’s gone!”

Wearily, the three searched the room and the hallway.

Tory looked in the closet. The others looked under the beds—as if Lourdes could possibly fit in any of those places.

That’s when Michael happened to glance out the win­dow. Dawn was beginning to break on the distant hori­zon, and in the faint half-light he could see a huge shape lumbering through a vacant lot toward an old Dakins warehouse a block away.

“Look,” he said. “There she is!”

The front of the old warehouse was teeming with ac­tivity, but Lourdes approached from the rear and no one saw her. She smiled as she approached. All this time the four of them had been running, unsure of their destina­tion. It was nice, for once, to have a destination.

Her momentum took her through the chicken wire fence that surrounded the property as if it were paper, and she pushed on through the police line, tearing the ribbon as if it were a finish line. She leaned against the boarded-over door, and her sheer weight forced the door inward, leading her into a dark cavernous space where her la­bored breathing echoed from distant concrete walls. To the right was a flight of stairs and, without pausing for fur­ther thought, she began to heave herself step by step to­ward the upper floors of the desolate building.

Activity was growing at the front of the warehouse as the three kids followed Lourdes in through the back door.

Once inside they paused to listen and heard the heavy footsteps of Lourdes straining on stairs high above.

“What she gonna do? Climb out on the roof and jump?” said Winston, trying to catch his breath.

The very thought made Michael turn and bound up the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him.

Tory took a moment to look down at her hands. Her knuckles were swollen and they cracked when she bent them. It made her so angry that she squeezed them into a fist, but that only hurt more. She turned to Winston, who was still catching his breath. “Did you ever think you’d be chasing someone through a warehouse at the crack of dawn?” she asked.

“No,” said Winston, in a voice that was higher pitched than the day before. “But then I never thought I’d be five years old again either.”

It was as they turned to go upstairs that Tory glanced at the great cavern around her. The tiny slits of windows were mostly boarded over, and in the dim half-light, she could see a series of pillars stretching down the empty warehouse, holding up the floors above. There were bulges near the top of a good dozen of those pillars; bulges like tumors growing out of the concrete. And each of those bulges had a tiny, blinking red light.

Tory grabbed Winston’s arm, and yanked him around. “Winston, tell me you don’t see what I see. ...” This time when they looked, not only were the tumors visible on the concrete, but so were the wires. They draped from the dark tumors, snaked across the floor, and all came to­gether in a bundle that made a determined path out the front door.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the tumors were explosives.

Michael reached the seventh and final floor of the warehouse, before the others had even begun to climb.

“Lourdes?”

She stood at the far end of the vast empty loft. She wobbled a bit and finally collapsed under her own enor­mous weight. As she hit the ground, the concrete echoed with a boom like the slamming of a heavy vault door, and the dust burst out from beneath her like her very soul dis­persing. She didn’t move.

Michael, afraid to say anything, for fear that she wouldn’t answer, approached with caution, and to his great relief saw that she was still alive.

“You okay?” asked Michael.

“Go away.” Lourdes made a mighty effort to turn her head, so Michael could not see her tears. In all the time he had known her, Michael had never seen Lourdes cry like this. She had stoically borne all her hardship with a stiff— if somewhat fat—upper lip, but not now.

Michael sat beside her and wiped the tears away.

“I feel like a beached whale,” she said.

“Well,” said Michael, “the Pacific Ocean’s only three hundred miles away. . . .”

Lourdes laughed in spite of herself.

“When I die,” she said, “I’m gonna sit on God until he yells uncle.” They both laughed again, then a silence fell between them.

“Why did he do this to us, Michael?”

Michael shrugged and thought for a moment. “He didn’t do it to us, he just didn’t stop it.”

“That’s just as bad,” said Lourdes.

Michael lifted her heavy head and began to gently stroke her hair. “Maybe he’s a clutch player,” said Mi­chael. “And he’s just waiting for the right time to make a move.”

Winston and Tory finally made it to the top floor.

“We gotta get outta here now!” shouted Winston as he ran with Tory from the stairs. “This building’s con­demned and it’s coming down today. They’ve already rigged the explosives.”

“I know,” said Lourdes.

That caught everyone off guard.

Lourdes gritted her teeth and closed her eyes to keep herself from crying. “Maybe the three of you have some time left, but not me. If I have to die today, then I want to go out with a bang, not a whimper.”

“We won’t let you do this,” said Tory. “Can’t you feel how close The Others are . . . If we just hold on a little longer ...”

“I don’t feel anything anymore,” said Lourdes. “All I feel is fat, and I’m tired of feeling it.”

Outside there were shouts from the demolition crew.

“That’s it!” shouted Winston, the preschooler on the verge of a tantrum. “I don’t care how lousy you feel! Get yo’ butt down those stairs!” His voice slipped deeper into his Alabama drawl, which always grew stronger when he got angry.

“I can’t,” said Lourdes. “I can’t move anymore. At all.”

They all looked at her there, straining to breathe as she lay on the ground. Winston panicked and rammed into her with what little weight he had. “C’mon, help me!” They all took to pushing against Lourdes, but she wouldn’t budge.

“Grab her arms,” suggested Tory. They grabbed her arms and legs to pull her, but nothing helped.

“Just go!” shouted Lourdes, through her thick throat. “It’s better if you just go!”

They let go of her arms and legs, and just stood there, unable to help her . . . and in that moment of silence Mi­chael made a decision.

“I’m not leaving you,” he said, and he sat down next to her.

Winston stared at him incredulously. “You’re just gonna sit here and let yourself get blown to smithereens?”

“Face it,” said Michael. “None of us has much time left. A day or two at the most...”

Tory, grimacing in pain, looked at her swollen knuck­les, then at her swollen knees. “Michael’s right. We haven’t had control over anything for the longest time . . . maybe here’s something we can control. . .”

Winston turned to her, his eyes filled with terror “No!”

“If I gotta die,” said Tory, “then I want to die with dig­nity.”

Winston threw up his hands. “I can’t believe this! You said yourself, Tory, The Others are close now—we can find them—we can stop them. . . .”

“We lost, Winston,” said Michael. “We fought hard, but we lost.”

“No!” shouted Winston defiantly. “With our luck, instead of dying proper, our souls’ll get blown up again into a thousand cockroaches or something. No! If I gotta die, I ain’t going out in flaming glory—I’m going the way I was meant to go!”

Winston grew red in the face as he looked at them. He threw himself on the ground kicking and screaming in a full-fledged tantrum, then finally gave up on his compan­ions. “Fine,” he said, tears swelling in his eyes. “We started this together, but if I have to finish it alone, then I will.” Then Winston, all three feet of him, stormed across the dusty floor and disappeared down the stairwell.

When he was gone, Michael turned to Tory. “When we die,” said Michael, “you think those . . . those awful things will die with us?”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” said Tory.

Lourdes, without the strength to move her lips any­more, could only rasp her breath in and out.

They held hands, now just a circle of three. “I’m glad,” whispered Tory. “I’m glad we all came together. No mat­ter what, I’ll never regret that.”

Outside the rain had stopped, the wind had stopped and the black clouds above waited with guarded anticipa­tion. Far away lightning struck, and every distant rumble echoed within the warehouse, shaking the walls and re­minding them of the great thunder that would soon tear out the foundation of their lives. With every rumble, con­crete flakes skittered to the ground, like the footfalls of a thousand cockroaches.

Winston, with the physiology of a five-year-old, found his days swinging back and forth between complete ex­haustion and uncontrollable energy. Had he been ex­hausted when they asked him to stay, he might have just curled up, thumb in mouth, and fallen asleep before the big blast came—but Winston was feeling very much alive and did not intend to go quietly. Today was a day to live.

As he leapt down the stairs two at a time, he had to keep reminding himself that he hadn’t abandoned the other three. They, in fact, had abandoned him. They had given up. Now he would be alone. He would chase the tail of the other two shards until he could no longer walk, until he could no longer crawl. When his body had withered itself out of existence, he would die knowing he fought to the end. That was dying with dignity, not being buried be­neath ten tons of shattered concrete.

Winston bounded down the stairs to the first level and was surprised to see, just twenty yards away, a worker in a hard-hat, facing away from him. Winston could see he was double-checking the wires, and the realization that there were still a few minutes till the building blew made him reconsider his options.

There was time to save the others! Even if they didn’t want to be saved, he could save them. He would run up to the man in the hard-hat, he would tell him of the others still upstairs, he would ruin their awful plan.

Winston took a few steps closer, about to shout out, when suddenly a second figure that had been eclipsed from Winston’s sight came into view. It was a boy—no older than fifteen, and he was staring straight at the worker. The boy had red hair.

Immediately Winston felt a rush of dizziness that took the wind right out of his lungs. This was wrong. This was very wrong. He ducked behind a pillar and watched.

The worker was frozen, his flashlight at his side, casting a light on the dusty floor. The boy with red hair seemed anxious and sweaty, and very, very intense.

“You’ve be placed the explosives wrong,” suggested the boy to the man in the hard-hat. “You should do something about it.”

The worker just stared at him.. “Okay,” he said dream­ily and strolled off into the shadows.

Winston gasped, and the red-haired boy snapped his eyes to Winston.

The second their eyes met, Winston knew exactly who this was.

He was the fifth shard.

Winston couldn’t break eye contact with the red­headed boy. His gaze riveted Winston to the ground. If there were indeed six shards, then this boy had inherited the largest, most powerful one, and in its shadow had grown the worst parasite. Winston knew he was no match for the force behind those eyes.

The redheaded boy stood stunned by the sight of Win­ston—but only for a moment. Then he turned and disap­peared down a hole in the concrete floor.

Once he was gone, a hundred thoughts flew through Winston’s mind fighting for purchase. Run for your life! No—follow him! No—break the worker out of his trance! But the one thought that overrode them all was the urge to race back upstairs and tell the others!

He bounded up the stairs, racing past the demolition man, who mindlessly whistled a Beatles tune as he moved a pack of explosives from one end of the building to the other.

On the seventh floor, Lourdes, Michael and Tory waited in silence. They could hear the sounds of morning in full swing. Car horns, diesel engines. The occasional shouts of the demolition workers as they diligently pre­pared for the morning’s spectacle.

Then they heard footsteps racing up the stairs and knew by their lightness that it had to be Winston. He had changed his mind. In the end they would be together. As it was meant to be.

Winston burst through the stairwell.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” he shouted.

“Winston . . .” said Michael. “We’ve made up our minds. . . .”

“We’re not leaving Lourdes. . . .” said Tory.

“No! You don’t understand!” he grabbed Tory by her plagued arms and looked into her eyes, “Tory, you were right! You’ve been right all along—The Others are here!”

Realization slowly dawned in Tory’s eyes.

“What?”

But the only answer was a blast louder than thunder that shook the world and sent pulverized concrete dust flying into their faces.

Seven floors below, the foundations of the old Dakins warehouse blew apart, and the building began its freefall journey to the earth.

The Chinese Tongs that had built the impossible maze of tunnels beneath Boise were long dead, and the opium dens those tunnels once connected were gone and forgot­ten. Now, more than a hundred years later, Dillon and Deanna traveled those lost passages. Dillon should have found the pattern of the twisting, intersecting tunnels easy to figure out, but as he raced wildly to reach Deanna, he found himself lost. He had never been lost before, but what had happened in that old warehouse had thrown him for such a loop, he wasn’t thinking straight.

They were here.

The Others.

Somehow they had found him, and he was convinced that they were here to kill him.

At last, down the long dim underground corridor, Dil­lon saw Deanna, just as the blast went off somewhere above their heads. The explosion was so loud, it sent pain shooting through his ears, and the rumble that followed rattled his teeth. He fell into a puddle of stagnant muck, while behind him concrete dust shot through the tunnel like steam through a pipe.

Then, through the dust blasting into his face, Dillon saw and heard hideous things. Sinewy gray tentacles reaching for him through the dust cloud—blue flaming hands around his neck, sharp claws digging into his chest, fangs, and eyes—so many angry eyes!

It must be my imagination, he thought in a panic. It can’t be real, yet even so, he felt a tentacle wrap itself around his ankle and dig in. Dillon clawed at the ground to get away, he gripped a stone in the wall, but something stung his hand.

Choking from the concrete dust filling his lungs, Dillon could swear he felt hot breath on his face and heard a sound in his mind louder than the collapsing building.

Knocking.

Many hands knocking on a door—a furious horde de­manding to be let in. Anything! thought Dillon. Anything to stop that horrible knocking in his brain. He opened his mind as easily as opening a door, and the creatures were gone, leaving only the blinding dust in his eyes.

As the dust around him began to settle, Deanna ap­peared in front of him.

“Dillon! What’s happening?” she asked desperately.

Dillon coughed out another lungful of dust. And forced himself not to think about the monster-hallucination. In­stead he let himself feel the wrecking-hunger feed on the collapse of the Dakins building. But that was only a first course.

“Listen,” said Dillon. “Listen, it’s wonderful!” The re­lief filling him soon grew into joy, and then ecstacy.

The first building had come down far above them, but the roaring had not stopped. From the right came another rumble, just as loud as the first, and then another, further away, and then another until they couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.

Deanna sank to the ground, shivering as if it were the end of the world. “It’s like a war out there,” said Deanna.

Dillon beamed a smile far too wide. “Oh, it’s much better than that!”

His dim flashlight went out, but that was all right. Dil­lon didn’t want Deanna looking at him right now, be­cause something was beginning to happen to him. He was beginning to change; he could feel it all over.

Dillon closed his eyes, imagining the beast he had learned to ride so well . . . only now when he tried to picture it, he saw a whole team of beasts instead: a wave of dark horses teamed together by a single yoke carrying him along at a breakneck pace.

There in the dark, his flat stomach began to slowly swell, and his many freckles began to bulge into a swarm of angry zits.

In the dim light of this awful morning, the foreman of the demolition crew could do nothing but watch as his well-orchestrated detonation became a nightmare of unparal­leled proportions.

It should not have happened. The way the explosives had been set, the building should have come straight down . . . but it didn’t. Instead, the entire building keeled over backward and landed on Jefferson Place—an office building across the street that had been evacuated as a precaution. The old office building shifted violently on its foundation, and keeled over to the left. . . .

. . . Where stood the Hoff Building—a city landmark.

No one had thought it necessary to evacuate that one.

The Hoff Building took the blow, and for a moment it looked as if it was only going to lose its eastern face. But then it, too, began a slow topple to the left, its domed tower crashing into the Old Boise Post Office.

Dominoes, thought the foreman. They’re going down like dominoes. It was impossible; it would take a pattern of in­credible coincidences for each building to hit the one be­side it with just the right force to bring it down as well . . . but the evidence was here before their eyes.

Debris struck the Capitol building, which seemed to be all right . . . until the pillars holding up its heavy dome buckled and the dome crashed down and disappeared into the building, hitting bottom with such force that all the windows shattered.

And it was over.

Seven buildings had been demolished.

Beside the foreman, his explosives expert just stood there, rocking back and forth, and happily whistling “Twist and Shout.” Another crew member was scream­ing at the top of his lungs.

They’re insane! thought the foreman. They’ve completely lost their minds. And finally, the combination of everything around him was exactly enough to make the foreman snap as well. As he felt his own mind slipping down a well of eternal madness, he realized that the destruction he had just witnessed was somehow not over yet. In fact, it was just beginning. In a moment he started laughing hys­terically. And he never stopped.

Michael Lipranski now understood death. It was blind, cold and dusty. It was filled with a loud ringing in one’s ears that didn’t go away. Death was oppressive and choking.

These were the thoughts Michael was left with after having died. There were, of course, many questions to come, but the one question that was foremost in his mind was this: Why, if he was dead, did he still feel like cough­ing?

Michael let out a roaring hacking cough and cleared concrete dust from his lungs. He opened his eyes. They stung, but he forced them open anyway. Around him were three other ghosts . . . or at least they looked like ghosts. They all began to stir, and as they sat up, a heavy layer of white dust fell from them.

“What happened?” asked Winston.

And as they looked around, the answer became clear. They were still on the seventh floor . . . or at least what was left of it. Just a corner really. The rest of the building was gone. So were quite a few others around it. It looked as if downtown Boise had been hit by a small nuclear bomb.

“He did this,” said Winston.

“He, who?”

“The Other One . . . the fifth one. I told you I saw him!”

“He saved our lives?” asked Tory.

“I don’t think he meant to,” said Winston.

They looked out at the devastation once more. Lourdes, her death-wish forgotten, stood and walked to the jagged edge where the seventh floor gave way to open air. The rest of the building had shorn away and had turned to rubble. If they had been anywhere else on that floor, they would have been part of that rubble . . . but they weren’t anywhere else, they were right here . . . and Lourdes began to wonder idly what sort of intuition had made her collapse in the north corner rather than the south corner, or was luck so incredibly dumb that it didn’t even know an easy target?

Tory looked stunned. “I guess it takes more than a few thousand pounds of explosives to get rid of us.”

“Lourdes, you’re standing!” Michael approached Lourdes at the jagged edge of the concrete floor. Indeed, she had found the strength to lift her weight again . . . or was there less weight to lift? “Is it my imagination . . . or do you have one less chin?”

The others came closer. The change was almost imper­ceptible . . . but the others were able to notice.

Tory looked at her hand and flexed her fingers. Her skin was still as awful as before, but the swelling that had come to her joints was fading. Tears came to her eyes, and the salty tears didn’t even sting, for her sores were slowly beginning to close.

They looked at each other, afraid to say what they now knew, for fear that speaking it would somehow jinx it. Fi­nally Tory dared to utter the words.

“They’re gone. . . .” she whispered. It took a few mo­ments for it to finally hit home. Then, in the midst of the devastation Tory’s voice rang out from the top floor of the ruined Dakins building, a clear note of joy in the midst of sorrow.

“We’re free!”

The jagged broken wall provided them with a treach­erous path down to the rubble below.

There was chaos around the scene, but not the chaos one might expect. People screaming, crying, wandering like zombies—it was as if the shock wave of this event had driven everyone around it completely insane.

Winston looked around him and fumed. The red­headed boy had created this wave of destruction. The physical wasn’t enough for him—he had to destroy the minds of the survivors. It made Winston furious . . . furi­ous at himself for having seen him and not trying to stop him! Not even the knowledge that his own parasite was gone could calm his fury.

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 gingerly pulled the revolver out of his 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 red-headed son of a bitch where he belongs.”

12. Shroud Of Darkness

At 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 through 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 ex­acdy. 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 AAA 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 and 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.”

Burton, Oregon. Population 3,255. In the center of town, a harvest festival sent bluegrass music wafting to­wards 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, 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.

Their 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 rundown 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 odd 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.

It 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 with which 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 into 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, pushed Dillon against a car, 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 from this mon­ster as she possibly could. She instandy 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 a 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 of 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.”

Deanna 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 numbing 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. There are 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 to 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 even know if I like girls.”

“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, if you know what I mean.”

“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 chose 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 reluctandy 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 your head’s screwed on straight.”

Michael stared at his clouds for a good ten minutes, but then they were finally torn apart by powerful cross-winds. 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 had 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.

“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 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—Squirrelgirl?”

“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 seatbelt.

“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 Winston’s hand; he held Tory’s shoulder; she gripped Michael’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 fire- truck 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 brakes 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 a 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 “Squirrelgirl” 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.

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.”

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 to­wards 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 sulfer 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.

The hands that now gripped the steering wheel were not his hands—at least not the hands that he remem­bered. These were bloated and swollen—covered with red boils. This body was not his either. His growing gut had burst out of his pants in the middle of the night. He was forced to find a truck stop and confiscate larger clothes from a trucker whose life had come to a sudden and unexpected end. Now Dillon had to roll up the pant legs as well—he swore that he was an inch shorter than the day before. Inside he could feel many, many hungers now, coiled within him, competing for his will, all scream­ing to be fed.

The wrecking-hunger, however, still screamed the loudest, and its final feeding was all that mattered—a feeding so great that when it was done, there would be nothing left to devour.

Back in the Burton Library, he had studied the maps, the charts, the statistics. He had worked calculations that a supercomputer would have shied away from, and he had pulled out an answer, sifting it through a secret sixth sense. The answer he came up with was this: of all the locations in the world from which to set up the ultimate chain reaction, only one rested in North America. The epicenter of destruction was in Washington state, in the shadow of Mount St. Helens. Here, in this secret fulcrum of human existence, Dillon would have to find a human fuse. It would have to be someone with no ties to the out­side world and filled with a lonely anger. Someone sepa­rate and alone. It would have to be a hermit, whose des­tiny Dillon could aim with the pinpoint accuracy of a sniper.

Although the calculations that brought him there were complex, the actual plan was simple: Dillon would find his hermit, then find the hermit’s weakness and fire him to­ward a nearby city. In the city, there would be a gathering place—a bar, perhaps—where this man would create a chain of events that would drive everyone there beyond the limit of their sanity. Those who survived would carry the insanity home with them.

At least one would board a plane.

At least ten of the people on that plane would board other planes, and in this way, the seed of destruction would be planted within the minds of thousands of travel­ers, moving in hundreds of different directions. In a mat­ter of days, people around the world would suddenly be faced by the exact chain of events that would bring them to their breaking points and drive them mad. Millions of patterns collapsing like a house of cards.

In the end, the destruction of mankind would not come as a great nuclear holocaust. It would not come as a me­teor splitting the earth in half. It would come from a sim­ple thought whispered in one lonely man’s ear. A single thought, which would breed a rage of chaos that would sweep across the globe in a swift chain reaction.

Dillon remembered seeing a film once about a great steel bridge that had violently collapsed, brought down by mere resonance—the simple vibrations of the air around it. Dillon’s thought would surely resonate and bring down something far more mighty than a steel bridge. He was the hammer that would fracture every thought mankind had ever had, making civilization crumble to its very foundations.

Dillon pondered how a single thought—the right thought—had always had such power to create. Simple thoughts pushed in the right direction at the right time.

The idea of the wheel; the thought of the written word—simple ideas that had picked up momentum across the globe, swelled like a tidal wave and created civi­lization. How fitting that a single thought was all it took to bring it crashing down.

The power of such an act could only be surmounted by the power released when everything fell—power that would feed the wrecking-hunger like it had never before been fed. Just imagining it made Dillon drool, and he longed for the great process to begin.

For an instant the image of his dead parents flitted through his mind.

Are you proud of me now, Mom and Dad?

He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he floored the accelerator, and the engine’s powerful roar drowned out the question before it could resonate in his mind.