Scorpion Shards

you’d never tell a living soul. It’s only fair.”

Lourdes shifted and the seat creaked, threatening to give way. Michael waited.

“I don’t have secrets,” she said in her deepest, most thickly padded voice.

Michael waited.

Lourdes sighed, and Michael leaned closer to listen.

“My parents . . . they love me very much,” said Lourdes. “I know this because I heard them talking one night. They said that they loved me so much, they wished that I would die, so I would be put out of my misery.” Lourdes spoke matter-of-factly, refusing to shed a single tear. “The truth is, I never felt misery until I heard them say that.”

Outside the air began to take on a new flavor—a rich, earthy smell that Michael recognized as fog rolling in, matching the cloudy, numb feeling in his brain.

“Lourdes,” said Michael, “I don’t care what anyone says. I think you’re beautiful.”

***

Michael and Lourdes arrived in St. Louis the next morning, their van riding the crest of the storm. The black rain clouds followed behind them like a wave rolling in from the distant Atlantic Ocean, baffling the weathermen who always looked west for weather.

Michael, starved, stopped at the first cheap-looking fast-food place he found, but all they sold were fried brain sandwiches. When Michael returned to the car, with his questionable sandwich, and a drink for Lourdes, he looked behind him to see a sheet of rain moving across the surface of the Mississippi River, until it finally reached them, letting loose over St. Louis. Michael hopped into the van and managed not to get drenched.

He handed Lourdes her diet Coke. “What do you know about St. Louis?” she asked.

“I know I’d rather be just about anywhere else in the world,” he said, looking miserably down at the brain- burger in his hand.

“Besides that, what do you know?”

Michael shrugged. “The Cardinals,” he said. “That’s about it . . .” And then he stopped dead—and started to breathe rapidly. Michael turned to Lourdes and grabbed her heavy arm, trying to speak but unable to catch his breath.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Lourdes . . . there’s one more thing I know about St. Louis . . . something that never occurred to me until now!”

“So, tell me.”

“I think maybe you should look for yourself.”

Lourdes followed Michael’s gaze to the south. Lourdes wiped the fog from the windshield, and her eyes traced the path of the riverbank, until she saw it, too. It was about a mile away, curving hundreds of feet into the sky—thousands of tons of gray steel, shaped and curved into the magnificent arch that graced the city of St. Louis. The sleek steel wonder stretched deep into the clouds, and back down to earth again, and the very sight of it gave Michael and Lourdes the eerie shivers—because more than anything else, the arch looked like a ghostly gray rainbow.

***

Tory and Winston had already been at the arch for twenty minutes. They had stood with die-hard tourists in a line that wound through the underground museum, waiting to board the tiny car that would take them to the peak of the arch.

The logic made perfect sense. If you were supposed to meet someone in St. Louis, but didn’t know where, there were certain places one ought to try: airports, bus stations, train stations, landmarks—and they knew St. Louis had to be the place. They could sense something here that they felt nowhere else they had been—the westward cur­rent suddenly seemed caught in a swirling eddy.

They had been to all the other places, and now they searched the city’s best-known landmark—their last hope—before continuing west. To Omaha, if Tory got her way.

Once at the top of the arch, the view was spectacular, for the very tip of the arch pierced the dense, low- hanging storm clouds. It was like a view from heaven.

Tory wore her scarf over most of her face like an Ara­bian veil. “I’ve never been this high,” she said. “I guess this is what it must look like from a plane.” The clouds beneath the observation window were slow-moving bil­lows; huge cotton snails sliding over one another.

The car brought them back down to the underground museum, and still there was no sign of anyone on the look­out for them. It was worse than the old needle in a hay­stack. At least then you knew it was a needle you were looking for.

“There’s nothing here,” Tory finally had to admit. Then Tory and Winston heard a voice deep in the crowd.

“This is a waste of time,” the voice said. Tory and Win­ston quickly turned and saw a boy through the crowds. He had a thin, scraggly body and thin straggly hair. He seemed flushed and sweaty. Next to him stood a girl so immense there was no way she’d fit in the tiny car that rode to the top of the arch.

But it was the scraggly boy that caught Winston’s atten­tion—not his face, but his eyes. Even from a distance, Winston could see the color of his eyes.

“I know him!” said Winston. “Don’t I know him?”

Winston and Tory pushed through the crowd, and as they did, the sounds around them seemed to become dis­tant. The people milling about and waiting in line seemed like mere shadows of people. The guard mouthed the words “Move along,” but his voice sounded as if it were coming from miles away. The only sights clear and in focus were the fat girl and scraggly boy, who were now staring at them with the same troubled wonder.

Winston approached the scraggly boy, pulling his torn satin cloth out of his pocket. One glance at the cloth, and then at the boy’s eyes proved to Winston what he already knew. The cloth was the exact same color as the scraggly boy’s eyes. Impossibly deep—impossibly blue! This was the connection!

Michael grabbed the cloth and looked at Winston, sud­denly overwhelmed with emotion. Michael felt the urge to say It’s good to see you again, even though he knew he had never met this small black kid before.

Tory approached, staring at Lourdes, and rather than being repulsed, she felt somehow comforted by her large presence. It made Tory want to peel back her scarf, to re­veal her own awful face, suddenly not ashamed of it in front of the present company.

“My God!” said Lourdes, as Tory revealed her face, and Lourdes smiled with a look of wonder instead of dis­ gust. Still holding onto Michael, Lourdes reached out to touch Tory, who still had a hand on Winston’s shoulder; Winston had put his small palm up against Michael’s large one, closing a circuit of the four of them . . . and the instant the circuit was closed, something happened.

Their skin felt on fire, their bones felt like ice. They could not move.

Then an image exploded through their minds with such power and intensity, it seemed to burn the world around them away. It was a vision before sight, a tale before words. It was a memory—for it was so terrifyingly familiar to all of them it could only be a memory—not of something seen or heard but of something felt:

Bright Light! Sharp Pain! One screaming voice becoming six screaming voices. Six! There are six of us!

As the vision filled them, the clouds above began to boil and separate, as a powerful wind blew through the ghostly steel rainbow and the wet earth was finally drenched by blinding rays of sun.

6. The Unraveling

At that same moment, about four hundred miles away, Dillon Cole doubled over in a pain even more intense than the wrecking-hunger. He burst into a men’s room in the small bus depot in Big Springs, Nebraska, stumbled into a stall, and collapsed to the tile floor. At first he thought this must have been God striking him down for the sheer magnitude of his sins—but then as the world around him seemed to burn away, he knew it was some­thing