Scorpion Shards

only stare in growing dread as Winston Pell, the incredible shrinking boy, brought up his hand, slipped his thumb into his mouth, and kept it there for a long, long time.

***

That afternoon, at another farm hundreds of miles away in Torrington, Wyoming, Dillon Cole tore through a wheat field putting distance between himself and the farmhouse behind him. He would not look back; he would not think back, and what he left behind in that house would be put completely out of his mind.

He felt the wrecking-hunger curl up and go to sleep well fed, and when the hunger was fed, Dillon felt strong—stronger than anyone alive. What would I be with­out the wrecking-hunger? he thought. The hunger answered like a rumbling from his stomach: he would be nothing. Sometimes he felt as if the hunger were a living thing; a weed that had coiled around his soul and he couldn’t tell where it ended and where he began. He didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

But whatever it was, those four Others wanted to take it away, didn’t they? Even now they were drawn toward him, across the miles, and if they found him, they would weaken him; maybe even destroy him. They would drive a wedge between him and Deanna, and Dillon could not allow that. So they had to keep moving until . . .

Until what?

Until the hunger no longer needed to be fed.

He raced across the wheat field to the place where he had left Deanna, but when he got there, she was gone.

Dillon had left Deanna in the wheat field with little warning. They had just left a farmhouse where a family had been kind enough to give them lunch—they were crossing a field, when suddenly Dillon had told her to wait, and then doubled back over the hill toward the house again.

He had gone to feed the hunger—Deanna knew that—she could see in his face how he had been suffer­ing —strangling—but why did he have to leave her alone? He knew what happened to her when she was alone.

A wind swept across the rolling hills of wheat. The ground beneath her seemed to move, and fear gripped her. She felt one of her waking nightmares coming on again, and although she knew it could not be real, it terri­fied her all the same. Was there something there under the ground? Something coming for her? Yes! She could see it burrowing beneath the wheat. Why had Dillon left her here?

She began to run, but the fear ran with her. Finally she stumbled into a field that had already been harvested, where thick black mud swallowed her to her ankles. Something was reaching for her. She could feel it. She screamed in terror.

She fell to the mud, and the ground seemed to swallow her. Was the ground alive? Was it climbing up around her, dragging her down into darkness? She couldn’t see now—the mud was in her eyes, in her mouth. She swore she could feel a beast coming out of the mud wrapping around her like a snake, and she screamed again to chase the terror-mare away, but her screaming didn’t help.

Then something grabbed her by the wrists. At first she thought it was the ground itself reaching up to pull her even deeper, but then there was a voice. A familiar voice.

“Deanna, it’s all right!” She could barely hear Dillon through her own screams. “Look at me,” he said. “See me. Make it go away.”

Deanna, her sight still blurry, fixed on his dark eyes, pushing the foul vision of fear away.

When the terror-mare had ended, it was like coming out of a seizure, which is exactly how Dillon held her— tightly, as if she had been in the throes of convulsions. Deanna was exhausted and let all her muscles go slack, feeling the steady pressure of Dillon as he held her.

“You left me,” she said weakly.

“I’m sorry. I was wrong to—I won’t do it again.” Dil­lon picked her up and carried her to a place where the wheat was tall, and the ground was dry, then he lay her down, and tenderly wiped away the mud that had caked on her arms. Dillon was calm and relaxed. Deanna knew what that meant.

“What happened at the farmhouse?” she asked. “How bad was it?”

“I didn’t touch a thing,” said Dillon. “I just sort of planted a seed. That’s all.”

“What did you do?”

Dillon stared at her, considering the question. “I’ll tell you, if you want to know.”

But the truth was, she didn’t want to know, so she didn’t press the issue. Instead she just lay there staring up at the sky, feeling her fear curl up inside her and go to sleep as she listened to far off birds crying somewhere over the hill. Their voices sounded like screams in the distance.

“We need to keep moving,” said Dillon, helping Deanna up.

“Do we know where we’re going yet?” she asked.

“We’re not‘going’ anywhere,” Dillon answered. “We’re getting away from The Others.”

Dillon had been saying that since they left Nebraska—but it wasn’t entirely true, was it? Dillon knows where he’s going, thought Deanna, he just doesn’t know he knows. It was clear to Deanna that he was doing what he did best— tracing a pattern—but this pattern was so complex and intricate not even he could see its end.

Deanna kept her faith in Dillon, knowing that wher­ever this journey was leading, she and Dillon would be together. She held onto that thought as they headed west out of Torrington, leaving behind the farmhouse and the screaming birds.

8. Dr. Brainless And The Six Of Swords

It was a small observatory in a small university, where a man of small recognition worked feverishly to get his telescope up and running.

Winston was doubtful about the entire thing—but then he was doubtful of everything since Tory came up with that crazy stuff about the Scorpion Star. Winston feared he’d never be able to stretch himself around that one—but the others had, and now Tory was in the lead wher­ever they went.

In the two days the quartet had been together, Winston had felt his disease, or whatever it was, start to accelerate. A day ago he had chewed a sandwich on his seven-year molars. But when he ran his tongue through his mouth today, those molars were gone, receding back into his head. His front teeth were starting to get smaller and smaller. Soon all his adult teeth would be gone, and he would have no teeth at all, because his baby teeth had long since been exchanged for quarters beneath his pil­low.

The others were no better off: Lourdes’s blouse looked like a patch quilt because they kept having to sew scraps of material into it to make it larger. Tory had begun com­plaining that her joints ached something fierce, which meant that whatever was devouring her skin was begin­ning to move deeper into her body, and Michael. . . well, sometimes he looked like a madman on the verge of turn­ing into a werewolf. He complained his girl-crazies were getting worse and that his heart beat so fast, he was afraid it might blow up in his chest.

They had all hoped that coming together would slow down their deterioration, but it hadn’t—in fact, things were progressing faster, and they could all be dead in a matter of days. Winston didn’t know how an astronomer could help, but he was desperate enough to try anything now.

Finding the man was not very difficult. A simple visit to an Omaha library uncovered several articles on the ec­centric astronomer. Dr. Bayless was his name, but his cru­eler colleagues were more fond of calling him Dr. Brain­less.

Winston fought to stay ahead of Michael and Lourdes and right behind Tory as they crossed the small college campus toward the physics building. Tory still shuffled through the copies of the articles they had found, trying to read in the late twilight.

“Listen to this—it says here that Bayless’s mother was a carnival psychic, and she gypped rich people out of thousands of dollars!”

“So?” scoffed Winston.

“So, the scientific community thinks Bayless is a quack as well and gives him the cold shoulder.”

“But he predicted the explosion of Mentarsus-H,” chimed in Lourdes, in her deep, whale-belly voice. “So