Scorpion Shards

rush him out of the way of a speeding fire engine.

He knelt there by the curb, heaving and gripping his stomach.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” demanded Win­ston.

Tory and Lourdes knelt beside him and helped him stand up.

His face was wet from tears and pale—almost green.

“What happened?” asked Lourdes.

Michael didn’t answer. Instead he just held his stomach and forced his breathing back under control. Finally he said, “I got lost . . . that’s all.” And no one dared to ques­tion him further.

They turned and headed off in a direction their inter­nal compass told them was west, while behind them, way down the road, the fire truck stopped in front of a physical plant that was billowing black smoke.

9. Light And Shadows

That night the storm returned with a vengeance even before the streets had a chance to dry. The night that had seemed so steamy quickly turned cold, and the sky let loose an unrelenting assault of sleet. It battered the windshield of the van with such fury that they had to pull off to the side of the road and wait.

Tory studied the map; they were somewhere west of Omaha now, in the middle of nowhere, and it occurred to Tory with an awful shiver that they were always in the middle of nowhere. It seemed from the moment her jour­ney had begun, Tory had slipped into the dark festering world that existed between the walls and beneath the floors of the rest of the world. A rat-ridden place filled with the torn, ruined things that nobody wanted. They were all now residents of this waste-world, and the eerie capriciousness of the weather—never deciding on hot or cold, wet or dry—made the rest of humanity seem further and further away. It seemed to Tory that their lives had slipped into a place so dismal that souls perished and only weeds could take their place.

As the sleet pummeled the van, Winston sat in the back with Lourdes, sewing pieces of fabric onto her clothes so that they would still fit.

“Maybe The Others are dead,” Winston dared to whisper at one point. “Maybe they were killed by those monster-things that tried to get us.”

Lourdes shook her head and said, “If they were dead, then why do we still feel pulled to the west?”

And Lourdes was right—the pull was still there and still strong. Tory, who always rode shotgun, was the offi­cial navigator, and when she looked at the map, certain roads and cities seemed to jump off the page at her. Inter­state 80, Big Springs, Nebraska, Torrington, Wyoming. They had to go to these places, in hopes of finding traces of the other two who were still missing from their little band. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had to go on. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, Tory kept telling her­self. When we’re all together, we’ll be stronger—and it will all make sense; she clung to that belief as if it were a lifeline.

Michael had little to say on the matter. Since they had left Omaha, he had become completely withdrawn. He sat silently in the driver’s seat in an icy daze. His de­meanor had become as hard and bitter as the torrents of ice that brutalized the van.

The moment they got to the van, Tory had begun leaf­ing through the things she had scavenged from the ob­servatory. First she puzzled over the cards: the Six of Swords and the Charioteer; The Tower and the Hermit; Death, and the Five of Wands. And the torn world. Then she began to look through the books. Astronomy mostly—textbooks that Bayless had written himself. Page after page yielded noth­ing relevant to Tory, and now as they sat in the ice storm, she seemed no closer to a solution.

“Something that he said keeps going over and over in my mind,” Tory told the others. “He said that his whole life was just preparing him for this. . . for us.”

“Then why don’t you look at his whole life?”

It was Michael who spoke, and everyone was startled to hear him speak after being silent for so long. “He was a biologist before he was an astronomer,” said Michael. “And you’ve been looking at the wrong books.”

Michael then held up the book he had been looking at.

It was a book on parasites.

“Bayless wrote this years before he became an astrono­mer,” said Michael. “It says here in the introduction that when he was a kid his pet dog was just about eaten from the inside out by worms. Since then he was fascinated by parasites—creatures that live off of other creatures.”

Then Michael began to read from Bayless’s book: “There are whole universes of life hiding in the dark places where no one dares to explore. They thrive in the hidden expanses we take for granted . . . between the very cells of our body . . . between the walls we call our world.”

Tory gasped. “He said that?”

Michael nodded, and Tory shivered. It was like hear­ing a man echoing her thoughts from beyond the grave.

Michael passed around the book, and they leafed through it. It was a bizarre collection of diagrams, photos and case studies, and Bayless seemed to have had a mor­bid fascination with it all. There was a picture of a tape­ worm the size of a garden hose found in the gut of an ele­phant. There was a barnacle the size of a trash barrel on the back of a whale. There were leeches from the Amazon the size of running shoes.

“This was his specialty before he took up astronomy,” said Michael. “The study of parasitic organisms.”

A gust of wind rocked the van and a sheet of ice as­saulted the windshield like a cascade of ball bearings. Winston asked the question that no one else dared to voice.

“What’s it got to do with us?”

Michael couldn’t look him in the face. He turned to look out of the window, but all the windows were fogged with the steam of their breath.

Between the walls of the world thought Tory. Right now it seemed no world existed beyond the small capsule of the van.

“Something happened to me while you were all still in the observatory,” said Michael. “I didn’t want to talk about it . . . but I think I’d better. ...”

Everyone leaned closer as Michael began his story.

***

“I did get lost for a while, just like I said,” began Mi­chael. “But then I ended up outside of a lecture hall. There was this girl unchaining her bike. I went up to her, just to talk, you know . . . but before I knew it we were kissing.

“After a while she pulls me into this doorway. The door opens, and we go in—and I know we shouldn’t, but by now I don’t care, cause I’m feeling like nothing else in the world matters.

“But then I think about what happened with that girl, back when I lived in Baltimore—the only time things ever went too far. Thinking about it makes me scared, so I push myself away from this girl. I run clear across the room, and I think it’s over . . . but then I look back at her from across the room . . . and that’s when I see the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s surrounded by fire—an unnatural blue-green fire— and it’s all over her, but she’s not burning . . . and the fire—it has a dozen arms and legs—but worst of all it has eyes. It’s alive! But all I can do is sit there and watch, too horrified to even scream, as this thing wraps itself around her like a cocoon . . . and she doesn’t even know. It’s like she’s hypnotized.

“Finally the girl goes limp, and the monster turns to me. I try to run, but my feet slip and when I look back it’s moving toward me through the air—and then in a second it’s on me and I swear I can feel this monster oozing back inside me, right through the pores of my skin . . . and for the first time I realize that the feeling inside that always drives me crazy . . . isn’t me—it’s this thing that’s been living here inside me, like a leech, stealing away all my strength.

“When I look up, I see the girl walking toward me. It looks like there’s nothing wrong with her—but the room is on fire all around her, real fire, orange and hot, just like what happened with that girl in Baltimore—only that time I never saw the creature, because I didn’t rip myself away from it . . . and that time I didn’t get the girl out of the