Scorpion Shards

simple sug­gestion.

“People are like dominoes,” explained Dillon, in the midst of the cataclysm. His voice was eerily calm, as if the people on this street were just numbers he was crunching through an equation. “You can make them all fall down, if you know exactly who to push, and when to push them.”

Somewhere a gunshot echoed. There were crashing sounds in many of the homes and somewhere the whoosh of igniting flames.

Dillon’s hunger was fed with every blast, with every crash and every wail as yet another person fell from san­ity. He closed his eyes and felt the life-patterns in the street around him falling like a spiderweb clipped from its branch, until the only pattern that remained was the unrelenting spiral of chaos in every life around him.

Deanna, too, felt her own terror mysteriously fade away into a dizzy numbness.

“I’ve fed us both, now,” said Dillon.

Deanna just looked at him, blankly.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” he said. “You’ve got it as bad as I do—only with you it’s not a wrecking- hunger; it’s a terror-hunger.”

Deanna just shook her head, not wanting to hear it, not wanting to think about it.

“It’s true, Deanna; you need fear, the same way I need disaster—why do you think you feel better whenever you’re around me? It’s because you live on the terror I create—and when you can’t live on other people’s terror, you start feeding on your own.”

Deanna closed her eyes and tried to deny it . . . but the more she thought about it, the more true it rang. Didn’t she feel her strongest when those around her were in fear? Didn’t she draw strength from other people’s terror?

“You’ll never feel fear again, Deanna,” said Dillon, “as long as I can leave people terrified for you.”

The streets around them still echoed with the wails of dozens of souls losing their minds to a nightmare.

“Now do you see why we have to be together?” asked Dillon with a tenderness that clashed with the violence on either side of them. “We’re like thunder and lightning— you can’t have one without the other. Destruction and fear.”

He was right. He was right about everything, because every terrified wail seemed to feed something inside her. Was this who they were? Two hideously twisted creatures that lived like vampires, drinking up the misfortune of others? The very thought made her stomach turn.

This is not who I want to be!

She hid her lace in shame and disgust.

Heal flashed as a fireball exploded somewhere down the street, and it was over. All that remained were the weak wails and moans, like the moment after a tumbling airplane came to rest. Survivors wandered the streets, some milling about aimlessly, others talking to themselves. The fine lattice of their minds had dissolved like sugar in water. Those who were dead were the lucky ones. The rest were irreconcilably insane.

My God, thought Deanna, these people had put so much energy into creating their lives . . . and now all that energy was being released as their lives detonated. That energy had to go somewhere . . . and that was the energy Dillon was feeding on!

She tried to shake the thought away. No! Human be­ings don’t drink that kind of energy. . . .

And for the first time, Deanna began to see that there might be something else living inside of Dillon—a crea­ture that was anything but human. “I have to feed it,” Dillon often said. He even spoke about his hunger as if it were a living thing.

Was there something like that inside of her as well?

Only now did she begin to realize the dizzying depth of the pit they were falling into. The severity of their actions was beyond comprehension, and it made her wish she could tear off her body and slide into someone else’s, just to be away from herself and this hideous destiny.

“You see there?” said Dillon, pointing down the street toward some homes that seemed just beyond the circle of destruction. “Those are the people I saved. I was actually able to save people! The hunger wanted them but I said no.” He spoke with the blind innocence of a child and leapt from the tree, bouncing around in the midst of the disaster as if it were a playground. Stronger than ever before, he gazed past the Armageddon to the homes he had “saved.”

“See, I kept my promise,” he said, helping Deanna from the tree. “I didn’t do any more than was absolutely necessary . . . and I did a good thing saving those people, didn’t I?” He smiled like a little boy waiting to be re­ warded.

The thoughts were swimming in Deanna’s head now. Nearly fifty people’s lives were destroyed, but all Dillon was willing to see were the fifty whose lives weren’t. Was this the best they could hope to do—damage control? Was that something to be proud of?

“See how I control it?” he said. “I don’t give it any more than it needs—I leave it a little bit hungry—that’s how I control it!”

And Deanna could see that Dillon believed this—he believed in his own ability to control this thing like a small child believed no one could see him when he closed his eyes.

Deanna shook her head to drive out Dillon’s excuses and rationalizations, but couldn’t.

“Deanna, c’mon—you’re looking at me like you hate me or something. You don’t hate me, do you? You prom­ised you wouldn’t.”

Did she hate him? Did she find him beyond redemp­tion? She instantly thought back to a python she once saw swallowing a live rabbit. It was awful to watch, but, after all, that’s what pythons had to do. If this was how Dillon survived, could she blame him any more than she blamed that python? And wasn’t she doing the exact same thing?

Deanna looked into his eyes, trying to find him there. There was intense darkness inside of him now, surround­ing him, eating away at him like a vile parasite. So much of him had turned vile, it was hard to find any good left in him, but she continued to search until, through that blackness, she found the glimmer of light hidden deep within. It was that part of Dillon that was decent and kind—still fighting for life inside the blackness, like a star in the void of space. She focused on that shrinking light within Dillon, and to it she said “I love you.”

Dillon smiled, a tear in his eye. “Me too,” he said. He touched Deanna’s cheek, gently held her around the waist, and set the pace as they strode off of Blackburn Street, even before the first police car arrived. As they walked, Deanna forced her own will deep into Dillon’s back pocket, but this time it didn’t slip in as easily as it had before.

***

I love you. Dillon let her words echo from one side of his mind to the other. He drew strength from it, and, in a matter of moments, he had successfully forced the eve­ning’s unpleasantness out of his mind. These people here—they didn’t matter. They weren’t real the way he and Deanna were real. The wrecking-hunger told him so.

Dillon’s spirits were high as he left town. The night was refreshingly cool, and he felt he could walk all night. He didn’t need sleep anymore. Come to think of it, he didn’t need food. He had already gorged himself on the fall of Blackburn Street, and it would be at least another day before he felt the hunger again.

He wondered what he would have to do next to satisfy the hunger. Surely it would be an even greater chal­ lenge—for each challenge was greater than the one before.

In the back of his mind he idly imagined an endless cas­cade of dominoes all lined up and ready to fall if the right one were pushed. The thought was enough to make him giggle like a child.

PART IV - DEMOLITION DAY

11. Ground Zero