Scorpion Shards

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.