Scorpion Shards

It was more than that, though—his body was changing as well. Had he gained weight? Yes, his slender figure had begun to bloat. She could see it in his face and hands—in his fingers, beginning to turn round and porcine. His skin, too, had changed. It began to take on an oily redness marked with whiteheads that were appearing one after another. He’s beginning to look on the outside what he’s becoming on the inside, Deanna thought, and shivered.

“Damn it!” said Dillon, hurling the map behind him. “I need more maps! These don’t tell me what I need to know!” He took a deep breath to calm himself, then rubbed his eyes and said, “There’s a town—when we get to the Columbia River—a good-sized population.”

“Why does the population matter?” Deanna couldn’t hide the apprehension in her voice.

“Because it means they’ll have a decent library,” Dil­lon answered. “And a decent library will have a decent almanac, and an atlas. A world atlas.”

“And?”

Dillon rolled his eyes impatiently as if it were obvious, “And when I see what I have to see, I’ll know where we have to go.”

She heard him take another deep, relaxing breath, then he gently put his hand on her neck. It felt clammy and uncomfortable. She could feel that aura of darkness and how revolting it felt.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything’s gonna be great.”

This too was a lie, but she knew that Dillon believed this one.

“When we get where we’re going,” Deanna asked, “is this all going to be over? Will it end?”

Dillon nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Once we get there . . . everything will end.”

***

Burton, Oregon. Population 3,255. In the center of town, a harvest festival sent bluegrass music wafting to­wards Main Street, where all was quiet. The library was empty today, except for Dillon and Deanna.

Dillon piled the large wooden reference table with vol­ume after volume of atlases and almanacs. The librarian was delighted to see a young man so involved in his stud­ies. Deanna, as curious as she was unsettled, helped him pull down heavy volumes describing the people and places of the world. First he stared at the maps— the way roads connected and wound from city to city, state to state, nation to nation. Then he looked at numbers —end­less lists of numbers, graphs and charts. Populations—demographics; people grouped in whatever ways the re­searchers could find to group them; by race or religion; by economics; by profession; by politics; by every imaginable variable.

“What are you looking for?” Deanna asked. But Dillon was so engrossed in his numbers he didn’t even hear her. He was like a computer, taking in thousands of digits, and processing them through some inner program.

Then, one by one Dillon closed the books. The atlas of Europe, of Asia. The books on Australia and South Amer­ica. The studies of Africa, the American Almanac . . . until he was left with the map of the northwestern United States. He stared at the map, drawing his eyes further and further northwest, his finger following the tiny capillaries of country roads until he stopped. Dillon’s master equa­tion had finally spit out an answer.

“There.”

His finger landed in the southwest corner of Washing­ton state. “This is where we have to go.”

“What will we find there?” asked Deanna.

“Someone.”

“Someone we know?”

Dillon shook his head. “Someone we will know. Some­one important.”

They left, not bothering to shelve the books.

***

Their course out of town took them right past the har­vest festival. They had no intention of stopping, but the Rover needed gas. The gas station was right across the road from the festival, where most everyone in Burton was spending this fine day.

Dillon, who was driving now, got out to pump, while Deanna scrounged around the messy car, finding dollar bills and loose change to pay for the gas. It was when she looked out of the window at Dillon that she knew some­ thing was wrong. The old-fashioned mechanical pump clanged out gallons and racked up dollars, but Dillon wasn’t watching that. Instead, he was looking at the pump just ahead of them, where a tattooed, beer-bellied man stood pumping up his rundown Trans-Am. His equally unattractive wife stood beside him.

It seemed that Dillon had caught the wife’s attention, and she was staring at him in a trance. Dillon stared right back. Then this woman in high heels and decade-old tight pants stepped over the gas hose and began to approach Dillon, but her husband, sensing something out of the or­dinary, held her back.

He scowled at Dillon. “Got a problem?”

Dillon looked away, shook it off, and the episode was over . . . but it lingered in Deanna’s mind. There were many strange twists and turns on the roller coaster the two of them had been on, but in some odd way those other turns were consistent. This seemed to take the coaster wholly off its track. She turned to Dillon again and no­ticed the beads of sweat beginning to form on his fore­head. She knew what that meant, and she began to panic. What happened in Boise should have satisfied his rapa­cious hunger for a good while. She knew she had to get him out of town, so she quickly paid the attendant in crumpled bills and loose change—but when she turned, Dillon had already disappeared into the crowds of the fair.

***

It was twilight now. The lights had come up on the Ferris wheel, and the Tilt-a-whirl spun its merry victims past one another in flashes of neon blue and red.

Deanna searched everywhere for Dillon, in every dark corner, in every crowd, but he seemed to have completely dissolved into the mob.

Finally she spotted him on the midway. He was walk­ing . . . no, wandering, down the hay-strewn path with the aimlessness of a zombie. He was drenched in sweat.

Deanna ran toward him, but stopped when she saw him once more lock eyes with another girl, just as he had with the woman at the gas station. This one was sixteen—maybe seventeen. She ate cotton candy and watched her muscle-bound boyfriend launch rubber frogs into the air with a sledgehammer, trying to win her a prize. The boy­friend grunted as he swung the hammer and didn’t seem to notice as the girl dropped her cotton candy, crossed the midway to Dillon, and then, for no apparent reason, leaned forward . . . and kissed him.

Deanna just stood there gawking.

Clearly this girl had never met Dillon before . . . and here she was launching herself into his arms with the same passion with which her boyfriend launched his rubber frogs.

Deanna watched as Dillon brought up his arms and pulled this girl closer, kissing her in a powerful way—a way in which he had never kissed Deanna. It was not an embrace of love, or even lust—it was passion turned ran­ cid. It was everything that a kiss should not be.

But it wasn’t a kiss, was it? It was more like a bite.

The girl’s arms turned white from the tightness of Dil­lon’s grip, and she gave into his embrace completely. Deanna’s mind swarmed with powerful, conflicting emo­tions—jealousy not the least of them.

Although she never wanted him to steal this kind of kiss from her, she didn’t want to see him steal it from anyone else, either.

How could a kiss be so evil—and what had possessed the girl to step into it? It couldn’t have been Dillon’s looks—not anymore. What once had been an attractive face was now puffy and infected. His dark eyes had become an icy, unnatural turquoise.

Here he was kissing another girl—right there in front of her, and he didn’t even care! The sense of betrayal was unbearable.

Dillon squeezed the girl against him and Deanna could see his dark aura stretch around her—then Deanna saw—no—she felt something invisible pass from the girl to Dillon.

The boyfriend, who had just won a pink dinosaur, turned and gawked with blinking idiocy at his girlfriend, kissing this sick-looking kid.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

At last Dillon moved his lips away from the girl’s, and she looked into his eyes. This time his touch had not scrambled her thoughts.

The boyfriend stepped in, pushed Dillon against a car, and delivered a right hook that sent Dillon’s head