Scorpion Shards

snap­ping to the left. Dillon recovered quickly . . . but not the boyfriend. He gasped and looked at his hand, where it had touched Dillon’s chin. His knuckles were locked. Not just that, but his whole forearm was locked in a muscle spasm that caused his sinews to bulge like ropes from his elbow to his wrist.

The boyfriend stumbled away, forgetting the girl, star­ing at his paralyzed arm. As for the girl, she just wandered off wide-eyed, and Deanna sensed that something had been stolen from her—something very important that she would never get back.

Dillon just grinned dumbly.

“Why did you do that?” Deanna demanded, over­whelmed with disgust.

“I don’t know. . . .”

“You really enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

“Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know.” He put his hand to his temples, as if keeping his head from blowing apart. “Deanna, what’s happening to me?”

She had no sympathy for him now as she locked eyes with his, and scrutinized him.

“Deanna, don’t look at me like that. . . .”

Deanna peered deep into his eyes searching as she al­ways did . . . seeking the glimmer in the darkness. She looked long and hard, through the rank and fetid decay that encased his body and soul . . . and finally Deanna realized that the light in him was gone. The part of Dillon that had shone so brightly in his darkness all this time had been wrapped in so many shrouds of evil that she could not find him anymore.

The moment she realized that was the moment she knew she had to run—to get as far away from this mon­ster as she possibly could. She instandy turned without pause for another thought and abandoned the shell that had once been Dillon Cole, racing into the crowds—but Dillon desperately pursued.

“Deanna!” he screamed. “Don’t go!”

She couldn’t stop herself from glancing back as he chased her, and what she saw made her run even faster.

Dillon was pushing through the crowds just as she was, and everyone he touched fell from him with hideous af­flictions. Some collapsed in paralysis, others lost their minds, others seemed to deflate as if their chests had been crushed inward, and still others turned red and diseased. “Deanna!!” he screamed, not even noticing the people he had destroyed.

She broke free of the crowd and scrambled away from the fair, to the top of a hill.

“Deanna, come back!”

When she reached the top of the hill, she dared to look back once more. Dillon was still standing there at the edge of the crowd. He stared at her a moment more . . . and finally with a scowl on his face, he turned and defiantly grabbed the first girl in sight. She came to him like he was a gift from heaven, and he kissed her, stealing her soul away with his kiss. Then he turned and headed back into the crowd.

From the top of the hill, Deanna watched him go, the living darkness now cloaked around him and trailing be­hind him. He stalked his way to the center of the crowd around the bluegrass band. He looked left, then right, until he finally found The Right Person—a matronly woman clapping her hands happily to the beat. Then Dil­lon whispered something into her ear.

And the crowd detonated.

From where Deanna stood, she could see how it hap­pened. It began with people becoming irritated, then irri­tation built into anger, anger into fury, fury into rage, until the entire crowd thrashed in a chaotic screaming tarantella—a dance of destruction, wild and insane, spreading outward like a shock wave. The music stopped and was replaced by wails of anguish and pain. In five minutes the townsfolk had turned into chaotic, murderous fiends, their sanity wiped from their minds by Dillon the destroyer.

Deanna turned and ran, screaming, into the woods.

***

Woods are a ripe place for fears, and Deanna’s were thriving on the branches and shadows that surrounded her. She had refused to feed on the terror Dillon had un­leashed, so now every shape was a threatening demon, every shadow a portent of pain. She stumbled over and over as she raced through the lonely woods not knowing where she would go.

At last she came to a road and tumbled to the gravel, skinning her knees through her jeans. She sat up on the empty asphalt, breathless, her voice ruined from all her screaming.

Finally a pickup truck swerved to stop in front of her.

A man got out—a middle-aged, family-looking man. There was a boy in the back of the pickup, all dressed up in an Indian outfit.

It seemed normal, and Deanna just wanted to dissolve into this man and his family, forgetting who she was and what was happening.

“I have to get out of here,” Deanna rasped. “So do you! You have to get away from this town!”

“Now hold on, there,” said the man warmly. “Let’s just calm down.” He looked her over as he stepped from the cab of his pickup. “You’ve had some fright,” he said. “I know just the thing for you.”

“Please,” begged Deanna, “you don’t understand . . .”

“Now just wait a second,” he said, with a calm and soothing voice. “I’ll be right back.” He reached into the back of his pickup and grabbed something, then turned back toward her, revealing what he held. It was a piece of a white picket fence, broken so that the white wood came to a sharp point.

And then Deanna noticed the man’s eyes. One pupil was closed down completely, the other wide and wild. This man had already been to the fair.

“We’ll take care of you,” said the man. “Fix you up real good.”

Deanna could now see that the tip of the picket was already covered with blood.

In the pickup, the boy mindlessly sang a single line from a nursery rhyme over and over like a broken record, lazily rolling his head from side to side, as he watched his father throw Deanna to the ground.

“This won’t hurt but a bit,” the madman said as he raised the picket above his head and pointed it at Deanna’s heart.

Deanna would have screamed if she still had a voice.

13. Turning Normal

Tufts of white speckled a rich blue sky on the Idaho—Oregon border. It was a weak legion of clouds that could not even block out the sun.

Michael could not remember blue sky; there were al­ways clouds and storms tormenting the heavens, and when the storms slept, there was always a numbing fog keeping the sky an everlasting gray.

But not today.

Michael lay on a brushy hillside staring up at the glori­ous sky. Beneath them lay Huntington, Oregon. They were barely a hundred miles out of Boise, but to Michael, what they left behind in Boise was a million miles away.

“What do they look like?”

Michael turned to see Tory come up beside him.

“That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Looking for shapes in the clouds?”

“I was just looking.” Michael sat up and glanced down the hill where the town spread out before them. Changing leaves glimmered in afternoon sunlight turning the town to gold. The air was neither hot nor cold, but temperate. Nice. Normal.

They had spent an entire day and night in and around Boise, spiraling outward from the epicenter of Chaos, searching for The Others, or, more specifically, the red­headed boy who was at the core of the nightmare. But they had also wasted time as they reveled in this new feel­ing of freedom now that the beasts were gone. It had taken until the next morning for them to feel the slightest pull northwest, and they realized he had left town long ago.

Now they had driven into Oregon and, somewhere in the town below, a tireless Winston was searching for