Scorpion Shards

signs of ruin, but he was the only one. Here on the hill, Lourdes lay on her back, asleep, with every exhalation breathing out another ounce of fat, and he and Tory just looked at the clouds.

Michael glanced at Tory and smiled.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Your eyelashes,” said Michael. “The way you were before, I could never see them.” What he didn’t tell her was that he never really looked at her face before. It had been so hideous. He could not bear the sight. But now the sores had closed, and bit by bit the swelling was going down.

Tory gingerly touched her face. “There’ll be scars. There are always scars from bad skin conditions, you know?”

“Maybe not,” offered Michael, wondering about the scars his own condition might leave behind.

Michael lay back down and turned his eyes to the clouds again, his mind finding their shapes. An angel. A unicorn. A tall sailing ship. He had always played this game as a child. He was very good at it.

“Can I tell you something, Tory?”

“Shoot.”

“I don’t think I’m as brave as the rest of you.”

“How do you figure?”

Michael kept his eyes on the drifting clouds. A wind seemed to fill the sail of the tall ship. “Well, take Winston, for example; he feels this in his gut. He knows he has to go out there and take care of this bad kid. And you—you were the strong one, who pulled the rest of us all this way . . . and if it weren’t for Lourdes, I would have given up a long time ago. . . .”

“I was ready to call it quits lots of times,” said Tory.

“How about now?” He turned to Tory, but Tory didn’t answer. “I saw that horror in Boise,” said Michael. “I know what that other kid is capable of . . . I know what I was capable of too . . . but now I’ve come out of the nightmare, Tory. Maybe there’s some blood-sucking Hell-thing driving him to do what he does—but the one that was inside of me is gone! The problem is, it was living in me for so long, I can’t remember being any other way. I don’t know how to feel about anyone or anything, you know?”

Michael looked away. “Tory . . . I don’t even know if I like girls.”

“You mean ...”

“I mean I don’t know what I mean. I don’t know any­ thing.” Michael took a deep breath. “It’s like everything inside me has been locked in a vault since I was eleven, and now that same eleven-year-old kid is coming back out. I’ve got to learn how to feel all over again, because right now I don’t feel anything either way, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s something you can figure out in one day. If we make it through this we’ll have our whole lives to deal with the regular stuff, but right now we’ve got other things to think about,” reminded Tory. “Our friendly neighborhood Hell-pets are still out there—they can still come back ...”

“If they’re not back already, then maybe they’ve found a better place to be,” said Michael. “Anyway, I don’t want to go looking for them under stones. I just want to go home, figure out who I am, and how I’m supposed to feel . . . and then be normal. I don’t even care what shade of normal it happens to be. Any kind of normal would suit me just fine.”

Michael turned to see Tory dab a tear from her face.

“I don’t think we get to be normal,” she said. “We’re Scorpion Shards, remember?” Then she took his hand, “Come here, I want to show you something. It’s sort of a . . . magic trick.”

She led him over the hill to a burned-out campsite—a place with torn mattresses and soggy cardboard. It reeked of urine and rot, and it reminded Michael of the type of world they had traveled through to get this far—to get into the light of this pleasant day.

“Find me something disgusting,” said Tory. “The most disgusting thing you can find.”

There were plenty of disgusting things around to chose from. Michael settled for a sopping rag, so rank it had turned black. It smelled like death on a bad day. He picked it up with his fingernails—just touching the thing made his body shiver in disgust.

“Now give it to me,” requested Tory.

Michael held it in her direction. “What are you going to do?”

“You’ll see.”

She took the disgusting rag and, to Michael’s horror, used it to wipe her hands, then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she brought it to her face and wiped her face with it. Michael had to look away. Finally, when she was done she held the rag back up to Michael.

“Take it,” she said.

Michael reluctandy held out his fingertips and grabbed the corner of the rag. The rag was still wet, but that’s all it was. A damp rag, perfectly clean, as if it had just been taken out of the washer. Even the smell was gone.

“Kills germs on contact,” said Tory. “I’m better than Listerine.”

Michael smelled the rag again, amazed. He wiped his own face with it and felt its cool sterile dampness on his face.

“Everyone’s got a hidden talent,” said Tory. “I sup­pose ours are a bit more interesting than most. Our tal­ ents are less . . . normal.”

Tory glanced up at the puffs of clouds blowing across the sky. “An angel,” she said. “A unicorn . . . and that one’s a schooner ship.”

Michael glanced back at the clouds, wondering how on earth she had seen the exact same things he had seen. The reason became clear in an instant, and Michael couldn’t believe his eyes.

The clouds had become like soft, white figurines, hov­ering in the sky. The wind had carefully sculpted the clouds into exactly what Michael had seen them as!

Tory smiled. “You make nice clouds,” she said. “Or at least you do when your head’s screwed on straight.”

***

Michael stared at his clouds for a good ten minutes, but then they were finally torn apart by powerful cross-winds. He tried to create them again, but found he didn’t have the concentration. As he watched them dissolve, Mi­chael began to wonder how many of the storms on their trip had been of his own creation.

Meanwhile, Lourdes had woken up and was staring at a dead squirrel . . . only it wasn’t dead.

“I was talking to it gently—coaxing it closer,” she told Michael. “And then it just keeled over and fell asleep. What could possibly make it do that?”

Michael looked at the silent squirrel, realizing that this could be the first hint of Lourdes’s “hidden talent.” Then suddenly the squirrel snapped open its eyes and scam­pered off.

“Isn’t that weird?” said Lourdes.

Michael chuckled, as he imagined Lourdes surrounded by animals like Snow White . . . but it wasn’t about ani­mals, was it? This was just a trick—like Tory’s rag, or Mi­chael’s sky sculptures. As with all of them, Lourdes’s talent had many layers to be discovered, and it took Michael’s breath away to think of the possibilities.

“We need to talk,” Michael told Lourdes, and she began to look worried.

“About what?”

Michael smiled and gently touched her arm, which was not quite as massive as it had been that same morning. “Good things,” he assured her. “Only good things.”

Just then Winston came bounding up the hill, out of breath.

“The redheaded kid didn’t stop in this town,” he an­nounced. “We gotta keep moving.” Michael noticed that Winston’s pants, which they had cut down to match his diminishing stature, were already an inch above his an­kles. Then Michael caught a glimpse of the revolver Win­ston had taken from that crazy cop in Boise. He kept it with him in his inside jacket pocket.

Michael imagined the days ahead of them now, and the joy he had felt only moments ago began to dissipate as quickly as his clouds in the windswept sky. He knew what they had to do. Stop the destroyer. Stop him at all costs, before he . . . before he what? It was hard to imagine any­thing worse than what they had seen in Boise.

As they gathered their things, Tory came up to Michael once more. “Still thinking of going home?” she