Scorpion Shards

It was the moment the van stopped that they began to feel a sense of presence that was so strong it bristled their neck hairs like static electricity.

“He’s still here!” said Tory. “Somewhere nearby!”

They quickly unlocked their doors and got out.

Once outside, the smell of smoke was strong and pun­gent. From the woods they could still hear the distant wails of the wandering mad, chasing each other through the timberland maze.

In front of them, the pickup truck barred their path; beside the truck lay a man, face-down in the mud, very much dead. In his hand he held a bloody fence picket. A crude arrow had caught him right in the jugular.

Michael turned away and leaned against a tree, gasp­ing for breath. “I think I’m gonna puke,” he said.

“Don’t,” said Tory. “We might get hail.”

It was Lourdes who was able to get a sense of direction. She turned to the right and pointed to a house about a hundred yards further down the road.

“There . . .” she said. “I think he’s in there.”

They took action instantly. Lourdes stalked forward, ready to rely on her bare hands, but Tory had her own ideas. Grimacing, she grabbed the dead man’s picket from his stiff hand.

“Maybe if I stake him through the heart, it’ll sanitize his soul,” she said.

Michael pulled a crowbar from the pickup truck, “Maybe I can use this as a lightning rod,” he said.

Winston, still not knowing his hidden talent, reached into his coat and pulled out the revolver, taking off the safety. “No maybe’s about what this’ll do to him,” he said.

The dwelling seemed very innocent as they ap­proached. Just a two-story country house.

“What if he’s armed, too?” said Michael. “What if he shoots us?”

“Then we die,” said Winston. The thought of dying in this town did not sit well with any of them. It would be better to die anywhere else but here.

The front door was slightly ajar, and they stood there on the porch for a quick moment, then burst in. Tory held her stake high, Michael gripped his crowbar in both hands, the sky already rumbling with his fury, and Win­ston aimed his gun at anything—anything that moved.

Inside the living room, a figure stood silhouetted against a window, holding something large and heavy in its arms.

Winston, his hands shaking, leveled the gun at the fig­ure’s head.

The figure stepped closer, Tory and Michael froze, and Winston hesitated.

“Shoot!” shouted Lourdes. “Shoot now!”

Winston almost did, he pulled his finger back on the trigger halfway . . . but then hesitated . . . because there was something he suddenly remembered.

The figure stepped out of the shadows. It was a girl with long, black hair, and slightly Asian eyes.

There are six of us, thought Winston. Six! . . . and this one was not the destroyer.

Winston lowered the gun. Michael dropped the crow­bar with a clang.

The girl held a young boy in her arms—about seven or eight years old. He wore a toy Indian headband on his head, and he clung to her as she approached them.

The girl glanced at Winston’s gun, but didn’t seem in­timidated by it at all. In fact, she didn’t seem frightened by any of them. “Could one of you go into the kitchen and get a towel?” she asked calmly.

There was a foul smell in the air, and from the smell, they knew that the boy in her arms had soiled his pants. Tory put down the picket and hurried to find a towel.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the girl. “Dillon said you were dead, but I knew he was lying.”

“Dillon? That’s his name?” asked Winston. “The guy with red hair?”

“Yes. I’m Deanna.”

They introduced themselves as Tory returned with the towel. Then Deanna put the boy down on the sofa, clean­ing him the way a mother would clean a baby—with ten­der care and patience.

“Who’s the kid?” asked Michael.

“Just a boy from town,” said Deanna. “He doesn’t seem to know his name, so I call him Carter, since that was the label on his shirt.”

When the boy looked up, they could see how truly ter­rible his eyes were. One of his pupils had closed down completely, and the other one was open wide and black.

“They all look like that once Dillon is done,” explained Deanna. “There’s not much we can do for them.”

She told them the story of how she met Dillon—the things they had done together, and how she finally broke free. She explained how the boy’s father was going to kill her with the bloody picket, but just before he brought the deadly spike down upon her chest, the man was hit by the arrow.

“I got him!” said the boy. “We were playing cowboys and Indians, and I got him good.”

Deanna cleaned the boy, and dressed him in oversized pants she found lying around the house. Tory took the soiled towel from Deanna, held it tightly in her hand, and the stench quickly vanished.

“You thought you were going to die, didn’t you?” Tory said as Deanna washed up. “You thought you were dying, so the thing living inside you panicked and ran away—the same thing happened to us—they got scared out of us!”

“I saw it,” said Deanna, calmly. “It was like a snake. . . . No . . . more like a giant worm.”

Everyone else shuddered, but Deanna didn’t seem bothered by the memory at all. She seemed rather fearless about the whole thing. “Anyway it vanished through the woods, heading west.”

Carter wandered around the living room and found his bow and arrows. He set to work removing the rubber suction-cup darts, and sharpening the wood with a pocket knife, as he had done with the first one. Lourdes went over to watch.

“Do you have a car?” asked Deanna.

“Just down the road,” answered Michael.

“We have to get going . . . I knew you’d be coming, so I stacked some supplies by the door—I know where Dillon is headed.”

“Look!” said Tory, and they all turned to catch sight of Lourdes at the other end of the room with Carter. Lourdes had gained the boy’s attention now—he had put down his knife and arrow. Together they seemed to be playing some sort of game—a mirroring game, where the boy would copy whatever Lourdes did.

“Lourdes, this is no time to be fooling around!” said Winston.

“Shh!” said Tory, sharply.

Lourdes kept her eye contact with the boy. She raised one arm; so did he. She raised the other arm; so did he. Only this wasn’t a game, and he wasn’t simply mimicking her, his actions were too perfect, too exact.

“She’s controlling him like a marionette!” said Mi­chael, staring in wide-eyed disbelief. “She’s controlling every movement of his body!” Each motion Lourdes made was exactly duplicated. She wiggled her fingers; so did he. She rolled her neck; so did he. Was it just the boy’s muscles, or did it go beyond that? Could she control his heartbeat? His breathing? His very metabolism? Until yesterday, she couldn’t control her own grotesque physi­ology, but now the physiology of others seemed within her grasp!

Lourdes looked at the boy, and the boy’s ruined eyes began to close. He nodded off to sleep.

Lourdes turned to the others. “Did you see that?” she said, just as surprised as the rest of them. “I think I did that!”

They all just stared at the sleeping boy in wonder, real­izing that the title of “Squirrelgirl” for Lourdes didn’t quite hit the mark.

“Those creatures turned our strengths into weak­nesses!” said Tory. It was becoming clearer to each of them now. Michael’s ability to affect nature had been used to wreak havoc in the very nature of people around him; Tory’s cleansing touch had been turned into a touch of disease; Lourdes’s ability to control the metabolism of others had been used to draw the flesh out of their cells and add it to Lourdes.

Tory turned to Winston. “We can figure out what your strength is now!”

“I already figured,” said Winston uneasily. He looked around, then asked Michael to bring down a potted plant from a shelf Winston couldn’t reach. Winston put the plant down on a coffee table, took a deep breath, then grasped the stem in his hand and concentrated. Right before everyone’s eyes, the plant grew until it had doubled in size and flowers bloomed. Winston smiled. It was the first time any of them had seen him really smile.