Scorpion Shards

“Looks like we got a flower-child,” said Michael, with a grin. “What are you gonna do, beat Dillon with a cor­ sage?”

Winston shrugged. “Ain’t my problem if you can’t see the possibilities.”

“You’ll find a good use for it,” said Deanna. “Don’t worry.”

And indeed it seemed that Deanna was not worried. By anything. Her fearlessness was a powerful strength. It gave them focus; it gave them clarity. She told them how Dillon had changed in the end, making it horribly clear where all their beasts had gone—and it seemed likely that Deanna’s beast had found him as well.

“He’s stronger than all of us,” said Tory. “If he can survive with all six of them inside him.”

“You said you knew where he was going?” asked Mi­chael.

Deanna nodded, and picked up sleeping Carter, refus­ing to leave him alone in this awful town, and they all headed back to the car.

“There’s still time to stop him, but it will take all of us to do it,” said Deanna.

“Stop him . . . from what?” asked Lourdes.

“Don’t you know what he wants to do?” she asked, looking at each of them. Only Deanna had the courage to say the words aloud.

“He’s going to shatter the world, the same way he shat­tered this town . . . and once it starts, we won’t be able to stop it.”

15. Resonance

Jagged spires of dead wood stretched through the morning mist. Thousands upon thousands of trees had once blanketed the steep hills, stretching to­wards a distant mountain . . .

. . . but now every last tree was dead.

Wind, rain and rot had eaten away their branches, leaving vast acres of wooden monoliths standing in a mulch of peat and heavy gray ash. This forest had died long before Dillon Cole got to it, and the cause of death was still there on the horizon, breathing steam like a fire god asleep.

The sheer power of it, thought Dillon as he drove from life into the miles of death that surrounded the northern face of Mount St. Helens.

The smell of decay within this realm of desolation blended with the rich, dark smell of volcanic ash, creating an aroma that was at once both clean and vile, like the awful smell of a sulfer spring.

As he drove into the volcanic wasteland, fear began to writhe in his gut, but he beat it down. The fear had de­scended on him shortly after Deanna had left him. Terror had suddenly coiled itself around his gut like a serpent, making him feel paranoid and claustrophobic in the cab of the Range Rover as he left the dying town of Burton. He had fought it down until it wasn’t so overpowering, but still the fear kept coming back, urging him to drive faster and more recklessly to his final destination.

The hands that now gripped the steering wheel were not his hands—at least not the hands that he remem­ bered. These were bloated and swollen—covered with red boils. This body was not his either. His growing gut had burst out of his pants in the middle of the night. He was forced to find a truck stop and confiscate larger clothes from a trucker whose life had come to a sudden and unexpected end. Now Dillon had to roll up the pant legs as well—he swore that he was an inch shorter than the day before. Inside he could feel many, many hungers now, coiled within him, competing for his will, all scream­ing to be fed.

The wrecking-hunger, however, still screamed the loudest, and its final feeding was all that mattered—a feeding so great that when it was done, there would be nothing left to devour.

Back in the Burton Library, he had studied the maps, the charts, the statistics. He had worked calculations that a supercomputer would have shied away from, and he had pulled out an answer, sifting it through a secret sixth sense. The answer he came up with was this: of all the locations in the world from which to set up the ultimate chain reaction, only one rested in North America. The epicenter of destruction was in Washington state, in the shadow of Mount St. Helens. Here, in this secret fulcrum of human existence, Dillon would have to find a human fuse. It would have to be someone with no ties to the out­side world and filled with a lonely anger. Someone sepa­ rate and alone. It would have to be a hermit, whose des­tiny Dillon could aim with the pinpoint accuracy of a sniper.

Although the calculations that brought him there were complex, the actual plan was simple: Dillon would find his hermit, then find the hermit’s weakness and fire him to­ward a nearby city. In the city, there would be a gathering place—a bar, perhaps—where this man would create a chain of events that would drive everyone there beyond the limit of their sanity. Those who survived would carry the insanity home with them.

At least one would board a plane.

At least ten of the people on that plane would board other planes, and in this way, the seed of destruction would be planted within the minds of thousands of travel­ers, moving in hundreds of different directions. In a mat­ ter of days, people around the world would suddenly be faced by the exact chain of events that would bring them to their breaking points and drive them mad. Millions of patterns collapsing like a house of cards.

In the end, the destruction of mankind would not come as a great nuclear holocaust. It would not come as a me­teor splitting the earth in half. It would come from a sim­ple thought whispered in one lonely man’s ear. A single thought, which would breed a rage of chaos that would sweep across the globe in a swift chain reaction.

Dillon remembered seeing a film once about a great steel bridge that had violently collapsed, brought down by mere resonance—the simple vibrations of the air around it. Dillon’s thought would surely resonate and bring down something far more mighty than a steel bridge. He was the hammer that would fracture every thought mankind had ever had, making civilization crumble to its very foundations.

Dillon pondered how a single thought—the right thought—had always had such power to create. Simple thoughts pushed in the right direction at the right time.

The idea of the wheel; the thought of the written word—simple ideas that had picked up momentum across the globe, swelled like a tidal wave and created civi­lization. How fitting that a single thought was all it took to bring it crashing down.

The power of such an act could only be surmounted by the power released when everything fell—power that would feed the wrecking-hunger like it had never before been fed. Just imagining it made Dillon drool, and he longed for the great process to begin.

For an instant the image of his dead parents flitted through his mind.

Are you proud of me now, Mom and Dad?

He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he floored the accelerator, and the engine’s powerful roar drowned out the question before it could resonate in his mind. 

PART V - BETWEEN THE WALLS

16. The Hermit

Slayton.

He didn’t need a first name.

Most of the time he didn’t need a name at all. He’d only drive his rusty pickup down into Cougar every few weeks or so for supplies, paying with ancient, crumpled bills, then he would disappear again down a dirt road that passed from life into death, from green trees into the dead valley in the shadow of the smoking mountain.