Scorpion Shards

hands and feet, he could feel the pain in the back of his head, but he couldn’t feel anything inside. The events of the past few weeks were slowly coming back to him, like the details of a nightmare . . . he remembered Boise, and Idaho Falls, and Burton, and the many other people and places he had carefully destroyed, but with those memo­ries came a fog of numbness. No feeling. No remorse. No sorrow or joy. Nothing. He had no feeling inside him at all. No heart. No soul.

“Dillon?”

He opened his eyes, and there beside him knelt Deanna. She helped him to sit up, and as he shifted he felt something hard against the small of his back. He reached behind his back and pulled out the gun that should have killed him. Deanna gently took it from him and exposed the barrel.

“Six chambers; three bullets. We fired an empty cham­ber hoping we could scare them out of you. If it hadn’t worked, we still had the three full ones.”

Dillon felt weak, feverish. He realized he hadn’t eaten for days.

“Where are we?”

His eyes had adjusted to the strange harsh light, and he looked around. The sands were vermillion red, the sky an icy frost blue. Far away, a massive tear in the sky poured forth a great ocean with a mighty roar. A much smaller tear, ten feet in the air above him, marked the passage back to their own world.

And all around them was despair.

Downed airplanes and crushed ships littered the sands. Rusted cars with crusty skeletons lay strewn every few hundred yards like a great garden of death. All the people and things that had ever disappeared without explanation were well accounted for in this unnameable place, having fallen through tears in the fabric of time and space. And yet this was not quite another world—it was an un-world—an unloved, unseen, unattended to place. A place between.

Dillon turned to see a solitary mountain looming be­hind them; it seemed as out of place as everything else. At the top of this peak stood what appeared to be a castle carved out of the rock itself.

Dillon’s beast was climbing this mountain. So was Deanna’s. The other four kids had taken off in various di­ rections across the sands after their demons, but Dillon’s and Deanna’s were getting away.

And still Dillon felt nothing.

He turned to Deanna.

“Deanna . . . I want you to look at me and tell me what you see.”

Deanna looked him over, and tried to hide the grimace on her face. “It’s not so good . . . but the weight is already going away, and your skin . . .”

“No,” said Dillon. “That’s not what I mean.”

He gripped her tightly and looked into her eyes. “I mean . . . what do you see . . . when you look at me . . .”

Deanna peered into his eyes, as she always did. He could almost feel her probing inside of him . . . searching . . . and then a tear trickled down her face.

“They’ve killed me, haven’t they?” asked Dillon. “Those monsters left my body alive—they left my body and my mind, but they killed my soul. . . .”

“No . . . ,” said Deanna, smiling gently through her tears. Dillon could now see that these were not tears of sadness; they were tears of joy. “The other day,” said Deanna, “I thought you were gone forever, so I ran . . . but I was wrong . . . you’re still alive, Dillon, body and soul.”

Deanna leaned forward and kissed his blistered, swol­len lips. And for a moment Dillon felt a twinge of feeling coming back to him.

He glanced up at the rift in space just out of their reach, remembering the extent of their situation.

“Slayton,” he said weakly. “I launched him toward Tacoma ...”

Deanna calmly helped him to his feet. “First the beasts,” she said. “They’re too powerful—they have to be destroyed.”

Dillon couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. After every­thing he had done, she still cared for him—and after all the terror, she could face this new challenge with fortitude and peace. “How can you be so strong?” he asked. But Deanna only smiled. What a wondrous gift, thought Dillon. To be so strong. To be so brave.

He stood on wobbly legs like a dead man refusing to give up the ghost and tapped into Deanna’s will, borrow­ing it for his own. Then they set off toward the mountain to face their demons.

***

Tory had been the first to realize that these beasts could be destroyed. She knew by the way the beasts moved. They didn’t zip across these sands like shadows; they ran, they crawled, they slithered, like beings of flesh and blood.

Indeed, in this un-world these beasts were creatures of flesh. That meant they would have weaknesses and could be hunted! The creatures raced off in different directions, and the kids took off after the beast each recognized to be his own.

In this world, Tory’s beast appeared to be an amor­phous gray blob, continually shifting and changing shape—but as she drew closer she realized it was not a blob, but a swarm. Millions of mutated bacteria—a col­ony of pestilence—buzzing in perfect formation, like a single being with a million minute bodies all following a single will.

Like a swarm of bees.

It was that thought that made her realize how she might kill it.

The swarm, only a dozen yards away now, took off, darting through strange leafless trees and bulky derelict vessels until reaching the wreck of an old propeller plane. When the swarm disappeared into the side of the plane, Tory knew she’d be climbing into a hive.

The wreckage was filled with rotted airplane seats and skeletons of passengers long dead. Toward the front of the cabin, the beast waited; a buzzing horde that had taken on a new formation complete with arms and legs, roughly in the shape of a human body.

Tory stalked closer, and the buzz in her ears grew as the creature advanced, then attacked. Hideous ugly bugs surrounded her, crawling over every inch of her body. They stung and bit; they gnawed and drew blood; they burrowed under her skin. The pain was unbearable, and Tory cried out in horror. She was being eaten alive by these things! She would die right here. With her body burning from the stings of the swarm, she reached deeper and deeper into it, hoping beyond hope that she’d be able to carry out her plan before the swarm killed her. Then, in the center of the buzzing mass, she found what she was looking for. There was a creature hovering there, twice the size of her fist, with a grotesque bulging body, tendrils and insectile eyes. It seemed half mosquito, half jellyfish. The thing’s segmented eyes stared at her in fear and fury, while all around her the swarm continued to bite—raising welts, burrowing into her, fighting to make her their hive.

This colony of disease—this ugliness—had once found a place in Tory, but she had no room for such ugliness anymore. Now as she gripped the queen of the swarm, she pumped all of her anger into her clenched fist and drove out her own revulsion, replacing it with determination. This thing had turned Tory’s own unique power against her . . . but now the creature was on the outside, and it had no defense against Tory’s cleansing touch.

The filthy thing writhed in her grasp, the disease drain­ing from it, its flesh fading from sickly gray, to jelly- clear. Its swarm fell to the ground one by one, pattering like a fall of rain, until the queen was alone and unprotected. Without her guardians and without her filth, Tory knew this creature in her fist was nothing . . . So she hurled the thing to the ground and crushed it beneath the heel of her shoe, the way she would crush any bug that became a nui­sance.

***

Michael chased the blue-burning beast of many hands toward the shore of the violent sea, where black water lapped like oil upon the vermillion sands.

As he dove on the beast, bringing it down, he felt him­self overwhelmed by a tempest of emotions so powerful he thought it would tear him apart. Fear raked across sor­row, slashed by anger, scalded by desire, and each emo­tion was so extreme, Michael felt the turbulence alone would destroy him. He flipped the creature around to face him—but it had no face; only eyes. Turquoise, hypnotic eyes, and many burning hands, each stronger than his own.