Shuttered Sky

them?

“He jammed his shovel into my arm, and I shot him in the eye with a blank,” Drew said. “I’ll survive, but unfortunately so will he.”

Winston stood and began to pace the dusty floor. “Do you know where he came from? Was he from some cult?” If one person found Michael’s grave, Winston knew others would, too. There were cults and crazies out there, more now than ever before. He remembered stories of how people regularly pried open the crypts of every celebrity from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis until their bodies had to be moved to protect them from their own legend. And now there was a man out there hell bent on destroying Michael’s remains. In a world where logic was diffracting out of focus, why should Winston expect this man’s actions to make sense . . . except for the fact that they did. Be­cause destroying Michael’s remains was not the senseless act it seemed. It was a surgical strike against the Shards; there had to be a body for a resurrection. “Destroying Michael’s remains is the only way to make sure Dillon can never bring him back.”

Drew nodded. “Somebody big doesn’t like you guys a whole lot.”

Winston shuddered at the thought. Somebody big? How big? “If there’s someone who wants to make sure Dillon doesn’t bring Michael back . . . maybe there’s a reason why Dillon should bring him back.”

“Whatever else you might have been,” Drew said. “You guys were a truly fearsome fivesome.”

It was true. Even with their formidable powers, the shards had always been stronger when they were together. Even with Deanna gone, Winston, Dillon, Tory, Michael and Lourdes had been far greater together. “Whoever’s doing this wants to make sure that we’re never together again. Never whole—never complete.”

And all at once it occurred to Winston that this grave robber could be the man in the lavender chair, who invaded his dreams. The man who prepared the way for the faceless three. The more he considered it, the more certain he was. “Michael can’t be left there unprotected.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” Drew told him, as he rocked gently back and forth, his feet on the edge of the footlocker. “Michael’s safe,” Drew said. “He’s among friends . . .”

When it hit Winston just what Drew was saying, it hit him hard. He hadn’t eaten much over the past twenty four hours, but now his late night burger and fries came surging toward daylight.

Drew had robbed Michael’s grave to prevent someone else from doing it first, and now sat sentinel beside his friend’s body. Michael was in the footlocker. God! No wonder Drew had tried to numb himself senseless with painkillers.

Winston fell to his knees, turned away, and retched onto the floor.

Damn you Dillon, where are you? If ever there was a time Dillon needed to be here, now was that time.

“Don’t worry about cleaning up,” Drew said in that even, Vicodin-buffered voice. “The carpet’s history anyway.”

When Winston had recovered, he approached Drew, trying to keep the footlocker in his blind spot; then he gently touched Drew’s wounded arm. “I can’t heal it for you, but this should do something.”

Drew nodded. “I had lost some sensation in my fingertips. I just found it again. Thanks.”

“Nerve tissue regeneration,” said Winston. “No biggie.” Winston picked up the bible, and looked at the notes scribbled across the wa­termark.

“I’ve tried the phone numbers in a dozen different area codes.” Drew told him. “I got a dry-cleaner in San Diego, a nursing home in East LA, and that’s about it. Nothing that seems related.”

“And Vicki Sanders?”

“I’ve found about a dozen of them on the Internet.”

“Then we’ll track down every one, until we find the one who can tell us what’s going on.” Winston forced himself to look at the foot-locker resting ominously inert in the center of the room. Someone was fighting a guerilla war against them, but it was time to fight back. And if anyone were going to touch Michael’s body, they’d have to go through Winston to do it.

11. Part of two

Sharks. Maddy Haas could not stop thinking about sharks. How the big ones would lose their stability, listing drunkenly in the largest of tanks, not knowing up from down, until they finally died. Hammerheads, Great Whites, Tiger sharks—none of them could survive in captivity.

“Shoop. Tomatoshoop.”

Dillon’s stupor was drug-induced, but like those sharks, it was an awful thing to behold. A being of such awe and majesty so suppressed as to choke on his own senses.

“Howstheshoop. Schloop. Sloop John B . . .”

An octopus in a tank, Maddie recalled, could squeeze itself through a hole in the glass an eighth of an inch wide, and die on the floor rather than be held in an aquarium.

' ‘So hoisht up the John B’s shails, shee how the blah blah blah. Call fr the cap’n ashore n’lemme go home . . .’ '

She hated Bussard for doing this to Dillon, and hated the fact that she was also a party to it.

She tasted the soup, which was saltier than the Dead Sea. Appar­ently Dillon’s blood pressure was not of concern to Bussard. Maddy dipped in the spoon and blew on it to cool it down for Dillon, who sat before her, immobilized in his chair.

Maddie looked around Dillon’s cubical cell, as he continued to sing, his volume slipping in and out like a radio with a bad tuner, Bussard had told her there were only a handful of people with the security clearance to be in there, and she wondered what on earth made Bussard trust her enough to be one of those people. Then it occurred to her, it wasn’t how much he trusted her, it was how little he trusted everyone else.

In her three weeks of meals with Dillon—especially those days before they began to drug him, she had learned from Dillon firsthand what he had been through, and who he truly was. The man beneath the myth, more boy than man. He was not, as Bussard had suggested, secretive about himself, or his motives. It was the fact that he was so forthcoming that made Bussard suspicious, and he continued to scru­tinize the tapes of her meals with Dillon.

“Are you afraid of me, Maddy?” Dillon had asked her early on, when her hands still shook while feeding him. And since he could read the pattern of a lie, she had told him the truth. Yes, she was. When she had first arrived at the plant—and first came to know who they had trussed up in this place, she had been frightened of his eyes, in­ vasive by nature. They seemed uncontained by the mask. His presence had been—still was—a tidal wave before her; a wall of looming force from which there was no hiding. No wonder he was worshiped. No wonder he was feared. Yet although the sensation of his power hadn’t diminished, it was a feeling she had come to enjoy. If he asked her now whether or not she feared him, she’d have to tell him that she wasn’t really sure.

' ‘Let me go home . . . I wanna go home . . . I feel so broke up I wanna go home.’ '

By the last line of the verse he was actually hitting some of the notes, and the slurred words were beginning to coalesce into English.

“My Dad always sung that to me.” Dillon said. “That was before I killed him.”

He was fishing for a word of comfort. He wanted Maddy to remind him what he well knew—that his parents had been accidental victims of Dillon’s emergent powers, before Dillon had understood the power he had. It was like this at the beginning of each meal now. In grand, sedated melodrama, he would make vague but sweeping claims of guilt, and she would assuage them. It was already an old dance, and this time she wasn’t getting on the floor.

“Feeling sorry for yourself again?” Maddy raised the spoonful of soup to the small mouth slit in his mask, “Feel sorry for me—I have to listen to you.” He slurped the soup in, and spat it right back out.

“MSG,” he said. “Stuff’ll kill ya.”

Maddy calmly blotted the spots of soup from her uniform, feeling a new blossom in her anger toward