Scorpion Shards

7. The Sum Of The Parts

I want to forget who I am.

I never want to leave here.

I want to stay in this tight circle of four forever.

Somewhere between dusk and dawn, between here and there, Tory, Winston, Lourdes and Michael lay close, touching each other in some way—hand to hand, toe to toe, head to chest, huddling like a litter of mice. This closed circuit of four felt more joyous, more peaceful than anything any of them had ever felt before. Their hearts beat in unison, their breath came and went in a single tide. It felt wonderful to finally be whole. Almost whole.

The place was as solitary and secluded as a place could be; a corn silo on the edge of town, part of an abandoned farm. The dome of the silo had long since turned to rub­ble, the victim of storms and neglect, leaving a round hole high above them filled with stars, like a portal to another universe. The storm had been washed away when the four of them had come together, and now the air was so tranquil and calm it didn’t even feel cold.

They were silent for a long time as they rested, and when they finally began to talk, the words that came out were things they never dared to speak out loud.

“I shared a room with my sisters until my parents fixed up the attic for me,” said Lourdes, her voice so heavy and thick that her very words seemed to sink to the ground. “They said it was to give me more room, but I knew it was to hide me away. That first night in the attic, I dreamed I was floating down Broadway in the Thanksgiving Day pa­rade, so bloated with helium I could burst. A hundred people held me with strings, and all I could do was hang there bouncing back and forth between the skyscrapers, while thousands of people stared and laughed. When I woke up I could feel myself growing . . . I could feel my body drawing energy right out of the air—maybe even pulling it from other people’s bodies. I had stopped eat­ing, but I still grew. That’s when I knew the problem wasn’t just food.”

Then Lourdes gently squeezed Michael’s hand, which rested so calmly in hers; Michael focused his eyes on the distant stars. “When I was thirteen,” he said, “my friends dared me to talk to this high school girl who I had a crush on. She was three years older, and a head taller than me, but the crush I had on her was out of control, so I just had to talk to her. I went up to her, but before I could open my mouth to say anything, she looked at me and WHAM! I felt there was some sort of weird connection, like I was draining something out of her, right through her eyes—and I knew right then I should have stopped and walked away, but I didn’t, because I liked the way it felt. It was cold out, but suddenly the whole street began to feel hot like it was summer. I asked her out, and she said ‘yes.’ Ever since then no girl has ever said ‘no’ to me, and no guy has wanted to be my friend.”

Winston moved his Nike against Tory’s shoe and shifted his head against the comfortable pillow of Lourdes’s sleeve, making sure not to break the circle.

“My mother used to get these swollen feet ’cause she stood all day long working at the bank,” Winston began. “It was always my job to massage her feet when she got home. We already knew I had stopped growing, but that’s all we knew. Then one day, I’m massaging her feet, and she tells me how good it feels, ’cause she can’t feel the pain no more, so I keep on massaging. And then, when she tries to get up, she can’t. She tries to feel her legs, but she can’t feel nothin’. Doctors said it was some kind of freak virus, but we all know the truth, even if Mama won’t say it. I paralyzed her legs. A few weeks later, we knew for sure that I was growing backward, too.”

Winston wiped a tear from his eye, and Tory began to speak. “There was this blind boy in my neighborhood, with allergy problems so bad a skunk could have walked into the room, and he wouldn’t have smelled it. Once I started breaking out, he was the only boy who liked me. Then one day he brushed his fingertips across my face, because he wanted to see me, you know, the way blind people do. He pulled his hand away and turned white as a ghost, then he ran off to wash his hands over and over again, trying to wash the feel of my face off his fingers. He came down with pneumonia a few days later and was in the hospital for weeks. He was the first one to get sick from touching me. And that’s how I knew it wasn’t just zits.”

No one spoke for a while. They rested their voices and minds, listening to the singular “whoosh” of their breaths, feeling each other’s paralleled heartbeats, and it seemed to make everything okay. They needed no more words to express how they felt.

I want to forget who I am.

I never want to leave here.

I want to stay in this tight circle of four forever.

Their whole felt far greater than the sum of their parts—but they couldn’t stay like this, could they? They would freeze to death. They would starve to death. And they would never solve the mystery of who they were, and why they were dying these miserable deaths.

Yes, they were dying. Although they never dared to say it out loud, they all knew the truth. Tory’s disease would eat away at her until there was nothing left. Michael’s pas­sion would consume him like a fire, Lourdes would become so heavy her bones would no longer be able to hold her, and Winston would wither until he became an infant in search of a womb to return to, but there would be none.

But better not to think about that.

I want to forget who I am. . . .

While the others seemed content to shut their minds down, Tory could not. Mysteries did not sit well with her and she despised riddles of any sort. From the moment they had come together, she, more than the others, had struggled to understand the truth behind their shared vi­sion, and their shared journey, but all she had were half-truths.

She knew they belonged together, but why?

The vision told them that two were missing, but who?

They must have known each other from somewhere, but how?

The vision had been so contorted, confusing and over­whelming that it only left more questions in its wake. Questions—and this collective state of blissful shock.

“The truth is bigger than any of us want to know,” Lourdes had proclaimed.

“The truth is something we’re not supposed to know,” Winston had declared.

“What we don’t know can’t hurt us,” Michael had de­creed.

But those were all just excuses. Cop-outs. Tory could not accept that.

Up above, a crescent moon was coming into view within the circle of stars . . . but something was missing, thought Tory. What was it? Of course! It was the nova on the edge of the horizon. She could not see it, but she knew it was there. The dying star.

The dying star?

It began as a single thought, that suddenly grew until it became the key to the vision . . . but not just the vision . . . the key to everything! It was so simple, yet so stagger­ing, she didn’t know whether to believe it or just crawl up into a ball and disappear.

She broke the circle of four, and the moment the con­nection was broken, the world around them became cold and hostile once more. The ruined silo was no longer a haven, it was just a lonely, forgotten place where they could all die and no one would ever find them.

As they all sat up, they began to shiver. It was like com­ing out of a dream. “What’s wrong?” Winston asked Tory. Now that they were apart, they moved away from one another, withdrawing to the walls of the silo, as if, now that their senses had returned, they were ashamed of the words they had spoken and the heartbeat they had shared.

“You sick or something?” he asked.

Tory just shook her head, still reeling from the thoughts playing in her mind.

“You figured something out, didn’t you?” asked Lourdes. “Tell us.”

Tory began to shake and tried to control it. “I’m afraid to tell you,” she said, " ’cause what I’m thinking about is crazy.”

“We won’t think you’re crazy,” said Lourdes.

“I’m not afraid of that . . . I’m afraid you’ll think I’m right.”

Winston looked at Lourdes, and Michael just looked down. A wind now breathed across the open silo above them, and the heavy stone ruin began to resonate with a deep moan, like someone blowing across the lip of a bottle.

“Tell us,” said Lourdes.

Tory took a deep breath and clenched her fists until her knuckles were white. She forced her thoughts into words. “We know that all of this started when that Scorpion Star blew up last week, right?”

The others nodded in agreement.

“But . . . that star didn’t just blow up, did it?” continued Tory. “We’re just seeing it now, because of the speed of light, and stuff, but it really blew up sixteen years ago.”

Winston shifted uncomfortably. “What are you getting at?”

“Winston, you believe we have a soul, don’t you?” asked Tory.

“Yeah, so?”

“So, does every living thing have a soul?”

He took a moment to weigh the question. “I don’t know—maybe.”

“How about a star?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” said Michael. “A star’s not a living thing!”

Tory looked him right in the eye. “How do you know?”

“Because it’s just a ball of gas.”

“So? When it comes right down to it, we’re all just piles of dirt, aren’t we? Dirt and a whole lot of water.”

Michael zipped his jacket as high as it would go, but it wasn’t just the cold he was trying to keep out. “Speak for yourself,” he said.

“Let her talk!” demanded Lourdes.

“I know this sounds wild,” said Tory, “but the more I think about that vision we had, the more it makes sense . . . because it wasn’t a vision at all. It was a memory.”

Tory took a deep breath and finally spat out what she was thinking. “What if the Scorpion Star was alive? What if it had a soul, or a spirit, or whatever you want to call it . . . and when it blew up all those years ago, its soul blew up, too . . . into six pieces that flew through space a zillion times faster than light, and ended up right here on earth. What if it became our souls? What if it became us?”

Lourdes heaved herself closer to Tory. “And sixteen years later,” added Lourdes, “when we saw the light of the explosion, it reminded us . . . and we started to move toward one another like it was an instinct.”

“No!” Winston shook his head furiously, “No, you’re crazy.” He put his hands over his ears and pulled his knees up. “And anyway,” he said, “if it’s true we’d all have to born on the same day, wouldn’t we? The same day the star exploded.”

Tory hesitated for a moment. She hadn’t thought it through that far yet.

“When’s your birthday?” Winston asked her.

“May 23rd?” she offered.

“Ha!” shouted Winston. “My birthday’s June 15th! You’re wrong!”

“Maybe not,” said Michael, and all eyes turned to him. “I was born on April 20th, but I was six weeks premature. I was supposed to be born at the beginning of June.” He turned to Tory. “Were you early or late?”

Tory shrugged. “Don’t know. My mother and me . . . we didn’t talk much.”

“I was right on time,” chimed in Lourdes. “June sec­ond.”

Everyone turned to Winston.

“June fifteenth, huh?” said Michael. “I’ll bet you were two weeks late, weren’t you?”

Winston wouldn’t look him in the eye. He pulled his knees up to his chest again.

“Well, Winston?” said Tory.

Winston picked the ground with a twig and finally said, “My Mom always said I was too stubborn to come into this world when I was expected. I came in my own time . . . two weeks late.”

Tory gasped. “Then we were all supposed to be born on the same day!”

Michael nodded, “Not just the same day . . . but the same second, I’ll bet.” He looked down, and found in the debris of the silo the shattered remains of an ancient Coke bottle—he picked it up and pieced the shards of the bottle together. “Check this out—sixteen years ago, our parents conceived each of us at the same instant in time . . . and at that same exact moment . . . BOOM!” He dropped the bottle, and the shards scattered as they hit the hard earth. ". . . The star died . . . and we got ready to be born.”

Winston stared at the broken glass, looking a little bit sick. He didn’t say anything—just closed his eyes and held his knees tightly to his chest. Tory could tell that he was trying desperately to make this information go away. The way he looked at things—it’s like he wanted all of creation to fit nice and neatly in a little box, and whatever didn’t fit he just ignored. Well, this time Tory knew he couldn’t ig­nore it—he’d have to stretch that little box.

“C’mon, Winston, you can deal with it,” said Tory. “Make the stretch.”

“I ain’t no bungee cord, okay? I don’t stretch that way.” Winston shut his eyes even tighter, and Tory could hear him grinding the last nubs of his teeth in frustration.

The soul of a star, thought Tory, how big—how powerful was the soul of a star? Even one-sixth of it must have been brighter than any other on earth. “We must be the most powerful human beings in the world!” she told her friends.

“Then why are we dying?” Winston looked at her coldly and left the silo. Since no one had an answer, they silently followed him out.

Why were they dying? thought Tory. Not just dying—but suffering hideous afflictions. Why would the brightest lights on earth be so consumed by darkness? This answer she had found was only half an answer, and it made her furious.

Outside the silo, the ground was covered by a thick fog that swirled around their ankles, and the air smelled rich with the decaying remains of an early harvest. A hint of blue on the eastern horizon told of the coming dawn, and although they had not slept, they were too tightly wound to sleep now.

“Yesterday when I closed my eyes,” said Michael, “I could almost see the faces of the others . . . but now they feel further away.” And then he dared to voice something they were all too afraid to admit might be true. “I don’t think they’re coming,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong.”

“We have to go to Nebraska,” said Tory. “To Omaha. I’m telling you some astronomer at some school there pre­dicted the explosion of the star; he has to know something that can help us.”

They did have a sense that they had to move northwest, and although Omaha didn’t leap out at them as a must-see town, it wasn’t out of their way, either—and it was the closest thing to a lead that they had, so Tory got her way. Omaha it was.

By now Lourdes had squeezed her way out of the stone entrance to the silo and joined them. Winston, however, was standing by himself, pondering the glow of the nova, which was quickly being overcome by the light of dawn. Tory reached out to touch Winston gently on the shoul­der, but Winston quickly pulled away.

“Don’t!” His sleeves fell over his hands, and he had to fight to stick his arms through them again. The jacket seemed much larger on him than it had yesterday, and his boyish voice seemed a little bit higher. “Just don’t touch me, okay?”

“Winston ...”

“I like being one person, okay. I don’t want to be one-sixth of something, or even one-fourth of something.”

“But Winston, if what I’ve said is right, it could mean so many things—look at the possibilities!”

Winston’s face hardened into the expression of a stub­born old man on a very small boy. “I don’t care to,” he said. Winston’s hand began to twitch at his side, and he turned away from Tory, but Tory still watched. He brought his hand up a little, then forced it back down, as if fighting some inner battle—but it was a battle he lost. Tory could only stare in growing dread as Winston Pell, the incredible shrinking boy, brought up his hand, slipped his thumb into his mouth, and kept it there for a long, long time.

That afternoon, at another farm hundreds of miles away in Torrington, Wyoming, Dillon Cole tore through a wheat field putting distance between himself and the farmhouse behind him. He would not look back; he would not think back, and what he left behind in that house would be put completely out of his mind.

He felt the wrecking-hunger curl up and go to sleep well fed, and when the hunger was fed, Dillon felt strong—stronger than anyone alive. What would I be with­out the wrecking-hunger? he thought. The hunger answered like a rumbling from his stomach: he would be nothing. Sometimes he felt as if the hunger were a living thing; a weed that had coiled around his soul and he couldn’t tell where it ended and where he began. He didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

But whatever it was, those four Others wanted to take it away, didn’t they? Even now they were drawn toward him, across the miles, and if they found him, they would weaken him; maybe even destroy him. They would drive a wedge between him and Deanna, and Dillon could not allow that. So they had to keep moving until . . .

Until what?

Until the hunger no longer needed to be fed.

He raced across the wheat field to the place where he had left Deanna, but when he got there, she was gone.

Dillon had left Deanna in the wheat field with little warning. They had just left a farmhouse where a family had been kind enough to give them lunch—they were crossing a field, when suddenly Dillon had told her to wait, and then doubled back over the hill toward the house again.

He had gone to feed the hunger—Deanna knew that—she could see in his face how he had been suffer­ing—strangling—but why did he have to leave her alone? He knew what happened to her when she was alone.

A wind swept across the rolling hills of wheat. The ground beneath her seemed to move, and fear gripped her. She felt one of her waking nightmares coming on again, and although she knew it could not be real, it terri­fied her all the same. Was there something there under the ground? Something coming for her? Yes! She could see it burrowing beneath the wheat. Why had Dillon left her here?

She began to run, but the fear ran with her. Finally she stumbled into a field that had already been harvested, where thick black mud swallowed her to her ankles. Something was reaching for her. She could feel it. She screamed in terror.

She fell to the mud, and the ground seemed to swallow her. Was the ground alive? Was it climbing up around her, dragging her down into darkness? She couldn’t see now—the mud was in her eyes, in her mouth. She swore she could feel a beast coming out of the mud wrapping around her like a snake, and she screamed again to chase the terror-mare away, but her screaming didn’t help.

Then something grabbed her by the wrists. At first she thought it was the ground itself reaching up to pull her even deeper, but then there was a voice. A familiar voice.

“Deanna, it’s all right!” She could barely hear Dillon through her own screams. “Look at me,” he said. “See me. Make it go away.”

Deanna, her sight still blurry, fixed on his dark eyes, pushing the foul vision of fear away.

When the terror-mare had ended, it was like coming out of a seizure, which is exactly how Dillon held her— tightly, as if she had been in the throes of convulsions. Deanna was exhausted and let all her muscles go slack, feeling the steady pressure of Dillon as he held her.

“You left me,” she said weakly.

“I’m sorry. I was wrong to—I won’t do it again.” Dil­lon picked her up and carried her to a place where the wheat was tall, and the ground was dry, then he lay her down, and tenderly wiped away the mud that had caked on her arms. Dillon was calm and relaxed. Deanna knew what that meant.

“What happened at the farmhouse?” she asked. “How bad was it?”

“I didn’t touch a thing,” said Dillon. “I just sort of planted a seed. That’s all.”

“What did you do?”

Dillon stared at her, considering the question. “I’ll tell you, if you want to know.”

But the truth was, she didn’t want to know, so she didn’t press the issue. Instead she just lay there staring up at the sky, feeling her fear curl up inside her and go to sleep as she listened to far off birds crying somewhere over the hill. Their voices sounded like screams in the distance.

“We need to keep moving,” said Dillon, helping Deanna up.

“Do we know where we’re going yet?” she asked.

“We’re not‘going’ anywhere,” Dillon answered. “We’re getting away from The Others.”

Dillon had been saying that since they left Nebraska—but it wasn’t entirely true, was it? Dillon knows where he’s going, thought Deanna, he just doesn’t know he knows. It was clear to Deanna that he was doing what he did best— tracing a pattern—but this pattern was so complex and intricate not even he could see its end.

Deanna kept her faith in Dillon, knowing that wher­ever this journey was leading, she and Dillon would be together. She held onto that thought as they headed west out of Torrington, leaving behind the farmhouse and the screaming birds.

8. Dr. Brainless And The Six Of Swords

It was a small observatory in a small university, where a man of small recognition worked feverishly to get his telescope up and running.

Winston was doubtful about the entire thing—but then he was doubtful of everything since Tory came up with that crazy stuff about the Scorpion Star. Winston feared he’d never be able to stretch himself around that one—but the others had, and now Tory was in the lead wher­ever they went.

In the two days the quartet had been together, Winston had felt his disease, or whatever it was, start to accelerate. A day ago he had chewed a sandwich on his seven-year molars. But when he ran his tongue through his mouth today, those molars were gone, receding back into his head. His front teeth were starting to get smaller and smaller. Soon all his adult teeth would be gone, and he would have no teeth at all, because his baby teeth had long since been exchanged for quarters beneath his pil­low.

The others were no better off: Lourdes’s blouse looked like a patch quilt because they kept having to sew scraps of material into it to make it larger. Tory had begun com­plaining that her joints ached something fierce, which meant that whatever was devouring her skin was begin­ning to move deeper into her body, and Michael. . . well, sometimes he looked like a madman on the verge of turn­ing into a werewolf. He complained his girl-crazies were getting worse and that his heart beat so fast, he was afraid it might blow up in his chest.

They had all hoped that coming together would slow down their deterioration, but it hadn’t—in fact, things were progressing faster, and they could all be dead in a matter of days. Winston didn’t know how an astronomer could help, but he was desperate enough to try anything now.

Finding the man was not very difficult. A simple visit to an Omaha library uncovered several articles on the ec­centric astronomer. Dr. Bayless was his name, but his cru­eler colleagues were more fond of calling him Dr. Brain­less.

Winston fought to stay ahead of Michael and Lourdes and right behind Tory as they crossed the small college campus toward the physics building. Tory still shuffled through the copies of the articles they had found, trying to read in the late twilight.

“Listen to this—it says here that Bayless’s mother was a carnival psychic, and she gypped rich people out of thousands of dollars!”

“So?” scoffed Winston.

“So, the scientific community thinks Bayless is a quack as well and gives him the cold shoulder.”

“But he predicted the explosion of Mentarsus-H,” chimed in Lourdes, in her deep, whale-belly voice. “So who’s quacking now?”

Winston turned to Michael, who seemed distracted and bothered as if the air itself was pricking his whole body with needles as he walked.

“What do you think?” asked Winston.

“He probably won’t help us unless we bring him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch,” said Michael.

Behind the physics building stood the observatory—a small domed structure painted a peeling institutional green. It was no more an emerald city than their path had been a yellow-brick road.

As they pushed their way through the squeaky doors of the observatory, they were met by the smell of old floor varnish and a twelve-foot telescope with pieces missing. It was an unimpressive observatory, consisting of little more than the crippled telescope, a desk in a far corner and an arrow on the floor pointing north—in case anyone couldn’t figure that out by themselves.

Across the room, a thin man, with thinner hair, fought with workers—trying keep them working on the tele­scope, even though it was way past five o’clock. He was tall, with a slight roundness to his back from too many years making calculations at a desk. The four kids ap­proached the ranting astronomer solemnly like a small minion of misery, and when he saw them he waved them off.

“No classes today. Go home.” His voice had a hostile, unfriendly tone that could only come from many years of bitter disappointment.

Tory cleared her throat and stepped forward. “Dr. Bayless, we’ve come a long way—we have to talk to you.”

Bayless turned to take a better look at them, then, with a disgust he didn’t even try to hide, said “My God! What happened to you?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Winston.

Around them the workers were staring and moving to­ward the doors, whispering to each other about the freaks that had just walked in.

“Go on,” Bayless shouted to the workers. “Get out— see if I care.” They were more than happy to oblige. “The cosmic event of a lifetime, and the telescope had to break down this month.”

He took a moment to look at the four of them again, shook his head—shuddering with revulsion—and let loose a bitter laugh. “Life’s misfortunes just fall at my doorstep, don’t they? If it’s not a ruined telescope, it’s the wretched of the earth. Well, how can I help you?”

“What can you tell us about supernovas?” asked Tory.

“What can’t I tell you?” he replied, slipping into profes­sor-speak. “Supernovas are the reason we’re all here. Ox­ygen, carbon, silicon—all the heavier elements are cre­ated in the explosions. Without novas, the whole universe would be little more than hydrogen gas ...” He paused and looked at them again, shuddering, but this time not laughing. “But you didn’t come here for an astronomy lecture, did you?”

“You predicted the explosion of Mentarsus-H,” said Tory. “We think our condition’s got something to do with that.”

Now Bayless’s look turned from revulsion to suspicious interest. He studied them intensely and began to pick at his ragged yellow fingernails.

“My prediction was luck,” he said. “At least that’s what my colleagues say.”

“Don’t go playing games with us, all right?” said Win­ston, pulling his thumb from his mouth. “If you know something, tell us.”

“You got a big mouth for a little kid,” said Bayless.

“I’m fifteen,” growled Winston.

Bayless sighed and nodded reluctantly. “All right, come on and sit down.”

Bayless led them to a corner of the observatory that had been set up as his office. Winston noticed that Mi­chael kept his distance, breathing in gasps, like someone suffering from asthma, and shifting his weight from one foot to another like a caged animal. He’s got it bad today, thought Winston.

“The Scorpion Star,” said Lourdes to Bayless. “Tell us how you knew.”

Bayless leaned back in his desk chair, took a sip of cold coffee, and focused on his uneven fingernails, picking at them with an unpleasant click-click-click. Finally he spoke.

“It’s a curious talent,” said Bayless, “to look at the uni­verse and know what it’s thinking. To sense that countless galaxies would be discovered in dark space. To feel that the universe is even older than most scientists think it is. To glance at a star chart and see one star missing in the tail of the Scorpion, only to see it reappear when you blink.”

“Intuition?” suggested Tory.

“My mother had it,” said Bayless. “She chose to use it to separate fools from their money and turned herself into a sideshow freak. I chose to use it for more noble pur­poses. Biology . . . astrophysics.” Then he angrily flicked a fingernail in an arc over their heads. It landed on the dark floor, where it lay like a crescent moon. “Unfortunately science has no room for intuition. Scientists find a million ways to spell ‘coincidence,’ and so I’ve become a sideshow freak after all.” Then he smiled grimly, and added, ". . . like the four of you.”

His smile made them all squirm. Everyone but Tory.

“The star blew up sixteen years ago,” said Tory. “We’ve figured out the exact date.”

“Students of astrophysics, are you?” said Bayless, be­ginning on a new fingernail.

“No,” said Tory. “That was the day each of us was conceived.”

Bayless raised his attention from his marred fingertips to the four of them. “Remarkable,” he said, studying their faces, and movements. “Remarkable. Perhaps these ex­ploding stars have more to do with us than I’ve dared to imagine.” He pulled out a microcassette recorder from his desk and hit the record button. “Do you mind if I record all this?”

“We’d rather you didn’t,” said Lourdes.

He put his tape recorder in his desk, but Winston couldn’t tell if he turned it off.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Everything to the last detail. . .”

They took a good hour to go through their stories, and Bayless listened, attentive to every word. When they were done, the astronomer was practically drooling with excite­ment.

“Shards!” he exclaimed, laughing with glee. “Shards of a shattered star!” He peered at them as if they were sub­jects he planned to study. The slight hunch of his back made him resemble a vulture.

“I’ve written about this sort of thing,” he said pacing a short, sharp path, “but never dared to publish it—but now I can present you as proof!” He looked at them with such awe, it made Winston roll his eyes. “Do you have any idea how special—how luminous you are? Why, the rest of us are mere smithereens compared to you!”

“Yeah?” said Michael. “So if we got these fantastic kick-ass souls, how come we’re so screwed up?”

His words stopped Bayless in mid-pace. “I don’t know,” he said. “By my estimation you should be living lives like no others—glorious lives with—"

“Shut up,” shouted Winston. Hearing what his life should have been made it all seem even worse. He started to stomp around like a small child, and Tory put her hand on his head to calm him down. It only made him angrier.

“We don’t need ought-a-be’s,” said Tory. “We need some why-nots.”

Bayless looked at them and sighed. The answers they needed were clearly not easy to come by. Bayless pon­dered his inoperable telescope for a moment, then turned back to them decisively.

“Science can’t help you,” said Bayless. “Not unless you want to wait and see what they find in your autopsies.”

The thought made Winston shiver, and he swore he could feel himself shrink a fraction of an inch.

“Then what do you suggest?” said Michael, his breath­ing heavier, his voice even more impatient than it had been an hour ago.

Bayless thought about it, sighed in resignation, and reached into his bottom drawer, pulling out an old deck of cards that looked like they hadn’t been used in ages.

“When I was very young, my mother made me read cards for rich old women. I once told a woman she was going to die before the sun went down. She stormed out of the tent in a huff and was promptly trampled by the fair’s elephant.”

Michael stood engulfed in his own growing frustration. “We need real help and real answers, can’t you see that? We didn’t come all this way to read dumb old tarot cards!”

“And I didn’t get degrees in biology and astrophysics to read dumb old tarot cards, but here we are, aren’t we?”

Michael, his breathing helplessly heavy, his body un­controllably tense, his pants unrelentingly tight, looked to the others. “Are you going to sit here for this garbage?” Clearly his frustration had little to do with tarot cards—so Lourdes gently took his hand.

“Just relax,” she told him. “Take deep breaths. What you’re feeling will go away.”

“No it won’t,” he said. “You know it won’t.”

He shook off Lourdes’s hand and stormed along the arrow on the floor, until he crashed out of the observa­tory, into the night.

“Don’t mind him,” Winston told Bayless. “He’s just pointing north.”

Tory was about to go after him, but Lourdes stopped her. “He just needs some air,” she said. “He’ll be all right.”

When the echo of Michael’s exit had faded, Bayless re­turned to shuffling the cards.

“Does it have to be tarot cards?” asked Winston. “Where I come from only ignorant folk use ’em. They’re hard to believe in.”

Bayless continued to shuffle. “It’s not the cards you need to believe in, it’s the skill of the dealer,” he said. He pulled out a card and handed it to Winston. “It’s like play­ing poker. Any idiot can deal cards—but how many peo­ple can deal a straight-flush every time?”

Winston looked at his card. A small boy on a golden ram, racing out of control through the sky. In one hand the boy held a torch that fought to survive a brutal wind. To Winston the boy seemed terrified.

“The Page of Wands,” noted Bayless. “Unless I’ve lost my touch, that card is you.”

Winston studied the card. He didn’t quite know what it meant, but he did have a sense of identification—as if he truly could be this boy clinging helplessly to the back of the wild wooly ram.

“If I wanted to,” said Bayless, “I could tell your fortune with baseball cards and the result would be exactly the same.”

Winston cast his eyes down.

“All right, then,” said Tory. “Deal us a fortune.”

Bayless smiled. “Yes—let’s desecrate the halls of sci­ence, shall we?” And with that, he dealt seven cards, face down—six formed a triangle, and the seventh he placed in the triangle’s center.

He reached toward the two cards at the bottom. “If I remember correctly, these cards will show us the pre­sent.” He flipped the first one, revealing a cloaked figure in a small boat, navigating a troubled sea.

“Death?” asked Lourdes.

“No, the Six of Swords,” Bayless replied. Winston looked more closely at the card to see a cargo of six swords resting in the keel of the ship. “Six souls on a restless journey.”

“Then there are six of us!” said Tory. “Now we have proof!”

“If you can call this proof,” mumbled Winston.

Bayless flipped the second card. A chariot being torn apart by a black horse and a white horse. Bayless looked at the card, and began to sweat just a bit.

“Death?” asked Lourdes.

“The Charioteer,” said Bayless. “It’s making me uncom­fortable, but I don’t know why . . . See, the horses that pull this chariot are very powerful. They have to be stopped or the chariot will be destroyed.”

“So what does that mean?” asked Winston.

“Not sure yet.”

Bayless went to the next two cards. “These cards will show where your journey must take you.”

He anxiously flipped the first to reveal an image of a tower being destroyed by lightning.

“The Tower. Does the tower mean anything to you?”

The three kids shook their head.

Bayless nodded. “It will soon.”

He flipped the next card. It showed a dark figure cov­ered in shrouds, in the midst of desolation.

“Death?” asked Lourdes.

“No—The Hermit.” Bayless’s voice was becoming shaky, filled with both fear and wonder. “This is someone you must face . . . if you get that far.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Lourdes, as Bayless began to wring his fingers.

“He frightens me.” Bayless said, confused. “The Hermit shouldn’t frighten me. . . .”

His eyes darted between the three kids, and he re­turned to the cards. “Well, we’ve begun, we have to finish it,” he said. Now Winston was beginning to feel as if he didn’t want to see the rest.

“This is what you will find at journey’s end,” Bayless said. “These two cards are your destiny.”

He reached for the first card, hesitated for a moment, then flipped both cards simultaneously.

Winston looked at the first, and his heart missed a beat. Lourdes didn’t have to say it this time. The masked figure of darkness was unmistakable.

“Death,” said Bayless. “And the Five of Wands.” The sec­ond card showed a man and woman with five glowing torches doing battle with a dragon. “Death will surround you. And those who survive will face a greater challenge.”

“What sort of challenge?” whispered Winston.

“If I knew I would tell you.” Bayless quickly flipped the cards back over so he didn’t have to see them. “I forgot how much I hated telling fortunes.”

“What about the last card?” asked Tory.

Bayless cleared his throat.

“The central card. It binds your past, present and fu­ture. History and destiny.” He didn’t even reach for it. “Maybe you don’t want to see this card.”

“Turn it,” demanded Tory, and so the astronomer-turned-fortune-teller reached for the central card with a shaky hand, grabbed it by the corner, and pulled on it.

The card ripped in half.

It had caught on a splinter of wood in the old desk. Bayless gasped in horror, as he looked at the torn half of the card in his hand.

Winston took the card from him and pulled the torn half from the table, holding the two halves together. The card showed a golden circle, containing a creature: half-man, half-woman. In the four corners were a torch, a star, a sword and a grail.

“What is this card?” demanded Winston, but Bayless only shook his head and stammered like a crazy man.

“Tell us!”

“Everything.” He said. “This card is The World.”

And their fortune tore it in half.

Bayless stood up, his eyes darting around the observa­tory. He gasped, a revelation coming to him, and he began to rummage through his papers. “I understand,” said Bayless. He was terrified, but at the same time over­come by some excitement that the others were yet to un­derstand.

And there was something else . . . a strange hum that was growing in the room. A vibration that made every­thing shake.

“What do you understand?” shouted Tory. “Tell us!”

“I’m ready for this,” said Bayless. “Everything I’ve done—everything I’ve written, everything I’ve learned—my whole life has been for this.” He began piling up books on his desk, pulling them from shelves and talking as if he made perfect sense, which he didn’t. “I’ll come with you—I’ll document every single moment and no one will laugh at me again.”

By now the gears and casing of the telescope had begun to rattle and groan with the strange vibration. The three kids stood up, and looked around in terror. Something was very wrong here.

“Listen to me!” shouted Bayless, ripping open the drawers of his filing cabinet and pulling out piles of pa­pers. “There are things I can tell you; things I’ve never published because until now they’ve never made sense. Things you have to know!”

The roar in the observatory was deafening now, an earsplitting shrieking that sounded almost like voices. But Bayless was too excited to care.

“I know what’s happening to you!” proclaimed Bay­less.

But before he could get any further, there was a blast of light, and they all began to scream.

Because the room was suddenly filled with monsters.

Michael did not hear their screams—he was far away, bolting aimlessly over the fields, cursing the stars that looked down on him, cursing the earth that supported him, until his wanderings brought him in a circle back to the buildings of the university.

A class was letting out, and he hunched in the shadows, watching every pretty girl that passed—and they were all pretty in one way or another to Michael. As the crowd thinned out, one girl was left by a bicycle rack.

Michael stepped out of the shadows. He thought he would just watch her as she rode away. That’s all. Just watch.

For days Michael had looked away from girls—he had fought that burning feeling by standing in the cold rain, by screaming into empty fields—but now his resistance was low. He was tired . . . and before he even knew it, he had turned on his peculiar magnetism like a tractor beam.

When the girl heard his footsteps stalking closer, she didn’t think anything of it at first. “Did you enjoy the class?” she asked.

Michael just stared at her, enjoying her every move. “I’m not a student,” he answered.

She began to get a bit apprehensive, glancing around to see if any of her friends were still there, but everyone was gone. They were alone.

“You’re very pretty.” Michael took a step closer, she glanced at him and in an instant she was caught.

Before Michael could pause for a moment’s thought, he was kissing her and she didn’t resist for a moment.

Michael broke away.

“No,” he said, fighting it, “that’s not what I meant to do . . . What I really need . . . I mean what I really want to do is just. . . talk. That’s all.”

But she didn’t hear him, she was staring into his eyes the way they always did. She spoke, almost giggling, as if this were all part of a dream. “My name’s Rebecca,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Michael.”

She smiled and leaned forward to kiss him again. “Why am I doing this?” she said.

“Full moon,” said Michael, although it wasn’t. He was burning inside now, the sweat beading on his face.

Rebecca glanced over her shoulder, to make sure that everyone was gone, then took his hand and led him off down a dim, tree-lined path.

As they ran, Rebecca looked to the right and left. Mi­chael knew she was searching for some hidden place where they could get back to what they had started—a place to match that dark hidden place in Rebecca’s mind that Michael had already found. She was already falling into that darkness with the thrill of a sky-diver.

They came to a windowless building—the school’s physical plant. Steam billowed from the roof, air whistled through vents, and inside a pump rang out a dull toll sending water, gas and electricity to the many buildings of the campus.

Rebecca pushed Michael up against the door, kissed him, then giggled. “You kiss good,” she said.

It was getting out of hand. He knew that he should never have looked at her, but now his worries were drowning in a stormy sea of Rebecca’s kisses. Going around the bases was not a good thing for Michael. He had only done it once—in Baltimore, and after what hap­pened there, he swore not to let it happen again. Since then, bunting his way to first had been the name of the game—but suddenly he realized that he was about to swing away.

“You really don’t want to do this,” said Michael feebly, but even as he said it, he gripped her tighter and felt his own sense of control slipping away.

They leaned into the door, and it squealed open into a cavern smelling brackish and damp, where a water pump pounded and rattled them from head to toe.

Maybe it will be different, thought Michael, maybe it will be all right, and he clung to that thought like a parachute, as he slipped into the darkness, like a man leaping from a plane.

Monsters!

The shadows Tory Smythe saw leaping around the ob­servatory became permanently carved into her mind. Al­though it all happened in just a few seconds, she knew ex­actly what she had seen.

Shadow-black tentacles wrapped around the cradle of the telescope. A clouded face that swarmed with a million hideous insects descended upon the astronomer’s desk and something with cold dark fur brushed past Tory, its breath sickly sweet.

In an instant the telescope was torn from its moorings and came crashing down. The primary focus lens broke free and spun on the ground like a coin, casting patterns of refracted light around the circular room. Bayless was screaming—everyone was screaming—then the crea­tures let out their own unearthly wail and a blinding ex­plosion knocked them all to the ground. Something leapt at Tory. She opened her mouth to scream . . . and it was gone. The beasts were all gone. The light faded, and she just sat there, hands pressed against her ears, eyes shut tight, and her face contorted in a silent scream. She heard the others screaming, though—Winston and Lourdes— she heard them burst out of the observatory and race down the hill.

But Tory couldn’t move. She had heard old stories of how looking at some monsters could turn you to stone, and she wondered if that had happened to her. She cursed herself for having come here.

I don’t believe in monsters she told herself, but that didn’t make a bit of difference, because she knew what she had seen.

At last she was able to force her eyes open. The ruined observatory was silent and still. The only light in the room came from the fading fragments of the telescope lens, which had exploded and sent glass splintering in all direc­tions.

As she finally got to her feet, Tory realized that what­ever Dr. Bayless was going to tell them was going to re­main his secret. He would be viewing no more stars. He would be telling no more fortunes. Whatever these beasts were, they had not wanted Bayless to tell what he knew. They had caused the explosion—they had come to si­lence him.

She couldn’t help but feel responsible for what had happened to the astronomer. She felt pity for the man, but even more she felt fury that she was again left with more questions and riddles. It was that fury that overcame her fear, and she decided she wouldn’t run just yet—there were still things she had to do.

She grabbed whatever was left of the books and papers Bayless had pulled out and shoved them in her pack. She found the seven tarot cards scattered on the floor and took them as well, and then found a canvas tarp in the corner and brought it over to Bayless.

Around the room, the light was getting dimmer as the glowing splinters of the lens faded. The lens had shattered into half a dozen pieces. Five of those pieces were embed­ded in the walls like glass lightning bolts. The sixth had found a much more specific destination.

As Tory covered Bayless’s body, she knew what she had to do—she owed at least that much to the poor man. And so before drawing the canvas over his face, she reached toward the silent astronomer, then took a firm hold of that last shard of crystal and, biting back her ter­ror, pulled it from between Dr. Bayless’s eyes.

They found Michael at the edge of the campus, retch­ing his guts out in the middle of the street—and had to rush him out of the way of a speeding fire engine.

He knelt there by the curb, heaving and gripping his stomach.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” demanded Win­ston.

Tory and Lourdes knelt beside him and helped him stand up.

His face was wet from tears and pale—almost green.

“What happened?” asked Lourdes.

Michael didn’t answer. Instead he just held his stomach and forced his breathing back under control. Finally he said, “I got lost . . . that’s all.” And no one dared to ques­tion him further.

They turned and headed off in a direction their inter­nal compass told them was west, while behind them, way down the road, the fire truck stopped in front of a physical plant that was billowing black smoke.

9. Light And Shadows

That night the storm returned with a vengeance even before the streets had a chance to dry. The night that had seemed so steamy quickly turned cold, and the sky let loose an unrelenting assault of sleet. It battered the windshield of the van with such fury that they had to pull off to the side of the road and wait.

Tory studied the map; they were somewhere west of Omaha now, in the middle of nowhere, and it occurred to Tory with an awful shiver that they were always in the middle of nowhere. It seemed from the moment her jour­ney had begun, Tory had slipped into the dark festering world that existed between the walls and beneath the floors of the rest of the world. A rat-ridden place filled with the torn, ruined things that nobody wanted. They were all now residents of this waste-world, and the eerie capriciousness of the weather—never deciding on hot or cold, wet or dry—made the rest of humanity seem further and further away. It seemed to Tory that their lives had slipped into a place so dismal that souls perished and only weeds could take their place.

As the sleet pummeled the van, Winston sat in the back with Lourdes, sewing pieces of fabric onto her clothes so that they would still fit.

“Maybe The Others are dead,” Winston dared to whisper at one point. “Maybe they were killed by those monster-things that tried to get us.”

Lourdes shook her head and said, “If they were dead, then why do we still feel pulled to the west?”

And Lourdes was right—the pull was still there and still strong. Tory, who always rode shotgun, was the offi­cial navigator, and when she looked at the map, certain roads and cities seemed to jump off the page at her. Inter­state 80, Big Springs, Nebraska, Torrington, Wyoming. They had to go to these places, in hopes of finding traces of the other two who were still missing from their little band. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had to go on. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, Tory kept telling her­self. When we’re all together, we’ll be stronger—and it will all make sense; she clung to that belief as if it were a lifeline.

Michael had little to say on the matter. Since they had left Omaha, he had become completely withdrawn. He sat silently in the driver’s seat in an icy daze. His de­meanor had become as hard and bitter as the torrents of ice that brutalized the van.

The moment they got to the van, Tory had begun leaf­ing through the things she had scavenged from the ob­servatory. First she puzzled over the cards: the Six of Swords and the Charioteer; The Tower and the Hermit; Death, and the Five of Wands. And the torn world. Then she began to look through the books. Astronomy mostly—textbooks that Bayless had written himself. Page after page yielded noth­ing relevant to Tory, and now as they sat in the ice storm, she seemed no closer to a solution.

“Something that he said keeps going over and over in my mind,” Tory told the others. “He said that his whole life was just preparing him for this. . . for us.”

“Then why don’t you look at his whole life?”

It was Michael who spoke, and everyone was startled to hear him speak after being silent for so long. “He was a biologist before he was an astronomer,” said Michael. “And you’ve been looking at the wrong books.”

Michael then held up the book he had been looking at.

It was a book on parasites.

“Bayless wrote this years before he became an astrono­mer,” said Michael. “It says here in the introduction that when he was a kid his pet dog was just about eaten from the inside out by worms. Since then he was fascinated by parasites—creatures that live off of other creatures.”

Then Michael began to read from Bayless’s book: “There are whole universes of life hiding in the dark places where no one dares to explore. They thrive in the hidden expanses we take for granted . . . between the very cells of our body . . . between the walls we call our world.”

Tory gasped. “He said that?”

Michael nodded, and Tory shivered. It was like hear­ing a man echoing her thoughts from beyond the grave.

Michael passed around the book, and they leafed through it. It was a bizarre collection of diagrams, photos and case studies, and Bayless seemed to have had a mor­bid fascination with it all. There was a picture of a tape­worm the size of a garden hose found in the gut of an ele­phant. There was a barnacle the size of a trash barrel on the back of a whale. There were leeches from the Amazon the size of running shoes.

“This was his specialty before he took up astronomy,” said Michael. “The study of parasitic organisms.”

A gust of wind rocked the van and a sheet of ice as­saulted the windshield like a cascade of ball bearings. Winston asked the question that no one else dared to voice.

“What’s it got to do with us?”

Michael couldn’t look him in the face. He turned to look out of the window, but all the windows were fogged with the steam of their breath.

Between the walls of the world thought Tory. Right now it seemed no world existed beyond the small capsule of the van.

“Something happened to me while you were all still in the observatory,” said Michael. “I didn’t want to talk about it . . . but I think I’d better. ...”

Everyone leaned closer as Michael began his story.

“I did get lost for a while, just like I said,” began Mi­chael. “But then I ended up outside of a lecture hall. There was this girl unchaining her bike. I went up to her, just to talk, you know . . . but before I knew it we were kissing.

“After a while she pulls me into this doorway. The door opens, and we go in—and I know we shouldn’t, but by now I don’t care, cause I’m feeling like nothing else in the world matters.

“But then I think about what happened with that girl, back when I lived in Baltimore—the only time things ever went too far. Thinking about it makes me scared, so I push myself away from this girl. I run clear across the room, and I think it’s over . . . but then I look back at her from across the room . . . and that’s when I see the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s surrounded by fire—an unnatural blue-green fire— and it’s all over her, but she’s not burning . . . and the fire—it has a dozen arms and legs—but worst of all it has eyes. It’s alive! But all I can do is sit there and watch, too horrified to even scream, as this thing wraps itself around her like a cocoon . . . and she doesn’t even know. It’s like she’s hypnotized.

“Finally the girl goes limp, and the monster turns to me. I try to run, but my feet slip and when I look back it’s moving toward me through the air—and then in a second it’s on me and I swear I can feel this monster oozing back inside me, right through the pores of my skin . . . and for the first time I realize that the feeling inside that always drives me crazy . . . isn’t me—it’s this thing that’s been living here inside me, like a leech, stealing away all my strength.

“When I look up, I see the girl walking toward me. It looks like there’s nothing wrong with her—but the room is on fire all around her, real fire, orange and hot, just like what happened with that girl in Baltimore—only that time I never saw the creature, because I didn’t rip myself away from it . . . and that time I didn’t get the girl out of the fire in time.

“So now, with the fire all around, I pick her up, carry her out before the fire gets us, and as soon as we’re out­side, she turns to me and smiles, not even noticing any­thing strange is going on.

“And that’s when I realize that she’s dead.

“Yeah, she’s alive, but she’s also dead! That thing . . . it ate her soul and left her body alive!

“She smiles at me and says Hi, like everything’s blue skies and sunshine, and I think She doesn’t even know! Some­thing has just devoured her soul, and she doesn’t even know!

“I couldn’t stand it, so I ran from her as fast as I could . . . but only got to the next street before I started puking my guts out. That’s when you found me.”

Only an angry chorus of sleet responded to Michael’s terrible tale. No one had anything they could say. No words of consolation. No advice. Everyone’s eyes began to sting with cold tears.

Michael bit his tongue to stop his teeth from chattering and wiped the tears from his eyes. “So now I know why we’re dying. Those horrible beasts in the observatory didn’t just come out of nowhere. They were there all along. They’re here now. All four of them.”

Someone let out a wail of agony—it must have been Lourdes, and then tears of anger, terror, but most of all helplessness, burst out around the van. It was simply too much to take alone, and in an instant all eight of their hands were reaching for the others, longing to make con­nection once more—even Winston. They clasped hands, the circle of four was closed, and their breath and their heartbeats began to match—panicked and fast. The truth was indeed terrible, but easier to grasp and accept when the circle was closed.

“We’re possessed ...” said Winston.

“Not possessed, infected,” said Tory.

“Infested,” offered Michael. “The way people get lice . . . the way dogs get worms. Each of us is infested by some . . . thing. They must have found their way inside us a few years ago, when all the bad stuff started . . . and ever since then, they’ve been growing.”

They looked at each other’s faces, for the first time see­ing the ravages of the infestation for what they really were. The creature that hid within Lourdes crushed life out of others and turned it into fat. The one clinging to Tory could turn flesh rancid from disease. The one in Winston paralyzed anything it touched and was stealing Winston’s life away years at a time. And everyone knew what Michael’s did.

“Why us?” said Winston, shaking his head, still not wanting to believe.

“Because we’re star-shards,” answered Tory. “It’s like that elephant and the giant tapeworm; these monsters can only live and grow inside of us.” Tory tried to feel the creature within her, but all she could feel was the pain in her face and her joints. “We might have the world’s big­gest souls . . . but they’ve become infested by the blackest parasites that ever existed.”

“Gould be that everyone’s got them,” suggested Lourdes. ". . . it’s just that ours have grown a few million times bigger than normal.”

Winston shivered. “Cosmic Killer Leeches,” he said. “I wish my father were alive—he could have pulled a cure, right out of his pharmacy.”

“Yeah,” said Michael. “Shampoo twice a day, and drink lots of sulfuric acid.” They all laughed at that, and found it strange that they could laugh at all. Perhaps they weren’t as hopeless and helpless as they thought.

“We gotta figure out a way to destroy them,” said Tory, “before they destroy us.”

“Or worse,” said Lourdes.

Tory looked at Lourdes, wondering what could possi­bly be worse than having an invisible parasite rout your soul . . . and then she looked at the central card that Bay­less had dealt to them, and shivered. The torn world. . .

How powerful were these creatures? How many people in this world could they destroy if they had the chance—and what if the kids lost complete control and gave them­selves over to the will of these dark beasts, choosing to feed them by visiting their horrors upon others? To para­lyze them. To disease them. To crush them. To devour their souls.

If any one of them chose that path rather than bear the suffering, the devastation left behind would be unimagin­able. It would be like tearing the world in half.

They looked at each other, four souls, thinking a single thought.

“My God!” said Tory. “We have to find the other two!”

10. The Fall Of Blackburn Street

Dillon dreamed he was riding on the back of a panther—a great, dark beast bounding into a wild un­known. The power he felt in the dream made the rest of humanity seem small and unimportant, and as he rode he saw the weak, guilt-ridden boy he was before trampled beneath the beast’s pounding feet. Dillon awoke from the dream exhilarated, out of breath, and knowing that it was not entirely a dream. He wondered why he had resisted for so long.

His wrecking-hunger had evolved. Now it felt like a creature, burning with primal fury, yet acutely intelligent . . . and Dillon had learned that riding this beast was far better than letting it ride him.

He imagined Deanna there beside him, riding her own creature—a powerful pale horse—a terror-mare. To­gether he and Deanna would charge their beasts into the wind, and no one would stop them as they sped down paths of greater and greater destruction.

Where are you taking me? Dillon would silently ask it, and although it never answered, Dillon knew that it had a glo­rious purpose that he would soon understand.

Deanna, on the other hand, was no longer so en­tranced by her situation.

She had watched Dillon change from a teary-eyed boy, crushed by the weight of his own terrible actions, to a young man who was getting far too sure of himself.

Yet in spite of that, Deanna knew that he still needed her. Who else but Deanna could look deep into his eyes and find something inside that, even now, was still good and worthy of love? And if her capacity for love were greater than her capacity for fear, perhaps it would save her in spite of the destruction. Perhaps it would save them both.

Dillon gratefully accepted her love, and, in turn, she accepted his wisdom:

“Forget about the ‘Other’ ones,” he had told her. “They’ll only bring us trouble.” If Deanna didn’t accept this she would have to face the alternative, and so Deanna pushed The Others out of her mind as they raced head­long into the great northwest.

“We’re the strong ones,” Dillon had said. “Those Oth­ers are nothing compared to us.” And it was true. She and Dillon were stronger than all The Others combined.

Then why did she feel so weak?

Dillon had said he was like her good luck charm, but she wasn’t exactly wearing him around her neck; it was more like she had climbed into his pocket and hidden there.

Was her soul so frail that all she could do was follow him, borrowing his will for her own? She had been a hos­tage of her fears, and Dillon had freed her. . . . Did that make her his hostage now? She didn’t know—but she did know that she would follow him to the ends of the earth . . . which was exactly where she suspected they were headed as they crossed from Wyoming into Idaho.

The streets of Idaho Falls were gilded with a million orange leaves. The tall oaks on Blackburn Street had begun to shed summer, day by day, but still kept a dense cloak of yellowing leaves.

Dillon and Deanna arrived late in the afternoon, his arm around her waist, and her hand wedged in his back pocket, holding each other the way people in love often do. They stood there, in the middle of the quaint residen­tial street, staring at the old homes on either side. Dillon looked at the homes one by one, then turned his head, as if sniffing the air.

“What are you doing?” asked Deanna.

“Getting to know the neighborhood,” he answered. “Looking for a place to eat.”

Deanna didn’t like the sound of that. “Promise me you won’t do anything bad here.”

Dillon turned to her blinking, as if he didn’t know what she meant. “I promise that I won’t do anything that isn’t absolutely necessary,” he said.

A young boy breezed past them on his bike, stopping at the second house on the right. A small license plate on the back of the bike said “Joey.” Dillon slipped his hand from Deanna’s waist, and he approached the boy, with Deanna following in his wake.

The boy hopped off his bike and strolled toward his front door.

“Hey, Joey,” shouted Dillon. “Your brother around?”

Joey turned to look at Dillon, studied him for a mo­ment, then said, “Naah, Jason’s still at practice. He’ll be home soon, though. . . . You friends of his?”

“Yeah,” said Dillon. “I was on the team with him last year.”

The boy looked at Dillon doubtfully.

“Jason tells me you’re almost as fast as him now,” said Dillon. “Hell, you even walk like him!”

Joey beamed at that, but tried to hide it. Any hesitation the boy had was now gone. “You can wait inside if you like.”

Deanna turned to Dillon as they neared the porch. “How’d you know he had a brother?” she whispered.

“It was obvious,” Dillon whispered back. “He walks like he’s copying someone, but not someone who’s grown up. . . . He wears hand-me-downs, even though he can afford those brand-new running shoes . . . he rode up to the house like he was competing in a race . . . it’s all part of a pattern that says he’s some jock’s kid brother.”

Deanna stared at Dillon in amazement, and he just smiled. “C’mon,” he said, almost blushing behind his boyish freckles. “You know me pretty well—this stuff shouldn’t impress you anymore.”

Joey led them into the house. Dillon noted how the boy used keys instead of knocking, how he glanced up the stairs, and how quietly he closed the front door. Dillon took a sniff of the air, and said “How’s your grandfather doing?”

Joey shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Better, now that he’s back from the hospital.”

Dillon turned to Deanna and winked. Deanna just shook her head. What a show-off!

“Jason’ll be back soon, you can wait for him here.” Joey left them alone in the kitchen and went back out to fiddle with the chain on his bike. Once Joey was gone, Dillon got down to work. He began to search through drawers and cabinets—he didn’t take anything, he just let his eyes pore over everything he saw, observing . . . cataloguing . . . filing the information away.

Deanna had seen him do this the day before, at the farmhouse they had stopped at. Dillon had secretly rifled through the drawers, closets—even under sofa cushions.

Deanna had asked what he was searching for. “Clues,” he had told her.

Now his hands were moving quickly through the kitchen, his mind working with such force that Deanna could swear that she could feel it pulsating like a high- tension wire. He was fascinating to watch.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” said Deanna. “I want to know what you know—I want to see what you see.”

“Okay,” said Dillon. “Five people live here. Parents, two sons, and a grandfather. Mother smokes, father quit. Kids do okay in school.” He pointed to a picture on the refrigerator. “This is the older brother and his girlfriend, right? But something’s not right there—look at his smile; he’s not smiling for the picture—he’s smiling at the person taking the picture.”

“So who took the picture?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Dillon. “The angle, the back­ground, the way the girl’s gloating to have snagged the track star? Her sister took the picture, and good ol’ Jason would rather be dating her!”

Deanna just shook her head, marveling.

“Let’s check out the parents,” said Dillon. He glanced around, until setting his sights on a high knickknack shelf. Then he pulled down a small bronze Statue of Liberty pencil sharpener and held it out for Deanna to examine.

“The parents honeymooned in New York—but look—there’s no dust on it, even though there’s dust on the rest of the shelf. . . that means someone’s taken Miss Liberty down recently, and has been thinking about it. Smells like dishwashing soap. The mother took it down— either she’s nostalgic, or she’s worried about the marriage for some reason. Let’s see what the doorknobs have to say.”

“Doorknobs?”

Dillon opened the back door and touched the outside and inside doorknobs, then smelled his hands.

“Men’s cologne going out, women’s perfume coming in—not his wife’s, because I can smell that everywhere else. The husband is seeing another woman. Good chance his wife knows, and divorce is in the air. Will they break up? Let’s find out!”

Dillon opened the refrigerator; “He keeps his beer on the same shelf as the milk and the soda—not in the door all by itself.” Dillon opened the hallway closet. “Every­thing in this house is neatly arranged—these people love order and tranquility, right down to giving their sons sound-alike names. But Dad’s coats are mixed in with Mom’s, instead of on their own side: their order is tightly intertwined.” Dillon turned and glanced at the back door again. “And his dirty work boots—he said. “They’re in­side the house, on a mat; he’s considerate enough not to leave them on the wood floor, and she’s accepting enough not to make him put them outside.”

“So?”

“So if we leave this little family-stew to cook, I can tell that dear old Dad gives up the other woman, and the marriage is saved. Ninety-six percent probability.”

“You’re incredible!” said Deanna. “Sherlock Holmes couldn’t be that exact!”

Dillon shrugged. “It’s like looking at a work of art,” ex­plained Dillon. “It’s just a bunch of paint, but when you look at it you see the Mona Lisa, right? Well, when I look at all of these things, I see a picture, too. I see who these people were, who they are, and who they’re probably going to be.”

“What do you see when you look at me?” asked Deanna.

Dillon didn’t even try—he just shook his head. “You’re like me,” he said. “Too complex to figure out.”

She smiled at him, and he took her hand. “C’mon,” he said, “I know all I need to know about this family . . . let’s move on.”

As they left, Deanna noticed the way he rolled his neck, and the way sweat was beginning to bead on his forehead.

“The wrecking-hunger . . . it’s back again isn’t it?”

“I try not to think about it,” he said, and tugged on her arm a little more urgently. “C’mon.”

Out back, they saw a man in the next yard patching up a hole in a boat.

“Hi! We’re Joey and Jason’s cousins,” said Dillon to the man.

“Josh and Jennifer,” added Deanna with a smirk.

The neighbor nodded a quiet hello. Dillon noticed the circles beneath his eyes, and the ghost of a missing wed­ding ring on his tan left hand. Dillon listened to the way in which a dog inside the house yowled.

“Sorry to hear about your wife,” said Dillon. . . .

On they went, weaving in and out of homes and yards, pretending to be people they weren’t—and no one doubted them because Dillon was so very good at the game. He knew the exact things to say that would make people open up their homes, and their hearts, telling him things they would never usually tell a stranger. It was as if they were hypnotized and didn’t know it.

All the while Dillon’s sweats had gotten worse, his breath had gotten shorter, and his face was becoming flushed.

In the last home, a woman had offered them iced tea and looked at Dillon with worry in her eyes.

“You sure you don’t want me to call a doctor?” she asked, but Dillon shook his head and stumbled out into the street.

“He’ll be okay,” said Deanna, covering. “Asthma—his medicine’s back in our cousin’s house.” Deanna left the house and hurried after Dillon, feeling her own worry ex­plode into fear. More than just fear . . . terror. Her own familiar brand of terror.

At the edge of the street, Dillon leaned against a tree, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. His breath came in short labored gasps. Not yet, he told the hunger that gnawed on the ragged fringe of his soul. It was so powerful now, he knew if he didn’t feed it soon it would turn on him and devour him in an instant. You have to wait! You have to wait until everything’s ready, he told the hunger. Dillon kept telling himself that he was its master, but all beasts turn on their masters if they’re not fed.

By now the sun was low in the sky, casting hazy pat­terns of light through the trees. Patterns of light, patterns of life—sights, sounds, and an impossible puzzle of rela­tionships between the people on this peaceful street.

Not so impossible. Dillon looked from house to house, jumbling all the patterns in his mind, looking for a com­mon thread . . . and at last he found it. He marveled at the power of the solution he had found. It was like a key to open a great Pandora’s box. But it was so big—many times bigger than what he had done the day before. Did he dare do it? The wrecking-hunger answered by twisting his gut and bringing him to his knees.

Deanna ran toward him pale and frightened, and held him to keep him from falling to the pavement.

“Tell me what you need,” she said. “I can help you if I know.”

“You already know,” he answered.

Deanna looked away. Yes, she knew. He said he had come here looking for a place to eat. But deep down Deanna knew that he really meant a place to feed.

The look on Dillon’s face had become so helpless and desperate—so consumed by the hunger, she would have destroyed something herself to save him now.

“Will you let me do it?” asked Dillon. “Will you prom­ise not to hate me?”

“Do it,” said Deanna. “Feed it any way you can.”

Deanna was shaking now; her eyes darting back and forth as if death would come swooping at both of them from the sky. His hunger and her fear were so tightly con­nected, she knew that when the hunger was fed and he was strong once more, she would be strong as well.

Dillon found the strength he needed to get to his feet and stumble off into the road toward the second house on the right, where Jason, Joey’s older brother, had just ar­rived home with his girlfriend.

Deanna watched him go, then turned away as she felt something begin to rise in her own gut—and it wasn’t just fear.

Will you let me do it? he had asked. He had never asked so bluntly before, but the question was there every time. He needed her permission. He needed her approval for every monstrous act he committed, and she always gave it—as if in some way she was in control. As if she was the one setting him loose to create chaos.

There were many things she could make herself deny. She could deny the sounds of disaster they left behind, she could convince herself that, beyond all reason, something good would come from all this destruction. But now she could not deny that it was all happening because of her— because she gave Dillon permission. She bit her hand to hold back her own scream.

Across the street, Dillon approached Jason’s girlfriend, who was waiting for Jason on the porch. By now anything human had drained out of Dillon’s voice, and he spoke in a rough snarl that came deep from his gut. It was the voice of the hunger itself.

“You!” growled Dillon as he approached her.

The girl gasped at the sight of him hobbling closer on his weak legs.

Dillon came right up to her, looked into her eyes, read her soul, and said, “Ask Jason to tell you the truth.”

One of the girl’s wide black pupils suddenly constricted down into a pinpoint in a huge blue eye. “Okay,” she said dreamily, “I’ll ask him.” She turned and headed into the house.

Dillon stumbled across the street, already beginning to feel the tiniest bit better. He found Deanna standing just where he had left her.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Dillon, but she wasn’t budging. Her hands were clenched by her sides in tight, anxious fists.

“Tell me what you did to her.”

“I thought you didn’t want to know,” said Dillon.

“I want to know now!”

Dillon turned on her with a vengeance. “I’m trying to protect you!” he shouted. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve always wanted!”

Deanna drew a deep breath and said slowly, forcefully, “Tell me what you did!”

Dillon kicked the ground hard. “I planted a seed, like I did at the farmhouse. I just made a suggestion, that’s all.” Dillon told Deanna what he had said to the girl, and Deanna listened to his words thinking that there must be more . . . but that was all Dillon said. A suggestion? A mere suggestion was going to satisfy the wrecking-hunger? How could that be?

But it wasn’t just any suggestion, was it? It was the right suggestion. Dillon had sized things up and knew the exact words that would set powerful forces in motion that would grind these people up.

“I found the girl’s button,” said Dillon. “Everyone has a button, you just have to find it . . . and then push it.”

Deanna shook her head, her hands trembling so violently she felt her fingers might shake themselves off.

“We have to leave now,” said Dillon. “I don’t want to see it happen.”

“But I do!” insisted Deanna. “If I’m a part of this, then I want to know what we’ve done!”

Dillon tried to pull her away, but she wouldn’t go. They would weather this one out, whether he liked it or not. “All right,” he said, “but just remember, I tried to keep you from seeing.” Since Dillon knew it wasn’t safe where they were standing, he climbed a tree and helped Deanna up. From there, they had a bird’s-eye view of the entire block.

“It’ll start over there,” said Dillon, pointing to Joey’s house. Sure enough, inside the house two people were ar­guing. Jason and his girlfriend—something about the girl’s sister. The argument got louder and louder, until the girl burst out the front door in tears . . . just as Jason and Joey’s mother came home, holding a bag of groceries.

“You’re just like your father!” the girlfriend shouted back at Jason. “Everyone knows the way he sneaks around!”

The mother heard this, and the shock of this news made her drop a bag of groceries. Inside, a furious Jason took out his frustrations on his kid brother. In a moment Joey came running out of the house crying, not seeing the groceries spilled on the front walk. He slipped on a can of peas, went flying, and hit his head on the ground. Hard.

His mother screamed.

Dillon turned to Deanna. “Once it starts, it’s like a boulder rolling down a hill,” he said. “Watch!”

Deanna watched with sick fascination as a delivery boy ruling by on a moped turned his head to see why the woman was screaming and was distracted just long enough to hit a car head-on.

The widowed neighbor man came out to his porch at the sound of the crash, and his neglected dog bolted from the house, ran across the street, freaked at all the noise, and attacked a woman in her garden. The woman’s hus­band, a nervous man, ran inside to get a shotgun to save his wife from the mad dog. But his aim was very bad. And very unlucky.

Then, in a moment, the events began to happen so quickly, the chain of cause and effect was completely lost. One thing led to five things, led to five more things, and in a matter of minutes the twilight was filled with shattering windows, screaming people, and brutal fistfights, until the entire block had disintegrated into a savage frenzy . . . an explosive chain reaction of unlikely, unlucky “coinci­dences” that had all been started by a single, simple sug­gestion.

“People are like dominoes,” explained Dillon, in the midst of the cataclysm. His voice was eerily calm, as if the people on this street were just numbers he was crunching through an equation. “You can make them all fall down, if you know exactly who to push, and when to push them.”

Somewhere a gunshot echoed. There were crashing sounds in many of the homes and somewhere the whoosh of igniting flames.

Dillon’s hunger was fed with every blast, with every crash and every wail as yet another person fell from san­ity. He closed his eyes and felt the life-patterns in the street around him falling like a spiderweb clipped from its branch, until the only pattern that remained was the unrelenting spiral of chaos in every life around him.

Deanna, too, felt her own terror mysteriously fade away into a dizzy numbness.

“I’ve fed us both, now,” said Dillon.

Deanna just looked at him, blankly.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” he said. “You’ve got it as bad as I do—only with you it’s not a wrecking-hunger; it’s a terror-hunger.”

Deanna just shook her head, not wanting to hear it, not wanting to think about it.

“It’s true, Deanna; you need fear, the same way I need disaster—why do you think you feel better whenever you’re around me? It’s because you live on the terror I create—and when you can’t live on other people’s terror, you start feeding on your own.”

Deanna closed her eyes and tried to deny it . . . but the more she thought about it, the more true it rang. Didn’t she feel her strongest when those around her were in fear? Didn’t she draw strength from other people’s terror?

“You’ll never feel fear again, Deanna,” said Dillon, “as long as I can leave people terrified for you.”

The streets around them still echoed with the wails of dozens of souls losing their minds to a nightmare.

“Now do you see why we have to be together?” asked Dillon with a tenderness that clashed with the violence on either side of them. “We’re like thunder and lightning— you can’t have one without the other. Destruction and fear.”

He was right. He was right about everything, because every terrified wail seemed to feed something inside her. Was this who they were? Two hideously twisted creatures that lived like vampires, drinking up the misfortune of others? The very thought made her stomach turn.

This is not who I want to be!

She hid her lace in shame and disgust.

Heal flashed as a fireball exploded somewhere down the street, and it was over. All that remained were the weak wails and moans, like the moment after a tumbling airplane came to rest. Survivors wandered the streets, some milling about aimlessly, others talking to themselves. The fine lattice of their minds had dissolved like sugar in water. Those who were dead were the lucky ones. The rest were irreconcilably insane.

My God, thought Deanna, these people had put so much energy into creating their lives . . . and now all that energy was being released as their lives detonated. That energy had to go somewhere . . . and that was the energy Dillon was feeding on!

She tried to shake the thought away. No! Human be­ings don’t drink that kind of energy. . . .

And for the first time, Deanna began to see that there might be something else living inside of Dillon—a crea­ture that was anything but human. “I have to feed it,” Dillon often said. He even spoke about his hunger as if it were a living thing.

Was there something like that inside of her as well?

Only now did she begin to realize the dizzying depth of the pit they were falling into. The severity of their actions was beyond comprehension, and it made her wish she could tear off her body and slide into someone else’s, just to be away from herself and this hideous destiny.

“You see there?” said Dillon, pointing down the street toward some homes that seemed just beyond the circle of destruction. “Those are the people I saved. I was actually able to save people! The hunger wanted them but I said no.” He spoke with the blind innocence of a child and leapt from the tree, bouncing around in the midst of the disaster as if it were a playground. Stronger than ever before, he gazed past the Armageddon to the homes he had “saved.”

“See, I kept my promise,” he said, helping Deanna from the tree. “I didn’t do any more than was absolutely necessary . . . and I did a good thing saving those people, didn’t I?” He smiled like a little boy waiting to be re­warded.

The thoughts were swimming in Deanna’s head now. Nearly fifty people’s lives were destroyed, but all Dillon was willing to see were the fifty whose lives weren’t. Was this the best they could hope to do—damage control? Was that something to be proud of?

“See how I control it?” he said. “I don’t give it any more than it needs—I leave it a little bit hungry—that’s how I control it!”

And Deanna could see that Dillon believed this—he believed in his own ability to control this thing like a small child believed no one could see him when he closed his eyes.

Deanna shook her head to drive out Dillon’s excuses and rationalizations, but couldn’t.

“Deanna, c’mon—you’re looking at me like you hate me or something. You don’t hate me, do you? You prom­ised you wouldn’t.”

Did she hate him? Did she find him beyond redemp­tion? She instantly thought back to a python she once saw swallowing a live rabbit. It was awful to watch, but, after all, that’s what pythons had to do. If this was how Dillon survived, could she blame him any more than she blamed that python? And wasn’t she doing the exact same thing?

Deanna looked into his eyes, trying to find him there. There was intense darkness inside of him now, surround­ing him, eating away at him like a vile parasite. So much of him had turned vile, it was hard to find any good left in him, but she continued to search until, through that blackness, she found the glimmer of light hidden deep within. It was that part of Dillon that was decent and kind—still fighting for life inside the blackness, like a star in the void of space. She focused on that shrinking light within Dillon, and to it she said “I love you.”

Dillon smiled, a tear in his eye. “Me too,” he said. He touched Deanna’s cheek, gently held her around the waist, and set the pace as they strode off of Blackburn Street, even before the first police car arrived. As they walked, Deanna forced her own will deep into Dillon’s back pocket, but this time it didn’t slip in as easily as it had before.

I love you. Dillon let her words echo from one side of his mind to the other. He drew strength from it, and, in a matter of moments, he had successfully forced the eve­ning’s unpleasantness out of his mind. These people here—they didn’t matter. They weren’t real the way he and Deanna were real. The wrecking-hunger told him so.

Dillon’s spirits were high as he left town. The night was refreshingly cool, and he felt he could walk all night. He didn’t need sleep anymore. Come to think of it, he didn’t need food. He had already gorged himself on the fall of Blackburn Street, and it would be at least another day before he felt the hunger again.

He wondered what he would have to do next to satisfy the hunger. Surely it would be an even greater chal­lenge—for each challenge was greater than the one before.

In the back of his mind he idly imagined an endless cas­cade of dominoes all lined up and ready to fall if the right one were pushed. The thought was enough to make him giggle like a child.