Scorpion Shards

16. The Hermit

Slayton.

He didn’t need a first name.

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

He was forty.

His skin was beginning to age, his hair beginning to gray—but inside, his thoughts and ideas, his very percep­tion of the world had never grown beyond age eight or nine.

He was slow.

Not only in the way he thought, but in the way he moved. He had come to accept this as the way of things, and it only bothered him when he was among others, whose thoughts and actions were quicker. For that rea­son, he didn’t care much for people—being around peo­ple drained him—made him feel less of a man. So he steered clear of them and made himself the center of his own solitary universe, where things moved at his own speed.

He learned to care for himself at an early age.

He built a shack in the woods, and when the timber company that owned the land kicked him off, he moved, and built another. And then another. Now, he finally thought he had found a place where no one would bother him—a dead forest gray and bleak that no one wanted. Here they would finally leave him alone.

He drank too much.

A habit he had picked up from his father, years and years ago. When the wind would blow, and the alcohol would swim through his mind, he would swear there were ghosts in the trees, like in stories his Ma used to tell. Ghosts and demons were very real to Slayton. And so he was not entirely surprised when the Devil appeared at his door one bleak October evening.

The door creaked open to reveal him standing there. Slayton didn’t make a move. He just sat at his table, hold­ing his half-full bottle of whiskey. The other half was al­ready in his head. Slayton knew who it was without him having to say a word.

“You must be Slayton.”

“How do you know my name?”

“They told me about you in town.”

The Devil did not look quite the way Slayton expected. He was fat and young. A redheaded teenager with an awful complexion.

“I’ve been looking for you,” the Devil said.

“I’ll bet you have.”

Slayton invited the Devil in, watching him carefully as he moved. Darkness surrounded him like a black hole. Shadow flowed in his wake, rippling like a dark cape. A living fabric of death.

The Devil closed the door behind himself, and sud­denly fear and anger began to overtake Slayton—but he bit it back, determined to stand toe to toe with the Devil. Slayton reached up, got a glass and poured some whiskey as the visitor sat down at the table. His darkness ebbed and flowed on the table like waves lapping the shore.

“Drink with me?” asked Slayton.

The Devil-boy shook his head, pushing the glass away.

“What’s the matter? Not old enough?” and Slayton let out a rough wheezing laugh at the thought of the Devil being underage. That was a good one!

“No time,” said his guest, looking into Slayton’s eyes, probing his very thoughts. “No time, I’m in a hurry.”

Only then did Slayton notice that this Devil-boy across the table was sweating something awful. He was breath­ing quickly, and shallowly as if he was out of breath—as if he was panicked, but trying to hide it.

“What’s yer angle?” asked Slayton.

“Angle?”

“If ya come to take me, how come y’aint done it? Go on—get it over with. I ain’t got no patience for the likes a you!”

The Devil-boy smiled a crooked, leprous smile. “You have no idea how very important you are,” he said. “I wouldn’t touch a hair on your head.”

“Then what are ya here fer?”

“Dinner,” said the Devil.

Slayton shook his head, and the world spun in circles one way and then the other. He took another swig of whiskey and left to see what there was to eat in the kitchen. What was the Devil likely to eat? he wondered. Beef jerky? Saltines? When he stumbled back out of the kitchen, he saw his visitor searching through his munitions locker, which had been locked.

“You get your nose outta there!” shouted Slayton, but the fat Devil boy didn’t move.

“You collect weapons?” asked the Devil-boy.

“What business is it of yours?”

The Devil-boy swung the door wide to reveal Slayton’s cache—a regular arsenal of all types of weaponry from rifle to pistol, from Bowie knife to crossbow. All shiny and clean.

“Most of ’em never been fired,” said Slayton. “All loaded, though. You never know when you might need one.”

“It’s a fine collection,” said the Devil-boy. Then he turned to the many items on Slayton’s shelves. Old family pictures. Knickknacks from here and there. He brushed his finger across the dusty shelf, and his eyes darted back and forth, looking at everything—first everything on the shelf, then everything in the room. His eyes moved so quickly, Slayton couldn’t keep up with him. Those awful blue-green eyes—they were invading him, weren’t they? They were violating all of his personal things. Slayton could not stand for this, so he grabbed one of the many weapons stacked in his closet—a rifle—and aimed it at the Devil.

“I don’t got no dinner for you,” Slayton said. “You’d better go now.”

The Devil-boy ignored Slayton. Instead, he tilted his head slightly, as if listening . . . then he sniffed the air . . . and then it was as if something snapped into place. He turned his eyes to Slayton once more and fixed his gaze.

“You loved your mother very much, didn’t you,” said the Devil. “It’s sad she died so young.”

“Wh . . . What do you know about it?”

“I know enough. I know your Daddy worked the timberline and was always gone. I know he never gave a rat’s ass about you. I know how he, and how most everyone else called you names . . . but your Ma, she defended you against all those cruel people, didn’t she?”

Slayton lowered the rifle a bit and nodded slightly.

“She had a special name for you. Something secret—between the two of you. What was it?”

Slayton swallowed hard and lowered the gun to his side. How does he know this?

“Little Prince,” said Slayton. “Just like the book.”

The fat Devil-boy smiled. “When she died your Daddy just left you. How old were you, fifteen?”

“Just turned it,” said Slayton. “Then he drunk hisself to death. I was glad, too.”

“I know you were.” The Devil began to move closer and Slayton couldn’t turn his eyes away.

“This is important, Slayton. After your father died, you lived in a city for a year or so, before you moved back into the woods . . . Tell me the name of the city.”

Slayton bit his lower lip to keep it from quivering. The Devil knows everything, don’t he?

“Come on, Slayton. Tell me the name of the city.”

“Tacoma,” said Slayton weakly.

“Tacoma!” The Devil smiled in some sort of deep re­lief. “Listen to me, Slayton,” he said. “I’m going to make you the most important man in the world, and all you have to do is listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” said Slayton, his gaze locked onto the Devil’s swimming blue eyes.

Then the Devil got as close as he possibly could to Slay­ton’s ear, without touching him, and whispered in the faintest of voices:

“There’s someone in Tacoma . . . who owes you.”

It took a moment to register . . . and then the words hit home, ringing true as a church bell in Slayton’s mind. Every fiber of his soul resonated with the thought, until he felt as if his very brain would be rattled apart. Yes! Someone in Tacoma did owe him. He didn’t know who it was, but whoever it was, Slayton would find him and make him pay!

Even Slayton could sense that this was the start of a grand chain of events that would greatly affect his life and the lives of many, many people.

He was about to turn to his munitions locker.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

Winston had grasped the gun in his pocket for so long, its cold handle had grown warm in his palm. A tip in the nearest town led them to this shack, and now as they kicked in the crooked door, Winston held the revolver out in front of him, afraid to pull the trigger, but also afraid not to. Everything was crucial now. No mistakes could be made.

The room was dim as they burst in, and it was hard to see. The others filed in, creating commotion, getting in the way.

There were two figures in the room, and in a moment he had identified which one was Dillon—but as Win­ston’s eyes adjusted to the dim lamplight, he hestiated. They all hesitated, because they could not believe what they saw.

“Madre de Dios!” cried Lourdes.

Dillon barely looked human—his body had bloated like a balloon, his face was swollen with festering blisters. His eyes were blazing sapphire holes.

Winston could feel the presence of the creature that had laid waste to his own soul in there as well. It was true—all of their monstrosities were now inside of Dillon!

“No!” screamed Dillon. He tried to make a break for it, but the five of them lunged at him, trapping him in a web of ten hands. He twisted free of their grasp and backed into the corner, a terrified, caged animal.

Across the room, the hermit could only stand there by the open closet door and gawk, while the little boy, Carter, looked in from the cabin’s threshold with his awful empty eyes.

“Do it!” Tory, shouted to Winston. “Do it now!”

“It’s too late!” Dillon screamed. “It doesn’t matter now, whatever you do won’t matter!”

“Shut up!” shouted Winston.

“It’s too late!” cackled Dillon again.

Winston stared at this creature in the dark corner and raised his gun. The plan, the plan, follow the plan.

Winston tightened his two-handed grip on the re­volver, steadied his shaking hands, then leveled his aim and pulled the trigger.

The roar from the six beasts drowned out any sound the gun could have made.

A flash of light—a flash of darkness—shadowy figures leaping in six different directions—screaming—blue flames—tentacles—horrid fangs! Six dark shadows cling­ing to the walls screeching and wailing in fury . . .

. . . And in fear.

“They’re afraid of us!” shouted Tory. “Look at them!”

The beasts recoiled from the kids in the room, leaping, slithering, flying from wall to wall.

“Don’t let them inside you!” shouted Michael. “Fight to keep them out!” Although none of them knew how to do that, they willed themselves to stand firm against the raging, snarling shadows, and the creatures did not dare come near them.

Without a host, the beasts could not survive long in this world.

And so they left it.

It was something the kids could not have anticipated. The six hideous leech-things came together in the center of the room, and with a blast that rocked the weak foun­dations of the tiny cabin, they ripped the world open.

A ragged hole tore in the fabric of space, and the crea­tures escaped through it, into blind darkness.

The hole! thought Winston, before he even understood what it was, we’re all too close to the—

Dillon’s limp body slipped into the gaping breach— Deanna grabbed him, losing her balance. Winston caught her, and before any of them knew what was happening they had all grabbed hold of one another, in a twisted huddle as they lost their footing and slipped into the vor­tex, from light into darkness.

And for an instant . . . just an instant they felt it:

Wholeness.

The six of them touching.

Complete and invincible.

Perfect and joyous.

The sum of the parts.

But the feeling ended when the six of them came through the darkness and hit a hard, unearthly ground, crashing apart once more like fragile pieces of glass.

Slayton watched them go.

It had all happened so fast, he wasn’t sure what he had seen . . . but then he realized that it didn’t matter because someone owed him in Tacoma.

Nothing mattered but that simple fact. Not the sudden disappearance of the Devil-boy and his devil friends. Not even the hole to Hell that still hung in the middle of the room. Nothing mattered because he had a mission.

Five minutes later, he had loaded most of his weapons into his pickup truck. He hadn’t noticed the little boy who stood there watching, until the boy spoke.

“Mister, you playin’ a game?” asked the boy, his head lolled to one side like he was half dead.

Slayton didn’t have time for questions, or things that got in his way, so he reached into his pickup bed and grabbed a loaded shotgun.

“Are you a cowboy, or an Indian?” asked the boy.

Slayton took aim at the boy. No one would get in his way between here and Tacoma.

17. Unworld

Dillon felt his mind, body and soul ripped apart, then a moment later he was torn from the world.

He never heard the gunshot, but the pain was very real. It exploded in the back of his head where the bullet must have left his skull.

All was still now. Silent. He felt his blood pouring from the back of his head, and he moved his hand toward his forehead, certain that this would be the last action of his life. He would touch his own shattered forehead and then die.

But there was no entry wound.

And in the back of his head, there was no exit wound either. There was only a sharp stone upon which he had fallen, and a gash on the back of his scalp that spilled blood onto sands that were already the color of blood.

Everything was spinning in Dillon’s head. He felt an unbearable emptiness. A hollowness. He had been crammed tightly with seething, horrid creatures, but now they were gone, and the emptiness they left behind was strange and terrible. He heard the voices of the other kids around him—the ones who had tried to kill him.

“They’re getting away,” one of them said.

“We can catch them!”

“Don’t just sit there, run!”

He heard feet running off, then saw the black kid who had fired the gun standing over him.

“You dead?” asked the black kid.

“Yes,” groaned Dillon.

“Good,” said the black kid, and he took off with the others.

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

“Dillon?”

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

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

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

“Where are we?”

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

And all around them was despair.

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

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

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

And still Dillon felt nothing.

He turned to Deanna.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like a swarm of bees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the creature did grow a face around those deep, deep eyes. It was the face of a beautiful girl; somehow a mixture of all the girls he had known and wanted—and its many hands no longer clawed him but caressed him. Those soft hands tingled across his chest and his legs. His arms slipped from around the creature’s neck to its shoul­ders. He felt hands on his head pulling him closer into a powerful embrace, and all his battling emotions were flooded by something more powerful than all the rest. It was the old familiar feeling; the brutal passion that ruled his days and nights.

The beautiful creature pulled Michael into a fiery kiss.

You can’t imagine the pleasure I could give you, he felt it say. All the Joys you could imagine . . . If only you stop resisting . . . if only you feed me . . .

Michael could feel the intensity of its passion mingling with his own.

Take me back, he felt the creature say. Invite me back in.

Michael could feel it trying to slide beneath his skin and dissolve into his blood.

Invite you in? thought Michael. Is that how it had hap­pened in the first place? Did it have to be invited in?

He thought of the girl in Baltimore, and then the one in Omaha. This thing had now become so powerful that it could steal a soul with a kiss. Was he going to invite this thing to rule him?

Michael knew he could not let it happen, so he turned everything off—and was amazed to find that he had the power to do it. He shut down his fear, he closed off his anger, he doused his lust. He made himself feel cold, calm and unaffected by the grip of this sensual creature that clung to him.

The air around them began to chill and fill with flurries of snow, but there was no icy wind of fear.

The creature wailed, its hands becoming claws again, digging into him, its face melting away into those burning blue eyes. It thrashed as if each snowflake were made of acid, and the snow kept falling heavier by the moment.

Only now did Michael realize that he was killing it—but he didn’t allow himself to feel excitement.

Cold. Calm. Unaffected.

Michael pulled away, standing above it, feeling the snow grow stronger; feeling himself feel nothing for this creature.

For all the spirits we destroyed, for all the girls whose souls we invaded together, I leave you cold. I will not be your accomplice. I will not be your slave. My body will not be your vessel. And I will walk away feeling nothing for you.

The snow was like a mountain of sand around the wail­ing creature now. With a hundred flaming blue hands it tried to free itself, but could not. Michael watched as it sunk into the snow and drowned. The snow itself glowed a bright blue for a few moments as the creature dissolved into it, but then the hot, black waters of the un-world sea crashed upon the glowing mound, melting it. In a mo­ment, nothing was left but a thin blue foam that was pulled by the undertow toward the distant churning wa­ters, where an ocean poured endlessly from a hole in the sky.

Lourdes struggled with her immense, slow-moving beast, but as strong as her muscles had gotten beneath all that fat, this beast was far stronger. It was like an octopus; a great boneless jet-black thing with tentacles as thick as her thighs and a singular, hateful eye.

But the worst was its mouth—a great toothless maw that stretched itself open wide as the tentacles pushed Lourdes toward it. She tried to dig her feet into the sand, but it was no use. It pulled her in and swallowed her whole with a mighty roar.

Lourdes took a last gasp of breath before the mouth closed around her, forcing her into a wet, airless darkness. She pushed her elbows against it, she scraped its gullet with her fingernails, she felt her heart pounding, using up the last of the oxygen in her lungs . . . but she also heard the beast’s heart beating. She was inside it now, rather than it being inside of her . . . and it dawned on Lourdes that this made all the difference. She fought to stay con­scious and concentrated on the sound of the creature’s bloated heart, until she saw it in her mind . . . Then in the same way she had made Carter and the squirrel sleep, she forced her will into the nervous system of this beast.

And she shut down its heart.

The creature began to thrash as its heart seized into a heavy knot. It violently spat Lourdes out onto the sand, and Lourdes, wet and slimy, but very much alive, gasped for breath, feeling her head spin. She kept the creature under her control, clenching her fists, imagining its heart clenched as tightly, until finally the thing quivered and fell to the ground, its life slipping away with the steamy breath from its swollen mouth. Lourdes watched the hatred in its awful eye vanish into the indifference of death.

Winston chased his beast into the looming shadow of a steamer ship that listed dangerously in the sand, its rusted hull wedged between two boulders.

Winston’s creature was small—even smaller than he was, and it surprised him. It loped on all fours, with stubby legs and long arms. Winston could have caught it easily, if his ankle hadn’t been twisted in the fall, but now he had to limp after it, grimacing with every step.

In the shadow of the listing steamer, Winston got close enough to grab the beast’s furry leg; to Winston’s surprise, the creature did not resist. It turned to Winston and gazed into his eyes.

This was not the creature Winston imagined. Its eyes were large and friendly; its fur was soft; its face seemed innocent. . . inquisitive, and it resembled a cross between a monkey and a bear cub.

As Winston looked at it, he felt a sudden urge to hold it close to him, so he did. It wrapped its furry arms and legs around him.

It felt good. Comfortable. Safe. He felt as if he could take this soft thing beneath his arm, curl up and fall asleep.

The soft creature did not slide beneath his arm, how­ever. It slid around him, clung to his back, and held him tightly around the neck.

Winston felt its open mouth by his ear. He smelled its breath; it was clean, like a baby’s breath.

I can make everything like it was, it whispered to him. Just like it was before your father died. I can make it all go back, and you can feel the way you used to feel all those years ago.

The creature’s sweet smell and the softness of its fur was enough to comfort his doubt. Enough to paralyze his fear.

Paralyze?

The creature’s mouth opened wider and its fangs drove deep into the back of Winston’s neck, settling in his spine. He felt his days slipping away again; his life moving back­ward, his body growing down. Winston roared with anger. He might have once longed for time to take a giant step backward, but not anymore! He grabbed the beast and flung it from him so hard that it hit the side of the rusty old ship with a clang that echoed inside the hollow hull.

The creature was advancing again, long sharp claws on its fingers, fangs in its mouth, but those longing, innocent eyes never changed.

It came at him through the sharp nettles that had grown in the shade of the behemoth boat, moving much faster than Winston.

What am I going to do, beat it with a corsage? The words came slinging back through his mind . . . and then he real­ized that he could do just that and more! Without an in­stant to lose, he grabbed the gnarled hardwood stem of the bush before him, painfully gripping the thorns, and pushed life into it.

The ground beneath him began to rumble and undu­late. Lines like mole tunnels pushed up the dirt, and shoots of thorn-laden branches sprouted from the ground. The furry creature found its fur caught in a sharp web of growth. It whined and cried and bleated like a lamb, as bright flowers sprung from branches, hiding the sharpness of the thorns.

Winston fought his way through the malevolent shrubs until he found a branch that was close to the creature. He touched that branch and immediately it sprouted new shoots that wove in and out of the dirt, winding around the creature until it was trapped in a prison of thorns.

The earth around them continued to undulate, as be­neath them the roots grew deeper and stronger. The lean­ing ship creaked on its precarious bed of sand.

The creature bleated and cried, writhing in agony, its fur shredding on the barbs of the new growth.

“Cry all you want,” Winston told it. “But I’m growing up!”

A heavy root the width of a tree trunk forced up the earth beneath the steamer. The great ship let out a ghostly metallic moan as it was shifted by the massive roots.

Winston began to scramble away, leaving the beast in its thorny prison. He pulled himself across the sand, through the nettles until he was out from the shadow of the ship.

Another ghastly moan and a heavy rattle.

Winston looked back to see the keel of the steamer fi­nally lose its battle with gravity. The entire ship began to fall to its side and, beneath it, the screaming, bleating beast fought to get free of the thorns until the mighty ship came down upon it. The ship shook the earth with a co­lossal rumble, crushing the small, deadly beast under a thousand tons of steel.

Dillon and Deanna heard the falling ship, and felt the shock wave shake the mountain beneath them moments later. Stones and pebbles, dislodged by the shaking of the earth, flew down the mountain toward them—but their only concerns now were the creatures climbing thirty yards ahead of them.

From behind, Dillon’s appeared half-human, but moved with powerful, otherworldly grace. Its skin was smooth, hairless leaden-gray over bulging muscles; both magnificent and repulsive at the same time—the very sight of it churned Dillon’s stomach. Deanna’s beast had no grace. It had no arms or legs either; it was a serpentine thing, flat and segmented like a giant worm.

They soon reached a plateau that was too smooth to be natural. It was, in fact, a grand stone court that led to the crumbling palace carved out of the stone, and the crea­tures disappeared into the dark recesses of this ancient acropolis. This was their home. Their lair.

“Don’t be scared,” said Deanna. “We’ll find them.”

Then she disappeared down a corridor that led to the left, and Dillon headed off to the right.

Deanna knew that she should have been frightened, but she was not. She kept her wits about her as she as­cended the stone stairs, passing the crumbling bones of ancient human skeletons as she stepped deeper into dark­ness. It could have been crouching in any dark corner she passed. It could have been waiting inches above her. She knew that somewhere nearby it was coiled like a cobra, ready to strike.

Her foot touched something. A stone? No—it moved. A rat? Were there rats in this forgotten place? She turned but was faced by more darkness. Webs that were too thick to be made by earth-born spiders brushed across her face.

She smelled it before she saw it—an acrid, dank odor of peat and fungus as it sprang at her from the left. She turned and it struck her shoulder, clamping on with tooth­less, powerful jaws like a bear trap. She felt its slippery scales coiling around her, its icy body constricting around her chest, cutting off her air and circulation. She lost her balance and rolled down a flight of stone stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs she was able to wrench her hand free, and she grabbed the thing by its neck, tearing its awful jaws from her shoulder. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and she could see it now as she held its flar­ing head away from her. Its breath was chill and foul, and its face was almost human . . . except that it had no eyes.

Then Deanna realized something. It was in the way it darted left, then right—the way it snapped sightlessly and frantically in the air. Deanna knew that feeling all too well.

You’re terrified, aren’t you?

The serpent coiled itself tighter around her.

You’re terrified that you’ll die!

Deanna could sense that although it had a stranglehold on her, it didn’t want to kill her. It wanted her to let it inside. To let it come . . . home.

Take me back, it seemed to plead. Please let me in. . . . I’m sooooo frightened. Don’t make me kill you!

Deanna, on the other hand, felt no fear at all within her. She calmly held its head away so it could not strike. She felt herself growing weak from the lack of air as its body coiled around her chest.

I am not your home. She told it silently. And I am not afraid of you. So I suppose you’ll have to kill me.

The serpent, more terrified than ever, squeezed her tighter, but Deanna forced herself to her feet and pressed her thumbs firmly against its neck. It, too, began to gasp for air, and as they staggered across the rough stone floor in a lethal dance, it became a simple matter of who was going to strangle whom first.

Dillon Cole, still feeling a mere shell of a human being, slowly stalked the halls of the ruined palace. Win­dow glass had long since crumbled to sand. Bones of the dead crumbled to dust beneath his feet. He wondered if, perhaps, he would join the minions of the dead in this godforsaken place.

The creature was easy to follow; its large feet left clear footprints on the dusty floor. Dillon followed the steps up, until he came to a great room.

There, between two pillars, sat a regal stone chair, and in that stone chair sat the crumbling remains of a man.

His clothes were still intact, but the threads had mildewed and decayed until it was barely recognizable as a tattered royal robe. This palace—this whole mountain—had fallen here from another world, and all that was left of its royal occupants were bones crumbling to dust.

On the other side of the room stood Dillon’s beast.

Dark gray flesh, rippling with strong muscles . . . and a familiar face.

Dillon’s face.

The creature made no effort to run. Instead it stalked closer, mirroring Dillon’s movements, until they stood five feet apart. It made no move to attack nor did Dillon. In­stead, Dillon stared into its eyes, trying to read some pat­tern there.

As complicated as it was, Dillon could read the pattern of its past. This being had begun as something small and insignificant—a maggot that he had invited into his soul in a moment of weakness. And once there, it had grown, evolved into something larger, then something larger still. Even now it seemed on the verge of a new metamorpho­sis. Through its translucent skin, Dillon could see a new form taking shape, ready to emerge . . . as soon as it was fed.

Dillon pulled the revolver from his shirt. This time the first three chambers were all full.

A smile appeared on the creature’s face. It was a twisted, evil version of Dillon’s own smile.

I can destroy you with a single thought. You’ll be gone long before the hammer hits the chamber.

Still Dillon tightened his grip on the trigger.

So the creature pushed a single thought into Dillon’s mind.

Suffer the weight, it said to him. Come out and SUFFER THE WEIGHT!

Dillon’s finger froze on the trigger, and from some­where deep inside he felt all his feelings all return to him at once. His crippled soul was called out of hiding, and with it came an eruption from the pit of his stomach that came screaming out of his mouth. All his emotionless memories finally locked in with their meanings, and they surged like bile through his brain.

Remorse!

Sorrow!

Shame, blame and guilt echoed through his brain like a sonic boom, rattling his mind until he felt himself about to fall into the same chaos that he had created around him. He tried to deny all the things he had done—tried to deny that he had chosen this path, but even among shades of gray, the truth was there in black and white: it had been his choice to destroy. It had been his choice to feed the beast.

The sheer weight of his crimes weighed upon him now with such a pressure that he wished that fourth chamber had been full when Winston had pulled the trigger.

But he could right that mistake, couldn’t he? The first three chambers were full. He could rid himself of the pain—the horrible guilt.

Suddenly the creature standing before him didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was ending the pain, so he turned the gun around and touched the cold barrel against the bridge of his own nose.

And then, in front of him, he saw the creature flex its fingers and take a deep breath, waiting to be fed.

To be fed.

Dillon gritted his teeth and with all his might kept his finger from pressing that trigger. Destroying himself would be feeding the creature. It suddenly became clear to Dillon that the only way to deny this creature satisfac­tion was to bear the pain. And so Dillon did. He accepted the responsibility for all the people’s lives he had de­stroyed. He accepted the blame for the death and for the insanity. He felt the awful weight on his shoulders . . . and that weight, pressing like a thousand stones, almost killed him right there.

But it didn’t.

And instead he was left with just enough strength to turn the gun around again and pull the trigger.

The bullet caught the creature in the shoulder. It wailed in pain and surprise, then grabbed Dillon and hurled him across the room.

Dillon came crashing down on the throne, shattering what was left of its former occupant. Bone fragments splintered into the air and a cloud of dust rose from where Dillon sat.

The creature, bleeding a viscous, dark blood, leapt to­wards him, and Dillon fired again.

The second blast caught the creature in the stomach.

It doubled over in pain.

Dillon rose from the throne and the creature backed away toward an open veranda, pulling itself along, limp­ing, leaving a path of its slippery blood.

Dillon stalked after it. Then, at the threshold of the bal­cony, it turned its eyes to him once more.

Finish it, the beast said, taunting. Shoot now!

Something inside Dillon told him to look at the pat­terns—to check the series of outcomes that firing that bul­let could create. But he didn’t listen; instead he just lev­eled the gun and let his anger fly uncontrolled with the firing of the final bullet.

The beast moved its head at the last moment, the bullet barely grazed its ear, and when the beast stepped away Dillon realized how fully and completely he had been tricked . . . and how much heavier the weight on his soul had suddenly become.

Behind the creature, on the veranda, Deanna was coiled in a death grip with her serpent of fear, when sud­denly her arms went limp from the bullet that had grazed the ear of Dillon’s beast. . . and then hit her in the chest.

“No!!!!!!!!” Dillon ran to her.

The serpent squealed, uncoiled and retreated to the corner, quivering, and Dillon caught Deanna’s collapsing body.

The dark spirit laughed a healthy, hearty laugh. It flexed its muscles and absorbed this act of destruction. It fed on Deanna’s dying breaths.

Deanna gasped for breath in Dillon’s arms.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But his words felt impotent and useless. She tried to speak but couldn’t. He felt the wound in her chest, which was pouring blood, and saw the life slipping from her eyes.

Deanna gazed at him weakly. “I’m not afraid,” she said. “I’m not afraid . . . .”

Dillon could see the pattern of death. He could see her mind imploding—feel death beginning to break down her body. He felt her disappearing down that long tunnel.

And then he realized he could stop it.

He concentrated on her wound. He concentrated all his attention. His talent was not only to see patterns but to change them. Could he close the pattern of a wound the way he could instantly solve a Rubik’s Cube? Could he reverse the patterns of chaos and death the same way he could create them?

He put his hand on Deanna’s wound, which had stopped pumping blood. He felt the wound ever so slowly beginning to close—

—But then he felt the pattern of her mind collapsing, so he focused on that, keeping her mind from giving in to death—

—But then he felt the pattern of her cells begin to slowly decay, so he turned his attention on keeping her flesh from giving over to the silence of death—

—But her wound had begun to bleed again . . . so he turned his attention to that.

A screaming, tear-filled rage overcame Dillon. This was a task he could not accomplish, no matter how pow­erful his talent. He did not yet have the skill to prevent Deanna’s death. In the end all he could do was hold her in his trembling arms and watch her great light disappear into eternity.

Standing just a few feet away, Dillon’s creature fed on Deanna’s death and completed its metamorphosis. Its outer skin broke away to reveal a lattice of veins and fine bones that pulled away from its body spreading wide, casting a shadow of a pair of wings, blacker than black, over Dillon and Deanna.

The creature still bled—wounded, but still alive.

Suffer the weight, Dillon, it said to him again. And every mo­ment you suffer is a moment I grow strong.

Then it turned from him and leapt off the balcony, soaring high on its great black wings and leaving a veil of darkness that trailed behind it, followed by Deanna’s ser­pent, which slithered down the rocky slope.

Dillon leaned over Deanna’s body and cried, but his tears did no good, and when he had no more tears, he lifted her up and brought her to the throne. He brushed off the dust and fragments of ancient bone, and he gently set her down, wrapping her in the moldering royal robe . . . and as he held the robe, he could see its pattern com­ing back together in his hands. It was a simple pattern, just a weave of fabric. In a few moments what had been tattered, disintegrating cloth became a rich royal-blue robe of silk.

Order out of chaos.

How could he have been so blind as to let his talent be used to destroy when it could have been used to create?

He held the cloth a moment longer until all its frag­ments had woven together in his hand and it was as bright and clean as the day it was made. Then he finished wrap­ping it around Deanna’s limp body and closed her unsee­ing eyes.

He kissed her cold cheek. “I’ll come back for you, Deanna,” he promised. “I’ll bring you back.”

Was it possible? Was life out of death something he could ever manage? Could his talent ever be honed to weave back a tapestry of life the way it rewove a tapestry of silk?

He kissed Deanna again and let her go. She seemed to recline regally in the throne, like a queen in repose.

“I love you,” he whispered.

He turned and stepped out on the veranda once more, the sorrow almost overtaking him so that he had to hold onto the stone to keep from doubling over. Down below, he could see the others trying to climb back to their world. While way in the distance the winged Spirit of Destruc­tion soared into the icy sky, and the serpentine Spirit of Fear followed in its shadow, like thunder after lightning.

In the heat of the red desert, they didn’t discuss how they had defeated their foes—instead they focused all their attention on the task at hand. There was a hole fif­teen feet off the ground, and it was quickly healing itself closed. They pushed a rusted car beneath the hole, then piled everything from stones to airplane seats to rusted bi­cycles—anything they could find to get themselves high enough. Then, when their mound was done, Winston laid his hands on a vine, which grew around the mass of loose objects, locking them together in a living mesh.

They only stopped in their task once: the moment they felt one of them die. Then they all took a deep breath and continued stacking, not daring to talk about it.

They had already begun to climb toward the hole when they saw Dillon coming toward them.

“They got away,” said Dillon. ". . . And Deanna’s dead.” The four hesitated, not even wanting to get close to him. It was Tory who finally stepped down.

“We need to know about the hermit on the other side,” said Tory. “What can we do to stop him?”

Slayton! He had forgotten about Slayton! He was long gone, somewhere in Tacoma by now, already beginning the great collapse.

“I don’t think he can be stopped,” said Dillon sadly. “You should have killed me.”

But, instead, Tory reached her hand out to him. “Hurry, the hole’s almost closed.”

Up above, Michael and Lourdes had already forced their way through the hole, which was no larger than a basketball now.

“You’re gonna let him come with us?” Winston shouted down to Tory. “After what he’s done? With his leech-freak still out there?”

“He’s one of us,” was the only answer Tory gave.

Winston threw a bitter gaze at Dillon, and then threw himself into the hole and vanished. When Tory got to the top, she took a moment to look at the desolation here in this infinite “between.” Then she pushed her way into the hole, which stretched around her like right elastic, until she disappeared into darkness.

Dillon hesitated. If the world on the other side of that hole was already starting to fracture, it would soon be more of a hell than this tormented place they were leav­ing. But it was his world, and his responsibility to face what he had done there. So he took a deep breath and grabbed the lip of the hole with both hands, stretching the rend in space as wide as it would go. Then he squeezed his way into a layer of cold, suffocating darkness, and finally pushed himself through the gap on the other side, into the world of life.

The weapons locker was empty.

This was the first thing Dillon noticed as he fell from the hole to the cold wooden floor of Slayton’s shack. The weapons locker was empty, and Slayton was gone.

Dillon squeezed his eyes shut, trying to somehow disap­pear inside himself, but could not. “You don’t know how awful it’s going to be,” he told the others. “You can’t imagine what the world will be like tomorrow. . . .”

They all looked at each other, then turned back to Dil­lon.

“There’s something you should see outside,” Lourdes said.

It was night now, and the hermit’s old pickup was still there, its headlights shining straight at them. Its engine was on—overheating and billowing steam; radiator fluid soaked the ground.

Two figures were in the light of the headlights: a small boy making rivers in the dirt with the spilled radiator fluid, and Slayton, who was sitting up against the grill. It seemed Tacoma was no longer of any interest to him.

“Was this part of the plan?” Michael asked Dillon.

Clearly it wasn’t.

“You were good . . .” Tory told Dillon. “But I guess there’s some things not even you can predict.”

Lourdes picked Carter up in her arms, as the five of them stared at Slayton, loaded shotgun still in hand, sit­ting motionless against the grill of the pickup.

The radiator was leaking because it had been punc­tured by a steel arrow. The same steel arrow that pinned Slayton’s lifeless body to the radiator grill.

“We was playing cowboys and Indians,” said Carter, still gripping Slayton’s crossbow in his hands. “I won.”

Inside the dead hermit’s shack, a hole in the wall of the world quietly healed itself closed and disappeared with a tiny twinkling of light.

18. The Five Of Wands

They buried Slayton beside his shack with his own shovel. He had lived forsaken, but was laid to rest with more tender care than he had known in life. They buried his weapons with him and, with each shovel of dirt, they not only buried the man, but also the nightmare they had lived under for so long.

They finished at dawn, and now the forest that had seemed so desolate revealed its own slow recovery in the growing light. Between the gray, lifeless trees, grass and wildflowers had come back to begin the process of life again.

Winston gathered some of the wildflowers, strewed them across the barren grave, then brushed his fingers across them until the grave sprouted into a colorful gar­den. Then the four of them built a fire to warm them­selves, and stood around it, talking of small, unimportant things, which they never before had had the luxury to do.

Only Dillon stayed away, still an outsider.

He had been the first to begin digging the grave, the first to gather wood for the fire, but when nothing was left for him to do, he placed himself in exile. They all were painfully aware of his presence.

“Someone should say something to him,” suggested Tory.

Winston gnawed beef jerky on teeth that were still coming in. “I got nothing to say to him,” he declared coldly.

They all stole glances at Dillon, who sat alone by the hermit’s grave, aimlessly shuffling a worn deck of cards he had found. He was thinner now, and his face almost cleared up, but there was a burden in that face so weighty and oppressive, it was hard to look at him.

“What can we say that will make any difference?” wondered Lourdes and glanced towards Carter, who now busied himself dropping sugar cubes into a bucket of rain­water, watching them dissolve with the same mindless in­difference he must have felt when he fired that crossbow. The boy was a living testament to the people and places Dillon had shattered, and nothing any of them could say would change that.

“Any one of us could have ended up like Dillon,” said Michael. “I know I almost did.”

Michael left the warmth of the fire and was the first to brave the distance to the boy they knew only as The De­stroyer.

“Solitaire?” asked Michael as he approached Dil­lon.

Dillon didn’t break the rhythm of his shuffling. “A trick,” he answered.

“Can I see it?”

Dillon looked at Michael apprehensively, then handed Michael the cards. “Shuffle them and lay them face up,” he said.

Michael sat down, shuffled the cards, then spread them out, face up, showing a random mix of fifty-two cards.

Dillon picked the deck up again and began to shuffle it himself. “I never liked playing cards,” said Dillon, “be­cause no matter how much I shuffled the deck, the first card I always turned over was the ace of spades. The death card.”

“That’s not the death card,” said Tory as she came over and sat beside them. “Believe me, I’ve seen the death card, and it’s not the ace of spades.”

Lourdes came over as well, leaving Winston the only one refusing to talk to Dillon. They watched as Dillon shuffled the deck over and over, and when he was done he handed the deck to Tory. “Flip the first card,” he asked.

Tory flipped it. It was the ace of spades.

“Cool trick,” said Michael.

It was Lourdes who realized that the trick hadn’t ended. “Why don’t you flip the second card?” she sug­gested.

Tory flipped it; the deuce of spades.

“So?” said Michael.

Tory flipped another card; the three of spades; then the four of spades; then the five. She looked at Dillon warily, then turned the entire deck over and spread the cards face up.

The cards were in perfect order; ace through king, spades through diamonds! They stared, not sure whether to be aghast or amused.

“Pretty good trick, huh?” said Dillon. His eyes be­trayed the truth: this was much more than a mere trick.

“So what’s the big deal?” asked Michael as he exam­ined the deck.

“Entropy,” said Tory.

“Entro— what?”

“Entropy,” she repeated. “Newton came up with it— it’s one of the basic laws of the universe, just like gravity.”

“What is?!” demanded Michael.

Tory rolled her eyes. “That things go from a state of order to disorder. You know—mountains erode, glass breaks, food rots—"

“Cards get shuffled,” said Lourdes.

“Right,” said Tory, “but Dillon here . . . he’s breaking that law.”

They all stared at him. “Is that true?” asked Lourdes.

Dillon quivered a bit, and said, "‘Go directly to jail, do not pass ‘Go.’’ ”

While Michael chuckled nervously, and Lourdes just stared at the cards, Tory scoured the area for a way to test her theory. She finally settled on Carter, who had long since drowned all his sugar cubes, and was just staring into the bucket of water. She took it from him, and he hardly seemed to notice it was gone.

“The law of entropy says that sugar dissolves in water,” said Tory, bringing the bucket over to them. “Right?”

Everyone looked into the bucket. The water was clear; not a granule of sugar left.

“Dillon, put out your hands,” asked Tory.

Dillon did, and Tory slowly poured the water through his fingers.

What they saw, didn’t appear spectacular . . . at first . . . it just seemed . . . well, weird. As soon as Tory began to pour the water, granules of sugar appeared in Dillon’s hands, out of the clear water. The water kept spilling through his fingers, and his palms filled with the white powder . . . but it didn’t stop there. The grains seemed to be pulling themselves together as Dillon concentrated, and once the water had poured through his fingers and the bucket was completely empty, Dillon was left with not just a handful of sugar . . . but a handful of sugar cubes.

They stared at the cubes, stupefied.

“That’s awesome!” said Michael. “It’s like reversing time!”

“No it’s better,” suggested Lourdes. “It’s reversing space.”

Dillon put his handful of sugar cubes down, and they slowly dissolved into the mud.

“What do you do with a talent like that?” wondered Michael.

“What can’t you do with it!” said Tory. “It’s better than all of our talents put together. . . . It’s like . . . creation.”

The very thought made Michael pale. A chill wind blew and somewhere in the distance a small cloud began to darken.

“Don’t mind Michael,” Tory said to Dillon, “he gets a little bit moody.”

But it wasn’t just a matter of Michael’s being moody. He had something else weighing on his mind.

“So what happens now?” asked Michael.

The question had hung heavily in the air since dawn, but had gone unspoken. What now? Any urge they had felt to come together had long since faded away just as the light of the supernova had dimmed in the night sky. If anything, the urge was to drift apart. They all turned to Dillon for an answer—as if somehow he were the one now holding them together like crystals of sugar, and they needed his permission to go their separate ways.

“We do,” said Dillon, “whatever we want to do.”

It was a quiet declaration of independence, but seemed as profound a moment as when the exploding star first filled the night sky.

“I want to go home.”

It was Winston who spoke. They all turned to see him there, a fraction of an inch taller than he was just moments before. “I gotta fix things—change things, get my life moving,” he said, then he wiped a tear from his eye before it had a chance to fall. “And I miss my mom and brother.”

No one could look each other in the eye then. Thoughts of home that had been locked away all this time now flooded them.

“By the time I get home,” said Lourdes, “they won’t even recognize me. . . . It’s all gonna be new. . . .”

The shifting wind blew cold again. “What if we don’t go home?” whispered Michael.

“You will,” said Dillon.

Winston crossed his arms. “How the hell do you know?”

Dillon shrugged. “I can see the pattern,” he said. He studied the four of them—the way their eyes moved, the way they breathed, the way they impatiently shifted their weight from one leg to the other.

“You’ll leave here not sure of anything; not even the ground beneath your feet,” he told them. “But the further you get away from this place, the saner it’s all going to feel . . . and every place you stop, there’ll be people coming out of the woodwork talking to you—wanting to be near you, and not even knowing why. Waiters will tear up your checks—strangers will open up their homes to you; every­one will think you’ve gotten your lives all together, and you’ll laugh because you’ll know the truth. And each per­son you come across—they’ll take away something they didn’t have before—something pure, or joyful, a sense of control, something to grow on. At least one of those peo­ple will get on a plane. And then it’ll spread to places you’ve never even heard of.”

They stood there aghast. Michael stared at Dillon, slack-jawed. “You can see all that?!”

Then Dillon’s straight face resolved into a wide grin. “Sucker!!” he said.

Tory burst out with a relieved guffaw, and soon the others were laughing and razzing Michael, as if they hadn’t fallen for it as well.

Dillon’s grin faded quickly and that solemn melancholy returned to take its place. “You’d better all go,” he told them, “You’ve got a whole country to get across.” Then he glanced at Carter. “You can leave him with me.”

Somehow it didn’t seem fitting to say good-bye, so Tory reached out her hand to Dillon and introduced her­self.

“I’m Tory,” she said. “Tory Smythe.”

Dillon smiled slightly, and shook her hand “Dillon Benjamin Cole.”

The others were quick to follow.

“Michael Lipranski.”

“Lourdes Maria Hidalgo-Ruiz.”

Winston kept his hands in his pockets refusing to shake Dillon’s. “Winston Marcus Pell.”

Then the four who had come together turned and headed toward Michael’s van, dissolving away from Dil­lon, the way they would soon dissolve away from each other.

Winston was the last to go. He stood there, a few feet from Dillon, a scowl well-cemented on his face. He looked Dillon over head to toe.

“You know you’ll never be forgiven for the things you’ve done. There ain’t enough grace in all the world to cleanse you of that.”

Dillon had to agree. “You’re probably right.”

Winston studied Dillon a few moments longer, and his scowl softened. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to be you,” he said.

Far behind them, they heard the others piling into the van. Winston took a step back, but before he turned to leave, he reached out and tapped Dillon on the arm, the closest he could bring himself to a friendly gesture. “Stay clean,” said Winston. “Don’t let the bugs in.”

Dillon nodded, and Winston ran off to join the others. In a moment their minds were far away, their voices growing with joy and anticipation. Then Michael started the engine, and the four great souls ventured forth into the bright morning, ready to embrace their new, old lives.

It wasn’t until lunch time that they spared a thought for Dillon again, when a coffee shop waitress told them their lunch was on the house.

Dillon watched them drive down the dirt road away from Slayton’s shack. The van’s stereo was blasting, and Dillon could tell they were already soaring back into the world of love and life—a place where Dillon could not join them. Once the sound of their engine faded in the distance, Dillon approached Carter.

The boy still sat near Slayton’s grave, doing nothing, thinking nothing. Dillon sat down in front of him and looked into the boy’s eyes; the large black pupil of the left, the tiny pinhead of the right.

Dillon gathered all of his attention, pushing out his own fear and confusion. He held this boy by the shoulders and looked through those empty eyes, until he found the im­possible jigsaw of a little boy . . . mindless . . . patternless, splintered beyond any hope of repair, and yet Dillon set himself to the task of repairing it.

Dillon sat there ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour, pushing his own mind into the boy’s chaos and stringing together a lifetime of thought and meaning. It wasn’t as easy as destruction; it was a thousand times harder to re­create what was no longer there, but Dillon forced himself to do it.

When he was done, Dillon felt drained, cold and ex­hausted—but when he looked into Carter’s eyes now, the boy’s eyes looked normal. And they began to fill with tears.

“I done bad things,” cried the boy, with a mind all too clear. “I kilt people. I done bad, bad things.”

“It wasn’t you,” Dillon told the boy. “It was me.”

Dillon took the sobbing boy into his arms and together they cried in the lonely woods. Dillon cried for all the souls he had ruined, for all the pain he had caused. . . .

. . . And he cried for Deanna. Losing her was more than he could bear. If she had been here, she could have comforted this boy, touching him with her gift of strength and faith. She could have healed his heart just as Dillon had healed his mind. What a wonderful world this could have been if Deanna could still be in it.

So they both cried, and when neither of them could cry anymore, Dillon put the boy into the Range Rover and got into the driver’s seat.

The boy, still sniffling a bit, studied him. “You old enough to drive?” he asked.

Dillon shrugged. “Not really.”

The boy put on his seat belt, and Dillon started the car. The boy didn’t ask where they were going. Maybe he just didn’t want to think about it, or maybe he already knew.

Interstate 84 crossed out of Washington, then fol­lowed the Columbia River east, along the Washington-Oregon border. Just before dark, they turned off the inter­state, heading down a country road that wound through a dense forest. Less than a mile down, the road was blocked by a police barricade; only the truly determined would be getting anywhere near the town of Burton, Oregon, for a good long time.

Dillon stopped the car and took a deep breath as he stared at the barricade. In the distance, he could hear ghostly wails of the mad ones still lost in the woods—so many of them, it made Dillon wish he could turn and run, screaming louder than the voices in the woods. But then he remembered how bravely Deanna had faced things at the end. Certainly Dillon could find a fraction of that bravery now.

As they got out of the car, the boy looked at Dillon with trusting eyes, as if Dillon had all the answers in the world.

“Can you make it all better?” asked the boy. “Can you fix everything?”

Could he? There was no pattern Dillon could see that gave him an answer; there was only his will, the boy’s hope, and a memory of Deanna’s faith in him. But per­haps that’s all he needed to begin the mending.

“I don’t know,” said Dillon. “We’ll see.”

Then he took the boy’s hand, and together they walked toward the barricade of the shattered town.