Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

“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.