Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

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.

At 4:30 a.m., Mountain time, Lourdes Hidalgo decided it was time to die.

It had been two days since that night in the ice storm. With little money, and even less time to spare, they had searched for a trail—any sign of the missing two. Nothing turned up along I-80, and nothing in Big Springs, but in Torrington, Wyoming, they found a newspaper article that led them to a devastated farm. It reeked of something unnatural.

Once they found the farm, they knew they were on the right track, because the presence of the fifth and sixth shard was as strong as a scent on the wind. What they had feared was now confirmed; those other two had lost con­trol and had set off on a mad rampage to feed the para­sites that were strangling their souls. Intuition told them that number five was the dangerous one and that number six probably fed on the aftermath of destruction like a vulture fed on a lion’s kill.

After that, following their trail was like following the ashen trail of a burning fuse. News reports had led them in the ruined neighborhood in Idaho Falls, which seemed ten times worse than what they found at the farm. They were only a day behind as they headed deeper into Idaho, terrified of what they would find next.

They rested in Boise, finding a cheap hotel for the night. It had been a major effort for Lourdes to haul herself out of the van this time, and each footstep felt like it would be her last.

Like everywhere else their journey took them, this hotel was right in the armpit of town, where old decrepit build­ings loomed ripe for the wrecking ball.

Lourdes could see one such building from the hotel window, across the expanse of a vacant lot: a concrete warehouse seven stories tall, with slits for windows and a big faded sign painted on the side that said “Dakins Worldwide Storage.” The building’s few entrances were boarded over, and the abandoned property was fenced in. Apparendy Dakins had found better worldwide storage elsewhere.

While the others slept, Lourdes kept vigil and watched that solitary, lonely building, feeling a strange affinity for it as she pondered the short time remaining to her own life. Few buildings on earth could be as unloved as this one.

In the five days since they had banded together, they had witnessed wonders and had watched each other dete­riorate. Winston’s dignity was the first casualty, for his body had grown so small he couldn’t see out of the van’s windows when he sat, and he had to eat soft food because all his teeth were receding. Tory, who had been a driving force all along, was slowing down, as her disease turned inward, swelling her joints with painful arthritis . . . and Michael . . . well, rather than allowing his passion to wreak havoc on the soul of every girl he encountered, Mi­chael had turned his mind to a dark lonely place within himself and seldom came out. Brooding and silent, with dark, wan eyes, he looked like he was dying of cancer.

As for Lourdes, there were no mirrors large enough to present her full image. She could feel the weight on her bones growing, building density, like ice on the branches of a tree. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, fighting to force blood through clogged arteries. She could feel her bloated self, ready to burst through the shell that contained her, and knew that it could happen at any moment.

So she stayed awake . . . and at 4:30 a.m. one of the many seams on her blouse tore so violently that the blouse itself literally burst in two.

That’s when Lourdes decided that it was time to call it quits.

Outside, the rain had let up a bit, and Lourdes could see the warehouse more clearly. There were people mill­ing about the building, and it seemed odd to Lourdes that such a lonely place would be the center of anyone else’s attention but hers, so she watched and wondered. In a few moments, things became very clear to her, and she knew exactly what she was going to do.

“Michael, Winston, wake up!” Tory shook them both, dragging them out of a deep sleep. “It’s Lourdes! She’s gone!”

Wearily, the three searched the room and the hallway.

Tory looked in the closet. The others looked under the beds—as if Lourdes could possibly fit in any of those places.

That’s when Michael happened to glance out the win­dow. Dawn was beginning to break on the distant hori­zon, and in the faint half-light he could see a huge shape lumbering through a vacant lot toward an old Dakins warehouse a block away.

“Look,” he said. “There she is!”

The front of the old warehouse was teeming with ac­tivity, but Lourdes approached from the rear and no one saw her. She smiled as she approached. All this time the four of them had been running, unsure of their destina­tion. It was nice, for once, to have a destination.

Her momentum took her through the chicken wire fence that surrounded the property as if it were paper, and she pushed on through the police line, tearing the ribbon as if it were a finish line. She leaned against the boarded-over door, and her sheer weight forced the door inward, leading her into a dark cavernous space where her la­bored breathing echoed from distant concrete walls. To the right was a flight of stairs and, without pausing for fur­ther thought, she began to heave herself step by step to­ward the upper floors of the desolate building.