Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

It should not have happened. The way the explosives had been set, the building should have come straight down . . . but it didn’t. Instead, the entire building keeled over backward and landed on Jefferson Place—an office building across the street that had been evacuated as a precaution. The old office building shifted violently on its foundation, and keeled over to the left. . . .

. . . Where stood the Hoff Building—a city landmark.

No one had thought it necessary to evacuate that one.

The Hoff Building took the blow, and for a moment it looked as if it was only going to lose its eastern face. But then it, too, began a slow topple to the left, its domed tower crashing into the Old Boise Post Office.

Dominoes , thought the foreman. They’re going down like dominoes. It was impossible; it would take a pattern of in­credible coincidences for each building to hit the one be­side it with just the right force to bring it down as well . . . but the evidence was here before their eyes.

Debris struck the Capitol building, which seemed to be all right . . . until the pillars holding up its heavy dome buckled and the dome crashed down and disappeared into the building, hitting bottom with such force that all the windows shattered.

And it was over.

Seven buildings had been demolished.

Beside the foreman, his explosives expert just stood there, rocking back and forth, and happily whistling “Twist and Shout.” Another crew member was scream­ing at the top of his lungs.

They’re insane! thought the foreman. They’ve completely lost their minds. And finally, the combination of everything around him was exactly enough to make the foreman snap as well. As he felt his own mind slipping down a well of eternal madness, he realized that the destruction he had just witnessed was somehow not over yet. In fact, it was just beginning. In a moment he started laughing hys­terically. And he never stopped.

Michael Lipranski now understood death. It was blind, cold and dusty. It was filled with a loud ringing in one’s ears that didn’t go away. Death was oppressive and choking.

These were the thoughts Michael was left with after having died. There were, of course, many questions to come, but the one question that was foremost in his mind was this: Why, if he was dead, did he still feel like cough­ing?

Michael let out a roaring hacking cough and cleared concrete dust from his lungs. He opened his eyes. They stung, but he forced them open anyway. Around him were three other ghosts . . . or at least they looked like ghosts. They all began to stir, and as they sat up, a heavy layer of white dust fell from them.

“What happened?” asked Winston.

And as they looked around, the answer became clear. They were still on the seventh floor . . . or at least what was left of it. Just a corner really. The rest of the building was gone. So were quite a few others around it. It looked as if downtown Boise had been hit by a small nuclear bomb.

“He did this,” said Winston.

“He, who?”

“The Other One . . . the fifth one. I told you I saw him!”

“He saved our lives?” asked Tory.

“I don’t think he meant to,” said Winston.

They looked out at the devastation once more. Lourdes, her death-wish forgotten, stood and walked to the jagged edge where the seventh floor gave way to open air. The rest of the building had shorn away and had turned to rubble. If they had been anywhere else on that floor, they would have been part of that rubble . . . but they weren’t anywhere else, they were right here . . . and Lourdes began to wonder idly what sort of intuition had made her collapse in the north corner rather than the south corner, or was luck so incredibly dumb that it didn’t even know an easy target?

Tory looked stunned. “I guess it takes more than a few thousand pounds of explosives to get rid of us.”

“Lourdes, you’re standing!” Michael approached Lourdes at the jagged edge of the concrete floor. Indeed, she had found the strength to lift her weight again . . . or was there less weight to lift? “Is it my imagination . . . or do you have one less chin?”

The others came closer. The change was almost imper­ceptible . . . but the others were able to notice.

Tory looked at her hand and flexed her fingers. Her skin was still as awful as before, but the swelling that had come to her joints was fading. Tears came to her eyes, and the salty tears didn’t even sting, for her sores were slowly beginning to close.

They looked at each other, afraid to say what they now knew, for fear that speaking it would somehow jinx it. Fi­nally Tory dared to utter the words.

“They’re gone. . . .” she whispered. It took a few mo­ments for it to finally hit home. Then, in the midst of the devastation Tory’s voice rang out from the top floor of the ruined Dakins building, a clear note of joy in the midst of sorrow.

“We’re free!”

The jagged broken wall provided them with a treach­erous path down to the rubble below.

There was chaos around the scene, but not the chaos one might expect. People screaming, crying, wandering like zombies—it was as if the shock wave of this event had driven everyone around it completely insane.

Winston looked around him and fumed. The red­headed boy had created this wave of destruction. The physical wasn’t enough for him—he had to destroy the minds of the survivors. It made Winston furious . . . furi­ous at himself for having seen him and not trying to stop him! Not even the knowledge that his own parasite was gone could calm his fury.

Winston approached a policeman sitting on a fire hy­drant. He was staring into the barrel of his own gun with a blank expression. When he saw Winston, he turned to him, pleading.

“Am I in trouble?” asked the officer. “Am I gonna get a whooping?”

Winston reached out and gingerly pulled the revolver out of his hands. The officer buried his head in his hands and cried.

“How did he do this?” asked Winston, as they stum­bled their way through the nightmare of insanity.

“How?” said Tory. “How many thousands of people could you have paralyzed if you wanted to? How many plague epidemics could I have started? The only differ­ence between him and us,” she said, “is that we didn’t want to.”

About three blocks away from the wreckage, sanity seemed intact. People gawked and chattered and paced, but not with the same mindless chaos that surrounded the site of destruction.

As they left the insanity circle, it was Lourdes who took a moment to look back. In the midst of the rubble, the only thing left standing was the seven-story sliver that had been the corner of the Dakins storage building.

“Clutch player?” Michael suggested with a grin.

“Maybe,” said Lourdes. “I was thinking that it looks like a tower. A tower that was struck by lightning.”

As the sound of approaching sirens filled the air, Tory turned to the others. “I don’t think those things died,” she told them. “I mean if we’re alive, then they’re probably alive, too. I think they bailed because they thought they were going to get blown up. The explosion scared them out. . . but that doesn’t mean they’re gone for good.”

Tory touched her face, to make certain that the pain there was still slipping away. “We still may have to fight those things,” she said. “But maybe when the six of us are together—"

“When the six of us are together,” said Winston, feel­ing the weight of the revolver in his pocket, “I’m gonna send that red-headed son of a bitch where he belongs.”