Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

At the edge of the wreckage, a man with no mind stumbled away from his Range Rover. It was just one of many cars left idling in the middle of the road. Deanna and Dillon used it as their ticket out of Boise, and in a moment they were careening wildly northwest.

Deanna, who had never been behind the wheel of a car before, gripped the wheel and taught herself to drive at ninety miles an hour on the straightaway of I-84.

“How many people died?” she demanded. She would not turn her eyes from the road, but through the corner of her eye she could see Dillon sitting beside her. He seemed completely absorbed in his map, pretending not to hear her.

“How many?” she demanded again.

“I don’t know,” said Dillon. “I can’t tell things that ex­acdy. Anyway, what’s done is done,” he said and spoke no more of it.

Things were changing far too quickly for Deanna to keep up. What had begun for both of them as a cleansing journey filled with the hope of redemption had become nothing more than a mad rampage with no end in sight. It made her want to get out and run . . . if only she could bear the fear of being on her own. Stepping out of that car and leaving Dillon would have been like stepping out of an airlock into space. She needed him, and she hated that.

She glanced at Dillon as he pored over the AAA map. He tossed it behind him and pulled another from the glove compartment.

“I won’t keep running like this,” said Deanna.

“We’re not running, we’re going somewhere,” he fi­nally admitted.

“Where?”

“I don’t know yet...” he snapped; then said a bit more gently, “I’ll tell you as soon as I know, I promise.”

“We were wrong,” said Deanna. “We should find The Others—"

“The Others are dead,” he said.

Deanna knew this was a lie. It was the first outright lie he had ever told her.

The road ahead of them was straight and clear, and Deanna dared to take a long look at Dillon. He had changed since she had first seen him in that hospital room. There he had been a tormented but courageous boy who had whisked her from her hospital bed. He had been a valiant, if somewhat disturbed, knight in shining armor. But now his courage had turned rancid. There was no armor, just an aura of darkness flowing around him like a black shroud—as if his body could no longer contain the blackness it held.

It was more than that, though—his body was changing as well. Had he gained weight? Yes, his slender figure had begun to bloat. She could see it in his face and hands—in his fingers, beginning to turn round and porcine. His skin, too, had changed. It began to take on an oily redness marked with whiteheads that were appearing one after another. He’s beginning to look on the outside what he’s becoming on the inside, Deanna thought, and shivered.

“Damn it!” said Dillon, hurling the map behind him. “I need more maps! These don’t tell me what I need to know!” He took a deep breath to calm himself, then rubbed his eyes and said, “There’s a town—when we get to the Columbia River—a good-sized population.”

“Why does the population matter?” Deanna couldn’t hide the apprehension in her voice.

“Because it means they’ll have a decent library,” Dil­lon answered. “And a decent library will have a decent almanac, and an atlas. A world atlas.”

“And?”

Dillon rolled his eyes impatiently as if it were obvious, “And when I see what I have to see, I’ll know where we have to go.”

She heard him take another deep, relaxing breath, then he gently put his hand on her neck. It felt clammy and uncomfortable. She could feel that aura of darkness and how revolting it felt.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything’s gonna be great.”

This too was a lie, but she knew that Dillon believed this one.

“When we get where we’re going,” Deanna asked, “is this all going to be over? Will it end?”

Dillon nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Once we get there . . . everything will end.”

Burton, Oregon. Population 3,255. In the center of town, a harvest festival sent bluegrass music wafting to­wards Main Street, where all was quiet. The library was empty today, except for Dillon and Deanna.

Dillon piled the large wooden reference table with vol­ume after volume of atlases and almanacs. The librarian was delighted to see a young man so involved in his stud­ies. Deanna, as curious as she was unsettled, helped him pull down heavy volumes describing the people and places of the world. First he stared at the maps—the way roads connected and wound from city to city, state to state, nation to nation. Then he looked at numbers—end­less lists of numbers, graphs and charts. Populations—demographics; people grouped in whatever ways the re­searchers could find to group them; by race or religion; by economics; by profession; by politics; by every imaginable variable.

“What are you looking for?” Deanna asked. But Dillon was so engrossed in his numbers he didn’t even hear her. He was like a computer, taking in thousands of digits, and processing them through some inner program.

Then, one by one Dillon closed the books. The atlas of Europe, of Asia. The books on Australia and South Amer­ica. The studies of Africa, the American Almanac . . . until he was left with the map of the northwestern United States. He stared at the map, drawing his eyes further and further northwest, his finger following the tiny capillaries of country roads until he stopped. Dillon’s master equa­tion had finally spit out an answer.

“There.”

His finger landed in the southwest corner of Washing­ton state. “This is where we have to go.”

“What will we find there?” asked Deanna.

“Someone.”

“Someone we know?”

Dillon shook his head. “Someone we will know. Some­one important.”

They left, not bothering to shelve the books.

Their course out of town took them right past the har­vest festival. They had no intention of stopping, but the Rover needed gas. The gas station was right across the road from the festival, where most everyone in Burton was spending this fine day.

Dillon, who was driving now, got out to pump, while Deanna scrounged around the messy car, finding dollar bills and loose change to pay for the gas. It was when she looked out of the window at Dillon that she knew some­thing was wrong. The old-fashioned mechanical pump clanged out gallons and racked up dollars, but Dillon wasn’t watching that. Instead, he was looking at the pump just ahead of them, where a tattooed, beer-bellied man stood pumping up his rundown Trans-Am. His equally unattractive wife stood beside him.

It seemed that Dillon had caught the wife’s attention, and she was staring at him in a trance. Dillon stared right back. Then this woman in high heels and decade-old tight pants stepped over the gas hose and began to approach Dillon, but her husband, sensing something out of the or­dinary, held her back.

He scowled at Dillon. “Got a problem?”

Dillon looked away, shook it off, and the episode was over . . . but it lingered in Deanna’s mind. There were many strange twists and turns on the roller coaster the two of them had been on, but in some odd way those other turns were consistent. This seemed to take the coaster wholly off its track. She turned to Dillon again and no­ticed the beads of sweat beginning to form on his fore­head. She knew what that meant, and she began to panic. What happened in Boise should have satisfied his rapa­cious hunger for a good while. She knew she had to get him out of town, so she quickly paid the attendant in crumpled bills and loose change—but when she turned, Dillon had already disappeared into the crowds of the fair.