Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

It was twilight now. The lights had come up on the Ferris wheel, and the Tilt-a-whirl spun its merry victims past one another in flashes of neon blue and red.

Deanna searched everywhere for Dillon, in every dark corner, in every crowd, but he seemed to have completely dissolved into the mob.

Finally she spotted him on the midway. He was walk­ing . . . no, wandering, down the hay-strewn path with the aimlessness of a zombie. He was drenched in sweat.

Deanna ran toward him, but stopped when she saw him once more lock eyes with another girl, just as he had with the woman at the gas station. This one was sixteen—maybe seventeen. She ate cotton candy and watched her muscle-bound boyfriend launch rubber frogs into the air with a sledgehammer, trying to win her a prize. The boy­friend grunted as he swung the hammer and didn’t seem to notice as the girl dropped her cotton candy, crossed the midway to Dillon, and then, for no apparent reason, leaned forward . . . and kissed him.

Deanna just stood there gawking.

Clearly this girl had never met Dillon before . . . and here she was launching herself into his arms with the same passion with which her boyfriend launched his rubber frogs.

Deanna watched as Dillon brought up his arms and pulled this girl closer, kissing her in a powerful way—a way in which he had never kissed Deanna. It was not an embrace of love, or even lust—it was passion turned ran­cid. It was everything that a kiss should not be.

But it wasn’t a kiss, was it? It was more like a bite.

The girl’s arms turned white from the tightness of Dil­lon’s grip, and she gave into his embrace completely. Deanna’s mind swarmed with powerful, conflicting emo­tions—jealousy not the least of them.

Although she never wanted him to steal this kind of kiss from her, she didn’t want to see him steal it from anyone else, either.

How could a kiss be so evil—and what had possessed the girl to step into it? It couldn’t have been Dillon’s looks—not anymore. What once had been an attractive face was now puffy and infected. His dark eyes had become an icy, unnatural turquoise.

Here he was kissing another girl—right there in front of her, and he didn’t even care! The sense of betrayal was unbearable.

Dillon squeezed the girl against him and Deanna could see his dark aura stretch around her—then Deanna saw—no—she felt something invisible pass from the girl to Dillon.

The boyfriend, who had just won a pink dinosaur, turned and gawked with blinking idiocy at his girlfriend, kissing this sick-looking kid.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

At last Dillon moved his lips away from the girl’s, and she looked into his eyes. This time his touch had not scrambled her thoughts.

The boyfriend stepped in, pushed Dillon against a car, and delivered a right hook that sent Dillon’s head snap­ping to the left. Dillon recovered quickly . . . but not the boyfriend. He gasped and looked at his hand, where it had touched Dillon’s chin. His knuckles were locked. Not just that, but his whole forearm was locked in a muscle spasm that caused his sinews to bulge like ropes from his elbow to his wrist.

The boyfriend stumbled away, forgetting the girl, star­ing at his paralyzed arm. As for the girl, she just wandered off wide-eyed, and Deanna sensed that something had been stolen from her—something very important that she would never get back.

Dillon just grinned dumbly.

“Why did you do that?” Deanna demanded, over­whelmed with disgust.

“I don’t know. . . .”

“You really enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

“Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know.” He put his hand to his temples, as if keeping his head from blowing apart. “Deanna, what’s happening to me?”

She had no sympathy for him now as she locked eyes with his, and scrutinized him.

“Deanna, don’t look at me like that. . . .”

Deanna peered deep into his eyes searching as she al­ways did . . . seeking the glimmer in the darkness. She looked long and hard, through the rank and fetid decay that encased his body and soul . . . and finally Deanna realized that the light in him was gone. The part of Dillon that had shone so brightly in his darkness all this time had been wrapped in so many shrouds of evil that she could not find him anymore.

The moment she realized that was the moment she knew she had to run—to get as far away from this mon­ster as she possibly could. She instandy turned without pause for another thought and abandoned the shell that had once been Dillon Cole, racing into the crowds—but Dillon desperately pursued.

“Deanna!” he screamed. “Don’t go!”

She couldn’t stop herself from glancing back as he chased her, and what she saw made her run even faster.

Dillon was pushing through the crowds just as she was, and everyone he touched fell from him with hideous af­flictions. Some collapsed in paralysis, others lost their minds, others seemed to deflate as if their chests had been crushed inward, and still others turned red and diseased. “Deanna!!” he screamed, not even noticing the people he had destroyed.

She broke free of the crowd and scrambled away from the fair, to the top of a hill.

“Deanna, come back!”

When she reached the top of the hill, she dared to look back once more. Dillon was still standing there at the edge of the crowd. He stared at her a moment more . . . and finally with a scowl on his face, he turned and defiantly grabbed the first girl in sight. She came to him like he was a gift from heaven, and he kissed her, stealing her soul away with his kiss. Then he turned and headed back into the crowd.

From the top of the hill, Deanna watched him go, the living darkness now cloaked around him and trailing be­hind him. He stalked his way to the center of the crowd around the bluegrass band. He looked left, then right, until he finally found The Right Person—a matronly woman clapping her hands happily to the beat. Then Dil­lon whispered something into her ear.

And the crowd detonated.

From where Deanna stood, she could see how it hap­pened. It began with people becoming irritated, then irri­tation built into anger, anger into fury, fury into rage, until the entire crowd thrashed in a chaotic screaming tarantella—a dance of destruction, wild and insane, spreading outward like a shock wave. The music stopped and was replaced by wails of anguish and pain. In five minutes the townsfolk had turned into chaotic, murderous fiends, their sanity wiped from their minds by Dillon the destroyer.

Deanna turned and ran, screaming, into the woods.

Woods are a ripe place for fears, and Deanna’s were thriving on the branches and shadows that surrounded her. She had refused to feed on the terror Dillon had un­leashed, so now every shape was a threatening demon, every shadow a portent of pain. She stumbled over and over as she raced through the lonely woods not knowing where she would go.

At last she came to a road and tumbled to the gravel, skinning her knees through her jeans. She sat up on the empty asphalt, breathless, her voice ruined from all her screaming.

Finally a pickup truck swerved to stop in front of her.

A man got out—a middle-aged, family-looking man. There was a boy in the back of the pickup, all dressed up in an Indian outfit.

It seemed normal, and Deanna just wanted to dissolve into this man and his family, forgetting who she was and what was happening.

“I have to get out of here,” Deanna rasped. “So do you! You have to get away from this town!”

“Now hold on, there,” said the man warmly. “Let’s just calm down.” He looked her over as he stepped from the cab of his pickup. “You’ve had some fright,” he said. “I know just the thing for you.”