Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

“I saw it,” said Deanna, calmly. “It was like a snake. . . . No . . . more like a giant worm.”

Everyone else shuddered, but Deanna didn’t seem bothered by the memory at all. She seemed rather fearless about the whole thing. “Anyway it vanished through the woods, heading west.”

Carter wandered around the living room and found his bow and arrows. He set to work removing the rubber suction-cup darts, and sharpening the wood with a pocket knife, as he had done with the first one. Lourdes went over to watch.

“Do you have a car?” asked Deanna.

“Just down the road,” answered Michael.

“We have to get going . . . I knew you’d be coming, so I stacked some supplies by the door—I know where Dillon is headed.”

“Look!” said Tory, and they all turned to catch sight of Lourdes at the other end of the room with Carter. Lourdes had gained the boy’s attention now—he had put down his knife and arrow. Together they seemed to be playing some sort of game—a mirroring game, where the boy would copy whatever Lourdes did.

“Lourdes, this is no time to be fooling around!” said Winston.

“Shh!” said Tory, sharply.

Lourdes kept her eye contact with the boy. She raised one arm; so did he. She raised the other arm; so did he. Only this wasn’t a game, and he wasn’t simply mimicking her, his actions were too perfect, too exact.

“She’s controlling him like a marionette!” said Mi­chael, staring in wide-eyed disbelief. “She’s controlling every movement of his body!” Each motion Lourdes made was exactly duplicated. She wiggled her fingers; so did he. She rolled her neck; so did he. Was it just the boy’s muscles, or did it go beyond that? Could she control his heartbeat? His breathing? His very metabolism? Until yesterday, she couldn’t control her own grotesque physi­ology, but now the physiology of others seemed within her grasp!

Lourdes looked at the boy, and the boy’s ruined eyes began to close. He nodded off to sleep.

Lourdes turned to the others. “Did you see that?” she said, just as surprised as the rest of them. “I think I did that!”

They all just stared at the sleeping boy in wonder, real­izing that the title of “Squirrelgirl” for Lourdes didn’t quite hit the mark.

“Those creatures turned our strengths into weak­nesses!” said Tory. It was becoming clearer to each of them now. Michael’s ability to affect nature had been used to wreak havoc in the very nature of people around him; Tory’s cleansing touch had been turned into a touch of disease; Lourdes’s ability to control the metabolism of others had been used to draw the flesh out of their cells and add it to Lourdes.

Tory turned to Winston. “We can figure out what your strength is now!”

“I already figured,” said Winston uneasily. He looked around, then asked Michael to bring down a potted plant from a shelf Winston couldn’t reach. Winston put the plant down on a coffee table, took a deep breath, then grasped the stem in his hand and concentrated. Right before everyone’s eyes, the plant grew until it had doubled in size and flowers bloomed. Winston smiled. It was the first time any of them had seen him really smile.

“Looks like we got a flower-child,” said Michael, with a grin. “What are you gonna do, beat Dillon with a cor­sage?”

Winston shrugged. “Ain’t my problem if you can’t see the possibilities.”

“You’ll find a good use for it,” said Deanna. “Don’t worry.”

And indeed it seemed that Deanna was not worried. By anything. Her fearlessness was a powerful strength. It gave them focus; it gave them clarity. She told them how Dillon had changed in the end, making it horribly clear where all their beasts had gone—and it seemed likely that Deanna’s beast had found him as well.

“He’s stronger than all of us,” said Tory. “If he can survive with all six of them inside him.”

“You said you knew where he was going?” asked Mi­chael.

Deanna nodded, and picked up sleeping Carter, refus­ing to leave him alone in this awful town, and they all headed back to the car.

“There’s still time to stop him, but it will take all of us to do it,” said Deanna.

“Stop him . . . from what?” asked Lourdes.

“Don’t you know what he wants to do?” she asked, looking at each of them. Only Deanna had the courage to say the words aloud.

“He’s going to shatter the world, the same way he shat­tered this town . . . and once it starts, we won’t be able to stop it.”

Jagged spires of dead wood stretched through the morning mist. Thousands upon thousands of trees had once blanketed the steep hills, stretching to­wards a distant mountain . . .

. . . but now every last tree was dead.

Wind, rain and rot had eaten away their branches, leaving vast acres of wooden monoliths standing in a mulch of peat and heavy gray ash. This forest had died long before Dillon Cole got to it, and the cause of death was still there on the horizon, breathing steam like a fire god asleep.

The sheer power of it, thought Dillon as he drove from life into the miles of death that surrounded the northern face of Mount St. Helens.

The smell of decay within this realm of desolation blended with the rich, dark smell of volcanic ash, creating an aroma that was at once both clean and vile, like the awful smell of a sulfer spring.

As he drove into the volcanic wasteland, fear began to writhe in his gut, but he beat it down. The fear had de­scended on him shortly after Deanna had left him. Terror had suddenly coiled itself around his gut like a serpent, making him feel paranoid and claustrophobic in the cab of the Range Rover as he left the dying town of Burton. He had fought it down until it wasn’t so overpowering, but still the fear kept coming back, urging him to drive faster and more recklessly to his final destination.

The hands that now gripped the steering wheel were not his hands—at least not the hands that he remem­bered. These were bloated and swollen—covered with red boils. This body was not his either. His growing gut had burst out of his pants in the middle of the night. He was forced to find a truck stop and confiscate larger clothes from a trucker whose life had come to a sudden and unexpected end. Now Dillon had to roll up the pant legs as well—he swore that he was an inch shorter than the day before. Inside he could feel many, many hungers now, coiled within him, competing for his will, all scream­ing to be fed.

The wrecking-hunger, however, still screamed the loudest, and its final feeding was all that mattered—a feeding so great that when it was done, there would be nothing left to devour.

Back in the Burton Library, he had studied the maps, the charts, the statistics. He had worked calculations that a supercomputer would have shied away from, and he had pulled out an answer, sifting it through a secret sixth sense. The answer he came up with was this: of all the locations in the world from which to set up the ultimate chain reaction, only one rested in North America. The epicenter of destruction was in Washington state, in the shadow of Mount St. Helens. Here, in this secret fulcrum of human existence, Dillon would have to find a human fuse. It would have to be someone with no ties to the out­side world and filled with a lonely anger. Someone sepa­rate and alone. It would have to be a hermit, whose des­tiny Dillon could aim with the pinpoint accuracy of a sniper.

Although the calculations that brought him there were complex, the actual plan was simple: Dillon would find his hermit, then find the hermit’s weakness and fire him to­ward a nearby city. In the city, there would be a gathering place—a bar, perhaps—where this man would create a chain of events that would drive everyone there beyond the limit of their sanity. Those who survived would carry the insanity home with them.