Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

It leapt deeper into the tree, and the tree limbs clat­tered like bones as the thing hurried to the ground.

“It’s Tailybone!” screamed Thaddy, half out of his lit­tle fool mind. “It’s Tailybone!” and he screamed for their mother.

Winston pushed himself back into the room and fell to the floor. A light came on downstairs.

“Thaddy, are you all right? What’s going on up there?” Winston headed downstairs with the baseball bat, and Thaddy fell in line close behind, still whimpering about Tailybone.

“Shut up!” Winston commanded his brother. “There ain’t no such thing, there never was and there never will be!”

“Then what was that?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t no Tailybone. It was a some one , or a something.” Winston was sure of that now, because the face of the beast had something very human about it. Maybe it was something that escaped from someplace. A carnival. An asylum.

“Maybe it’s an alien, maybe,” said Thad. “It was so UGLY!”

“What was so ugly?” shouted Mama. They passed her room downstairs, on the way out the back door. She was already scrambling out of her bed and into her wheel­chair.

“Don’t worry, Mama, I’ll check it out.”

“Don’t you go out there, Winston, if it’s a prowler, we’ll call the sheriff!”

But nothing she could say would stop him now. At first he had been terrified, but the terror was quickly boiling itself into full-blown fury. He had his fighting fury up, and no one messed with ’Stone Pell when he was in a fighting frenzy.

The kids around town knew that you didn’t fight that little freak ’Stone, unless you wanted to be laid out by the count of five—because now Winston’s touch was more than just numbing. Every punch Winston threw was guar­anteed to paralyze whatever it hit. First your right arm would go senseless, then your left, then your chin, then your gut, and before long you were lying on the ground, your body limp and useless for hours—maybe even till morning. Maybe longer.

It left Winston with no one to fight, and that was a hor­rible thing, because, lately all Winston wanted to do was fight.

Winston and Thad raced through Mama’s stunted gar­den, hopped the fence, and followed the thing out into the pasture at the edge of a field ripe with cotton.

The moon was on the rise now, making the cotton shine like snow. There was enough light to see the shape of the thing, as it lumbered behind the octopus tree, an ancient live oak with a dozen limbs perfect for climbing. The thing tried to get up into the tree, but Winston swung the bat. He missed, but the creature slipped on some Spanish moss, and fell to the ground. Thaddy pushed at it once, and then ran to hide behind the octopus tree.

“Paralyze it, ’Stone,” yelled Thad. “Paralyze it good!”

Winston threw the bat down and cornered it against a hedge thick with sharp thorns. He moved in for hand-to-hand combat.

The beast wasn’t as big as he had thought—but it was certainly bigger than he was. Winston dove on the thing, fists flying. It struggled, and Winston grabbed onto its arms—but the thing pulled away, and they both fell over the fence into the cotton. He couldn’t paralyze it, no mat­ter how hard he tried. All he could do was fight it, and so Winston and the beast rolled in the cotton, fighting one another, until the beast spoke.

“Stop it,” it screamed in a voice that was wet and raspy, but still not evil enough for a nightmare beast. “Or I’m really gonna have to beat you silly!”

The thing threw Winston off, and he landed hard against a fence post with a thud.

By now Thaddy was scratching his arm—the one that had touched the thing.

“Why aren’t you paralyzed yet?” Winston demanded. “What the hell are you?”

“I’m a freak,” it said. “I’m a freak like you.”

Winston took a good look at its face. It was pocked and cratered, like the face of the moon—full of peeling sores and swelling boils, as if it had been bathing in nuclear waste. It was what Winston imagined leprosy might be like—only worse.

That’s when Thaddy made an amazing observation.

“I think it might be a girl,” he said.

A girl? Winston regarded the grotesque face. It was hard enough for Winston to figure what color its skin was, much less its sex. The straight blonde hair gave away that it was white, but the fact that the hair was short and mat­ted didn’t say what sex it was, if any.

“Are you a boy or a girl?” demanded Winston.

“A girl,” it said, disgusted.

By now, Thaddy was scratching his arm like crazy.

“What did you do to him?”

The she-thing smiled. “He shouldn’t have touched me. Guess I gave him cooties.”

Thaddy looked at Winston and the pizza-faced girl in horror, as if to say You mean there really is such a thing as coo­ties? He turned and ran back to the house, screaming for Mama.

“He’ll get a rash on his arm,” said the girl. “Probably come down with a bad fever for a week or so, but then it’ll go away . . . he shouldn’t have touched me.”

“Winston?” called his mother from the porch. “What’s going on out there?”

“Just some girl, Mama,” said Winston. “Thaddy fell in some poison ivy—better tend to him.” This was far easier than trying to explain the truth to her.

When his mother had rolled back into the house, the girl-thing told Winston her name was Tory, short for Vic­toria.

“What’s wrong with you?” Winston asked Tory.

“Acne,” she said. “Ain’t you ever seen acne before?”

Winston looked closely. If this was acne, it was acne gone mad. There was a human being down there, but it was hidden far beneath an oily layer of zits built on zits built on zits. If you spread all those blemishes across ten faces, each face would still be painful to look at.

“You’re damn ugly,” observed Winston.

“Gee, thanks for noticing, Mighty Mouse. It just so happens that I know who you are. I’ve been watching you ever since my aunt and me moved here last month. Are you really a witch midget? A devil-dwarf?”

“Go to hell!” shouted Winston, and he leapt at her. So what if she was a girl? No one called him things like that.

They rolled and fought, and even though Winston wasn’t really winning, it felt good. It felt wonderful to ac­tually have someone to fight who didn’t fall to the ground the second he touched them.

“You possum-rot pus-head,” shouted Winston.

“You pin-headed voodoo troll!” shouted Tory.

“Slime-drippin’ cesspool explosion!”

“Baby-brained diaper butt!”

“Fusion-face!”

“Shrunken head!”

“Elephant girl!”

Tory delivered a punch to the nose that was right on the mark. It hurt pretty bad, and Winston had to stagger off, collapsing by the fence.

“Why can’t I paralyze you?” he asked weakly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you get sick when I touch you?”

They looked at each other like boxers in separate cor­ners.

“Sorry I hit you so hard,” said Tory. “It’s just that the elephant girl thing is a sore spot. It’s what they used to call me when I lived in Florida.”

“Where’d you live, the Everglades?” jabbed Winston. “Are you a swamp thing?”

Tory didn’t answer. Even in the dim light Winston could see her puffy eyes filling with tears.

“Okay,” said Winston. “Truce?”

“Truce,” echoed Tory, rubbing the tears from her eyes before they had a chance to fall. Tears would probably make her face sting, thought Winston.

“You always go looking in people’s windows at night, scarin’ ’em half to death?” he asked, wiping his bloody nose.