Scorpion Shards (12 page)

T
HAT AFTERNOON, AT ANOTHER
farm hundreds of miles away in Torrington, Wyoming, Dillon Cole tore through a wheat field, putting distance between himself and the farmhouse behind him. He would not look back; he would not
think
back, and what he left behind in that house would be put completely out of his mind.

He felt the wrecking-hunger curl up and go to sleep well fed, and when the hunger was fed, Dillon felt strong—stronger than anyone alive.
What would I be without the wrecking-hunger?
he thought. The hunger answered like a rumbling from his stomach: he would be nothing. Sometimes he felt as if the
hunger were a living thing; a weed that had coiled around his soul and he couldn't tell where it ended and where he began. He didn't know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

But whatever it was, those four Others wanted to take it away, didn't they? Even now they were drawn toward him, across the miles, and if they found him, they would weaken him; maybe even destroy him. They would drive a wedge between him and Deanna, and Dillon could not allow that. So they had to keep moving until . . .

Until what?

Until the hunger no longer needed to be fed.

He raced across the wheat field to the place where he had left Deanna, but when he got there, she was gone.

D
ILLON HAD LEFT
D
EANNA
in the wheat field with little warning. They had just left a farmhouse where a family had been kind enough to give them lunch—they were crossing a field, when suddenly Dillon had told her to wait, and then doubled back over the hill toward the house again.

He had gone to feed the hunger—Deanna knew that—she could see in his face how he had been suffering—strangling—but why did he have to leave her alone? He knew what happened to her when she was alone.

A wind swept across the rolling hills of wheat. The ground beneath her seemed to move, and fear gripped her. She felt one of her waking nightmares coming on again, and although she knew it could not be real, it terrified her all the same. Was there something there under the ground? Something coming for her? Yes! She could see it burrowing beneath the wheat. Why had Dillon left her here?

She began to run, but the fear ran with her. Finally she
stumbled into a field that had already been harvested, where thick black mud swallowed her to her ankles. Something was reaching for her. She could feel it. She screamed in terror.

She fell to the mud, and the ground seemed to swallow her. Was the ground alive? Was it climbing up around her, dragging her down into darkness? She couldn't see now—the mud was in her eyes, in her mouth. She swore she could feel a beast coming out of the mud wrapping around her like a snake, and she screamed again to chase the terror-mare away, but her screaming didn't help.

Then something grabbed her by the wrists. At first she thought it was the ground itself reaching up to pull her even deeper, but then there was a voice. A familiar voice.

“Deanna, it's all right!” She could barely hear Dillon through her own screams. “Look at me,” he said. “
See
me. Make it go away.”

Deanna, her sight still blurry, fixed on his dark eyes, pushing the foul vision of fear away.

When the terror-mare had ended, it was like coming out of a seizure, which is exactly how Dillon treated it. He held her tightly, as if she had been in the throes of convulsions. Deanna was exhausted and let all her muscles go slack, feeling the steady pressure of Dillon as he held her.

“You left me,” she said weakly.

“I'm sorry. I was wrong to—I won't do it again.” Dillon picked her up and carried her to a place where the wheat was tall and the ground was dry, then he lay her down, and tenderly wiped away the mud that had caked on her arms. Dillon was calm and relaxed. Deanna knew what that meant.

“What happened at the farmhouse?” she asked. “How bad was it?”

“I didn't touch a thing,” said Dillon. “I just sort of planted a seed. That's all.”

“What did you do?”

Dillon stared at her, considering her question. “I'll tell you, if you want to know.”

But the truth was, she
didn't
want to know, so she didn't press the issue. Instead she just lay there staring up at the sky, feeling her fear curl up inside her and go to sleep as she listened to far-off birds crying somewhere over the hill. Their voices sounded like screams in the distance.

“We need to keep moving,” said Dillon, helping Deanna up.

“Do we know where we're going yet?” she asked.

“We're not ‘going' anywhere,” Dillon answered. “We're getting away from The Others.”

Dillon had been saying that since they left Nebraska—but it wasn't entirely true, was it?
Dillon knows where he's going,
thought Deanna.
He just doesn't know he knows.
It was clear to Deanna that he was doing what he did best—tracing a pattern—but this pattern was so complex and intricate not even he could see its end.

Deanna kept her faith in Dillon, knowing that wherever this journey was leading, she and Dillon would be together. She held onto that thought as they headed west out of Torrington, leaving behind the farmhouse and the screaming birds.

I
T WAS A SMALL OBSERVATORY IN A SMALL UNIVERSITY
, where a man of small recognition worked feverishly to get his telescope up and running.

Winston was doubtful about the entire thing—but then he was doubtful of everything since Tory came up with that crazy stuff about the Scorpion Star. Winston feared he'd never be able to stretch himself around that one—but the others had, and now Tory was in the lead wherever they went.

In the two days the quartet had been together, Winston had felt his disease, or whatever it was, start to accelerate. A day ago he had chewed a sandwich on his seven-year molars. But when he ran his tongue through his mouth today, those molars were gone, receding back into his head. His front teeth were starting to get smaller and smaller. Soon all his adult teeth would be gone, and he would have no teeth at all, because his baby teeth had long since been exchanged for quarters beneath his pillow.

The others were no better off: Lourdes's blouse looked like a patch quilt because they kept having to sew scraps of material into it to make it larger. Tory had begun complaining that her joints ached something fierce, which meant that whatever was devouring her skin was beginning to move deeper into her body, and Michael . . . well, sometimes he looked like a madman on the verge of turning into a werewolf. He complained his girl-crazies were getting worse and that his heart beat so fast, he was afraid it might blow up in his chest.

They had all hoped that coming together would slow down their deterioration, but it hadn't—in fact, things were progressing faster, and they all could be dead in a matter of days. Winston didn't know how an astronomer could help, but he was desperate enough to try anything now.

Finding the man was not very difficult. A simple Web search uncovered several articles on the eccentric astronomer. Dr. Bayless was his name, but his crueler colleagues were more fond of calling him Dr. Brainless.

Winston fought to stay ahead of Michael and Lourdes and right behind Tory as they crossed the small college campus toward the physics building. Tory still shuffled through printouts of the articles they had found, trying to read in the late twilight.

“Listen to this—it says here that Bayless's mother was a carnival psychic, and she gyped rich people out of thousands of dollars!”

“So?” scoffed Winston.

“So, the scientific community thinks Bayless is a quack as well and gives him the cold shoulder.”

“But he predicted the explosion of Mentarsus-H,” chimed in Lourdes, in her deep whale-belly voice. “So who's quacking now?”

Winston turned to Michael, who seemed distracted and bothered as if the air itself was pricking his whole body with needles as he walked.

“What do
you
think?” asked Winston.

“He probably won't help us unless we bring him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch,” said Michael.

B
EHIND THE PHYSICS BUILDING
stood the observatory—a small domed structure painted a peeling institutional green. It was no more an emerald city than their path had been a yellow-brick road.

As they pushed their way through the squeaky doors of the observatory, they were met by the smell of old floor varnish and a twelve-foot telescope with pieces missing. It was an unimpressive observatory, consisting of little more than the crippled telescope, a desk in a far corner, and an arrow on the floor pointing north—in case anyone couldn't figure that out by themselves.

Across the room, a thin man, with thinner hair, fought with workers—trying to keep them working on the telescope, even though it was way past five o'clock. He was tall, with a slight roundness to his back from too many years making calculations at a desk. The four kids approached the ranting astronomer solemnly like a small minion of misery, and when he saw them, he waved them off.

“No classes today. Go home.” His voice had a hostile, unfriendly tone that could only come from many years of bitter disappointment.

Tory cleared her throat and stepped forward. “Dr. Bayless, we've come a long way—we have to talk to you.”

Bayless turned to take a better look at them, then, with a disgust he didn't even try to hide, said, “My God! What happened to you?”

“That's what we're trying to find out,” said Winston.

Around them the workers were starting and moving toward the doors, whispering to each other about the freaks that had just walked in.

“Go on,” Bayless shouted to the workers. “Get out—see if I care.” They were more than happy to oblige. “The cosmic event of a lifetime, and the telescope had to break down this month.”

He took a moment to look at the four of them again, shook his head—shuddering with revulsion—and let loose a bitter laugh. “Life's misfortunes just fall at my doorstep, don't they?
If it's not a ruined telescope, it's the wretched of the earth. Well, how can I help you?”

“What can you tell us about supernovas?” asked Tory.

“What
can't
I tell you?” he replied, slipping into professor-speak. “Supernovas are the reason we're all here. Oxygen, carbon, silicon—all the heavier elements are created in the explosions. Without novas, the whole universe would be little more than hydrogen gas . . .” He paused and looked at them again, shuddering, but this time not laughing. “But you didn't come here for an astronomy lecture, did you?”

“You predicted the explosion of Mentarsus-H,” said Tory. “We think our condition's got something to do with that.”

Now Bayless's look turned from revulsion to suspicious interest. He studied them intensely and began to pick at his ragged yellow fingernails.

“My prediction was luck,” he said. “At least that's what my colleagues say.”

“Don't go playing games with us, all right?” said Winston, pulling his thumb from his mouth. “If you know something, tell us.”

“You got a big mouth for a little kid,” said Bayless.

“I'm fifteen,” growled Winston.

Bayless sighed and nodded reluctantly. “All right, come on and sit down.”

Bayless led them to a corner of the observatory that had been set up as his office. Winston noticed that Michael kept his distance, breathing in gasps, like someone suffering from asthma, and shifting his weight from one foot to another like a caged animal.
He's got it bad today,
thought Winston.

“The Scorpion Star,” said Lourdes to Bayless. “Tell us how you knew.”

Bayless leaned back in his desk chair, took a sip of cold
coffee, and focused on his uneven fingernails, picking at them with an unpleasant click-click-click. Finally he spoke.

“It's a curious talent,” said Bayless, “to look at the universe and know what it's thinking. To sense that countless galaxies would be discovered in dark space. To feel that the universe is even older than most scientists think it is. To glance at a star chart and see one star missing in the tail of the Scorpion, only to see it reappear when you blink.”

“Intuition?” suggested Tory.

“My mother had it,” said Bayless. “She chose to use it to separate fools from their money and turned herself into a sideshow freak. I chose to use it for more noble purposes. Biology . . . astrophysics.” Then he angrily flicked a fingernail in an arc over their heads. It landed on the dark floor, where it lay like a crescent moon. “Unfortunately science has no room for intuition. Scientists find a million ways to spell ‘coincidence,' and so I've become a sideshow freak after all.” Then he smiled grimly, and added, “. . . like the four of you.”

His smile made them all squirm. Everyone but Tory.

“The star blew up sixteen years ago,” said Tory. “We've figured out the exact date.”

“Students of astrophysics, are you?” said Bayless, beginning on a new fingernail.

“No,” said Tory. “That was the day each of us was conceived.”

Bayless raised his attention from his marred fingertips to the four of them. “Remarkable,” he said, studying their faces, and movements. “Remarkable. Perhaps these exploding stars have more to do with us than I've dared to imagine.” He pulled out a digital recorder from his desk and hit the record button. “Do you mind if I record all this?”

“We'd rather you didn't,” said Lourdes.

He put his recorder in his desk, but Winston couldn't tell if he turned it off.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Everything to the last detail . . .”

T
HEY TOOK A GOOD
hour to go through their stories, and Bayless listened, attentive to every word. When they were done, the astronomer was practically drooling with excitement.