Scorpion Shards (14 page)

Maybe it will be different,
thought Michael,
maybe it will be all right,
and he clung to that thought like a parachute, as he slipped into the darkness, like a man leaping from a plane.

M
ONSTERS
!

The shadows Tory Smythe saw leaping around the observatory became permanently carved into her mind. Although it all happened in just a few seconds, she knew exactly what she had seen.

Shadow-black tentacles wrapped around the cradle of the telescope. A clouded face that swarmed with a million hideous insects descended upon the astronomer's desk, and something with cold dark fur brushed past Tory, its breath sickly sweet.

In an instant the telescope was torn from its moorings and came crashing down. The primary focus lens broke free and spun on the ground like a coin, casting patterns of refracted
light around the circular room. Bayless was screaming—everyone was screaming—then the creatures let out their own unearthly wail and a blinding explosion knocked them all to the ground. Something leapt at Tory. She opened her mouth to scream . . . and it was gone. The beasts were all gone. The light faded, and she just sat there, hands pressed against her ears, eyes shut tight, and her face contorted in a silent scream. She heard the others screaming, though—Winston and Lourdes—she heard them burst out of the observatory and race down the hill.

But Tory couldn't move. She had heard old stories of how looking at some monsters could turn you to stone, and she wondered if that had happened to her. She cursed herself for having come here.

I don't believe in monsters,
she told herself, but that didn't make a bit of difference, because she knew what she had seen.

At last she was able to force her eyes open. The ruined observatory was silent and still. The only light in the room came from the fading fragments of the telescope lens, which had exploded and sent glass splintering in all directions.

As she finally got to her feet, Tory realized that whatever Dr. Bayless was going to tell them was going to remain his secret. He would be viewing no more stars. He would be telling no more fortunes. Whatever these beasts were, they had not wanted Bayless to tell what he knew. They had caused the explosion—they had come to silence him.

She couldn't help but feel responsible for what had happened to the astronomer. She felt pity for the man, but even more she felt fury that she was again left with more questions and riddles. It was that fury that overcame her fear, and she decided she wouldn't run just yet—there were still things she had to do.

She grabbed whatever was left of the books and papers Bayless had pulled out and shoved them in her pack. She found the seven tarot cards scattered on the floor and took them as well, and then found a canvas tarp in the corner and brought it over to Bayless.

Around the room, the light was getting dimmer as the glowing splinters of the lens faded. The lens had shattered into half a dozen pieces. Five of those pieces were embedded in the walls like glass lightning bolts. The sixth had found a much more specific destination.

As Tory covered Bayless's body, she knew what she had to do—she owed at least that much to the poor man, And so before drawing the canvas over his face, she reached toward the silent astronomer, then took a firm hold of that last shard of crystal and, biting back her terror, pulled it from between Dr. Bayless's eyes.

T
HEY FOUND
M
ICHAEL AT
the edge of the campus, retching his guts out in the middle of the street—and had to rush him out of the way of a speeding fire engine.

He knelt there by the curb, heaving and gripping his stomach.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” demanded Winston.

Tory and Lourdes knelt beside him and helped him stand up.

His face was wet from tears and pale—almost green.

“What happened?” asked Lourdes.

Michael didn't answer. Instead he just held his stomach and forced his breathing back under control. Finally he said, “I got lost . . . that's all.” And no one dared to question him further.

They turned and headed off in a direction their internal compass told them was west, while behind them, way down the road, the fire truck stopped in front of a physical plant that was billowing black smoke.

T
HAT NIGHT THE STORM RETURNED WITH A VENGEANCE EVEN
before the streets had a chance to dry. The night that had seemed so steamy quickly turned cold, and the sky let loose an unrelenting assault of sleet. It battered the windshield of the van with such fury that they had to pull off to the side of the road and wait.

Tory studied the map; they were somewhere west of Omaha now, in the middle of nowhere, and it occurred to Tory with an awful shiver that they were always in the middle of nowhere. It seemed from the moment her journey had begun, Tory had slipped into the dark festering world that existed between the walls and beneath the floors of the rest of the world. A rat-ridden place filled with the torn, ruined things that nobody wanted. They were all now residents of this waste-world, and the eerie capriciousness of the weather—never deciding on hot or cold, wet or dry—made the rest of humanity seem further and further away. It seemed to Tory that their lives had slipped into a place so dismal that souls perished and only weeds could take their place.

As the sleet pummeled the van, Winston sat in the back with Lourdes, sewing pieces of fabric onto her clothes so that they would still fit.

“Maybe The Others are dead,” Winston dared to whisper at one point. “Maybe they were killed by those monster-things that tried to get us.”

Lourdes shook her head and said, “If they were dead, then why do we still feel pulled to the west?”

And Lourdes was right—the pull was still there and still strong. Tory, who always rode shotgun, was the official navigator, and when she looked at the map, certain roads and cities seemed to jump off the page at her. Interstate 80, Big Springs, Nebraska, Torrington, Wyoming. They had to go to these places, in hopes of finding traces of the other two who were still missing from their little band. It wasn't much, but it was all they had to go on.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts,
Tory kept telling herself.
When we're all together, we'll be stronger—and it will all make sense.
She clung to that belief as if it were a lifeline.

Michael had little to say on the matter. Since they had left Omaha, he had become completely withdrawn. He sat silently in the driver's seat in an icy daze. His demeanor had become as hard and bitter as the torrents of ice that brutalized the van.

The moment they got to the van, Tory had begun leafing through the things she had scavenged from the observatory. First she puzzled over the cards:
the Six of Swords
and
the Charioteer
;
the Tower
and
the Hermit
;
Death
, and
the Five of Wands
. And the torn world. Then she began to look through the books. Astronomy mostly—textbooks that Bayless had written himself. Page after page yielded nothing relevant to Tory, and now as they sat in the ice storm, she seemed no closer to a solution.

“Something that he said keeps going over and over in my mind,” Tory told the others. “He said that his whole life was just preparing him for this . . . for
us
.”

“Then why don't you look at his whole life?”

It was Michael who spoke, and everyone was startled to hear him speak after being silent for so long. “He was a biologist before he was an astronomer,” said Michael. “And you've been looking at the wrong books.”

Michael then held up the book he had been looking at.

It was a book on parasites.

“Bayless wrote this years before he became an astronomer,” said Michael. “It says here in the introduction that when he was a kid his pet dog was just about eaten from the inside out by worms. Since then he was fascinated by parasites—creatures that live off of other creatures.”

Then Michael began to read from Bayless's book:
“There are whole universes of life hiding in the dark places where no one dares to explore. They thrive in the hidden expanses we take for granted . . . between the very cells of our body . . . between the walls we call our world.”

Tory gasped. “He said that?”

Michael nodded, and Tory shivered. It was like hearing a man echoing her thoughts from beyond the grave.

Michael passed around the book, and they leafed through it. It was a bizarre collection of diagrams, photos, and case studies, and Bayless seemed to have had a morbid fascination with it all. There was a picture of a tapeworm the size of a garden hose found in the gut of an elephant. There was a barnacle the size of a trash barrel on the back of a whale. There were leeches from the Amazon the size of running shoes.

“This was his specialty before he took up astronomy,” said Michael. “The study of parasitic organisms.”

A gust of wind rocked the van and a sheet of ice assaulted the windshield like a cascade of ball bearings. Winston asked the question that no one else dared to voice.

“What's it got to do with us?”

Michael couldn't look at him in the face. He turned to look out of the window, but all the windows were fogged with the steam of their breath.

Between the walls of the world,
thought Tory. Right now it
seemed no world existed beyond the small capsule of the van.

“Something happened to me while you were all still in the observatory,” said Michael. “I didn't want to talk about it . . . but I think I'd better . . .”

Everyone leaned closer as Michael began his story.

“I
DID GET LOST
for a while, just like I said,” began Michael. “But then I ended up outside of a lecture hall. There was this girl unchaining her bike. I went up to her, just to talk, you know . . . but before I knew it we were kissing.

“After a while she pulls me into this doorway. The door opens, and we go in—and I know we shouldn't, but by now I don't care, 'cause I'm feeling like nothing else in the world matters.

“But then I think about what happened with that girl, back when I lived in Baltimore—the only time things ever went too far. Thinking about it makes me scared, so I push myself away from this girl. I run clear across the room, and I think it's over . . . but then I look back at her from across the room and that's when I see the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life. She's surrounded by fire—an unnatural blue-green fire—and it's all over her, but she's not burning . . . and the fire—it has a dozen arms and legs—but worst of all it has eyes.
It's alive!
But all I can do is sit there and watch, too horrified to even scream, as this thing wraps itself around her like a cocoon . . . and she doesn't even know. It's like she's hypnotized.

“Finally the girl goes limp, and the monster turns to me. I try to run, but my feet slip and when I look back, it's moving toward me through the air—and then in a second it's on me and I swear I can feel this monster oozing back inside me, right through the pores of my skin . . . and for the first time I realize that the feeling inside that always drives me crazy . . .
isn't me—it's this thing that's been living here inside me, like a leech, stealing away all my strength.

“When I look up, I see the girl walking toward me. It looks like there's nothing wrong with her—but the room is on fire all around her, real fire, orange and hot, just like what happened with that girl in Baltimore—only that time I never saw the creature, because I didn't rip myself away from it . . . and that time I didn't get the girl out of the fire in time.

“So now, with the fire all around, I pick her up, carry her out before the fire gets us, and as soon as we're outside, she turns to me and smiles, not even noticing anything strange is going on.

“And that's when I realize that she's dead.

“Yeah, she's alive, but she's also dead! That thing . . . it ate her soul and left her body alive!

“She smiles at me and says ‘Hi,' like everything's blue skies and sunshine, and I think,
She doesn't even know! Something has just devoured her soul, and she doesn't even know!

“I couldn't stand it, so I ran from her as fast as I could . . . but only got to the next street before I started puking my guts out. That's when you found me.”

O
NLY AN ANGRY CHORUS
of sleet responded to Michael's terrible tale. No one had anything they could say. No words of consolation. No advice. Everyone's eyes began to sting with cold tears.

Michael bit his tongue to stop his teeth from chattering and wiped the tears from his eyes. “So now I know why we're dying. Those horrible beasts in the observatory didn't just come out of nowhere. They were there all along. They're here now. All four of them.”

Someone let out a wail of agony—it must have been
Lourdes—and then tears of anger, terror, but most of all helplessness, burst out around the van. It was simply too much to take alone, and in an instant all eight of their hands were reaching for the others, longing to make connection once more—even Winston. They clasped hands, the circle of four was closed, and their breath and their heartbeats began to match—panicked and fast. The truth was indeed terrible, but easier to grasp and accept when the circle was closed.

“We're possessed . . . ,” said Winston.

“Not possessed, infected,” said Tory.

“Infested,”
offered Michael. “The way people get lice . . . the way dogs get worms. Each of us is infested by some . . .
thing.
They must have found their way inside us years ago, when all the bad stuff started . . . and ever since then, they've been growing.”