Shattered Sky (27 page)

On a cruise ship between locks of the canal, Lourdes Hidalgo collapsed and began to convulse in a grand mal. Since her physiology controlled all those within her immediate sphere of influence, so did all others on the vessel.

Toward the rear of a plane that had just touched down in Dallas after an emergency landing, Winston Pell began to scream uncontrollably, unable to catch his breath, and unable to understand why.

And on a two-lane interstate in rural East Texas, a stolen pickup truck flew off the road and wrapped around a tree.

H
ALF AN HOUR EARLIER,
Dillon and Maddy had crossed from Louisiana into Texas.

Maddy had begun to liken Dillon to a shark again—a creature that could not stop moving, lest it sink and drown—so powerful, yet a slave to its own motion. He spoke little, kept the radio off, and demanded the wheel, claiming that driving kept his mind focused as they plunged West through the lush East Texas foliage. For the longest time, there was nothing but trees on either side of the straight road, until they passed a huge, incongruous blue billboard. The billboard featured a bold yellow 800 number, and beneath it the words “vasectomy reversal.” Seeing that sign all by itself in the middle of nowhere made Maddy laugh aloud.

“See, Dillon,” she said, nodding at the sign, “there are things in this world more bizarre than you.”

“I could do the job without an 800 number,” Dillon deadpanned. “And I'll bet I charge less, too.”

“I'm glad to see you have a sense of humor,” she told him.

Dillon considered that. “Do I take myself too seriously, Maddy?”

“You are the most somber deity I know.”

He chuckled at that. It made Maddy feel a touch more powerful in the situation.

More hints of civilization passed around them, until they actually began to see homes through the trees.

“At least we're getting somewhere,” Dillon said.

Maddy reached over to wipe some sweat dripping down the side of his face. He had a beautiful profile, in spite of the scars. To her he was perfect, and she wondered when it was she had fallen in love with him. Perhaps it was the first time she had touched him, reaching in through that horrible face mask to scratch his nose.

All at once she felt a sudden, uncomfortable surge in her solar plexus, and for an instant forgot what she was thinking about. Then Dillon screamed and jerked the wheel left, pulling them across the double-yellow. Maddy's shoulder slammed into the side window with the force of the turn.

“Dillon!?”

In an instant they were off the road entirely, and the feel of the asphalt beneath them gave way to airborne numbness as they flew over a ditch, toward the trunk of a huge oak.

Even before the wheels contacted the ground, the pickup hit the massive tree at seventy miles an hour.

The old pickup had no air bag, and Maddy's seatbelt tore loose from the impact. Her skull smashed the windshield. Her shoulder hit the tree. Her broken body tumbled in the dead grass.

Intense pain.

Darkness.

But no loss of consciousness.

In a few seconds the pain was gone.

Maddy was on the ground, looking up at a gray sky beyond the branches of the oak. Her hair was matted and wet with blood. It covered her clothes. She saw the bloody hole in the windshield through which she had ejected, but no wounds remained on her body. She had been healed so quickly, her battered body hadn't even had the chance to die before being restored.

Dillon was still in the pickup, pinned by the steering wheel, wailing—but his screams didn't seem to be about the pain. Maddy climbed on the crumpled hood, punching loose what was left of the windshield. “Dillon! Dillon, calm down!”

It was as if he didn't see her—his eyes were wild, like the eyes of the people he shattered.

“They're here!” he wailed. “They're here!”

“Who's here?”

He gritted his teeth, fighting the steering wheel, pushing back, and it seemed as if he made the crushed cabin longer again. Until Maddy realized that the truck was indeed stretching. She tumbled from the hood and watched in disbelief as the crumpled steel of the totaled vehicle unfolded. Shattered glass fought the pull of gravity, crawling back into place.

“My God . . .”

Another fifteen seconds and the Nissan pickup was in mint condition, its grille kissing the bark of the oak. Not a dent; not a scratch.

Dillon's power had never acted this quickly—it had never been this strong. Maddy could feel his strength now. She could always feel his power simmering beside her—but not like this. Now his presence was like the heat of a furnace. Whatever had set him screaming in the first place had charged him to a new high.

D
ILLON BARELY NOTICED HITTING
the tree. He was faintly aware that his body had been crushed and healed at a speed unlike anything he had done before. But none of that mattered . . .
because they were here.

He had no idea who
they
were, or why their entrance to this world was of such significance. He didn't even know why he had been dreaming about them. Even as his powers spiked, he felt weak, vulnerable, and powerless in the face of what
they
were. For a moment he saw Maddy trying to get his attention, but there wasn't room enough in his mind to hold her. She was little more than a snapshot as he ran past her through the trees that lined the highway and onto a service road, where several people had already come out of their
homes to view an accident that was no longer there.

There were three homes on the street and a business with a gravel parking lot. Through an empty lot there were more buildings on what must have been the main street of this one-stoplight town.

There was a steepled building across that lot. A church. Plain beige brick. Humble and unprepossessing. He reached for the cross around his neck—the one his parents had given him when he was a boy—and remembered that it was gone—that it hadn't been there for years. He had lost it in his days of infestation, when the wrecking-hunger consumed him, and the parasite of destruction co-opted his power to feed itself. He remembered stumbling into a church during those dark times—but even the poor priest who had heard his confession had been destroyed by his presence. So helpless and confused he had been. It was the same way now. Suddenly the sanctuary of this homely church seemed the most inviting place on earth, and he longed to curl up in the protective shadow of something greater than himself.

He tried to make a beeline to the church, but found himself stumbling all the way through the field. The path of brown grass and dried autumn leaves greened like a living stream around him, spreading outward like a wake on water. As he approached the church from the back, he tripped over a waist-high wrought iron fence around the property. He found himself on the ground, facing a row of headstones. The church had its own graveyard. A sizeable one. The brown grass on the graves was already turning green. He sensed what was about to happen, and he closed his eyes, desperately praying that it wouldn't—but he had no faith in his own prayer. He knew that today his prayers would go as unheeded as the prayers of pigeons.

“Dillon, look at me!”

It was Maddy again. She grabbed him and rolled him over, pinning his shoulders. “Focus on
me!
”

“No! No—I can't be here!” But it was already too late, because he could hear—he could
feel
beneath the reviving grass, a deeper gathering of life.

H
OLDING
D
ILLON DOWN WAS
like gripping a live wire. His iridescence burned through Maddy, an intense sensation her body could not decipher as either pleasure or pain, but an amalgam of both. Then when she heard the first voice, it caught Maddy off guard, and she loosened her grip on Dillon just enough for him to push her off and scramble away. He didn't get far; just a few yards, before he crumpled by a tombstone, weeping and slowly shaking his head like a bull struck by a car.

“Hey!”
someone had shouted.
“Hey, is anybody there?”
She looked around. The voice was muffled and distant. She couldn't place the direction from which it came.

Then there was a second voice and another, and another.
“What is this?” “Somebody answer me!” “Hello?!”

And it dawned on Maddy with a jagged, penetrating chill that these voices were not coming from the church or the woods, or nearby buildings. They came from beneath her feet.

“What's happening?” “Help me!” “Who's out there?”

It began as confusion and curiosity, then when some rudimentary understanding kicked in, their cries turned fearful, their fists pounding in the dark upon the satin-lined caskets that confined them. At first it was just a few, but it soon grew into a chorus of screaming for release beneath the tons of earth that covered them.

“No no no!” Dillon cried, covering his ears. “Make them stop! Make them stop!”

Maddy stood there, dumbfounded. She had no response for this. Nothing in her tactical training had prepared her for
this
.

Suddenly a rhythmic roar swooped down from above, for a brief moment overwhelming the cries of the underchorus before it passed. Maddy knew it was a helicopter even before she saw it. Generic gray, with no markings. It buzzed the treetops, then set down in a clearing a hundred yards away.

Then, when she turned back to the graveyard there was a flak-jacketed, rifle-armed force—at least a dozen men—storming the graveyard from two directions. Once in range, they brought up their rifles and took aim. Some were trained on her, but most were on Dillon. She went to Dillon, shielding him with her body, trying to keep him from making sudden moves, because he was still within himself, oblivious to it all. And beneath them, the chorus grew in desperate insanity.

A figure approached from the helicopter. He wore a dark suit, and had a familiar stride. Even though she had a clear view of him as he approached, it wasn't until he stepped into the graveyard that she locked on his identity. It was Elon Tessic.

T
O
E
LON
T
ESSIC, DISGUISE
was a simple trick of perception; once he became defined by his white attire, he merely had to shed it to become invisible. Even personal friends had failed to recognize him when he wore anything other than pressed Mediterranean white. Today he was just another man in a dark suit.

As he approached, Tessic found his overzealous mercenaries to have far too much firepower for his liking, so he signaled to their leader, a militia-bred mercenary named Davitt, to lower their weapons.

Even before he stepped into the graveyard, Elon could hear the distraught voices underfoot, and feel the waves of psychic
energy strobing off of Dillon. It was intimidating to say the least, but not entirely unexpected. Once he had stepped over the fence, he approached Maddy, whose confusion had already taken a turn toward anger.

“Tessic!” she screamed. “You son of a bitch.”

“My men will escort you to my helicopter,” he said calmly.

“If they come near us, I'll break their necks.”

“I have no doubt you would . . . but if you decide to stay here, I can guarantee that your military friends won't be far behind.”

She hesitated, studying him. “You're not working for them?”

“I'm an independent contractor,” he told her. “Today I'm here to help.”

She threw a glance at the armed men around them. “Are they?”

Elon grabbed one of the mercenaries' rifles, opened the barrel, and showed it to Maddy.

“Tranquilizer darts, in case we encountered your resistance.”

The moment of silence between them was punctuated by the muffled voices hopelessly calling from the grave.

“We must get Dillon away from this place,” he told her. “Do you hear around you? Do you understand?”

Without answering, Maddy knelt back down to Dillon, who had been subdued by the voices of those he had called back from the dead. She helped him to his feet and threw an untrusting glance at Tessic, but in the end, got Dillon out of the graveyard, and moved him toward the helicopter that waited in the nearby field.

A dozen yards away, a scraping of concrete drew Tessic's attention. A man labored to push up the concrete lid of his
own crypt, his fingertips already raw from the task. A scene from the Haunted Mansion, but far more disturbing.

Disturbing, thought Tessic, but not frightening—for these were not ghouls, but ordinary people, unable to know the cause of their situation. Not comprehending their own death, much less their call back to life.

“Help me. Please,” said the man, straining against the concrete lid. “Someone's put me down here . . . someone's buried me alive. . . .”

A few of Tessic's mercenaries, now fearful themselves, looked at Tessic for direction. Even Davitt was affected by it. “What do we do?” he asked.

“Go help him!” Tessic ordered.

Two men forced off the lid of the crypt and it tumbled to the ground. They pulled out a middle-aged man in a tan, pin-striped suit that was pressed and clean. The style was at least thirty years out of date.

“Who in blazes are you?” the man asked, when Tessic approached. Since no response would have made sense to him, Tessic chose not to answer. Instead he turned to Davitt. “We'll take him with us as well.”

“What about the others?”

Tessic looked around the graveyard. The voices were growing weaker. There were only two crypts with lids that could be removed. The rest were earthen graves. Even if he had had a hundred men with shovels, he couldn't have unearthed a single one of them before they all suffocated. So Tessic had his men remove the occupant of the second crypt, then forced himself to listen to the other voices, giving them at the very least, the dignity of a witness.

He could hear in their fading voices a mix of emotions. There were those who had some rudimentary understanding,
and accepted this moment as a gift, and those who saw it as a curse. There were the sounds of love, comfort, and surprise between husbands and wives whose departures had been years apart. There were also wails full of the agonized loneliness of those who had no one to comfort them in this all too brief hiatus from eternity.