Thief of Souls (30 page)

“No?” grunted Tory. “Who is it, then?”

Michael considered that.
Someone I don't know. Reconstituted beef.

Thinking back, there were many mistakes Michael had made since setting off in search of Dillon, but there was one that stuck out in his mind. It was the first thing that had made him truly feel like a god. The one willful act that sold him into Okoya's bondage. The changing of Drew's nature.

How could Michael blame Drew for being less of a person than he had been, when the change was Michael's doing? At the time, Michael had convinced himself it had been for Drew's sake, but that wasn't entirely true. He had done it for himself; to hurl Drew's attentions away from him.

Although Michael couldn't see Drew in the blackness, he
could hear his uneven breathing, and he slid across the grime of the sump floor until he bumped against Drew's sopping jeans.

“Who's that? What are you doing?”

“It's just me, Drew.” He grabbed Drew's arm.

“No! Stop that! Don't touch me—just get back over there.” Drew struggled, but Michael held him firm.

“There's something I have to give you,” said Michael.

“Whatever it is, I don't want it!”

“Maybe not. But you need it.” Michael pinned Drew into a corner.

“What's going on over there?” asked Tory. She had no idea that Michael had denatured Drew. For Drew's sake, he chose not to tell her now.

“Get off me!” screamed Drew. His voice echoed around the chamber. “Leave me alone, you freak!”

Michael put one hand against Drew's face, and pressed the other heavily against his chest.

“I don't want you to!” cried Drew. “I don't want you to!”

“Shhh,” said Michael. The calm in his voice brought a slight warmth to the air around them. “Shhh. It will all be okay.”

In a moment, Drew stopped struggling, and Michael forced a surge of energy out through his palms until it flowed through Drew like a circuit.

“I'm afraid,” whispered Drew.

“That's okay,” answered Michael.

Michael then reached his thoughts down, until he found Drew's denatured self, and folded it in upon itself, collapsing and re-forming it back to the way it had started: strong of character . . . responsible . . . trustworthy . . . and undeniably homosexual.

Suddenly Drew was holding Michael, rather than pushing
him away, and Michael allowed it because he knew that this was not about sex. It was an embrace between brothers. An embrace between friends. And so he returned it.

Drew let Michael go first, and they both let their minds clear for a moment.

“Would it be appropriate,” asked Michael, “to welcome you back?”

He heard Drew breathe heavily in the darkness, reorienting himself to his inner landscape. “It might be.”

“Wild ride these past few weeks, huh?”

“Yeah, a regular spin cycle,” Drew said. “I wouldn't recommend it for pregnant women, or people with back trouble.”

Michael grinned, and then quickly, before he had the chance to change his mind, he leaned forward and gave Drew a kiss.

It didn't feel right, it didn't feel wrong, it just felt strange. But at the moment it also felt necessary. “Hold on to that one,” Michael told him quietly, “because it's the only one you're going to get from me.”

“I can deal with that.”

Then from somewhere across the chamber, they heard Tory. “If you two are done fighting, you may want to check this out. I found a vent we could probably squeeze through, if I can get the grate open.”

“Can I help?” asked Drew. He confidently slid past Michael, toward the sound of Tory's voice.

With hands held out before him, Michael crossed the chamber, to work the gate with Drew and Tory, and soon all three of them were way too focused to hear the faint triplet of sounds slowly building as it echoed back and forth in the concrete around them.

W
ITH THE DAM SET ON AUTODESTRUCT,
D
ILLON HURRIED
back to the campsite. As he neared it, he could see rows of police and state troopers lining the road a few hundred yards away. They kept a safe distance, as did the news helicopters circling above—for they had already learned that anyone who went in, came out a devout follower, or did not come out at all. Dillon knew that the best law enforcement could do, was to hold back the influx of curiosity-seekers . . . but that would soon be impossible, because, by the time this day was over, they would be seeking more than just their curiosity—they would be seeking the face of God. But what they would find would be a divinity of five. Dillon could sense the eyes of the nation aligning in a single direction, focusing on this spot in the desert where Dillon's extraordinary event was already beginning to unfold.

When he approached the circle of buses, he heard cheers from within. The followers had gathered around Okoya, who stood atop a boulder. Dillon couldn't hear what Okoya said, but whatever it was, it stirred up the followers. And although their excitement charged the dry desert air, Dillon found himself troubled—not because of their enthusiasm, but because it was focused on Okoya, and not him. Dillon had to fight his way through the dense crowd, until they saw who it was and began to part for him. It seemed to Dillon that there were twice as many people here today as there were yesterday.

Okoya stepped down from his high spot. “Is it done?”

Dillon nodded. “The road is jammed with cars. We're going to have to walk—and we don't have much time.”

“I'll get them going,” Okoya turned to leave, but Dillon grabbed him.

“I wanted to make an announcement: to prepare everyone for what's about to happen—what they're going to see.”

“I've done that already,” said Okoya.

Dillon felt a wave of anger rise in him. “Who gave you permission to do that? It should be me announcing the descent into Black Canyon.”

“You were supposed to be back at dawn,” Okoya said impatiently. “You've already wasted enough time; don't waste any more.” Okoya pulled out of Dillon's grasp, and went to gather the crowd.

As Dillon headed for the canopy where the other Shards had slept, he began to wonder why Okoya was the one to step forward. The way each of the Shards had been jockeying for position, Dillon would have assumed any one of them would leap at the chance to usurp some measure of power.

But Michael and Tory were nowhere to be found, while Winston and Lourdes appeared far too content at the center of their own petty universes to be bothered with actually
doing
anything. He found the two of them sitting beneath the canopy. Lourdes was lost in a deep emotional involvement with breakfast, while Winston faced away from her, practically vanishing behind the morning paper. Sitting on velvet chairs, on sandy tapestries pilfered from Hearst Castle, they were a surreal disconnect, like a Magritte painting; both comically and tragically absurd.

“Where are Michael and Tory?” Dillon asked.

Lourdes squeezed the juice from her grapefruit into her mouth before answering, “I haven't seen them all morning.”

“They took off,” said Winston. “Okoya seems to think they left with their own little splinter group.”

“What?”

“People do get tired of taking orders,” Winston said, barely veiling his own threat of desertion.

“You should try some of Okoya's hash browns,” said Lourdes.

Dillon's head was swimming now, his mind fighting to grasp how things could have slipped so far. How could Tory and Michael abandon them?

The rich aroma of steaming, butter-fried potatoes played in his nostrils, as he looked at the bowl of hash browns, it hit him that they smelled a bit
too
good, hitting his olfactory with such intensity, Dillon found his own hunger becoming acute. Indeed, it seemed all of their appetites had elevated beyond the commonplace, to things far more enticing. Dillon leaned closer, picking up the bowl in his hands, focusing his thoughts on the potatoes before him. Although they looked like hash browns, its pattern was like something else entirely. In fact, to Dillon, those little shoestrings seemed to be squirming and writhing—weaving in and out of one another . . .
Like worms,
he thought—but with a life-pattern far more complex. A life-pattern that was . . . that was . . .

The moment he realized what he was looking at, Dillon yelped as if his hands had been seared, and he hurled the bowl away. It shattered on a boulder, splattering red liquid light that dripped to the ground, disappearing into the sand.

Winston put down his newspaper.

Whatever the spell had been, it was now broken, for now Lourdes's fork didn't hold hash browns. Instead the tines dripped with vermillion light. It oozed from the corners of her mouth like blood. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and watched as it soaked into her skin, vanishing. She looked to Winston, and then to Dillon, already beginning to turn a pale shade of green. “If that wasn't hash browns,” she asked, “exactly what have I been eating?”

“Not just you,” said Dillon, turning to Winston. Winston looked down at the newspaper that had seemed so innocuous a moment ago. There were no words on the page—no pictures,
just rows of random letters and symbols that his brain had translated into meaning. Even now he was still drawing something from the page as he gazed at it—a faint stream of red light passing from the page to his eyes, like a long draft of a cold drink. Finally Winston shuddered, breaking free—and the moment he did, the paper itself began to dissolve away, bubbling into that same liquid light.

Okoya arrived a moment too late to preserve his illusions. “What a waste,” he said. “I worked hard to prepare these things for you.”

“Okoya,” said Winston, with a fearful quiver Dillon had never heard in Winston's voice before, “what have we been . . .
consuming
?”

“The souls of your followers, of course,” Okoya answered serenely.

Dillon stared at Okoya, but he wasn't seeing him. Instead Dillon saw patterns of thought and action rearranging themselves in his own head. Everything Dillon had done, from the moment he had been dragged from the Columbia River three weeks before, until now, had been based on the single, unwavering belief that his efforts would hold together a world that was about to fall apart. What he had planned today was founded on that belief. He had been certain that holding back the waters of Lake Mead would propel him into the spotlight—a position of power that would allow him to seize enough control to keep the world from slipping into chaos.

But this event was not my idea, was it?
Dillon realized.
Wasn't it Okoya who suggested that I could be the glue that bonded the world?
But if Okoya's only interest in the human spirit was its nutritional value, why would he support Dillon's efforts? How could preserving humanity serve Okoya's agenda? The answer was that it wouldn't.

“I don't feel so good,” said Lourdes, stumbling off her chair to the ground, to join Winston who was already on his knees, clutching at his eyes, as if he would gouge them out.

A group of Happy Campers stumbled up. Seeing Winston and Lourdes in agony on the ground, one of them asked, “Is everything okay?” The man gripped his own stomach in pain. In fact, quite a few of the Happy Campers around them were doubling over, caught in Lourdes's sphere of influence.

And then Dillon finally made one more connection. “Shiprock,” he said. Winston looked up at him from the ground. “It's where you and Tory met Okoya, isn't it?”

“It was two weeks before anything happened there . . . .”

But Dillon now suspected that wasn't true; that a massacre had occurred long before any blood was actually spilled.

“Nothing has changed, Dillon,” Okoya said slowly. “You will still have the world at your fingertips, believe me.”

But was that what Dillon wanted? he wondered. It was a thrilling thought, to reign with supernatural power . . . but such a thing would mean a complete shift in the fundamental structure of the world. Power would no longer be divided among equals around the globe, because now there was a vast inequality, unlike anything the modern world had known. Five elite beings. They would not just be playing gods, they would
be
gods . . .

. . . and because of it, the very structure of civilization would crumble.

“It's too late to do anything but move forward,” Okoya demanded. “There's nothing more to think about.”

Dillon thought to the globe he had so painstakingly sketched patterns across.
“There will be an event,”
he had told the others,
“something so inexplicable, that the world cannot look away.”
In turn, that event would ignite an even larger, more devastating
event—like a detonator's charge ignites a warhead.

Until now Dillon could see almost every pattern around him, except his own. But now his own was finally revealed—through Okoya—and the house of cards he had built all his efforts on collapsed, revealing the bleak pattern it masked.

Holding back the waters was not a way to ward off that igniting event—it
was
the igniting event.

And Dillon was the detonator.

“I don't know what you are,” Dillon told Okoya, “but I won't let you use us anymore.”

If Okoya was concerned, he didn't show it. “You'll do what needs to be done, Dillon. Because a few miles away, there's a dam that's about to crumble by your hand. It's too late to stop that now. The way I see it, you only have two choices—allow the dam to burst, and kill hundreds of thousands of people downriver . . . or you can hold back the waters and save all those lives.” Okoya cracked his superior smile. “I know you'll do the right thing.”

Dillon knew he was snared in Okoya's trap, but he was not about to let Okoya claim victory. There were moans all around them now, and Dillon turned around to see almost all the followers doubling over in pain, their bodies reflexively mimicking Lourdes as she lay on the ground, every ounce of her body reviling her cannibalistic feasts.