Scorpion Shards (9 page)

Michael let out a bitter laugh. If girls on the brain were his problem, then there were thousands of them in there, all with jackhammers.

“Whenever he got the girl crazies,” continued Lourdes, “he'd go off into the bathroom. When he came out a few minutes later, he didn't feel that way no more. He thought we didn't know what he was up to, but we did. We just didn't say.”

Michael cleared his throat. He just kept looking up at the spots in the roof-lining.

“I do that, too,” said Michael. “I do it a lot.” Hearing the words come out of his mouth made tears come to his eyes—but Lourdes didn't laugh at him. She just listened.

“My brother—I'll bet he thought he was the only person in the world to do that. I'll bet he hated himself for it.”

Michael felt his whole body react to his tears. His throat closed up, his feet felt even colder, his fingers felt weak. Above him, the clattering sound of the rain grew stronger.

“Sometimes . . . ,” said Michael. “Sometimes I think . . . what if all my dead relatives are watching me? What if their ghosts can see the things I do?”

“Dead people don't care,” said Lourdes. “Because if they really do hang around after they die, I'll bet they've seen so many secret things, nothing bothers them anymore.”

“You think so?”

“At the very worst, they think it's funny.”

“I don't think it's funny!”

“That's because you're not dead.”

Above, the rain began to ease up.
Some things you can't talk about,
thought Michael. He never thought it would be so easy to talk about those things with Lourdes.

“We should go soon,” said Lourdes, who, for obvious reasons, preferred to travel by night rather than by day. “Maybe when the rain stops we'll see the rainbow.

Michael rolled his eyes. She always brought up the thing about the rainbow.

“It's night,” reminded Michael. “Whoever heard of a rainbow at night?”

“Maybe night's the only time you can find a gray rainbow.”

“Maybe there's no such thing as a gray rainbow, and that dream you're having doesn't mean a thing.”

Lourdes shook her head. “Dreams always mean something,” she said. “Especially dreams you have more than once.”

Michael cracked the window and took a deep breath. He could smell the end of the storm, the same way he could smell when it began. He could always smell the weather. An autumn storm always began with the smell of damp concrete and ended with the aroma of yellow leaves trampled along the sidewalk. A winter blizzard began clean, like the air itself had been polished to perfection, and ended with a faint aroma of ash.

As Michael sat there, breathing in the end of the storm, he had to admit that talking to Lourdes had made him feel a little bit better.

“Lourdes,” said Michael, “tell me something about you
now. Tell me something about yourself you swore you'd never tell a living soul. It's only fair.”

Lourdes shifted and the seat creaked, threatening to give way. Michael waited.

“I don't have secrets,” she said in her deepest, most thickly padded voice.

Michael waited.

Lourdes sighed, and Michael leaned closer to listen.

“My parents . . . they love me very much,” said Lourdes. “I know this because I heard them talking one night. They said that they loved me so much, they wished that I would die, so I would be put out of my misery.” Lourdes spoke matter-of-factly, refusing to shed a single tear. “The truth is, I never felt misery until I heard them say that.”

Outside the air began to take on a new flavor—a rich, earthy smell that Michael recognized as fog rolling in, matching the cloudy, numb feeling in his brain.

“Lourdes,” said Michael, “I don't care what anyone says, I think you're beautiful.”

M
ICHAEL AND
L
OURDES ARRIVED
in St. Louis the next morning, their van riding the crest of the storm. The black rain clouds followed behind them like a wave rolling in from the distant Atlantic Ocean, baffling the weatherman, who always looked west for weather.

Michael, starved, stopped at the first cheap-looking fast-food place he found, but all they sold were fried brain sandwiches, a local specialty. When Michael returned to the car with his questionable sandwich and a drink for Lourdes, he looked behind him to see a sheet of rain moving across the surface of the Mississippi River, until it finally reached them, letting loose over St. Louis. Michael hopped into the van and managed not to get drenched.

He handed Lourdes her Diet Coke. “What do you know about St. Louis?” she asked.

“I know I'd rather be just about anywhere else in the world,” he said, looking miserably down at the brain-burger in his hand.

“Besides that, what do you know?”

Michael shrugged. “The Cardinals,” he said. “That's about it . . . .” And then he stopped dead—and started to breathe rapidly. Michael turned to Lourdes and grabbed her heavy arm, trying to speak but unable to catch his breath.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“Lourdes . . . there's one more thing I know about St. Louis . . . something that never occurred to me until now!”

“So, tell me.”

“I think maybe you should look for yourself.”

Lourdes followed Michael's gaze to the south. Lourdes wiped the fog from the windshield, and her eyes traced the path of the riverbank, until she saw it, too. It was about a mile away, curving hundreds of feet into the sky—thousands of tons of gray steel, shaped and curved into the magnificent arch that graced the city of St. Louis. The sleek steel wonder stretched deep into the clouds, and back down to earth again, and the very sight of it gave Michael and Lourdes the eerie shivers—because more than anything else, the arch looked like a ghostly gray rainbow.

T
ORY AND
W
INSTON HAD
already been at the arch for twenty minutes. They had stood with die-hard tourists in a line that wound through the underground museum, waiting to board the tiny car that would take them to the peak of the arch.

The logic made perfect sense. If you were supposed to meet someone in St. Louis, but didn't know where, there were certain
places one ought to try: airports, bus stations, train stations, landmarks—and they knew St. Louis had to be the place. They could sense something here they felt nowhere else they had been—the westward current suddenly seemed caught in a swirling eddy.

They had been to all the other places, and now they searched the city's best-known landmark—their last hope—before continuing west. To Omaha, if Tory got her way.

Once at the top of the arch, the view was spectacular, for the very tip of the arch pierced the dense, low-hanging storm clouds. It was like a view from heaven.

Tory wore her scarf over most of her face like an Arabian veil. “I've never been this high,” she said. “I guess this is what it must look like from a plane.” The clouds beneath the observation window were slow-moving billows; huge cotton snails sliding over one another.

The car brought them back down to the underground museum, and still there was no sign of anyone on the lookout for them. It was worse than the old needle in a haystack. At least then you knew it was a needle you were looking for.

“There's nothing here,” Tory finally had to admit. Then Tory and Winston heard a voice deep in the crowd.

“This is a waste of time,” the voice said. Tory and Winston quickly turned and saw a boy through the crowds. He had a thin, scraggly body and thin, scraggly hair. He seemed flushed and sweaty. Next to him stood a girl so immense there was no way she'd fit in the tiny car that rode to the top of the arch.

But it was the scraggly boy that caught Winston's attention—not his face, but his eyes. Even from a distance, Winston could see the color of his eyes.

“I know him!” said Winston. “Don't I know him?”

Winston and Tory pushed through the crowd, and as they
did, the sounds around them seemed to become distant. The people milling about and waiting in line seemed like mere shadows of people. The guard mouthed the words “Move along,” but his voice sounded as if it were coming from miles away. The only sights clear and in focus were the fat girl and scraggly boy, who were now staring at them with the same troubled wonder.

Winston approached the scraggly boy, pulling his torn satin cloth out of his pocket. One glance at the cloth, and then at the boy's eyes proved to Winston what he already knew. The cloth was the exact same color as the scraggly boy's eyes. Impossibly deep—impossibly blue! This was the connection!

Michael grabbed the cloth and looked at Winston, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. Michael felt the urge to say
It's good to see you again,
even though he knew he had never met this small black kid before.

Tory approached, staring at Lourdes, and rather than being repulsed, she felt somehow comforted by her large presence. It made Tory want to peel back her scarf, to reveal her own awful face, suddenly not ashamed of it in front of the present company.

“My God!” said Lourdes, as Tory revealed her face, and Lourdes smiled with a look of wonder instead of disgust. Still holding onto Michael, Lourdes reached out to touch Tory, who still had a hand on Winston's shoulder; Winston had put his small palm up against Michael's large one, closing a circuit of the four of them . . . and the instant the circuit was closed, something happened.

Their skin felt on fire, their bones felt like ice. They could not move.

Then an image exploded through their minds with such power and intensity, it seemed to burn the world around them away. It was a vision before sight, a tale before words. It was
a memory—for it was so terrifyingly familiar to all of them it could only be a memory—not of something seen or heard but of something felt:

Bright Light! Sharp Pain! One screaming voice becoming six screaming voices. Six! There are six of us!

As the vision filled them, the clouds above began to boil and separate, as a powerful wind blew through the ghostly steel rainbow and the wet earth was finally drenched by blinding rays of sun.

A
T THAT SAME MOMENT, ABOUT FOUR HUNDRED MILES
away, Dillon Cole doubled over in a pain even more intense than the wrecking-hunger. He burst into a men's room in the small bus depot in Big Springs, Nebraska, stumbled into a stall, and collapsed to the tile floor. At first he thought this must have been God striking him down for the sheer magnitude of his sins—but then as the world around him seemed to burn away, he knew it was something else. The vision—the
memory
then burst upon his mind. It was both glorious and awful at once, and so intense that he thought it would kill him.

Awful Awful Awful

Blinding fire

Tearing

Shattering

Unbearable pain

Shard of light

Piercing

Screaming through the void

Then silence . . .

And a beat.

And silence . . .

A heartbeat.

And warmth

And comfort

And the soft safety

Of flesh and blood.

It was the vision of a cataclysmic death . . . followed by life. His own life. Something died . . . and he was born . . . but not just him. Others.
The
Others.

The convulsions that racked his body subsided as the vision faded, and he felt the grip of reality once more. He picked himself up and staggered back into the waiting area.

“Deanna?” He found her still doubled over on a bench. Her head was in her hands and she was quietly crying. She had shared this earth-shattering vision as well.

“You okay?” asked Dillon, still shaking from the experience.

“What was it?” Deanna got her tears under control. “I was so scared . . . what's happening to us?”

“The Others are together,” said Dillon, just realizing it himself. The fact struck him in the face, leaving him stunned—and unsure of how to feel about it.

It was all beginning to make sense to him now. There were six of them in the vision, all screaming discordant notes.

They were all here, together, for fifteen years. Maybe thousands of miles apart by human standards, but from the perspective of an immense universe, they were right beside one another . . . and moving closer. The thought of it began to make Dillon get angry, and he didn't know why . . . and then he realized why. It was the wrecking-hunger, suddenly brought to a full boil, as if the vision triggered it to attack.

“I think we somehow know each other—even though we've never met,” said Deanna. “There
are
six of us, aren't there?”

“Four of
them
,” said Dillon. “And two of
us
.”

Dillon could see Deanna struggling to understand—but she couldn't grasp the entire truth yet. She couldn't see the pattern the way he did.

“We need to find them,” insisted Deanna. “We have to join them . . .”

“We don't
have
to do anything.”

“Yes we do! We have to meet The Others and find out who we really are!”

“I know who I am! I'm Dillon Cole, and that's all I need to know!”

“What's wrong with you?” she shouted. “Isn't that why we've been moving east? To find them?”

Dillon knew she was right. The thought of finding The Others had been like a carrot dangling before them. But now that carrot was quickly growing rotten in Dillon's mind. What would joining the others prove? What would it do beyond making Dillon just one of six? Yes, the wrecking-hunger was awful—but it was something familiar. Joining The Others, however, was a great dark unknown.