Scorpion Shards (23 page)

“I don't got no dinner for you,” Slayton said. “You'd better go now.”

The Devil-boy ignored Slayton. Instead, he tilted his head slightly, as if listening . . . then he sniffed the air . . . and then it was as if something snapped into place. He turned his eyes to Slayton once more and fixed his gaze.

“You loved your mother very much, didn't you,” said the Devil. “It's sad she died so young.”

“Wh . . . what do you know about it?”

“I know enough. I know your daddy worked the timberline and was always gone. I know he never gave a rat's ass about you. I know how he and most everyone else called you names . . . but your ma, she defended you against all those cruel people, didn't she?”

Slayton lowered the rifle a bit and nodded slightly.

“She had a special name for you. Something secret—between the two of you. What was it?”

Slayton swallowed hard and lowered the gun to his side.
How does he know this?

“Little Prince,” said Slayton. “Just like the book.”

The fat Devil-boy smiled. “When she died, your daddy just left you. How old were you, fifteen?”

“Just turned it,” said Slayton. “Then he drunk hisself to death. I was glad, too.”

“I know you were.” The Devil began to move closer and Slayton couldn't turn his eyes away.

“This is important, Slayton. After your father died, you lived in a city for a year or so, before you moved back into the woods . . . . Tell me the name of the city.”

Slayton bit his lower lip to keep it from quivering.
The Devil knows everything, don't he?

“Come on, Slayton. Tell me the name of the city.”

“Tacoma,” said Slayton weakly.

“Tacoma!” The Devil smiled in some sort of deep relief. “Listen to me, Slayton,” he said. “I'm going to make you the most important man in the world, and all you have to do is listen to me.”

“I'm listening,” said Slayton, his gaze locked onto the Devil's swimming blue eyes.

Then the Devil got as close as he possibly could to Slayton's ear, without touching him, and whispered in the faintest of voices:

“There's someone in Tacoma . . . who owes you.”

It took a moment to register . . . and then the words hit home, ringing as true as a church bell in Slayton's mind. Every fiber of his soul resonated with the thought, until he felt as if his very brain would be rattled apart.
Yes! Someone in Tacoma
did owe him.
He didn't know who it was, but whoever it was, Slayton would find him and make him pay!

Even Slayton could sense that this was the start of a grand chain of events that would greatly affect his life and the lives of many, many people.

He was about to turn to his munitions locker.

That's when all hell broke loose.

W
INSTON HAD GRASPED THE
gun in his pocket for so long, its cold handle had grown warm in his palm. A tip in the nearest town led them to this shack, and now as they kicked in the crooked door, Winston held the revolver out in front of him, afraid to pull the trigger, but also afraid not to. Everything was crucial now. No mistakes could be made.

The room was dim as they burst in, and it was hard to see. The others filed in, creating commotion, getting in the way.

There were two figures in the room, and in a moment he had identified which one was Dillon—but as Winston's eyes adjusted to the dim lamplight, he hesitated. They all hesitated, because they could not believe what they saw.

“Madre de Dios!”
cried Lourdes.

Dillon barely looked human—his body had bloated like a balloon, his face was swollen with festering blisters. His eyes were blazing sapphire holes.

Winston could feel the presence of the creature that had laid waste to his own soul in there as well. It was true—all of their monstrosities were now inside of Dillon!

“No!” screamed Dillon. He tried to make a break for it, but the five of them lunged at him, trapping him in a web of ten hands. He twisted free of their grasp and backed into the corner, a terrified, caged animal.

Across the room, the old hermit could only stand there by the
open closet door and gawk, while the little boy, Carter, looked in from the cabin's threshold with his awful empty eyes.

“Do it!” Tory shouted to Winston. “Do it now!”

“It's too late!” Dillon screamed. “It doesn't matter now, whatever you do won't matter!”

“Shut up!” shouted Winston.

“It's too late!” cackled Dillon again.

Winston stared at this creature in the dark corner and raised his gun.
The plan, the plan, follow the plan.

Winston tightened his two-handed grip on the revolver, steadied his shaking hands, then leveled his aim and pulled his trigger.

The roar from the six beasts drowned out any sound the gun could have made.

A flash of light—a flash of darkness—shadowy figures leaping in six different directions—screaming—blue flames—tentacles—horrid fangs! Six dark shadows clinging to the walls screeching and wailing in fury . . .

 . . . And in fear.

“They're afraid of us!” shouted Tory. “Look at them!”

The beasts recoiled from the kids in the room, leaping, slithering, flying from wall to wall.

“Don't let them inside you!” shouted Michael. “Fight to keep them out!” Although none of them knew how to do that, they willed themselves to stand firm against the raging, snarling shadows, and the creatures did not dare come near them.

Without a host, the beasts could not survive long in this world.

And so they left it.

It was something the kids could not have anticipated. The six hideous leech-things came together in the center of the room, and with a blast that rocked the weak foundations of the tiny cabin, they ripped the world open.

A ragged hole tore in the fabric of space, and the creatures escaped through it, into blind darkness.

The hole!
thought Winston, before he even understood what it was.
We're all too close to the—

Dillon's limp body slipped into the gaping breach—Deanna grabbed him, losing her balance. Winston caught her, and before any of them knew what was happening they had all grabbed hold of one another in a twisted huddle as they lost their footing and slipped into the vortex, from light into darkness.

And for an instant . . . just an instant they felt it:

Wholeness.

The six of them touching.

Complete and invincible.

Perfect and joyous.

An absolute union.

But the feeling ended when the six of them came through the darkness and hit a hard, unearthly ground, crashing apart once more like a fragile pieces of glass.

S
LAYTON WATCHED THEM GO
.

It had all happened so fast, he wasn't sure what he had seen . . . but then he realized that it didn't matter because

someone owed him in Tacoma.

Nothing mattered but that simple fact. Not the sudden disappearance of the Devil-boy and his devil friends. Not even the hole to Hell that still hung in the middle of the room. Nothing mattered because he had a mission.

Five minutes later, he had loaded most of his weapons into his pickup truck. He hadn't noticed the little boy who stood there watching, until the boy spoke.

“Mister, you playin' a game?” asked the boy, his head lolled to one side like he was half dead.

Slayton didn't have time for questions, or things that got in his way, so he reached into his pickup bed and grabbed a loaded shotgun.

“Are you a cowboy, or an Indian?” asked the boy.

Slayton took aim at the boy. No one would get in his way between here and Tacoma.

D
ILLON FELT HIS MIND, BODY, AND SOUL RIPPED APART
, then a moment later he was torn from the world.

He never heard the gunshot, but the pain was very real. It exploded in the back of his head where the bullet must have left his skull.

All was still now. Silent. He felt his blood pouring from the back of his head, and he moved his hand toward his forehead, certain that this would be the last action of his life. He would touch his own shattered forehead and then die.

But there was no entry wound.

And in the back of his head, there was no exit wound either. There was only a sharp stone upon which he had fallen, and a gash on the back of his scalp that spilled blood onto sands that were already the color of blood.

Everything was spinning in Dillon's head. He felt an unbearable emptiness. A hollowness. He had been crammed tightly with seething, horrid creatures, but now they were gone, and the emptiness they left behind was strange and terrible. He heard the voices of the other kids around him—the ones who had tried to kill him.

“They're getting away,” one of them said.

“We can catch them!”

“Don't just sit there, run!”

He heard feet running off, then saw the black kid who had fired the gun standing over him.

“You dead?” asked the black kid.

“Yes,” groaned Dillon.

“Good,” said the black kid, and he took off with the others.

Dillon closed his eyes again. And tried to feel something . . . anything. He could feel the blood pulsing in his hands and feet, he could feel the pain in the back of his head, but he couldn't feel anything
inside
. The events of the past few weeks were slowly coming back to him, like the details of a nightmare . . . he remembered Boise, and Idaho Falls, and Burton, and the many other people and places he had carefully destroyed, but with those memories came a fog of numbness. No feeling. No remorse. No sorrow or joy. Nothing. He had no feeling inside him at all. No heart. No soul.

“Dillon?”

He opened his eyes, and there beside him knelt Deanna. She helped him to sit up, and as he shifted, he felt something hard against the small of his back. He reached behind his back and pulled out the gun that should have killed him. Deanna gently took it from him and exposed the barrel.

“Four chambers; three bullets. We fired the empty chamber hoping we could scare them out of you. If it hadn't worked, we still had the three full ones.”

Dillon felt weak, feverish. He realized he hadn't eaten for days.

“Where are we?”

His eyes had adjusted to the strange harsh light, and he looked around. The sands were vermillion red, the sky an icy frost blue. A much smaller tear, ten feet in the air above him, marked the passage back to their own world.

And all around them was despair.

Downed airplanes and crushed ships littered the sands. Rusted cars with crusty skeletons lay strewn every few hundred yards like a great garden of death. All the people and
things that had ever disappeared without explanation were well accounted for in this unnameable place, having fallen through tears in the fabric of time and space. And yet this was not quite another world—it was an unworld—an unloved, unseen, unattended-to place. A place between.

Dillon turned to see a solitary mountain looming behind them; it seemed as out of place as everything else. At the top of this peak stood what appeared to be a castle carved out of the rock itself.

Dillon's beast was climbing this mountain. So was Deanna's. The other four kids had taken off in various directions across the sands after their demons, but Dillon's and Deanna's were getting away.

And still Dillon felt nothing.

He turned to Deanna.

“Deanna . . . I want you to look at me and tell me what you see.”

Deanna looked him over, and tried to hide the grimace on her face. “It's not so good . . . but the weight is already going away, and your skin . . .”

“No,” said Dillon. “That's not what I mean.”

He gripped her tightly and looked into her eyes. “I mean . . . what do you see . . . when you look at me . . .”

Deanna peered into his eyes, as she always did. He could almost feel her probing inside of him . . . searching . . . and then a tear trickled down her face.

“They've killed me, haven't they?” asked Dillon. “Those monsters left my body and my mind, but they killed my soul . . .”

“No . . . ,” said Deanna, smiling gently though her tears. Dillon could now see that these were not tears of sadness; they were tears of joy. “The other day,” said Deanna, “I thought you were gone forever, so I ran . . . . But I was
wrong . . . . You're still alive, Dillon, body
and
soul.”

Deanna leaned forward and kissed his blistered, swollen lips. And for a moment Dillon felt a twinge of feeling coming back to him.

He glanced up at the rift in space just out of their reach, remembering the extent of their situation.

“Slayton,” he said weakly. “I launched him toward Tacoma . . .”

Deanna calmly helped him to his feet. “First the beasts,” she said. “They're too powerful—they have to be destroyed.”

Dillon couldn't keep his eyes off of her. After everything he had done, she still cared for him—and after all the terror, she could face this new challenge with fortitude and peace. “How can you be so strong?” he asked. But Deanna only smiled.
What a wondrous gift,
thought Dillon.
To be so strong. To be so brave.

He stood on wobbly legs like a dead man refusing to give up the ghost and tapped into Deanna's will, borrowing it for his own. Then they set off toward the mountain to face their demons.

T
ORY HAD BEEN THE
first to realize that these beasts could be destroyed. She knew by the way the beasts moved. They didn't zip across these sands like shadows; they ran, they crawled, they slithered, like beings of flesh and blood. Indeed, in this unworld these beasts were creatures of flesh. That meant they would have weaknesses and could be hunted! The creatures raced off in different directions, and the kids took off after the beast each recognized to be their own.