Scorpion Shards (26 page)

“He's one of us,” was the only answer Tory gave.

Winston threw a bitter gaze at Dillon, and then threw himself into the hole and vanished. When Tory got to the top, she took a moment to look at the desolation here in this infinite “between.” Then she pushed her way into the hole, which stretched around her like tight elastic, until she disappeared into darkness.

Dillon hesitated. If the world on the other side of that hole was already starting to fracture, it would soon be more of a Hell than this tormented place they were leaving. But it was
his
world, and
his
responsibility to face what he had done there. So he took a deep breath and grabbed the lip of the hole with both hands, stretching the rend in space as wide as it would go. Then he squeezed his way into a layer of cold, suffocating darkness, and finally he pushed himself through the gap on the other side, into the world of life.

T
HE WEAPONS LOCKER WAS
empty.

This was the first thing Dillon noticed as he fell from the hole to the cold wooden floor of Slayton's shack. The weapons locker was empty, and Slayton was gone.

Dillon squeezed his eyes shut, trying to somehow disappear inside himself, but could not. “You don't know how awful it's going to be,” he told the others. “You can't imagine what the world will be like tomorrow . . .”

They all looked at each other, then turned back to Dillon.

“There's something you should see outside,” Lourdes said.

It was light now, and the hermit's old pickup was still there, its headlights shining straight at them. Its engine was on—overheating
and billowing steam; radiator fluid soaked the ground.

Two figures were in the light of the headlights: a small boy making rivers in the dirt with the spilled radiator fluid, and Slayton, who was sitting up against the grill. It seemed Tacoma was no longer of any interest to him.

“Was this part of the plan?” Michael asked Dillon.

Clearly it wasn't.

“You were good . . . ,” Tory told Dillon. “But I guess there's some things not even you can predict.”

Lourdes picked Carter up in her arms, as the five of them stared at Slayton, loaded shotgun still in hand, sitting motionless against the grill of the pickup.

The radiator was leaking because it had been punctured by a steel arrow. The same steel arrow that pinned Slayton's lifeless body to the radiator grill.

“We was playing cowboys and Indians,” said Carter, still gripping Slayton's crossbow in his hands. “I won.”

Inside the dead hermit's shack a hole in the wall of the world quietly healed itself closed and disappeared with a tiny twinkling of light.

T
HEY BURIED
S
LAYTON BESIDE HIS SHACK WITH HIS OWN
shovel. He had lived forsaken, but was laid to rest with more tender care than he had known in life. They buried his weapons with him and, with each shovel of dirt, they not only buried the man, but also the nightmare they had lived under for so long.

They finished at dawn, and now the forest that had seemed so desolate revealed its own slow recovery in the growing light. Between the gray, lifeless trees, grass and wildflowers had come back to begin the process of life again.

Winston gathered some of the wildflowers, strewed them across the barren grave, then brushed his fingers across them until the grave sprouted into a colorful garden. Then the four of them built a fire to warm themselves, and stood around it, talking of small, unimportant things, which they never before had had the luxury to do.

Only Dillon stayed away, still an outsider.

He had been the first to begin digging the grave, the first to gather wood for the fire, but when nothing was left for him to do, he placed himself in exile. They all were painfully aware of his presence.

“Someone should say something to him,” suggested Tory.

Winston gnawed beef jerky on teeth that were still coming in. “I got nothing to say to him,” he declared coldly.

They all stole glances at Dillon, who sat alone by the hermit's grave, aimlessly shuffling a worn deck of cards he had
found in the shack. He was thinner now, and his face almost cleared up, but there was a burden in that face, so weighty and oppressive, it was hard to look at him.

“What can we say that will make any difference?” wondered Lourdes, and glanced toward Carter, who now busied himself dropping sugar cubes into a bucket of rainwater, watching them dissolve with the same mindless indifference he must have felt when he fired that crossbow. The boy was a living testament to the people and places Dillon had shattered, and nothing any of them could say would change that.

“Any one of us could have ended up like Dillon,” said Michael. “I know I almost did.”

Michael left the warmth of the fire and was the first to brave the distance to the boy they knew only as The Destroyer.

“S
OLITAIRE
?”
ASKED
M
ICHAEL AS
he approached Dillon.

Dillon didn't break the rhythm of his shuffling. “A trick,” he answered.

“Can I see it?”

Dillon looked at Michael apprehensively, then handed Michael the cards. “Shuffle them and lay them face up,” he said.

Michael sat down, shuffled the cards, then spread them out, showing a random mix of fifty-two cards.

Dillon picked up the deck again and began to shuffle it himself. “I never liked playing cards,” said Dillon, “because no matter how much I shuffled the deck, the first card I always turned over was the ace of spades. The death card.”

“That's not the death card,” said Tory as she came over and sat beside them. “Believe me, I've
seen
the death card, and it's not the ace of spades.”

Lourdes came over as well, leaving Winston the only one refusing to talk to Dillon. They watched as Dillon shuffled
the deck over and over, and when he was done he handed the deck to Tory. “Flip the first card,” he said.

Tory flipped it. It was the ace of spades.

“Cool trick,” said Michael.

It was Lourdes who realized the trick hadn't ended. “Why don't you flip the second card?” she suggested.

Tory flipped it; the deuce of spades.

“So?” said Michael.

Tory flipped another card; the three of spades; then the four of spades; then the five. She looked at Dillon warily, then turned the entire deck over and spread the cards face up.

The cards were in perfect order; ace through king, spades through diamonds! They stared, not sure whether to be aghast or amused.

“Pretty good trick, huh?” said Dillon. His eyes betrayed the truth; this was much more than a mere trick.

“So what's the big deal?” asked Michael as he examined the deck.

“Entropy,” said Tory.

“Entro-what?”

“Entropy,” she repeated. “Newton came up with it—it's one of the basic laws of the universe, just like gravity.”

“What is?!” demanded Michael.

Tory rolled her eyes. “
That things go from a state of order to disorder.
You know—mountains erode, glass breaks, food rots—”

“Cards get shuffled,” said Lourdes.

“Right,” said Tory, “but Dillon here . . . he's breaking that law.”

They all stared at him. “Is that true?” asked Lourdes.

Dillon quivered a bit, and said, “Go directly to jail, do not pass ‘Go.' ”

While Michael chuckled nervously, and Lourdes just stared at the cards, Tory scoured the area for a way to test her theory. She finally settled on Carter, who had long since drowned all his sugar cubes, and was just staring into the bucket of water. She took it from him, and he hardly seemed to notice it was gone.

“The law of entropy say that sugar dissolves in water,” said Tory, brining the bucket over to them. “Right?”

Everyone looked into the bucket. The water was clear; not a granule of sugar left.

“Dillon, put out your hands,” asked Tory.

Dillon did, and Tory slowly poured the water through his fingers.

What they saw didn't appear spectacular . . . . At first . . . it just seemed . . . well, weird. As soon as Tory began to pour the water, granules of sugar appeared in Dillon's hands, out of the clear water. The water kept spilling through his fingers, and his palms filled with the white powder . . . but it didn't stop there. The grains seemed to be pulling themselves together as Dillon concentrated, and once the water had poured through his fingers and the bucket was completely empty, Dillon was left with not just a handful of sugar . . .
but a handful of sugar cubes.

They stared at the cubes, stupefied.

“That's awesome!” said Michael. “It's like reversing time!”

“No it's better,” suggested Lourdes. “It's reversing
space.
”

Dillon put his handful of sugar cubes down, and they slowly dissolved into the mud.

“What do you do with a talent like that?” wondered Michael.

“What can't you do with it!” said Tory. “It's better than all of our talents put together . . . . It's like . . . creation.”

The very thought made Michael pale. A chill wind blew and somewhere in the distance a small cloud began to darken.

“Don't mind Michael,” Tory said to Dillon, “he gets a little bit moody.”

But it wasn't just a matter of Michael's being moody. He had something else weighing on his mind.

“So what happens now?” asked Michael.

The question had hung heavily in the air since dawn, but had gone unspoken.
What now?
Any urge they had felt to come together had long since faded away, just as the light of the supernova had dimmed in the night sky. If anything, the urge was to drift apart. They all turned to Dillon for an answer—as if somehow he were the one holding them together like crystals of sugar, and they needed his permission to go their separate ways.

“We do,” said Dillon, “whatever we want to do.”

It was a quiet declaration of independence, but seemed as profound a moment as when the exploding star first filled the night sky.

“I want to go home.”

It was Winston who spoke. They all turned to see him there, a fraction of an inch taller than he was just moments before. “I gotta fix things—
change
things, get my life moving,” he said, then he wiped a tear from his eye before it had a chance to fall. “And I miss my mom and brother.”

No one could look each other in the eye then. Thoughts of home that had been locked away all this time now flooded them.

“By the time I get home,” said Lourdes, “they won't even recognize me . . . . It's all gonna be new . . .”

The shifting wind blew cold again. “What if we don't go home?” whispered Michael.

“You will,” said Dillon.

Winston crossed his arms. “How the hell do you know?”

Dillon shrugged. “I can see the pattern,” he said. He studied the four of them—the way their eyes moved, the way they breathed, the way they impatiently shifted their weight from one leg to the other.

“You'll leave here not sure of anything; not even the ground beneath your feet,” he told them. “But the further you get away from this place, the saner it's all going to feel . . . and every place you stop, there'll be people coming out of the woodwork talking to you—wanting to be near you, and not even knowing why. Waiters will tear up your checks—strangers will open up their homes to you; everyone will think you've gotten your lives together, and you'll laugh because you'll know the truth. And each person you come across—they'll take away something they didn't have before—something pure, or joyful, a sense of control, something to grow on. At least one of those people will get on a plane. And then it'll spread to places you've never even heard of.”

They stood there aghast. Michael stared at Dillon, slack-jawed. “You can see all that?!”

Then Dillon's straight face resolved into a wide grin. “Sucker!” he said.

Tory burst out with a relieved guffaw, and soon the others were laughing and razzing Michael, as if they hadn't fallen for it as well.

Dillon's grin faded quickly and that solemn melancholy returned to take its place. “You'd better all go,” he told them. “You've got a whole country to get across.” Then he glanced at Carter. “You can leave him with me.”

Somehow it didn't seem fitting to say good-bye, so Tory reached out her hand to Dillon and introduced herself.

“I'm Tory,” she said. “Tory Smythe.”

Dillon smiled slightly, and shook her hand. “Dillon Benjamin Cole.”

The others were quick to follow.

“Michael Lipranski.”

“Lourdes Maria Hidalgo-Ruiz.”

Winston kept his hands in his pockets, refusing to shake Dillon's hand. “Winston Marcus Pell.”

Then the four who had come together turned and headed toward Michael's van, dissolving away from Dillon, the way they would soon dissolve away from each other.

Winston was the last to go. He stood there, a few feet from Dillon, a scowl well-cemented on his face. He looked Dillon over head to toe.

“You know you'll never be forgiven for the things you've done. There ain't enough grace in all the world to cleanse you of that.”

Dillon had to agree. “You're probably right.”

Winston studied Dillon a few moments longer, and his scowl softened. He shook his head. “I wouldn't want to be you,” he said.

Behind them, they heard the others piling into the van. Winston took a step back, but before he turned to leave, he reached out and tapped Dillon on the arm, the closest he could bring himself to a friendly gesture. “Stay clean,” said Winston. “Don't let the bugs in.”

Dillon nodded, and Winston ran off to join the others. In a moment their minds were far away, their voices growing with joy and anticipation. Then Michael started the engine, and the four great souls ventured forth into the bright morning, ready to embrace their new, old lives.