Scorpion Shards by Neal Shusterman
“Men’s cologne going out, women’s perfume coming in—not his wife’s, because I can smell that everywhere else. The husband is seeing another woman. Good chance his wife knows, and divorce is in the air. Will they break up? Let’s find out!”
Dillon opened the refrigerator. “He keeps his beer on the same shelf as the milk and the soda—not in the door all by itself.” Dillon opened the hallway closet. “Everything in this house is neatly arranged—these people love order and tranquility, right down to giving their sons sound-alike names. But Dad’s coats are mixed in with Mom’s, instead of on their own side: their order is tightly intertwined.” Dillon turned and glanced at the back door again. “And his dirty work boots—” he said. “They’re inside the house, on a mat; he’s considerate enough not to leave them on the wood floor, and she’s accepting enough not to make him put them outside.”
“So?”
“So if we leave this little family-stew to cook, I can tell that dear old Dad gives up the other woman, and the marriage is saved. Ninety-six percent probability.”
“You’re incredible!” said Deanna. “Sherlock Holmes couldn’t be that exact!”
Dillon shrugged. “It’s like looking at a work of art,” explained Dillon. “It’s just a bunch of paint, but when you look at it, you see the Mona Lisa, right? Well, when I look at all of these things, I see a picture, too. I see who these people were, who they are, and who they’re probably going to be.”
“What do you see when you look at me?” asked Deanna.
Dillon didn’t even try—he just shook his head. “You’re like me,” he said. “Too complex to figure out.”
She smiled at him, and he took her hand. “C’mon,” he said, “I know all I need to know about this family . . . let’s move on.”
As they left, Deanna noticed the way he rolled his neck, and the way sweat was beginning to bead on his forehead.
“The wrecking-hunger . . . it’s back again, isn’t it?”
“I try not to think about it,” he said, and tugged on her arm a little more urgently. “C’mon.”
Out back, they saw a man in the next yard patching up a hole in a boat.
“Hi! We’re Joey and Jason’s cousins,” said Dillon to the man.
“Josh and Jennifer,” added Deanna with a smirk.
The neighbor nodded a quiet hello. Dillon noticed the circles beneath his eyes, and the ghost of a missing wedding ring on his tan left hand. Dillon listened to the way in which a dog inside the house yowled.
“Sorry to hear about your wife’s passing,” said Dillon . . .
ON THEY WENT, weaving in and out of homes and yards, pretending to be people they weren’t—and no one doubted them because Dillon was so very good at the game. He knew the exact things to say that would make people open up their homes, and their hearts, telling him things they would never usually tell a stranger. It was as if they were hypnotized and didn’t know it.
All the while Dillon’s sweats had gotten worse, his breath had gotten shorter, and his face was becoming flushed.
In the last home, a woman had offered them iced tea and looked at Dillon with worry in her eyes.
“You sure you don’t want me to call a doctor?” she asked, but Dillon shook his head and stumbled into the street.
“He’ll be okay,” said Deanna, covering. “Asthma—his medicine’s back in our cousin’s house.” Deanna left the house and hurried after Dillon, feeling her own worry explode into fear. More than just fear . . . terror. Her own familiar brand of terror.
At the edge of the street, Dillon leaned against a tree, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. His breath came in short labored gasps. Not yet, he told the hunger that gnawed on the ragged fringe of his soul. It was so powerful now, he knew if he didn’t feed it soon, it would turn on him and devour him in an instant. You have to wait! You have to wait until everything’s ready, he told the hunger. Dillon kept telling himself that he was its master, but all beasts turn on their masters if they’re not fed.
By now the sun was low in the sky, casting hazy patterns of light through the trees. Patterns of light, patterns of life—sights, sounds, and an impossible puzzle of relationships between the people on this peaceful street.
Not so impossible. Dillon looked from house to house, jumbling all the patterns in his mind, looking for a common thread . . . and at last he found it. He marveled at the power of the solution he had found. It was like a key to open a great Pandora’s box. But it was so big—many times bigger than what he had done the day before. Did he dare do it? The wrecking-hunger answered by twisting his gut and bringing him to his knees.
Deanna ran toward him pale and frightened, and held him to keep him from falling to the pavement.
“Tell me what you need,” she said. “I can help you if I know.”
“You already know,” he answered.
Deanna looked away. Yes, she knew. He said he had come here looking for a place to eat. But deep down Deanna knew that he really meant a place to feed.
The look on Dillon’s face had become so helpless and desperate—so consumed by the hunger, she would have destroyed something herself to save him now.
“Will you let me do it?” asked Dillon. “Will you promise not to hate me?”
“Do it,” said Deanna. “Feed it any way you can.”
Deanna was shaking now; her eyes darting back and forth as if death would come swooping at both of them from the sky. His hunger and her fear were so tightly connected, she knew that when the hunger was fed and he was strong once more, she would be strong as well.
Dillon found the strength he needed to get to his feet and stumble off into the road toward the second house on the right, where Jason, Joey’s older brother, had just arrived home with his girlfriend.
Deanna watched him go, then turned away as she felt something begin to rise in her own gut—and it wasn’t just fear.
Will you let me do it? he had asked. He had never asked so bluntly before, but the question was there every time. He needed her permission. He needed her approval for every monstrous act he committed, and she always gave it—as if in some way she was in control. As if she was the one setting him loose to create chaos.
There were many things she could make herself deny. She could deny the sounds of disaster they left behind, she could convince herself that, beyond all reason, something good would come from all this destruction. But now she could not deny that it was all happening because of her—because she gave Dillon permission. She bit her hand to hold back her own scream.
Across the street, Dillon approached Jason’s girlfriend, who was waiting for Jason on the porch. By now anything human had drained out of Dillon’s voice, and he spoke in a rough snarl that came deep from his gut. It was the voice of the hunger itself.
“You!” growled Dillon as he approached her.
The girl gasped at the sight of him hobbling closer on his weak legs.
Dillon came right up to her, looked into her eyes, read her soul, and said, “Ask Jason to tell you the truth.”
One of the girl’s wide black pupils suddenly constricted down into a pinpoint in a huge blue eye. “Okay,” she said dreamily, “I’ll ask him.” She turned and headed into the house.
Dillon stumbled across the street, already beginning to feel the tiniest bit better. He found Deanna standing just where he had left her.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Dillon, but she wasn’t budging. Her hands were clenched by her side in tight, anxious fists.
“Tell me what you did to her.”
“I thought you didn’t want to know,” said Dillon.
“I want to know now!”
Dillon turned on her with a vengeance. “I’m trying to protect you!” he shouted. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve always wanted!”
Deanna drew a deep breath and said slowly, forcefully, “Tell me what you did!”
Dillon kicked the ground hard. “I planted a seed, like I did at the farm
But it wasn’t just any suggestion, was it? It was the right suggestion. Dillon had sized things up and knew the exact words that would set powerful forces in motion that would grind these people up.
“I found the girl’s button,” said Dillon. “Everyone has a button, you just have to find it . . . and then push it.”
Deanna shook her head, her hands trembling so violently she felt her fingers might shake themselves off.
“We have to leave now,” said Dillon. “I don’t want to see it happen.”
“But I do!” insisted Deanna. “If I’m a part of this, then I want to know what we’ve done!”
Dillon tried to pull her away, but she wouldn’t go. They would weather this one out, whether he liked it or not. “All right,” he said, “but just remember, I tried to keep you from seeing.” Since Dillon knew it wasn’t safe where they were standing, he climbed a tree and helped Deanna up. From there, they had a bird’s-eye view of the entire block.
“It’ll start over there,” said Dillon, pointing to Joey’s house. Sure enough, inside the house two people were arguing. The argument got louder and louder, until the girl burst out the front door in tears . . . just as Jason and Joey’s mother came home, holding a bag of groceries.
“You’re just like your father!” the girlfriend shouted back at Jason. “Everyone knows the way he sneaks around!”
The mother heard this, and the shock of this news made her drop a bag of groceries. Inside, a furious Jason took out his frustration on his kid brother. In a moment Joey came running out of the house crying, not seeing the groceries spilled on the front walk. He slipped on a can of peas, went flying, and hit his head on the ground. Hard.
His mother screamed.
Dillon turned to Deanna. “Once it starts, it’s like a boulder rolling down a hill,” he said. “Watch!”
Deanna watched with sick fascination as a delivery boy riding by on a moped turned his head to see why the woman was screaming—and was distracted just long enough to hit a car head-on.
The widowed neighbor man came out to his porch at the sound of the crash, and his neglected dog bolted from the house, ran across the street, freaked at all the noise, and attacked a woman in her garden. The woman’s husband, a nervous man, ran inside to get a shotgun to save his wife from the mad dog. But his aim was very bad. And very unlucky.
Then, in a moment, the events began to happen so quickly, the chain of cause and effect was completely lost. One thing led to five things, led to five more things, and in a matter of minutes the twilight was filled with shattering windows, screaming people, and brutal fistfights, until the entire block had disintegrated into a savage frenzy . . . an explosive chain reaction of unlikely, unlucky “coincidences” that had all been started by a single, simple suggestion.
“People are like dominoes,” explained Dillon, in the midst of the cataclysm. His voice was eerily calm, as if the people on this street were just numbers he was crunching through an equation. “You can make them all fall down, if you know exactly who to push, and when to push them.”
Somewhere a gunshot echoed. There were crashing sounds in many of the homes and, in one of them, somewhere the whoosh of igniting flames.
Dillon’s hunger was fed with every blast, with every crash and every wail as yet another person fell from sanity. He closed his eyes and felt the life-patterns in the street around him falling like a spiderweb clipped from its branch, until the only pattern that remained was the unrelenting spiral of chaos in every life around him.
Deanna, too, felt her own terror mysteriously fade away into a dizzy numbness.
“I’ve fed us both, now,” said Dillon.
Deanna just looked at him, blankly.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” he said. “You’ve got it as bad as I do—only with you it’s not a wrecking-hunger; it’s a terror-hunger.”
Deanna just shook her head, not wanting to hear it, not wanting to think about it.
“It’s true, Deanna; you need fear, the same way I need disaster—why do you think you feel better whenever you’re around me? It’s because you live on the terror I create—and when you can’t live on other people’s terror, you start feeding on your own.”
Deanna closed her eyes and tried to deny it . . . but the more she thought about it, the more true it rang. Didn’t she feel her strongest when those around her were in fear? Didn’t she draw strength from other people’s terror?
“You’ll never feel fear again, Deanna,” said Dillon, “as long as I can leave people terrified for you.”
The streets around them still echoed with the wails of dozens of souls losing their minds to a nightmare.
“Now do you see why we have to be together?” asked Dillon with a tenderness that clashed with the violence on either side of them. “We’re like thunder and lightning—you can’t have one without the other. Destruction and fear.”
He was right. He was right about everything, because every terrified wail seemed to feed something inside her. Was this who they were? Two hideously twisted creatures that lived like vampires, drinking up the misfortune of others? The very thought made her stomach turn.
This is not who I want to be!
She hid her face in shame and disgust.
Heat flashed as a fireball exploded somewhere down the street, and it was over. All that remained were the weak wails and moans, like the moment after a tumbling airplane came to rest. Survivors wandered the streets, some milling about aimlessly, others talking to themselves. The fine lattice of their minds had dissolved like sugar in water. Those who were dead were the lucky ones. The rest were irreconcilably insane.
My God, thought Deanna, these people had put so much energy into creating their lives . . . and now all that energy was being released as their lives detonated. That energy had to go somewhere . . . and that was the energy Dillon was feeding on!
She tried to shake the thought away. No! Human beings don’t drink that kind of energy . . .
And for the first time, Deanna began to see that there might be something else living inside of Dillon—a creature that was anything but human. “I have to feed it,” Dillon often said. He even spoke about his hunger as if it were a living thing.
Was there something like that inside of her as well?
Only now did she begin to realize the dizzying depths of the pit they were falling into. The severity of their actions was beyond comprehension, and it made her wish she could tear off her body and slide into someone else’s, just to be away from herself and this hideous destiny.
“You see there?” said Dillon, pointing down the street toward some homes that seemed just beyond the circle of destruction. “Those are the people I saved. I was actually able to save people! The hunger wanted them but I said no.” He spoke with the blind innocence of a child and leapt from the tree, bouncing around in the midst of the disaster as if it were a playground. Stronger than ever before, he gazed past the Armageddon to the homes he had “saved.”
“See, I kept my promise,” he said, helping Deanna from the tree. “I didn’t do any more than was absolutely necessary . . . and I did a good thing saving those people, didn’t I?”
The thoughts were swimming in Deanna’s head now. Nearly fifty people’s lives were destroyed, but all Dillon was willing to see were the fifty whose lives weren’t. Was this the best they could hope to do—damage control? Was that something to be proud of?
“See how I control it?” he said. “I don’t give it any more than it needs—I leave it a little bit hungry—that’s how I control it!”
And Deanna could see that Dillon believed this—he believed in his own ability to control this thing like a small child believed no one could see him when he closed his
Deanna shook her head to drive out Dillon’s excuses and rationalizations, but couldn’t.
“Deanna, c’mon—you’re looking at me like you hate me or something. You don’t hate me, do you? You promised you wouldn’t.”
Did she hate him? Did she find him beyond redemption? She instantly thought back to a python she once saw swallowing a live rabbit. It was awful to watch, but, after all, that’s what pythons had to do. If this was how Dillon survived, could she blame him any more than she blamed that python? And wasn’t she doing the exact same thing?
Deanna looked into his eyes, trying to find him there. There was intense darkness inside of him now, surrounding him, eating away at him like a vile parasite. So much of him had turned vile, it was hard to find any good left in him, but she continued to search until, through that blackness, she found the glimmer of light hidden deep within. It was that part of Dillon that was decent and kind—still fighting for life inside the blackness, like a star in the void of space. She focused on that shrinking light within Dillon, and to it she said, “I love you.”
Dillon smiled, a tear in his eye. “Me too,” he said. He touched Deanna’s cheek, gently held her around the waist, and set the pace as they strode off of Blackburn Street, even before the first police car arrived. As they walked, Deanna forced her own will deep into Dillon’s back pocket, but this time it didn’t slip in as easily as it had before.
I LOVE YOU. DILLON let her words echo from one side of his mind to the other. He drew strength from it, and, in a matter of moments, he had successfully forced the evening’s unpleasantness out of his mind. These people here—they didn’t matter. They weren’t real the way he and Deanna were real. The wrecking-hunger told him so.
Dillon’s spirits were high as he left town. The night was refreshingly cool, and he felt he could walk all night. He didn’t need sleep anymore. Come to think of it, he didn’t need food. He had already gorged himself on the fall of Blackburn Street, and it would be at least another day before he felt the hunger again.