Thief of Souls (22 page)

“It'll be somewhere in the Mediterranean,” he told them. “Millions will go there . . . and die. But it won't stop there. Death will spread out from that spot, until there's nothing left. Human, animal, or vegetable.
Unless we can change the pattern.
”

“Is it nuclear?” asked Tory.

Dillon shook his head. “No, that's not part of the pattern.
It's something else. Something worse. And so far, all the good we've done hasn't changed a thing!”

Then he clicked on the TV, giving them a final dose to drive his point home. Yet another interview with a Shiprock survivor. There were so many witnesses, the media was having a field day, and would have weeks' worth of interviews to horrify and tantalize the viewing public.

“Take a look at what happened in Shiprock, and tell me if you need any further proof. A man begins a killing rampage that's continued by one of the deputies who arrested him.”

“Big deal,” said Michael. “So a couple of lunatics decide to start blowing people away. It happens all the time—how are these psychos different from all the others?”

Dillon clenched his fists. “I don't know yet—but this
is
different. It's
important
—I'm just not sure how. You have to trust me!” He waited in silence for their response—hoping their thoughts, and their strength, would bolster his own. He knew they could rise to this challenge. These four had risen to defeat their beasts, they had risen to defeat Dillon in his own dark days. United, they had the power to—

“This is a waste of my time,” said Lourdes. “Where's lunch? I'm starved.”

“Are we through here?” said Winston, looking at his watch. “I have things to do.”

“I'm going swimming,” announced Tory.

Michael smirked at Dillon, laughing—mocking. “The secrets of the universe in TV ratings and chat rooms? C'mon, do you really expect us to take you seriously?”

But Dillon suspected nothing he could have said would have provoked anything but indifference from them. Dillon's frustration was a palpable thing now—he could feel it in the air around him, and he had a sudden urge to lash out in anger.
He turned away from them, like someone turning to sneeze, hoping to deflect his sudden burst of fury. Then he released it from his mind, full force upon a water glass that sat on his dressing table. The glass shattered, into a thousand pieces. The others turned to look at it with only mild interest.

“Cool trick,” said Michael, nodding to the place where the glass had been. “Bet that'll be a real crowd-pleaser with the Happy Campers.”

When Dillon glanced at the spot where the glass had been, he had to double-take. Yes, he had shattered the glass,
but the water was still there
, suspended in its cylindrical shape. It was his own power of cohesion that held the water together, refusing to let it spill across the tabletop.

But if he could effortlessly bind these molecules of water, why couldn't he bind the five of them together toward a single goal?

“Later,” said Winston, and the four of them drifted out.

Dillon stood there in the vacuum of their exit, completely bewildered. What had happened? Why weren't they listening? Although his encounters with them had been brief before they arrived at the castle, he had thought he
knew
them. He thought he knew their hearts, their minds, their convictions . . . .

And their alliances.

The thought made him shiver. It played in his mind for the rest of the day. It still tinted his thoughts later that afternoon, when he met the Shards again for their daily repair work.

There were more than fifty today. It was a bloody business, as there were more injured than sick. The other Shards did not bring up their little summit meeting from earlier that day, and so neither did Dillon. He merely watched them, and listened.

“You're all so damned slow,” Winston commented to the other Shards as he moved from one amputee to another, as if he were on an assembly line.

“Can't you hold still?” Tory snapped without a shred of patience, at a woman whose infection she was trying to purge.

Lourdes grumbled about all the places she would rather be, and Michael just sat there, peering out of the window, aloof and apart, letting his sedate mood settle on the wounded behind him.

It wasn't just that they had gotten good at the work—they had also developed an immeasurable distance from the patients over whom they loomed, as if their lives were now on some exalted plane. If the people lying before them were to die in their arms, and Dillon weren't there to revive them, Dillon doubted that the four of them would care in the least.

When one quadriplegic had been relieved of a broken neck, he turned to them. “Who in God's name are you?” he asked, with tears in his eyes.

No answer was given, but Dillon caught Lourdes grinning at the question.

Do they think of themselves as gods now?
Dillon wondered.
Are we?

The fact that he had to ask was not a good sign.

When the last of the wounded had been led off by Okoya for their “debriefing,” Dillon watched the other Shards dissolve away from one another, each surrounded by a clutch of followers that clung to them like lint. They made no attempt to push those followers away. Instead, the Shards seemed to take greater and greater delight as those around them jockeyed for position in their attempts to curry favor.

T
HAT NIGHT
D
ILLON LURKED
in dark corners, secretly watching the others. He observed Lourdes in the Refectory. She sat with a host of followers who were more than happy to provide her with company as she gorged herself. She was
clearly the center of her followers' attention, in what appeared to Dillon like a distorted burlesque of the Last Supper. But by the look of things, this was by no means a final repast. In fact, it seemed like the first of many in Lourdes's future.

Dillon found Winston in the Gothic Study, absorbed in a thin volume with no title. He wore a hand-woven robe so ornate he seemed part of the scenery. The door creaked as Dillon entered, earning him only a fraction of Winston's attention.

“Quiet evening,” commented Dillon.

“Is there something you need?” asked Winston.

“Just making the rounds.”

Winston turned a page. “Close the door on your way out.”

Dillon spied Michael in the Billiard Room, playing pool against a string of followers who made sure that Michael always won. Then, when he tired of the game, he sent someone to fetch his iPod and went out for a jog. He passed Dillon on his way out of the castle. “Life is good,” Michael said with a wink as he passed, then turned to the Happy Campers in attendance. “Who wants to run with me?” There was no shortage of jogging companions. He put in his earphones, and ran off. Whatever music he listened to, Dillon noted, it must have affected him deeply, because the entire night sky shimmered with waves of color, like his own personal aurora borealis.

As for Tory, she retired early, and Dillon found himself peering through her keyhole for a glimpse of what she was up to. Dillon played the voyeur, as she slipped into a full bathtub, and began to pour a luminous pink bath oil from a crystalline decanter into the waters.

Have I become so suspicious—so distrustful of them—that I have to watch them in secret?
He knew the answer was yes. What had brought him to this?

It was here, as Dillon pressed his eye to Tory's keyhole, that
someone stepped out of the shadows. Someone with a video camera.

“Shame, shame, Dillon—looks like I caught Big Brother spying.”

It was Drew. His voice seemed to quiver as he spoke, and his camera hand trembled.

Dillon tried to hide his own embarrassment at being exposed. “You can't get a good picture if you don't hold it steady, Drew.”

Drew shrugged. “Won't matter—it has a built-in image stabilizer,” and then he giggled unexpectedly. It wasn't so much a nervous giggle as it was . . . inappropriate—as if Drew wasn't quite fixed in the situation.

Dillon had seen little of Michael's friend since his life had been restored. For several days he had withdrawn into the Celestial Suite, as if cocooning himself. Then, when he emerged, there seemed to be something markedly different about him—but since Dillon hadn't known Drew before, he had no real basis for comparison. All he knew was that Drew in recent days appeared to be a slippery character, never lingering long in anyone's line of sight.

Dillon took a step closer, but Drew took a step back. “What'll you give me?” Drew asked. “What'll you give me if I keep this video to myself, and don't tell the others you were spying on them?”

Dillon stopped short. His rapport with the others had frayed to a tether. If they knew he was secretly watching them, it wouldn't help matters. He hadn't been expecting to be blackmailed by Drew, though. “I gave you back your life,” he told Drew. “Isn't that enough.”

“Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?”

Dillon took another step toward Drew, and once again
Drew backed up—this time into a shaft of light, where Dillon could get a good look at him.

Drew uncomfortably shifted from one foot to another, and back again, as if the ground were constantly sliding beneath his feet like the floor of a funhouse.

Dillon quickly sized Drew up. No, this was not the same person he had fished back from death two weeks before.

“I got an idea,” suggested Drew. “Why don't I do the spying
for
you? Sure—the others'll never suspect me. I'll catch them all on tape, and in return, you could give me a bunch of ‘servants.' Yeah! Just like the rest of you have. How does that sound?”

“You're kidding me, right?” But there was no hint of jest in Drew's shaky voice.

Drew lowered his voice to a whisper. “I could
tell
you things,” said Drew. “Things I've seen, that I'll bet you haven't. Like the way Winston reads—his eyes don't even move, as if it's not words he's getting from the page, but something else. Or how about Michael—those playlists he keeps adding to his iPod—I tried to play one, but there was nothing on it . . . at least nothing I could hear. And how about Tory's oils and perfumes? They have no scent! I could find out more for you . . . for the right price.” He offered a twitching, feculent grin. “Come on—you can trust me . . . .”

Trust? Dillon didn't think so. Of the many unusual things Dillon sensed in Drew's current life-pattern, integrity didn't figure highly. In fact, a lack of integrity—in every sense of the word—was what Dillon felt more than anything else. Drew was . . . “out of focus.” Each twitch of his eyes, every tremor of his hands, spoke of incohesion—he seemed to be falling apart from the inside out, and it wasn't the type of thing Dillon could fix any more than he could fix the focus of a blurry snapshot.

No, “trustworthiness” was not currently on Drew's list of attributes. Still, the way Drew buzzed in and out of everyone's business made him the perfect fly on the wall. The things he claimed to have seen—could they be true, or were they just figments of a mind out of balance? The latter was much easier for Dillon to swallow.

“Tell you what: you keep a good videologue of everything you see, and maybe I'll assign you an assistant.”

Drew became more shifty, more fidgety. “How about two?”

“Don't push your luck.”

Drew took another step back, stumbling over his own feet, and when Dillon reached out to steady him, Drew pulled out of his grasp with a violent jolt.

“Don't touch me, man!”
Drew backed away, his posture a gangly knot of misdirected energies. “Just don't touch me, okay?” And then he turned and ran, vanishing into the darkness.

As far as Dillon was concerned, Drew's behavior was just further proof that the world was falling apart.

E
IGHTY-FOUR PEOPLE TO FIX
the next day.

The busy-bee faction of the Happy Campers didn't bother bringing the wounded into the castle. The vans and trucks that carried them, simply dropped them off in the huge courtyard between the castle and the guest houses. They were all laid out before him, beneath the unshielded sun, like a scene from a brutal war.

Dillon knew he was still sidestroking.

But it was more like treading water, wasn't it?

He wasn't getting any closer to shore—he wasn't anywhere near getting things under control. And all their good work wasn't mending the fracturing world. Why was that? Each
day there were more followers—not just the numbers of the healed, but others who had heard the stories and made the pilgrimage up the road from Coast Highway. There were always people coming up the road now, all hours of the day and night, longing to be a part of the Big Fix, longing to be part of something larger than themselves.

“It's human nature to see divinity in anything larger than oneself,”
Okoya had said. Did these pilgrims making the trek to the castle think they were entering a new Jerusalem?

Dillon found himself wondering what his followers did all day while he threw his energies into repair work. Today he found out.

“We've tried to organize them for you,” said a woman with a clipboard as she stepped obliviously over the bodies beneath her. She had been there every day. Dillon had come to call her Nurse Hatchet, although she tended to speak more like a Realtor showing a house—which was probably her profession before she wound up here. “Broken bones and internal injuries are to the left, lost limbs and such to the right, and those that died during transport are by the fountain. Would you like something to drink?”

“No thank you.” Dillon looked around, hoping Lourdes would show up, to ease the pain all around him. But the others, he was told, were taking their time in coming.