Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  “Michael doesn’t know his own strength.”

  Now when Drew looked toward the horizon, he could see it had taken on a strange amber shade in all directions.

  Meanwhile, out in the field, Michael concentrated. He didn’t look to the horizon, he didn’t open his eyes. He focused on his anticipation and turmoil, letting his heart rate increase, feeling his heartbeat in his fingertips, then his wrists, then his elbows. Tension bubbled within him. He had no idea how far away the wind was, until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Michael,” Dillon said. “Get ready to brace yourself.” Dillon’s voice cracked as he spoke.

  Then Michael opened his eyes, and saw his creation. A tumbling wall of dust, hundreds of feet high. A brown tidal wave bearing down on them from all directions. Michael closed his eyes again, his anxiety closing in on his heart.

  Back at the Durango, Okoya laughed with glee at the sight, and Drew could only stand with one hand on the open door of the car staring at this mountain rolling toward them, engulfing the earth.

  A jet, perhaps the last one with departure clearance, fought its way heavenward on a trajectory taking it directly toward the dust storm. It looked as though it might clear it, but then the plane disappeared into the cloud’s roiling head. Drew didn’t know what became of it, because now there was a roar in the air, and the ground began to shake like an earthquake.

  Suddenly Drew realized they were out in the middle of nowhere. There was no structure they could run to. No place they could go.

  In the distance a farmhouse vanished beneath the dust. A string of telephone poles disappeared one by one, measuring the distance. It was five poles away.

  “Oh shit!”

  Drew practically threw Okoya into the car, and threw himself in after him. When he turned to reach for the door, the leading edge of the dust storm was upon them. He pulled the door closed just as it hit.

  Two hundred yards away, Winston saw the Durango disappear and he panicked. “Slow it down!” he screamed at Michael, “it’s coming too fast!”

  “I can’t!” he screamed back. “I’m trying, I—"

  It hit them from all directions at once, banging them into one another, lifting them off their feet and tumbling them through the shredding brush.

  Michael felt his flesh abrading away and regenerating. He could have died a hundred times in those first few seconds, before self-preservation kicked in. He bore down, held his breath and found, in the middle of it all, a seed of peace in which he now centered his awareness. Almost instantaneously the wind pushed outward, leaving a gap in the center of the maelstrom; a ten-foot bubble of still air, an eye in his storm in which the three of them now huddled, coughing and trembling.

  Dillon was the first to stand and assess the situation. The violent sands that raged around their air pocket kept shifting and changing— but it wasn’t random—nothing in Dillon’s presence ever was. The dust now swirled in shifting moire patterns. Spirals within spirals, like galaxies revolving.

  Now the burden was on Dillon.

  This was by far the most difficult task Dillon had ever been asked to perform. It was not just reconstructing a life out of cinders, but sifting out those ashes from a trillion particles of dust—and although Okoya told them this was possible, Dillon’s own faith was sorely lacking.

  To Dillon’s right, Michael hunched on all fours, straining to keep the winds churning around the low-pressure eye. To Dillon’s left, Winston tried to tell him something, but Dillon couldn’t hear a thing over the roar of the wind.

  The particles of dust churning in the air were already coalescing into a rougher grit, taking on texture and color. Particles of leaves, bits of bark and feather down. The memory of the dust over Dallas.

  Dillon reached a hand out of their protective bubble, feeling the grit sift through his fingers, and he began to concentrate his thoughts on Tory; the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the feel of her cleansing presence—every memory he could find. The patterns of the wind changed as he thought of her; slim dust flares snaked down through the swirling clouds.

  And when Dillon pulled back his hand, his palm was ashen gray.

  He brushed the dust from his fingers onto a spot he cleared in the brush, then thrust both hands into the maelstrom, and repeated the process, again and again, each time brushing the milligrams of dust from his hands until the dust became a small pile. How much would it take to substantiate her? How much of Michael’s body had they needed for Winston to bridge the gaps? Dillon knelt down to Michael and screamed in his ear. “I think we’re going to need water!”

  Michael nodded. He didn’t open his eyes or change positions, but in a moment the air around them fogged and the brush grew heavy with dew.

  Dillon reached his hands into the dust cloud again, thrusting them up to his elbows, while on the ground, the pile of fine ash condensed into tiny particles of bone.

  * * *

  In the Durango, Drew and Okoya waited the better part of an hour in the swirling winds, isolated, with only static from the radio. Okoya was hardly a comforting presence. He made no conversation, and spent much of the time grooming himself, brushing his hair and admiring his reflection in the vanity mirror, obviously pleased with the effect Dillon’s presence had on his tartared teeth and mangy hair. His motions were so feminine, it reminded Drew that he was in fact both genders at once—that their subjective designation of Okoya as a “he” was for convenience. He recalled that Tory and Lourdes had both considered Okoya a woman.

  Finally Drew heard the sound of the wind diminish; a long, slow exhale, and the direction of the wind changed, blowing back to the north. Dust flowed across the windshield but the dust began to thin, giving way to something else entirely. A storm of leaves and flower petals of every color now blew across their line of vision, until the wind died, leaving the car draped in a floral blanket. To the north Drew could see the wind storm retreating, trailed by a swarm of leaves and petals. The telephone poles reemerged from the cloud, then the farm house and the trees beyond it.

  He opened his car to a fresh organic aroma pervading the air. Sap and chlorophyll, magnolia blossom and rose.

  Out in the field a small oasis had bloomed. Saplings and shrubs were woven together by ivy and brightly colored trumpet vines. A shock wave of rats, rabbits and field mice exploded outward, while up above every bird from blue jay to crow took to the sky. A menagerie of life drawn back from the dust.

  Drew took to the field, stomping through the thick dew-covered brush, kicking up swarms of insects, anxious to see with his own eyes what was now hidden within the heart of the oasis.

  * * *

  She was aware. She was aware, but only barely.

  She could hear several people asking questions, voicing exclama­tions, but her mind had not congealed enough to attach any meaning to the words. The voices were ones she recognized; their timbre and rhythm familiar enough to set her at ease. She tried to open her eyes, but a grit of sand beneath her eyelids made opening her eyes painful, so she kept them closed. She felt hands brushing dust from her and she laughed at their touch, a bit intoxicated by the unexpected tactile sensation. She did not even attempt to dredge up how she came to be here. For once, if only this once, she was content to be in the inebri­ating now.

  She tried to open her eyes again, and this time found it a bit easier, although her vision was still clouded. Someone had slipped a robe around her, and now she was being carried through a lush field.

  Michael was the first face she locked onto and identified. “Hey,” he said gently, when he saw her gazing at him. “How’ve ya’ been, Tory?” His voice sounded tired, strained, as if the simple phrase took great effort to push out. She opened her mouth to speak, but found her throat clogged. She coughed, spouting a flurry of flower petals. How odd.

  Her legs and arms were still exposed to the cold day, and she could feel her fingertips and toes chill. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. She wiggled her toes, to find a fine grit between them
; indeed, the fine sand covered her body, as if she had been rolled in the white sands of a gulf beach. But it wasn’t just on her, the grit was in her—deep in her, but migrating outward, expelled in a powdery smoke with her breath, exuded through her pores.

  Up ahead was a red car. An SUV. She was pushed in, and by the time everyone else had piled in and the doors had closed, her level of awareness had tuned itself enough to start formulating the fundamental questions of where, how, and how long.

  She knew all the faces around her. Michael to her left, Winston to her right. Drew and Dillon in the front seat, and behind her—

  Okoya!

  She flinched, throwing Michael a panicked glance. “No! We have to tell the others! Warn them about Okoya.”

  “Easy.” Michael said. “Okoya’s not the problem now.”

  “Okoya’s not the problem now,” she repeated, trying to make the absurd suggestion stick. “Then what is the problem?”

  Dillon spoke up next. “Ask again later,” he said flatly, as if she had hit the null response of a Magic 8-Ball.

  She accepted his advice, not really caring to know what could be worse that Okoya. “I’m hungry,” she told them.

  Winston chuckled. “Death must be like sex,” he said. “Makes you hungry.”

  “How would you know?” teased Michael. Winston burned him a glare, and Tory grinned. Just like old times. But the times weren’t old, were they? And did someone say death?

  Drew started the car and the heater came on. In a few moments it was pouring warm air over her. The SUV rocked uneasily over the dirt, then climbed a slight embankment up to the road. As Tory’s lucidity continued to grow, she did remember the collapse of the dam, and the way she and Michael had tumbled through the sky.

  She turned once more to glance at Okoya, who offered her a nod, and the faintest of smiles. Her downy sense of contentment almost completely gone now, she found the questions mounting faster than she could process them.

  “Where’s Lourdes?” she asked. “Why isn’t she here, too? Is she dead?”

  “Might as well be,” grumbled Winston.

  Drew pulled from the narrow shoulder, and onto the two-lane highway, accelerating to sixty-five. He took his eyes from the road for a moment to scan through local stations. No stations are programmed, Tory thought. Does that mean we’re far from home? When did Drew get a Durango? When did Drew start driving?

  Michael put his arm around her, and she found herself sliding deeper into his grasp, wanting to be up against him. She looked at him, and he only smiled. Were we in love? She thought. No, but perhaps they should have been. Tory closed her eyes, and forced the questions away, allowing herself to enjoy her growing sense of well-being.

  * * *

  Dillon expected their powers would surge again with the addition of Tory. What he didn’t expect was what Okoya called “syntaxis.” It began as a subtle thing; none of them really noticed the visceral pull toward one another at first. There were too many things to think about as they drove from Tory’s birthing place. Drew, for instance, who suffered to sustain himself within their spiked fields of power, his hands shaking as he gripped the wheel. “I should be wearing lead under­wear,” he quipped, “or maybe a radiation suit altogether.”

  “Yeah,” said Winston, “That won’t draw any attention to us.”

  It wasn’t that Drew was looking ill. After all, in their presence—and with Tory there—he couldn’t be. His eyes appeared sharp, indeed, his senses must have been piqued. But too much of any good thing was never good. When one’s entire being was sharpened to a rapier edge, it was hard to handle; bound to leave unexpected incisions.

  “It burns like holy hell,” he told them, finding no other way to describe the sensation. Yet he dutifully skewered his attention to driv­ing, until the moment they parked, then he bolted from the driver’s seat, just to gain a few feet of distance.

  They were at a clutch of roadside motels, and, exhausted from the ordeal of prospecting the winds for Tory, Dillon chose to take a room, if only to have a few short hours to close their eyes. It irritated Okoya no end, as he was constantly berating the human body for its never-ending need for rest. “Lourdes has sailed out of range,” he insisted. “She’s probably crossed into the Mediterranean by now, and you’re just going to sit here?”

  But Okoya was not in charge—and Dillon made sure he was re­minded of that. “If this battle we’re facing is what you say it is, this may be the last chance we have to recuperate.”

  Okoya grumbled acquiescence, and went off to sit on a fencepost, facing stalwartly toward the horizon, like an Easter Island statue.

  “Did you say battle?” asked Tory, who was still in the dark about all of it. “Haven’t we had enough of those? Can’t we just lie out on some beach for a while?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” said Michael. “Lying on a beach these days can be lethal. Ask the people in Daytona.”

  Drew lingered in the parking lot, checking international airline schedules on his cell phone, happy to leave the Shards to themselves. They retired to a cheap motel room, and the moment the door closed—the moment they relaxed, and allowed themselves a moment of down time—the gravity began to take hold. The four of them began in separate corners of the room: Dillon in the desk chair, Winston sitting up in the solitary bed, and Tory and Michael on the floor, leaning back against the wall—Dillon had a disquieting sense of the distance between them; he felt he could measure it down to the mil­limeter, and wondered why such a thing should cloud his thoughts. “We need to bring Tory up to speed,” he said, then scooted his chair a bit closer to Michael and Tory.

  “I was dead, wasn’t I?” Tory said. “I’ve figured out that much. And most of the license plates I’ve seen are from Texas, so I take it we’re a long way from Hoover Dam.”

  “You weren’t just dead,” Winston told her. “You got yourself cremated. You were harder to put together than Humpty Dumpty. It was a real bitch.”

  Tory grinned. “I’m a bitch, even post-mortem.”

  By now Michael had come up behind her, and began massaging her neck. “That’s not the worst of it. You did a little sky-diving, and got dumped out over half of Texas.”

  “So what are you saying? You pulled me back out of thin air?”

  Michael pulled her closer, wrapping his arm around her. “Hey, we’re Houdini, babe.”

  By now Winston had migrated across the bed, closer to where Tory and Michael sat on the floor, and Dillon once more found himself pulling his chair toward the three of them, closing the distance between them.

  Together they tried to deliver for Tory, in as small a capsule as possible, all that had transpired, and what they were called upon to do. By the time they were done, Dillon noticed that Michael and Tory were all over one another, taking turns massaging each other’s necks, or backs; a hand on a thigh, an arm over a shoulder, touching in as many ways as they could.

  Dillon found himself leaning forward on his chair toward them, almost to the point of losing his balance, as if the floor itself were tilted. “If Okoya is telling the truth, and we provide the only immunity against this . . . this invasion, infection, whatever you want to call it, then we have no margin for error. Everything we do from this moment on is crucial. Like strategy in a war.”

  “If Okoya is telling the truth,” said Tory. “That’s a big ‘if.’ "

  “It feels true,” said Winston, who now lay across the bed, letting his hand dangle down, gently touching Tory’s shoulder.

  “What if it’s only because we want to feel it’s true?” Tory suggested. “Because we’re so desperate to know why we got spat out into this world with these powers. What if Okoya knows how desperate we are for an answer, and is using us again?”

  “What if what if what if,” said Michael. “I never wanted to know ‘why,’ so that theory doesn’t hold with me; I just wanted to survive— live my life in spite of the power. I don’t want this responsibility,” he said, “but I’m with Winston; it feels
true.”

  Winston slipped off the bed, and sat on the floor beside Tory, leaning against her. Without realizing what he was doing, Dillon had shifted from his chair, to the ground as well, even closer to the others.

  “What troubles me,” said Dillon, “is that to fight a disease, anti­bodies have to die.”

  Only now did Dillon realize that something was happening. That they were pulling toward one another with an unconscious magnetism as irresistible as gravity itself. Winston clasped Tory’s hand, Michael had his arm over Winston’s shoulder, and Dillon ached to close the distance between himself and them.

  “Let’s not talk about dying now,” Tory said. “Not when I’ve just been brought back.”

  Dillon found he couldn’t resist the pull. He reached out and touched the closest bit of exposed flesh he could. His hand wrapped around Michael’s ankle, and in an instant he felt himself pulled in. Tory lifted a hand to receive his, Winston reached out to grab him as well, pulling him into this awkward four-way hug. Dillon found him­self, as he always did, at the center; the linchpin that kept them con­nected.

  The sensation of the four of them in physical contact was over­whelming, but it was more than mere contact—it was an irresistible yearning to meld with each other’s spirits and to be as they had once been: a single soul in the heart of a brilliant star. The powerful yearning defeated any concept of personal space. When they were touching, they were one.

  “Do you remember when we held each other like this?” Tory asked Dillon. “In that field in Iowa—in that open corn silo, looking up at the stars?”

  “He wasn’t there,” Winston reminded her. “It was the three of us and Lourdes.”