Shard

by John Richmond

  Good dog.

  * * *

  George watched Will push the front door open with his left hand, his right falling to the butt of that gigantic revolver of his. (Big nerd actually named it after the dragon from The Hobbit.) Something was wrong. He sat forward in the passenger seat. Sweat popped on George’s brow and stung the gash on the side of his head. Shit, shit, shit. What should he do? Should he get out and back Will up or stay in the car? He became very aware of the smell of gun oil and tightened his grip on the M16.

  George took a deep breath and weighed the options. He could go in behind a trained policeman pointing an automatic weapon with which, admittedly, he had become a very accurate shot, and run the risk of accurately shooting the wrong person. “Stop it,” he said to himself. It was Shard. No one locked his or her door, and these folks probably just didn’t close theirs well enough. The door had come open a little, big deal. Still. George rolled the window down and listened. He counted thirty-Mississippi and calmed some more. George let his arm dangle out the window and drummed his fingers against the door. They would collect the Howards and go back to the police station. George could imagine them spreading a map of the town out on Will’s desk and figuring out the best place to begin the search for Erica.

  George leaned back and squeezed his eyes shut. Erica. He grimaced. He was sitting in a fucking car, doing fucking nothing, while Two-Bears fucking chit-chatted with the fucking Howards. His drumming against the metal door started to sound more like the death throes of a squirrel than jazzy finger beats. He opened his eyes and stared at the open front door. Man, did he ever wish he had a Bombay Sapphire and Tonic in that bee-bopping hand. Where the hell where they? It had been at least a minute.

  Something wet touched his hand.

  George shouted a nonsense word composed of many vowels and yanked his hand back into the car. It was followed by a pair of muddy paws and the tip of a snuffling nose. Darwin. Je-SUS. George looked out the window and into the beagle’s eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me, dawg?” Darwin whined and yapped at George. He backed off from the car door and turned in a little circle. He barked again and looked at the house. George smiled at this funny little dance, his brow folded. “What’s up, doggy-dude? Did the Well Creature finally eat Timmy?” It was a joke, but the words cut through the fog. George looked back the house, that gaping front door. It had been too long.

  A shot.

  * * *

  Red wind filled the room. The cardinals blotted out everything. Will held up his hands to ward off the multitude of little beaks and clawed feet, but the birds did not touch him. They flew around in a great swirling mass of disturbance then organized, congealed on Lizzie Owens, Cyrus MacCoy and the wasp. Lizzie and Cyrus changed in an instant from horrendous, albeit recognizable forms into red, writhing shrubs as the cardinals began to shred them. Loraine and Childe stood out in pale contrast against all that furious, blurring red. A second later and each was expelled, tumbling toward Will, as the limbs that held them were reduced to little more than bone.

  The three of them backed toward the hallway. Will had the fleeting impression that Cyrus and Lizzie were on fire; what was left of them flailed like willow branches in a slow breeze. Aside from the busy susurrus of wings and beaks, there was no sound other than their breath and thudding hearts. Will’s mind rushed back to him and he shoved Loraine and Childe toward the front door. “Go! Go!” he hissed. He was pretty sure he knew what was saving their collective asses, but he didn’t want to stick around and have tea with it afterward.

  Will gave a last look at the diminishing shapes covered in a crinkling mass of feathers and pin-prick black eyes before herding Loraine and Childe into the front hall. He watched the Howards shoot out into the yard like a couple of corks from a champaign bottle and then he heard it—the distinct click of a doorknob. Time slowed. Will turned on his heel. A troll stood in the hallway right behind him, short and fat, stinking. It had been hiding in the dark powder room. Will pulled a double take. It was Howard Sams and in a strange parody of what a real kid might do, a living kid, Howard stuck his tongue out at the good Constable. Surfing that thrushy board was another giant black wasp.

  Will started to bring Smaug to bear, but it was happening too slowly, the huge pistol weighed a thousand pounds. The wasp’s delicate wings flickered into transparency, the air they disturbed feathering Howard’s bangs. Will had just enough time to realize the boy was grinning around that impossibly long tongue. Every detail flashed into perfect clarity: the mold at Howard’s hair line, the obsidian glint off the wasp’s marble-sized eyes, the flex of its legs as it began to rise into the air.

  Howard staggered back as if an invisible boxer nailed him with a triplet of lightning-fast jabs to the body. He gulped the wasp back into his throat and put a hand on the wall to steady himself before taking a step forward again. Blackish ooze bloomed on the front of his t-shirt in three dinner plate-sized patches. Will didn’t waste his second chance and leveled the .357. He took the top off Howard’s skull neat as a meat clever and a million times as loud. The boy flew backward a couple of yards. And got up.

  A hand clamped down on Will’s shoulder from behind. He began to turn, to roll Smaug around, when George’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears. “Fuck outta’ here!” They ran, Will half staggering with shock, back to the car. Will could see Loraine and Childe’s faces through the windshield in the back seat, Darwin on Kiddo’s lap. Will threw himself behind the wheel; George thudded into the passenger seat, pulling the still smoking M16 in with him. Will got it then: the invisible boxer had been a quick squeeze from the machine gun. Georgie had saved his life. He hadn’t even heard the shots.

  Childe screamed, “Ah, Jeez, Howard!”

  The troll was back at the front door, staining the rectangle of dim light. Its head was reduced, flattened. Childe sobbed just once, a horrible choked sound that did more hurt to Will’s heart than any of what had just come before. The body of Howard Sams teetered on the front stoop, one chubby, bare foot raised and then he was gone. George blinked rapidly three times. “The hell was that?” He’d caught…something, a flare of giant hooks that reminded him of that old grappling arcade game that lowers down and snatches a toy from the bin. Except it came from behind Howard. Will threw the car into reverse and twisted over the back seat as he hauled down the driveway, the Subaru’s transmission whining. “What was that?” George demanded.

  “Yïn,” Will said.

  Chapter 31

  The Pompiliad dreamed. Over the past few days and nights, angular shadows crawled up and over its face, dust fell on its shoulders and hair, its unblinking eyes. Barn swallows and bats dropped guano around it. Nothing would stay over its head except beams of dust-solid sunlight. No roving insect investigated its fingers clamped white over the leather knobs of its knees; no cob used any outcropping as anchor for its web. On the second day, a solitary mud dauber wasp floated down to perch on the back of its hand. It stayed as the sunbeam clock threw its glowing arms and spots around the barn. In time, the wasp rose and flashed as it passed through a ray of sun. It slipped through a gap in the planks like a crack between worlds. (Hours later it found a baby bird, a cardinal, alone in her nest and stung it to death.) The Pompiliad was still. The Pompiliad dreamed.

  It dreamed an unfolding story through the eyes of its swarm. It levitated with a thousand cold intellects little more than appetite and drive, its drive, as they moved from place to place. One day they populated an old pine tree, waiting for instructions or opportunity. Another, they carpeted the pews of the abandoned Methodist Church, the heavy sulfur smoke drugging them quiet for a time. And the story found characters: the teacher, the moonshine man, the hill people, the migrants—all added eyes through which the Pompiliad could look. It sent these characters on to find more and they did, stinging out the lights of their old inhabitants, laying in new tenant riders. And there was its servant: the poisonous young man who was himself little more than need and aimlessness. It was ea
ting the servant alive from the inside, coring him out, but he was a young human. He would last until it no longer needed him.

  His part of the story was especially interesting. The Pompiliad had watched with detached amusement as the servant crept into the drunk’s house and dispatched him before taking its Queen. If the Pompiliad could be said to have anything even like emotion, it felt a pull toward this woman. She was strong, physically resilient, possessed of DNA coding granting her fine mind and limb. It would secret her away in the nursery, and through her hatch a generation of world eaters. When the traitor lizard was dead and its ridiculous pet arachnid food for the swarm, the Pompiliad would impregnate the woman at its leisure and change her. It imagined her new beauty: pendulous, swollen, straining, eyes as empty as chunks of coal, body a factory.

  The Pompiliad dreamed about a Queen and an army.

  It awoke soon after moonrise. Time in the old barn stopped. Every snowy spec of dust froze in space, each sliding beam of sapphire moonlight stilled, and every living thing from the barn owl roosting in the far corner to the tiniest microbe in the dirt floor died. A gentle rain of feathered and many legged things pattered into the dust as the Pompiliad gained its feet. Long arms swaying at its sides, back hunched, it trudged to the motorcycle and threw a leg over. The bike was covered in a thin layer of dust. It kicked up the stand and righted the chopper, but there was no slosh of gasoline from the fuel tank. The bike had been out of gas for more than seven hundred miles.

  The Pompiliad blinked its black eyes and the chopper roared into life. A moment later and those eyes had changed, covered over by large black sunglasses. It didn’t bother backing out but clamped down the front brake while gunning the engine. The back tire ground out a plume of sterile dust that choked the barn and buried the bodies of a thousand dead things. The bike whipped around to face the big double doors and the Pompiliad let go of the brake. It smashed through into the thick summer night and laid down a line through the hay toward the highway.

  South now. A fat gibbous moon hung over its shoulder like a fossilized skull. The road reflected in its dark lenses. South. The air was redolent with hydrocarbons, sweet grass, and the tang of skunk. South. The porch lights of farm houses slid by. In the refrigerators of those closest to the road the milk curdled, the eggs bloodied and the children’s dreams turned sour. South. The star Antares, the heart of the Scorpion, hung over a dark horizon. The Pompiliad smiled, remembering Scorpios all too well. South.

  And Shard by morning.

  Chapter 32

  Will stood in front of the four by four wall map. It was marked with a small splotch of streets surrounded by wooded hills that were overlaid with a maze of old mining roads. His arms were crossed over his chest like a man appreciating a museum piece. George stood next to him, tapping his foot and readjusting the way he held his own arms every few seconds: hands on hips, crossed arms, behind the back, again on hips. Will grabbed a push pin from a cluster in the lower left corner of the map and stuck it roughly in the center. “This is us here,” he said.

  “That’s terrific, Magellan, but where’s Erica? That’s what I need to know.” George faced Will with a look just bordering on lost. He was doing his best, but much more of this farting around and he was likely to go running into the night shouting her name.

  “I don’t know, man. If we had about a hundred more people, I’d say we should do a pattern search, but it’s just me and you.”

  “I’ll help look,” Childe said from atop his mother’s lap. He was much too big for lap sitting, but Loraine held onto him like grim death from her seat in Will’s desk chair. Darwin was busy sniffing around the open holding cell. “You’ll stay right here,” she said.

  Will didn’t like the look in her eyes. Loraine was walkin’ and talkin’ but she wasn’t really here. She’d been spooked plumb out of herself. He needed to talk with her, make her see what was going on here. It wasn’t going to make things any less spooky—more so, he was sure—but she needed to know she wasn’t alone in this insanity and that her bunkmates in the asylum were really quite nice. Hell, knowing that George knew what was going on was what had kept Will from losing his shit after he met Dampf. But they didn’t have time for that now. Loraine would just have to learn on the fly, because right now they needed to fan out and search for Erica. And Loraine and Kiddo couldn’t stay here by themselves.

  Will scanned the map for a long, quiet moment, the others’ eyes on him, and turned around. “Okay,” he said in pure cop, “here’s how we’re going to handle this: each of us gets a walkie and everyone over the age of fifteen and with less than four legs gets a gun. Loraine, I’ll show you the basics before we head out.” She opened her mouth to speak, but Will held up his hand and something in his posture or the tilt of his head did the job. She closed her mouth and waited. George’s eyebrows went up and he thought You don’t need to see our identification. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Will continued, “George, Loraine, Childe and Darwin will be one team. I’ll head up to the mine offices and see if I can’t fine Amy at her RV. If she’s there, we’ll form team two. If not, I’ll be on my own.” Will turned toward George. “Like I was saying before, if we had enough people we could do a pattern search and just carpet bomb the whole town with eyeballs, but since we only got two points of search, we need to think about likely spots and hit those first. If we don’t find her at any of those places,” he put a finger on the map and drew it out in a concentric line, “we spiral out until we do.”

  The Constable turned back around, “We check in on the walkies every five minutes.” He eye-locked each of them for each word, “Every. Five. Minutes.” Will could see Loraine was still waiting to freak out and refuse. And there was no better way to get past this, either for or against, than to get past it. He took a deep breath and said, “Okay, Loraine, your turn.”

  Loraine nodded as if to an opponent in a debate. “I’m not going anywhere but to my car and then right the hell out of this town. I’m going to take my son and my dog and drive until I see enough lights to convince me that the population is in the hundreds of thousands.” She paused for a moment, “I’m thinking Lexington…maybe Cincinnati.”

  George broke in, “And what about Erica? You just going to let her get killed or, or, or worse?”

  Will put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. It was a bit like touching a live wire insulated with a thin film of rubber. George shook it off with a noise just shy of a growl. “No! Damnit, no! Loraine, I know you’re not from here but you have to help,” George spread out his palms, “you have to. That little bastard T.R. could have done anything with her.”

  Childe who had been studying his knees looked up, “T.R. took your girlfriend?”

  “And shot me in the head,” George said, holding back a curtain of dirty blonde hair to show the streak of coagulated blood running from just behind his temple to just over his ear. “You have to understand that this isn’t the big city. This isn’t a place with a population that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. People actually help their neighbors here. I mean what did me and Will just do for you back at your house?” Even in the midst of this rant George paused, “Okay, it was mostly Will, but you get the goddamned point.”

  Loraine kissed Childe on the ear and whispered, “Hop down, sweetheart.” He slid off her lap and Loraine stood up with an audible pop in each knee. She extended a finger like a fencing foil and took a step toward George. Loraine was five-three on a good day in heels and George was over six feet when he slumped. The scene reminded Will of a greeting card he once got with a tiny Chihuahua staring up at an enormous Great Dane, You’re only as small as you feel! Loraine jabbed that finger at George and said, “You don’t get to tell me what’s right and what isn’t, George Rhodes. I’m terribly sorry that hoodlum hurt you and took miss Mendez, but I will not endanger my boy, understand?” Loraine drew up like a preacher with a fist full of the good news. “I am a mother. My first duty is to the protection of my son. That is the nat
ural order.”

  Will’s head dropped. Okay, George would go get Amy and they would be a team. Will would search alone. He was about to announce this new configuration so they could just get on with it when Childe’s voice interceded, “Things have changed, mom.”

  All three adult heads swiveled like SETI dishes finally catching that alien signal. “What’d you say, sweetheart?” Loraine asked.

  Childe Howard, scruffy headed and tall for his age regarded his mother with plain eyes, “Thing’s are different, now, mom. Don’t you see that? The natural order, like you said? That’s changed, too.”

  Loraine walked over and put her hands on his shoulders. She spoke gently, but a reed of fear was woven just under her voice. Loraine did not want to hear what the light of her life had to say about how things had changed. No they hadn’t. Things—whatever “things” meant—were as they always had been. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. The earth was round and Republicans were evil. Nothing had changed. “What I see, young man, is a town full of crazies that isn’t safe anymore. I don’t know what, what hysteria has effected these poor people, but this is no place for a twelve year-old.”

  “It’s not hysteria, mom. It’s him.” He frowned. “Or it, I guess.”

  The whites of Loraine’s eyes showed a little more. “Stop talking in fantasies, Kiddo.” She squeezed his shoulders a little too tight. “We talked about ‘magical thinking’, remember? There’s a difference between the real world and your imagination. And—”

  “Howard Sams was dead, Loraine,” Childe said.

  “Don’t call me Loraine,” she hissed. “I’m your mother.”

  She dug her fingers into his arms, but Kiddo spoke even and true, “Howard Sams was dead. That other man had a giant wasp living in his head and that fat lady was also dead.”