by Daniel Hecht
It struck Cree that there were two people coming through the fence.
When he'd managed to get most of his body through, he fell forward onto the ground, directly onto his chest and chin. Only after he'd lain facedown for a moment did his limbs start moving again, the agonized effort of an overturned turtle or beetle, trying to right itself. After he'd flopped onto his back, he lay facing the cloak of sky with one arm pushing up and out and snapping back and one leg scraping the soil in slow, deliberate motions.
Thirty feet away, Cree stood unable to move, sick with horror.
After a moment his arm dropped and he just lay there. Only his bare chest was moving, a lateral ripple, lifting on one side and falling on the other with the sinuous flexibility of a belly dancer. His mouth was stretched wide, a black round hole in his face, but no steam came from it. No breath came from his open throat.
Cree's hypnotic terror shattered as she realized she was watching a boy suffocating. "Tommy!" she shouted. She lunged forward to help him just as the world exploded.
As if their invisible bonds had snapped, the three horses in the corral burst to life, pivoting away from Tommy. The gelding's wheeling shoulder struck Cree and sent her flying backward. She landed on her back, bounced hard, sat up immediately into a storm of flailing knobby legs as the mares hurtled past her, over her, shrieking. Something hard hit her head and knocked her flat, a string of firecrackers went off between her ears. The impact stunned her, but she jerked herself upright again and stared around her through the bloody yellow explosions in her head. Julieta's horses were back near the barn, wheeling and snorting as they raced up and down the far fence line. The phantom horses on the far side of the fence were gone. She heard their fading hoofbeats and their dwindling screams, so like the screams of women.
A yellow beam lit the ground as she struggled to her feet and lurched toward Tommy. Julieta's voice called from the infirmary door. Cree fell before she got to the boy, but she managed to crawl the rest of the way on her hands and knees. Tommy's chest continued its writhing, his mouth gaped for air but none came. When she dared to touch his skin, it was ice-cold.
Not knowing what else to do, she put her mouth over his and blew into it. The convulsing chest changed its rhythm but didn't seem to receive any air. She took her mouth away, shoved hard on his breastbone with both hands, put her lips over his and exhaled again.
The flashlight beam panned wildly, and she heard Lynn Pierce's voice as well and knew that the nurse and Julieta were running toward them, that's why the light gyred and came and went so jaggedly. She felt herself go distant and confused, but pulled her mouth away from Tommy again. This time she saw blood on Tommy's cheeks and realized it was her own, she was bleeding from her forehead and raining drops of red onto him. And it didn't matter, what mattered was getting air into the fish-gaping black mouth. She put her hands against his chest and brought her weight down hard once more. Before she could lean to his face, a wave of dizziness broke over her, rocked her back so that she lost her balance. But as she fell away, she heard a gasp at the back of Tommy's throat, and immediately another. And then Julieta was there, and light, and Lynn's hands holding her shoulders so she wouldn't topple.
11
ASYNCHRONOUS BREATHING," Cree said. "One lung is inhaling while the other is exhaling."
"That's not possible," the nurse said. "It's not anatomically possible!"
But of course it was, because they were looking at it. Tommy lay on the table beneath the bright, faltering lights of the examining room, eyes closed, arms at his sides. Once you understood what was going on, it was easy to see: The left side of his ribs rose and fell rapidly, while the right side drew slower, deeper breaths.
Ashen faced, speechless, Julieta stroked his forehead and gazed at him intensely, as if passion alone would allow her to see inside his skull.
Cree shut her eyes against the pounding pain and held the ice pack back against her forehead. "As long as the two sides don't get into regular opposition, he draws in enough air. But if one side inhales at the same time the other exhales, if they get into rhythm that way, the air just passes from lung to lung. That's what was happening when he came through the fence. He blacked out because he was suffocating. He was just rebreathing his own used-up air."
It was hard to think straight, but Cree realized they were talking about him as if he wasn't there. He acted like he was asleep, but she wasn't so sure. Through the pulsing haze in her head, she thought she felt him in there, disoriented but conscious.
Felt them in there.
"Tommy," she said softly. "Hey, Tommy."
Tommy stirred, hitching one shoulder. Julieta's eyes caught Cree's, terrified.
"You awake?" Cree persisted.
Tommy's eyes opened, rolled, stabilized. "Yeah."
"What's going on with you? What do you feel?"
"Nothing. I don't know." His speech was punctuated with wheezes, one lung laboring out of sync.
Cree gave him a moment to elaborate, but he didn't. "Up for Mrs. Pierce poking at you? We want to make sure you're not hurt."
He didn't answer but acquiesced by sitting up awkwardly, pushing himself up off the table with his left arm. He looked around him, blinking in the light, waiting. His breath steadied.
Lynn Pierce took over. "I need to ask you things, and I want you to answer even if they seem stupid to you. Is that okay?"
"Like we did the other times?"
"Yep, same thing." Lynn tried to smile. "You're a great patient, Tommy."
She looked into his eyes and ears, checked his reflexes with a rubber mallet, listened to his chest, and tried to conceal the alarm she obviously felt. "What's your name?" she asked. "I told you this would be stupid."
"Tom Keeday."
A tiny expression of relief on Lynn's face. "Where are you from?"
"East of Sheep Springs."
"What day is this?"
"Friday. September twenty-seventh."
"Who's the president?"
"Begaye. But there's an election coming up, he'll probably lose."
"Tribal president," Lynn explained to Cree. "Very good, Tommy. Can you stand up for me, good and straight?"
Tommy pushed aside the blankets and stepped off the table. His left leg wrongly anticipated the ground and he lurched, but after his right had tried twice to gauge the distance to the tile floor he managed to steady himself.
"Are you as straight as you can be?"
"Yeah."
Arms at his sides, he was bent sideways, the middle of his spine bowed noticeably to the left, his head cocked to the right. Cree shot a glance at Julieta, standing behind Tommy, and found that her eyes had filled and overflowed.
"Tommy, I want you to shut your eyes now. I'm going to touch you, and I want you to tell me where I'm touching you. Just like before."
He nodded and shut his eyes. When she gently prodded his left arm, he said, "Arm."
"You have to say left or right."
"Left."
"Great! Now this. And this." She touched his left pectoral muscle, his forehead, his left thigh, his stomach, and he named them all correctly.
Lynn prodded him on his spine in the middle of his back.
"Arm," he said. "Right arm."
Julieta's face folded in agony.
"This?" Another touch, this time on his neck, just below his buzz-cut hairline.
"Right shoulder."
The nurse bit her lips so hard Cree could have sworn her teeth would come through, but she went on. "Tommy, open your eyes now. What's this?" She had lifted his limp right arm, bending it at the elbow and so she could hold the limb right in front of him.
He opened his eyes and looked at it as if surprised and dismayed by the object's sudden appearance. "I don't know."
Holding the arm out in her right hand, Lynn used her left to stroke the bare skin, elbow to shoulder. "Keep your eyes open. What's this I'm touching?"
"I don't like it!"
"Don't like what?"
"Where's your right arm?"
"I already told you!"
Lynn put the arm down and ran her fingers over the knobs of his side-bowed spine again. "Here?"
"Yes! I told you!"
"I'm sorry to keep at you. You're doing great. One more thing, and then we'll move on. We're almost done. Okay?"
"Yeah." He was getting sullen now. He mumbled something in what Cree assumed was Navajo.
"Shut your eyes again, please. I want you to tell me when you feel something."
When Tommy had winced his eyes shut, she placed his right hand, palm up, on the tabletop. Lynn dabbed alcohol on his fingertips, opened a sterilized lancet, and held his hand against the table as she isolated his ring finger. With one sharp stab, she drove the lancet into the pad of the immobilized finger.
Tommy didn't say anything. Didn't move, didn't even flinch. A fat bead of blood appeared when Lynn pulled the needle away.
She gripped his middle finger and stabbed deep again. "Feel anything?"
"No."
Lynn Pierce's chin was quivering as she tossed away the lancet and bandaged the fingers. Tommy stood obediently, shoulders squared but spine as bent as a hitchhiker's thumb. Julieta looked at him with heartbreak in her eyes.
Cree's head was throbbing so hard she couldn't make sense of the shrill alarms going off throughout her body and brain. All she could think was doubleness. Too much at once. The three women looked at each other and at the bent, bare-chested boy, and the only thing Cree could feel clearly was horror at the freakish phenomenon she was witnessing. She could almost see the shape of the compound being that stood before her, a doubled thing like some monstrous, unviable conjoined twins with half-merged bodies, arms and legs misplaced and deformed. The outlandish, pretzeling interpenetration, so unbearably wrong.
Again Cree was conscious of their isolation. Two o'clock in the morning, and beyond this tiny island of unsteady light everything was dark for miles in every direction. Three scared women and one lost boy stood in an abandoned school in the desert. There was something invisible among them. And there was no explanation and no succor anywhere.
The room seemed to waver, and Cree had to sit down. She had no idea what to do. There was a powerful paranormal entity three feet from her, and she couldn't begin to approach it. Whenever she tried, she found the pain in her head in the way, obstructing every sense. Everything else was a blur full of shifting impressions. Doubleness, yes, and that stark sense of isolation. Besides that, all she knew was an almost overpowering need to take Tommy to her, hold him against herself, enfold him, protect him. Her heart, her womb ached with the need. But her enclosing arms wouldn't help. The danger, the enemy, was already inside.
"I'd say a mild concussion," Lynn told her. "Lot of blood, but that's typical of a scalp wound. The cut is superficial, you don't even need stitches. You really should go to the hospital for X- rays—we can get one of the maintenance staff to drive you, but I think it can wait until morning if you'd prefer."
The two of them were sitting in the examination room. The nurse had cleaned and bandaged the wound above Cree's eyebrow and then had carefully checked her eyes and reflexes and balance. Julieta had called Joseph Tsosie at the hospital and was told he'd be paged and would return the call. Through the slats of the blinds over the window into the ward room, they could see Tommy sitting on his bed. Eyes mostly closed, his chest moved in a slight lateral ripple, the left and right almost in sync now, and he kept bending his back to the right and tipping his head, almost as if trying to shake water out of his ear. Julieta sat in a chair against the wall, watching him but clearly fighting sleep.
"How long does it last?"
The nurse followed her gaze. "Getting longer. The first time, maybe half an hour. Last time, closer to two hours. He's never made it to the hospital when the full symptoms are presenting."
"Same thing every time?"
"The problem placing his limbs is much worse this time. And the breathing problem—that's new. First time I've observed it, anyway."
"So it's . . . progressing."
The silver head made a small, reluctant nod.
"Did Dr. Ambrose see him when he was like this?"
"Some of it. He saw the spinal curvature and the confusion about his arm and spine. The lack of sensation in his right arm."
Cree thought about that. It was always hard to tell what Mason perceived and what conclusions he'd drawn, but usually he knew more than he let on and had devious reasons for doing what he did. Mason's Machiavellian approach to manipulating people infuriated her—it was his way of viewing every living person as a test subject, a lab rat. If she found out he was keeping some insight to himself in this case, Cree decided, she'd shove him off Sandia Peak herself.
The phone rang and startled them both. Lynn snatched it up.
"Hi, Joseph! Yes. Yes. No, worse. Can you? Good." Lynn glanced up at the slatted window, and the corners of her mouth tightened with disapproval. "Well, she's upset, but she's doing all right so far—she's in there with him now. Dr. Black sustained a head injury. No, one of the horses. Not too bad, mainly a scalp cut. We're holding the fort. Just get here soon, please?"
She put the receiver down. "Joseph's on his way. He'll be here in about an hour." Relief was evident on her face—obviously, both women put a great deal of trust in Dr. Tsosie.
They waited. Two-fifteen. Tommy was fast asleep and Julieta had dropped off at last, head tipped back against the wall, mouth open; her light snores came through the monitor. Lynn Pierce was at her desk, wearily occupied with some paperwork. Cree was bleary and numb and was fighting off sleep herself when a movement from the ward room startled her.
Tommy's right hand had begun to move. First it swung slowly side to side on the wrist, like the head of a snake. The fingers played lightly on the blanket at Tommy's thigh, as if feeling the texture of the fabric. Then the arm bent, drawing the hand up along Tommy's side. When it encountered the edge of the folded-back sheet, it paused as the fingers deftly explored. In another instant, the hand was at Tommy's head. When it touched his hair, it pulled back suddenly as if the feel of his bristles startled it. It came back again tentatively, found his ear, traced the curve of it.
Cree watched, spellbound, horrified. The arm and hand clearly belonged to someone other than Tommy. Some blind being, trying to make sense of invisible surroundings.
Tommy groaned in his sleep and moved his head away from the probing fingers, but in another moment his whole body arched and suddenly he sat up and swung his feet off the bed. His eyes opened, rolled wildly, and then found Julieta. They burned at her from beneath his dark brows.
He began to lean forward, the feral gaze intensifying. Cree felt a sudden sense of alarm as the ceiling lights, relatively stable for some time, began to strobe and stutter, and then she watched in stunned horror as Tommy seemed to brace himself. Before she could move, he had propelled himself off the bed toward Julieta with a deep, guttural grunt.
Lynn Pierce's chair skated away as she jumped up. Tommy fell halfway across the room but continued writhing toward Julieta, his gaze still fixed on her. She had awakened and now sat in her chair, her expression a mix of shock and concern as the lights blinked on and off, steadied, fluttered again. The doubled Tommy clawed his way toward her in a series of aborted lunges, face contorted, and still Julieta didn't move.
By the time Cree and Lynn made it into the ward room, Julieta had broken from her paralysis and was crouching at Tommy's side. As she leaned toward him, he rolled and raked at her face with one hand. And then his body went into convulsions again, everything flailing and battering. Lynn and Cree threw themselves on him, holding back the savage clawing and the pumping legs. Julieta fell back, two streaks of red across her cheek near her eye. Lynn's face was held hard as a skull as she subdued the bucking body.
What are you? Cree's thoughts screamed. Who are you? But the effort to hold
Tommy down brought back the pain, blinding big mallet blows to her forehead. She couldn't think, could hardly see.
Looking down into his face as she held the twisting shoulders, Cree saw a difference in his eyes. One pupil was a great, dilated black hole, the other much smaller. As she looked down his right eye fixed her, held steady despite the tossing of his head. And with what looked like great effort, the eye winced itself shut. It opened again, still staring straight at her, and did it once more.
Maybe it was purely accidental, some fluke of his chaotic movements, but she couldn't escape the feeling it had been a wink. Had to be. Was it lascivious, taunting, pleading, threatening? She couldn't guess. But she could swear it had been a kind of communication—a signal from something living inside Tommy's skull.
12
JULIETA TIGHTENED her legs around the big barrel of Spence's body as she urged him into a full gallop. The ground jolted and rolled away, and the cold rush of early-morning air gave her the feeling of being airborne. The black gelding was a powerful horse, smart with his feet, and now she goaded him to his utmost. His rhythmic lunging and the pumping bellows of his breathing soothed the painful nerve deep inside her. A welcome narcotic.
"Take me away, Spence," she called to him. "Fly me away."
The sun hadn't yet broken the top of the mesa and the world was raw and fresh as she bucketed west from the rear corral gate. A wide track of disturbed ground showed that horses had been this way not long ago—Shurley's bunch, no doubt. The gray stallion and his mares must have visited Spence and the girls last night. From the deep bite of hoofs and wide scatter of soil, she could tell they'd left in a hurry.
Tommy's breathing had returned to normal by the time Joseph had arrived and inspected him. There'd been nothing for him to see but a very sleepy fifteen-year-old, understandably surly at being poked and prodded in the middle of the night. Once he was certain Tommy was stable, Joseph had checked Cree Black, looking for signs of concussion. Finally, he had come to Julieta to lightly touch the scrapes on her cheek, his eyes making it clear he was ministering not to the physical injury but to the deeper hurt she'd suffered from the assault. Julieta had left the infirmary at around four, leaving Joseph to spend what remained of the night in the bed next to Tommy's, and had gone back to her quarters.
