Again, the thunder and the painful repercussion. This time, the padlock fell to the floor.
Arden pulled the metal door open, and lifted the Shifter-made lantern to direct its glow within. He half expected the being inside to have suffocated, or even escaped Houdini-like...but it was there, blinking at him vertically, its long black hair framing its delicate geisha-white face.
He set aside the lantern and the shotgun to help her out of her metal coffin. There were other padlocks securing the connected lengths of chain wound around her, and he certainly couldn't shoot these off, and he suspected lock-picking with twisted paperclips was just as cinematically exaggerated as neatly shooting off a padlock. The image of him shooting Bob for his key ring flashed across his mind, and it left an unpleasant tang. He hadn't quite allowed himself to realize he had murdered another human being, but the thought of doing it again started to bring it home.
He experimented with unlooping and unwinding those sections of chain he could, and found the Gemini shrugging and squirming to slip out of her bounds as well. It became apparent that it was the confines of the locker, primarily, that had prevented her from doing this before. With Arden helping, they soon found that they could extricate her without unlocking any of the various padlocks…
...her...he was thinking of the creature as her, now...not it...
...and when the last loops of chain slipped down her dark-clothed legs, and she stepped out of them, she lunged for the shotgun Arden had rested on a bench.
He swept up the Scorpion before she could get her hand around Tim's gun, and thrust the barrel under her jaw, pinning her up against the locker that still housed the other surviving prisoner.
"You're coming with me," he hissed. "Understand? You're still my prisoner." He listened to shouting, the discharge of a handgun. A voice calling out for Tim. "You hear that? They'll kill us both if they find us here. You're coming with me."
He swept up the lantern again and handed it to her. She accepted it. He took her free hand in his. The bloodless flesh was as cool as gravestone marble...but she did not jerk the appendage out of his grip. With the Scorpion in his free hand and the shotgun left behind, he drew the Gemini after him. Now, to find a way out of here that wouldn't bring them face-to-face with either the Shifters or Bob's family.
Six
There was a door just beyond the locker rooms that led out directly onto the playing fields behind the high school. Arden cracked the metal door, and heard some shooting out there in the chilly blackness, some distant bellowing/echoing voices as a few of Bob's crew fought their way away from the school. Most of the battling still seemed behind him, however, contained within the building. He decided to chance an escape by this exit, and was opening the door further when he felt the Gemini jerk at his hand and he wheeled around to see Bob and Susie in the short hallway behind him.
Arden had swung his Shifter weapon around, and Bob had a Shifter pistol in his fist. It was a kind that sucked in moisture from the air, chilled it to unthinkable coldness, and fired it out as projectiles of compacted ice. It was already pointing at Chris's twin.
"You'd better get going, Tom," Bob said in a steely, slow voice, "and get that thing out of my sight."
Arden stared back at the man with what he hoped was an equal steeliness, gave a subtle nod, and dragged the Gemini out the door and into the open black void of night. All the while he expected ice bullets that never came. Whether or not Bob and Susie fled via the same exit he didn't know; he didn't look back or linger to find out.
He had nodded at the Shifter to extinguish their lantern, and thank God for the absence of floodlights which once would have blazed across these now overgrown fields. Still, as soon as he could get them out of the open he did so, pulling the Gemini behind the metal bleachers flanking the football field.
At one point they crouched down behind these ranked benches and waited as several indistinct figures scurried down the driveway that ran parallel to the football field and led to the student parking lot. The furtive shadows looked smallish, and Arden took them to be Shifters.
The moon glowed dimly on the bare whiteness of one of the figures' heads. He guessed it might be a Sagittarius; the ugliest of the Shifters, their skulls showed bare through the crowns of their heads, and protruded spherically so that to Arden it looked as if an ivory-colored bowling ball had been dropped off a tall building and half-sunk into the top of each Sag's head. The imagined impact also seemed to have squashed all their features downward in hideous folds and wrinkles to the bottom third of their faces. But whether or not the scampering childlike form was one of these demons or not he couldn't really make out.
As they huddled there below the bleachers, he wondered if his captive would emit some cry audible or inaudible to his ears that might alert these passing soldiers. But then they were gone.
Had she known he had pointed his gun at her mid-section all the while?
They rose and ran again, linked by the hands.
At the far end of the track field, beyond the football field, they came to a chain link fence.
Arden motioned with his gun for the Gemini to climb over it. Then, when she was on the other side, she watched him through the web-like barrier. He saw her pallid face glowing bluish and her black hair rippled across it like serpentine shadows. He whispered to her, "Now it's my turn.
Don't you dare try to bolt or pull any other tricks, or you'll be sorry."
He hoisted himself awkwardly over the top of the fence, while still holding the Scorpion in one hand. It had no strap by which he could sling it over his back. As a consequence, he slipped and tore his sleeve and raked his arm on the top of the fence, dropping on his back at the Shifter's feet.
She only stared down at him, mute and unmoving. He hissed a curse under his breath as he scrambled to his feet again, feeling angry at himself for feeling embarrassed in front of her.
Before he could reach for her hand, she held it out to him obediently. He took it. It had grown warmer from his having held onto it. They resumed their flight, the gunfire behind them now a muffled, faraway crackle like kids' firecrackers on the Fourth of July.
Just beyond the fence there was a Vietnam War memorial, on the black marble of which were etched the names of all the town's residents who had fought in that war. Only two of these names were for men who had actually died over there -- in a foreign civil war which had once divided Arden's own country, as if in a nearly bloodless second American Civil War. Now, he thought, all of these listed veterans might be dead, killed in a third Civil War. The first one was renowned for pitting brother against brother. The third had pitted self against self.
With unintentional symbolism, this memorial had been erected on the outskirts of town rather than near its center, where the other war memorials were situated. So, beyond its little paved lot were woodsy narrow side roads lined with small darkened houses. Arden drew Chris's twin down the first one they came to, and from there he guided them down another off-branching road, and another. The gunfire was now totally lost to their ears...perhaps it had even ceased. Had any of Bob's group successfully made it to safety? Had any of the attacking Shifters survived? Maybe each side had canceled out the other, and none of them were left.
Seven
Arden hunkered down at a window, peering between its sheer, filmy curtains into the deep blue limbo of night. Still no sounds of battle wafted to him. He turned his attention back to his companion. She crouched close to the floor, further back in the living room of this abandoned house. He didn't want to chance using the lantern, but her indistinctness unsettled him. He wished he could hear her rustle or even breathe; she was preternaturally still. He was grateful that at least a little of the night's blueness reflected dimly on her alabaster forehead, and glistened in her vertical eyes, so he could tell she was still there.
He crawled closer to her across the carpet. Though soft furniture was all around them, it was common instinct for both of them to keep low. Anyway, lounging about on sofas
and easy chairs would seem like some freakish mockery, like posing skeletons at a banquet table.
"I think we're safe," Arden said very quietly to the Shifter. "I think it's all over out there.
They're all dead. Or gone. You know?" The glistening black eyes stared up at him. The vertical lids blinked. Arden looked away from her face, holding his weapon across his knees. "So what
do I do now?" he said, more to himself than to her. "Let you go? Are you my prisoner? You're my enemy. And you're my wife..."
Light, tentative pressure on his knee. Arden flinched hard, jerked his head to face his captive.
He almost brought his gun up to strike her in the face with its stock.
The Gemini had rested a hand lightly on his leg. Those eyes still mysteriously glittered. Arden heard himself swallow loudly.
The hand moved a little. Back and forth. A fearful movement? A shy movement? But it was, for all that, a caress.
Without taking his eyes from hers, Arden reached around to rest the Scorpion on the floor on the far side of him. He then placed his hand atop her caressing hand. It was small, bony, cold, like a furtive and starving animal. He stroked it, then curled his fingers between hers.
They leaned toward each other. Her arms slipped around his shoulders, his around her slender back. He expected at any moment to feel a secreted dagger pierce him between the shoulder blades. He didn't care, as he moved his face to hers. No blade came. Their mouths pressed together. He closed his eyes to blot out the nearness of her alien features, however weirdly beautiful they were. Her white lips were chill. It was like kissing his dead wife goodbye...
They had shunned the chairs before, and shunned the beds in the house now. Arden had undressed the Shifter, removing her baggy, unattractive dark clothing to bare a body that softly luminesced in the murk. Under his body, hers seemed as delicate as a bird's. There was no hair down there but his hand had brushed across three circular and identical openings just below her navel, one above the other. She had helped guide him into the central orifice. She was warmer inside than out. Much warmer. He propped himself above her and leaned his back deeply into each drawn-out, probing thrust. Her slim legs hooked over the backs of his legs. She arched her back in soundless pleasure, ribs standing out in her taut chest, her eyes clenched vertically shut but her mouth gaping wide. She had no breasts, no nipples, but he dipped his head down to suck at the smoothness where they would have been. He pressed his face into her long sweep of neck, sliding his hands into her silken black curtains of hair. One last, shuddery, lunging thrust and he came with a sound like a sob -- suddenly, desperately wrapping his arms around her back to crush her to him. She breathed hard against his neck. She didn't loosen her arms or legs from around him. It was not only as if he were trying to hold onto Chris again, he thought as he lay there atop her. Tears running down his face, and dripping onto her shoulder. It was as if he were trying to pull his other self -- his enemy self -- back into his body.
Eight
Arden's eyes snapped open. Morning light, metallic-chilly but at least a pinkish gold, slanted into the room. He sat up quickly, expecting to see the Gemini squatting there watching him, training his gun on him. He couldn't believe he had fallen asleep without hiding the Scorpion first. Chris had always teased him about how he konked out after sex...
The Shifter was not pointing the Shifter weapon at him. But she was gone.
"Shit!" Arden hissed, scrambling awkwardly to his feet, stiff and cold, his elbows raw from carpet burns. He wrestled his way back into his clothing and shoes, then stumbled into the next room. And the next. He found no sign of his prisoner.
Finally, he went to the front door, and opened it. He didn't have the Scorpion in his hands. He didn't care. He imagined his twin would be waiting out there for him...having hunted him down successfully at last. Maybe his twin would have its arm around Chris's twin. And they would be soundlessly laughing at him. And then they would kill him.
And, in fact, his twin was outside the door. Arden realized he must have sensed it out there, in that unknown way that the twins were able to home in on each other...
But his twin, the Libra, lay dead, its body sprawled in the tall, dead grass of the front lawn, several feet from the doorstep. Though its face was hidden in the tangled, uncut weeds, he had no doubt that it was his own alternate self. The handle of a large kitchen knife protruded from the back of its neck. In its frozen fists, the Libra still clutched the handles of its gun. It had been just outside the door, just about to enter the house in which he slept, when it had been surprised by a stealthy attacker from behind.
Arden looked up and down the road. He saw no one. It might have been one of Bob's men who had sneaked up on the Libra, he reasoned. But he had another theory as well. That his other self, and Chris's other self, had been even more unhappy than he and Chris had been toward the end. That their schism had been destined for tragedy all along.
But in killing her husband...she had also saved her husband's life. Arden pulled the gun out from under the corpse, and walked off back toward town.
He saw no one along the way. But what he did see made him pick up his pace, until at last he was running into the center of town at full clip, gulping at the air, his lungs feeling as though
they were filled with fizzing blood. Until, at last, he fell to his hands and knees in front of a bald-headed man with a goatee who sat on the curb outside the Serves U Rite convenience store.
"Bob is dead," the man said softly. "They got him."
Arden lifted his heavy head, but instead of looking at the young man, he looked past him at the building. The gray concrete structure that had formerly appeared to magically float above the Serves U Rite had vanished.
He looked beyond the convenience store. He could no longer see the verdigris-green minaret with its tattered black pennant, which had formerly skewered the police station.
Slowly he got to his feet, and Bob's soldier watched him. He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "It's all gone."
Arden staggered a step, glared down at the man in drunken intensity almost like fury. "Gone where?" he demanded.
"Where? Back where it came from."
"How?"
"How? How did it come in the first place? Who knows?"
"But...why now?" Arden snapped. He spun on his heel, sweeping his gaze in a circle around him. "Why would it go away now?"
"Like I say, I don't know. It all just came back together again."
Arden returned his gaze to the bald youth, and snorted a sad, delirious laugh. "Yeah – it came together." It was like a crude, private joke. But he wondered if that could have been it, somehow. Could it have been something so small and simple, something so alchemical?
...As two bodies joining in the dark? Blending? Melding into one? Like magnetic poles, opposites, drawing together...negative pole no longer repulsing negative pole?
"The Shifters are all gone, I think," said the young man. "Only the dead ones are left. I don't feel them anymore."
"I don't either," Arden said. She was gone. Entirely gone now. Both of her...
The bald man stood, clapping dust off his pants. "I'm going to just walk, I suppose. Um, so, you wanna walk with me?"
Arden shrugged. Smiled a little. Looked around him again.
He had grown used to being alone. But he said, "For a while, I guess." And the two of them started trudging along the unbroken double lines that bisected the center of the street.
The End
Dark Regions Press
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