There were no survivors.
Not from the passenger list, that is.
However, of those passengers, several of them had packed their pets into the cargo hold—in fact, more than the usual number—and the jet harbored more than the usual number of rats, as if the confluence of coincidence had now evolved a structure beyond mere randomness. With the cabin burning above, and their travel kennels shattered by the impact, several dogs and cats followed the rats—sixteen animals in all-bursting out through the shredded ruin of the cargo hold, each filled with a new life force gleaned from the Osterized birds. Rather than scattering, they traveled from the crash in a tight and orderly pack, their minds filled with a limited but powerful awareness that their journey was not yet complete. And so they pushed deeper into the canyon, where hungry predators searched for a night’s meal.
4. Fusion
In a rusted mobile home with no wheels, Lara and Jara watched smoke rise in the southern sky, and waited for their parents to return.
Hours after it had crashed, the downed jet still blazed in the canyon.
Not many exciting things occurred in Hualapai land, and it seemed sad to both Lara and Jara that it was only disasters that brought excitement. Most of the village had headed off into the canyon toward it. Surely the media would want to talk to witnesses. Only a few actually saw the plane soar past on its way down, as it was way past midnight, but plenty were willing to tell every last detail of the crash.
Jara and Lara would have none of that. They had no heart for wallowing in the misery of the dead—and they did not want to face the media. They were of one mind when it came to that. And so, while their parents had gone off with the others to view the spectacle and search for survivors, Lara and Jara stayed put in their trailer, as was their way, and they started a new game of chess. They were always starting new games—the problem was finishing them. It was that way with so many things in the twenty years they had lived, that their lives felt little more than a collection of unfinished business.
Still, they started a new game, always hoping for some miracle of completion.
Tonight their concentration was finally broken by the melodic chants of the Shaman next door. He was, by trade, an electrician, but every once in a while, when some earth-shattering event stirred up the town, he would wrap himself in the old skins, and old traditions. Then he would spend hours filling his yard with sand paintings, and singing the chants that few remembered. When Radio Joe began his chants, and cast sulfur into the flames, Lara and Jara would almost believe that somewhere within the heart of the poverty that gripped the town, there truly was magic. The town scoffed at him in the light of day. But when someone was deathly ill, it was always Radio Joe they wanted spilling sands on their floor, and evoking the ancients in the secret dark of night.
At times like this, when the distant sky burned, and Radio Joe called on the spirits, Lara and Jara began to feel that eerie sense of magic, thick as the smoke on the wind.
“He’s louder than usual,” said Jara.
Lara turned to look out of the window where they could see Radio Joe, sitting before the small fire on his lawn. He shook the ceremonial spices to the left and right; he wailed and invoked; he danced and stomped around the flames, and it did seem as if the flames grew higher as he tended them with his ritual.
“The crash must have really spooked him.”
The fact was, it was hard not to be spooked by it. The plane had come roaring right over their heads, before it disappeared over the canyon’s edge. And although Jara and Lara rarely left the confines of their home, tonight the brother and sister strode out to speak to Radio Joe, leaving behind the strange, twisted footprints that can only be made by conjoined twins.
***
It was rarer than rare. Impossible, if you believed the experts. Siamese twins born male and female. In every other way they were identical. The survival of conjoined twins usually depended on their level of conjunction. Jara and Lara were severe thoracopagus. They had four legs, but the two central ones were withered and useless. The bones of their hips were fused, and they shared a liver, a pancreas, and a confused intestinal tract. Both their hearts were separate and strong, free from defects; but since their bloodstreams were connected, the two hearts often fought one another, like two drums beating out disparate rhythms.
Hospitals had offered to separate them for free years ago, but their parents both feared the dangers of the operation, and despised charity, so they refused those early offers. Then, as the twins grew, all those excited surgeons found other projects, and so Lara and Jara ultimately fell into the canyon of the forgotten. In times past, conjoined twins were killed at birth. Western medicine used to call them “monsters” before the advent of modern compassion. In spite of it Jara and Lara always tried to see beyond their hardship. Sometimes it was a blessing, to be able to be so close. To almost know the other’s thoughts. To share more than most others on earth. But there were only three people who could look at them and not see freaks. Their mother, their father, and Radio Joe.
***
“The spirits spoke to me tonight,” Radio Joe told them, as they warmed themselves around his fire. Lara and Jara grinned at one another.
“Was it AM or FM?” asked Jara. The old man often told tall tales to local children, of spirits that spoke to him through the radios and TVs he repaired.
“No. This time for real.” He closed his eyes and offered an open-palmed chant to the flames.
“What did they sound like?”
“They came in the voice of the mountain lion,” he told them. And even as he said it, they heard the guttural roar of the great cat somewhere close by.
The twins pulled themselves up quickly, but Radio Joe didn’t stir. He opened his eyes, and turned slowly to look up at them. The fire painted a stroke of madness in his ancient eyes. “They called for you,” he said. “You did not quest after your spirit. So your spirit has quested after you.”
In truth few of the teenagers in town went on vision quests anymore. Radio Joe never missed an opportunity to rebuke them for it.
The roar came again. It sounded strange—different from roars they heard before. It sounded more powerful than other lions. There was a lion that had attacked a woman a few weeks before; surely this was the same one. With most of the neighborhood gone, the twins knew they would have to take care of it. How surprised the others would be when they discovered that the freakish pair had dispatched the troublesome cougar.
“Are you going to shoot it?” asked Radio Joe.
“Once it’s had a taste of human blood it won’t stop,” said Jara. “It has to be destroyed. I know it’s not what you believe but—"
“Use my rifle,” Radio Joe said. “It’s in the shed.”
***
Tonight the world seemed to end at the rim of the canyon. As the twins stood there, gazing out across the great expanse, they could still see an orange glow far below, on the canyon floor. Smoke from the smoldering wreckage had blown to the canyon wall, filling the space beneath the cliff with a haze lit pale blue by the gibbous moon.
They had followed the strange roars of the mountain lion to this spot—and although they could catch hints of its gamy scent, the smell of smoke masked it as they neared the rim.
They looked down into the pit of the canyon.
“Do you think it went back down?” asked Lara. And the answer came as a single earth-shaking roar behind them.
It awakened in them a searing terror, and they realized at this awful, vulnerable moment that they feared death far more than they had imagined.
They turned in a ballet-smooth motion to see not one, but four mountain lions stalking toward them, out of the shadows of the Arizona night. Their mouths were covered with the fur and blood of their latest kills.
Jara raised his rifle but did not know which creature he should aim at. “Don’t move,” Jara said.
There was something about these beasts that was not right. It was th
e way they walked—their paws stepping in perfect unison as if they were all reflections of the same beast. And it was common knowledge that mountain lions did not hunt in packs.
The quartet of beasts opened their mouths to roar, and only now did the twins understand why the sound had been so strange. It had been the sound of all four of them roaring at once.
Backed against the half-mile drop to the canyon floor, Lara and Jara knew their lives were about to end one way or another. But the lions stopped ten feet away and held their position. Dark eyes fixed on the twins. Perhaps they were confused by the sight of Siamese twins, or perhaps it was something else. Out of nowhere, a voice spoke to them.
“I understand now.”
The twins heard the voice, but it was as if the voice had originated deep within their own minds.
“I understand.” This time the thought had come from the direction of the great cats. Although Lara didn’t pretend to understand all the mysticism of the old ways, she felt sure this was a vision—the kind Radio Joe often spoke of. The kind of vision that opened the door to one’s destiny.
Jara, on the other hand, wasn’t so convinced. He held the rifle on one of the creatures, unwilling to let his guard down.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Completion,” said the four voices. “Mine and yours.”
“We don’t believe in animal spirits,” said Jara.
“I don’t think that’s what they are.” Lara raised her hand and pushed down the barrel of Jara’s gun.
“What are you?” demanded Jara.
“I am nothing, " said the voices. “I am nothing without you. Because you are the point of focus. You are the one.”
Although the twins did not yet understand the full implication, the truth of it rang deep within them. The suggestion of them being at the focus of anything was a powerfully charged notion. They had lived so much of their lives in hidden anonymity, that it was more than just their curiosity that was piqued. It was a call to their souls.
“What do you mean?” the two asked in unison.
But they didn’t need to ask, because they implicitly knew. Jara and Lara were the point of focus. That meant that these creatures had not arrived here by random means. They were directed here by an ordered series of events. Then an image flooded the twins’ minds, and they instantly saw how these creatures came to be.
The bacteria aligned.
A powerful force injected perfect order into the river’s current, and the bacteria aligned!
The same order flowed its way up the food chain until the alignment of those billion bacteria had distilled down into the alignment of these four dangerous predators.
“And you . . . " said the four voices again. “You are the point of focus.”
If it were true, thought the twins, then it was something more than fate, and more than destiny. It meant that the unknowable forces of nature had not spat the twins out as freaks, but as vessels for something greater than themselves.
“I can give you what you need. What you long for,” said the voice. “I can give you completion.”
As they heard those words, they finally knew what it would mean to be the point of focus. They had lived lives of incompletion—from their own bodies, to the games of chess they never finished. They were like a tune, straining on the penultimate note, waiting for resolution. They were incompletion, and nothing was more desirable than to finally be complete.
“What do we have to do?” the twins said simultaneously.
“You already know,” came the answer.
Yes, they did know.
Jara raised his gun at the beasts . . . and released four deadly blasts.
The cats did not flinch, or shy away. Instead they each received the bullet through the brain, and collapsed to the dust, one after another. The twins realized what was about to happen next even before it began, and the knowledge made it even more joyous. The moment the creatures were dead, and their spirits were released, Lara and Jara could feel the four dissolve together, funneling into them. Now the twins could truly hear each other’s thoughts, feel each other’s beings. The four incomplete spirits that had inhabited the cougars, meshed together, weaving into a single great spirit that wound itself around the twins like a cocoon.
The strange force of order that had touched the distant river was now reversing in the twins what never should have occurred, and all at once, they knew what their innermost wish had always been.
To be one.
There, standing on the rim of the canyon, Lara and Jara—the two halves—merged together into a single being, brought into perfect focus—flesh, mind, and soul.
When it was done, two legs stood where there had been four. Two hands were raised in joy to the heavens, and one mind held the singular human being that had once been sister and brother.
The powerful spirit that had united them, allowed them to linger in their joyous moment of completion. And then that same spirit descended upon them on all sides with such violent ferocity that the twins’ soul imploded.
***
The Bringer stood in the cold night admiring his new body. It suited him just fine. It was young, it was strong—and like the Bringer itself, this body was neither male nor female, but a perfect synthesis of both.
“Sleep,” he told the twins, as he felt their soul collapse in upon itself. They had experienced their completion, which was more than most did. And although he spared their soul the indignity of being eaten, he had no remorse at having buried it beneath the heavy weight of his own spirit.
He took the four mountain lions that, for a brief time, had housed his quartered soul, and one by one cast them off the cliff and into the dark mist of the canyon.
This was not an ancient Mediterranean empire. That was a world and many ages away. Having stolen the twins’ memories, he knew the year and the ways of the modern world. But what was he doing here? He remembered the circumstances of his death: the drowning of the old human shell he had worn; the dissolution of his spirit into the sea. Who had coaxed his fragmented spirit back from the waters of death, causing it to congeal once more into a glorious whole? Who in this world had that kind of power? Instinct told him it must have been a star-shard who had done it, akin to the ones he had destroyed so many years ago. . . .
He peeled from himself the strangely tailored clothes the twins had worn. Clothes sewn by their mother, the Bringer recalled from his usurped memories; arm and leg holes cut at absurd angles that no longer fitted the single symmetrical body the twins had fused into. A perfect human body. He discarded them over the canyon rim, then strode toward the lights of the nearby village, already feeling the pangs of a three-thousand-year-old hunger.
***
Radio Joe had heard the four shots go off like the monotone chime of the old church bell, ringing a spirit into the earth.
He waited for the twins to return, tempering his own anxiety with the steady hypnotic spill of sands between his fingers, contemplating the ancient patterns on the hardpan of his yard.
When he saw a figure coming toward him out of the darkness, he thought it must have been the twins, but this figure moved in a steady gate. It was naked, and when Radio Joe looked into its face, he thought for a moment he had slipped into some terrible half-sleep, for what he saw was impossible.
The old man felt his aging heart attempt to stop, but he willed it to sustain his life—if only long enough to know the nature of the monster before him.
“Radio Joe,” said the figure, with the slyest of grins, “don’t you recognize me? Or should I say, ‘us.’ "
The old man stood in the center of his sand paintings, studying the figure before him. Firm, hairless pectorals that could have been breasts. Hips that were smooth like a woman’s, yet thighs as muscular as a man’s. And a dark wedge of venereal abomination, with two distinct organs, one wedged loosely within the folds of the other.
“What have you done with Lara and Jara?”
>
“They sleep,” it said. “For I may yet need them.”
Radio Joe reached down, grabbed a handful of black powder, and hurled it into the flames. The fire spat forth a bright green flame.
“Giyá Bachál vomga,” he chanted. “Return to the dark place. I command you to fall from the living world!”
But it only laughed. “Empty words,” it said. “I had thought it was you who had called me back from the dead—but you are no star-shard. You are barely a man anymore.”
The thing that had been Lara and Jara took a step forward, and Radio Joe took a step away, keeping the fire between the thing and himself.
“Who has drawn me back from the waters?” it asked, with a force that could not go unanswered.
“No one has!” said Radio Joe, knowing this more surely than he had known anything in his life. “No one would knowingly call such a creature as you to the living world.”
The creature considered his answer. “You’re far wiser than you know,” it said. “Perhaps my life is an accident, then. How fortunate for me!” It looked at its arms, studying the gooseflesh that had risen there. “Clothe me!” it ordered.
“I will not help you with your dark business,” Radio Joe told it, finding one more moment with this creature unbearable. “Either kill me or leave.”
It stalked slowly toward him, stepping over the sands, unbothered by the strong magic of their patterns. It stepped over the flames, ignoring the heat, until at last it was face-to-face with Radio Joe.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” it asked.
Radio Joe refused to look away, even though he sensed the depth of the danger he was courting. “At first I thought you were the one who caused the crash . . . but now I see I was wrong. You are the crash. You are the death of all you touch. You are the darkness that swallows light. You are Quíkadi Bp; páa Misma Ga Máa. The Bringer of Shadows. The thief of souls.”
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