“Who says he can’t?” asked Michael. “Let go of him!”
Lourdes turned to Michael, embarrassed. Clearly it had been a knee-jerk reaction to take hold of his heart with her mind. She let the blood return to Drew’s head, before he could faint out cold. Drew stayed down on his knees, as he caught his breath.
“Sorry,” said Lourdes.
“Lourdes, meet Drew. Drew, meet Lourdes,” said Michael, hoping to get them to shake hands, which they didn’t.
Drew stood up, still trying to shake off his dizziness. “Michael . . . who are you? What are you?”
“Well, it’s like this,” said Michael. “Our souls are the shattered fragments of the star Mentarsus-H, which went supernova, at the moment each of us was conceived. That makes us pretty damn impressive, if you haven’t already guessed.”
Drew stared at him completely baffled.
“It’ll make more sense in the morning,” Lourdes told him.
“No it won’t,” Drew answered. But he went with them anyway.
Life slipped from the sea creatures that had cast themselves on the shore, their last breaths gurgling out through their gills in unison, just as the birds came. Dozens upon dozens of them. Not nearly as many as there were sea creatures on the shore, but enough to pick hundreds of holes in the softer parts of the carcasses. The birds drifted in randomly, over a period of hours, yet left as a single flock at dawn, well fed for a long, long flight.
They took to the air, flying in a single perfect wedge; cutting through the sky and heading east. It was a living vector, propelling itself on five hundred wings flapping up and down in perfect order.
Above the coastal ranges, over the dry hot sands of the California desert, the birds traveled without rest. They were long beyond their endurance by the time they crossed into Arizona airspace, but something beyond mere muscle pushed them forward.
A faint awareness propelled them now. Faint, but growing, like a mind sliding out of sleep. As the flock followed the path of the Colorado River, the angle of their wedge narrowed from thirty degrees, to twenty, to ten, until they were a slim arrow of movement across the sky. Moving directly toward a bird much larger than themselves.
The thing before them roared dangerous and loud, but still the flock willed itself forward . . . until it was devoured by the spinning mouth of a jet engine.
The 767, outbound from Phoenix, was filled with thrill-seekers, on their way to win and lose fortunes in the smoke-filled casinos of Las Vegas—but they had not bet on this particular thrill. Although the plane’s engines often inhaled stray birds that got in their way, the plane wasn’t designed to withstand an entire flock ramming down the throat of a single engine.
The right engine, fouled by the remains of the birds, blew out with such force that the wing caught fire. Inside the cabin, there were a few brief minutes of panic as the plane slipped out of the pilot’s control and plummeted into the jagged depths of the Grand Canyon.
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.