Falling Idols

umber that dwarfed the sandstone spires and blotted out the sky. It flexed in place for several moments, then as if with deliberate intent roared across the desert floor toward the tracks.

There was no time to react, no place else to steer, nothing to do except pray. But God, they said later, must’ve had His heart set on a cataclysm that day. The engines had already passed by, but the caboose was still to come and the long snaking body of the train most vulnerable in between.

The column of wind hit, lifting the nearest freight cars from the tracks like links in the middle of a chain. The rest derailed and, from the center out toward both ends, began a slow, grinding corkscrew as they were pulled back toward the middle.

But maybe there was some small nod of mercy in the turbulent air that day. Hydraulic lines blew and couplings wrenched apart like soft lead as the whirlwind took its due and left the rest. While a pair of boxcars were plucked along with them, the cyclone seemed as selective as any arbitrary act of God, as a string of five tanker cars filled with liquid propane was sucked aloft, white capsules clenched inside a giant brown fist.

The cyclone retreated from the tracks then, to steer a new course. Toward Miracle, on its day of days.

There the whirlwind faltered and died and dropped its burden. The crew in the caboose felt the heat and blast wave from three miles away. The clouds of flame they described boiled high enough to challenge Heaven, and then fell back.

*

“But our love for you is not that of a parent for its children. We would never be so presumptuous. Because we know our place. Instead, our love is the love of older brothers and sisters for their younger siblings, even though we know that you will grow to be greater than we could ever hope to be.

“And while I cannot tell you why … that’s as it was always meant to be.”

*

He may have awakened that morning as Austin McCoy, but now he wasn’t convinced it was as simple as that. Dragons stirring inside his mind, wings unfurling inside his soul, and a body that felt ready to collapse.

Would Austin McCoy have scrubbed an entire town out of existence? Not the Austin who’d awakened a few hours ago. Never him. But this one would, and had. In forward motion, every minute since spent outrunning those discoveries on his porch and in Gabrielle’s tub. He could never get far enough away.

From the desolate high stage of a mesa he watched it burn, and from the first moments when those fiery blooms rolled across the landscape, obliterating the town and scalding streets into tar, he realized something that he’d never suspected before. His cells tingled with the knowledge and the kinship, made of stuff that had been around since the beginning of time … and remembered, even if he hadn’t. Now he understood his species’ fascination with explosions. They weren’t acts of destruction so much as instants of creation, echoes of the bang that had set everything in motion, giving birth to mountains, men, and mites.

Not bad for a day’s work.

He came down from the mesa when the firestorm retreated back to the town proper, so he could watch from ground level — at least as long as it would take until the sky filled with helicopters and planes, and the road brought an army of rescuers with nothing to do but wait to rake the ashes.

Dry as it was, the ground steamed beneath his boots. A fat green fly lit upon his shoulder. He almost swatted it, but let it crawl there instead. You never knew. You just never knew.

And, unlikely as this seemed to him, he realized that he and the fly weren’t the only things here left alive.

It came walking out of the fields of fire, moving toward him on two good legs, and when it came close enough to touch he could feel the scorching radiance from its body.

“Well done,” it said. Voice still that of a woman who could captivate with nuance and a glance. “Sodom and Gomorrah couldn’t have gone any better. They’ll wonder about this for ages.”

She’d come to him as a casualty of his grief and rage, but even at that she had allowed herself a bizarre beauty. Ever vain. She was naked as could be, a burn victim with all the crust and crisp scraped away, leaving the tight shiny pinkness underneath. Her hair was gone, her lips were gone, her nose was a bump and a pair of slits; her ears had shriveled against her skull; even her breasts were tiny now. Every spare ounce had been seared away. She looked like a snake on two legs.

“I know you’re too proud to ask why,” she said.

Scarlett. He still thought of her as Scarlett. But Scarlett was nothing but illusion. A means to a cruel end.

“So let’s talk of Gabrielle. Do you want me to tell you she didn’t suffer? Fine. She didn’t suffer. There — is that what you want?”

He said nothing.

“What — it wasn’t supposed to be this way? Of course it was. If you insisted on clinging to her, this was exactly what it was supposed to be like. Gabrielle wasn’t here to be taught by you. She wasn’t here to forgive you. And especially she wasn’t here to take you home. You are home … or as close as you’ve ever been.”

“But I love her,” he whispered.

“And I love you,” she said.

With the toe of his boot he drew a spiral in the blackened dirt. She erased it with a gleaming raw foot and reptilian smile, and looked back over her shoulder toward the heart of the inferno.

“Memuneh?” she said. “It’s not even his name. Did you know that?”

“I’d suspected.”

“He robbed it from your own folklore. ‘Dispenser of dreams. Defender in Heaven of his earthly wards.’ Sound familiar?”

Austin shut his eyes. Yes. Yes, it did. Sentimental treacle, lactated to suckle babies in the darkest nights of their souls.

“But he’s right about one thing. We are here for you. We save you from your own inertia.”