The twins, Dash and Promise, came of age in the long part of the war, when it was for them a train extending in both directions forever, no beginning or end in sight. It was a time they lived with their mother in a moss-stained, manufactured home hung off the western skirt of the Cascades, overlooking the Toutle River and the lights of town.
While the twins had no memory of life in town, their mother and their uncle (who had come to stay with them that summer) had grown up there. And so the adults spent their nights that summer in deck chairs on the crumbling cement patio, smoking cigarettes and reminiscing about their youth and the town below and watching as the army slowly rocketed it into darkness. Dash and Promise would sneak out and listen to them on these nights, sitting crouched in silence as the tracers fell overhead, raising their eyebrows when the adults said something meaningful, or mysterious, not twitching at explosions.
“Which one was that? St. Rose?” their uncle asked.
“That was the bottling plant. St. Rose was farther out.“
“St. Rose was where I was an altar boy, right?”
“Yeah, until Mom gave up and let your heathen butt run wild.”
“Where is it, from here? Can you see it?” he asked. “Where’s St. Rose?”
“Over there,” said their mother. “Off over in that dark part over there. It’s been dark like that since April,” she said. “Been dark like that awhile.”
Their uncle had arrived at dawn one dripping grey morning, delivered without ceremony by two guys in a modified pick-up truck. He said he’d lost his job, that they’d shut the port again and a new wave of folks was already on their way, headed east up the valley now, passing this way soon. He had a roller suitcase with him and two cardboard boxes full of cigarettes.
“That’s pretty much my life savings these days,” he said, kicking the cigarettes. “The rest is just clothes.”
“This isn’t clothes,” said Promise, lifting a deer skull by the antlers from the suitcase she’d unzipped.
Her uncle swatted her. “That’s not yours,” he said.
Their mother stopped counting cigarettes, walked over, and shoved her brother to the ground, landing him hard in a puddle.
“Not enough cigarettes in there for you to be hitting these kids,” she said. “These kids are the future.”
The pick-up truck guys laughed at their uncle’s pain, lingered unhurried by their truck, machine-gun bolted to its bed. Dash watched the men, their field coats and quiet eyes, until one of them stared back, nodded in sober fellowship. Promise focused on the machine gun.
“Do you think that’s what Dad looks like?” asked Dash later that night.
“Dad would be older than that,” said Promise. “And his hair is different in Mom’s picture, more like yours. Here, give me a hand with this.”
After their mom and uncle went to bed, the twins would collect their uncle’s deer skull and a large, grey blanket and cut down through the woods beyond the patio to the infamous bend in Highway 504 where, that summer, they haunted passers-by as The Ghost of the North Fork.
The ghost had been Promise’s idea but seemed reasonable enough to Dash. They made it by sitting one atop the other’s shoulders, their bodies wrapped in the blanket, the one on top wearing the skull as a head. So dressed, they would stand braced against a tree on the side of the road and await the night convoys of the evacuees from the coast. When they heard an engine’s drone and saw headlights bend around the curve, the ghost would stagger out into the road, eight feet tall, body black, death’s head eyes wide and bottomless. Vehicles swerved at its appearance, tires screeched and passengers yelled, but no horns sounded, and no one ever stopped. The travellers raced on into the darkness. Beneath the blanket, the twins’ hands clasped tightly, adrenaline coursing through their veins, young hearts pounding in the forest night.
The skull smelled old, like sour rain and ordnance, common smells.
One night an overloaded hatchback swerved hard avoiding them and shed two bags in the road before skidding wildly on. Unzipping the first, the twins found it full of baby clothes — tiny socks, hats, onesies, pajamas (their smell rich and strange, and not unpleasant) — and two old family photo albums. The second bag was filled with D batteries.
“The hell is this?” their mom asked their uncle, raising in accusation the stocking cap she’d found in his things, cap heavy with the weight of eight D batteries, hidden there by Promise to see what their mom would do. Their uncle insisted he’d never seen them, backed away, hands raised, as their mom approached talking over him, what else was he hiding? The situation seemed poised to go wrong until Dash silently left, returned with one of the scavenged photo albums, raised it in his hands.
“Promise and I found this. In the woods,” he said.
Within minutes, they were gathered together around it, paging slowly through a stranger’s family photos. The pictures, in rusting tones of chromogenic decay, depicted feasts and ceremonies, Christmases and Thanksgivings and birthdays, crowds gathered in polished-wood dining rooms and around sun-blind, food-laden picnic tables; they showed old clothes and hairstyles, smiling adults and children, happy encounters of little consequence. Some compelled commentary from the adults — _they’re at a video arcade there, it was this place that…those two are Boy Scouts…that looks like the Pendleton Round-Up — _others only silence, their meaning left for the twins to decipher, from whatever context they could find.
The batteries were not spoken of again. They turned up in two flashlights and an electric heater.
Paging through the album later, Dash found alone on the last page their mother’s beloved snapshot of their father: him holding the twins as newborns, a baby curled in either forearm, smile huge across his face.
“She put it there,” said Promise. “I saw her add it the night you got it out.”
While many met the ghost that summer, their encounters prompted almost no accidents. Vehicles missed them sometimes by inches, lifting the blanket like a breeze as it passed, but always the vehicles’ drivers recovered, corrected, and moved quickly on. All but once.
One night, after several hours spent idling in the sweet-aired dark, no sound but the animal thrum of midsummer, there came at last from down the road a drone of two engines at once accelerating up the hill. The twins rushed to assemble themselves, Dash donning the skull. They made it three steps out into the road before two huge shapes — passenger vans, their headlights off — rounded the bend and were suddenly and utterly upon them.
“Promise — ?” said Dash, but she was already shoving him off to the side and out of the way, the ghost spilling in opposite directions across the road as the first van raced between them. Dash rolled in a ball on the road as the second van swerved around him, climbed the bank, and flew spinning through the air, landing with a crash on its side, skidding white sparks in its wake.
A timeless moment passed, then Dash felt his sister’s hand upon his back. He looked up to see her illuminated in the dome light that turned on as the van’s back door fell open. She put a finger to her lips.
A man in a military uniform crawled groaning from the wreck, was followed by another man in a white jumpsuit, wrists chained, a prisoner. The prisoner tackled the uniformed man, wrapped his chains around his neck, and held him while a second prisoner emerged, took the uniformed man’s face in his hands, and turned it with a snap. As the first prisoner searched the body for keys, the second took a pistol from the dead man’s holster, returned to the van, and shot twice through the driver-side window where another uniformed man still hung seat-belted. The windshield spider-webbed with the shots and the sound echoed across the valley, and the man grew still.
Ignoring or not seeing the twins, the prisoners worked at their chains in the dome light. Dash gasped when the first prisoner’s face came into the light and he realized it was one of the pick-up truck guys who had given their uncle a ride earlier that summer. The second prisoner was older, hair greying at the temples, dark and tightly curled.
Dash saw that the first prisoner was staring at him.
“Christopher,” said the first prisoner. “I…I think your children are here.”
Chains fell from their father’s wrists as he rose and turned to face them. His face was bruised, right eye swollen, abrasions scabbed. His skin looked pale and looser than in their mother’s picture. He had been away so long that neither of them could remember seeing him in-person. And yet.
“Would he even have known it was us?” wondered Promise to her brother, years later, after the war had made inhuman titans of them both, grown them into strange and weary champions of their people, famed siblings of myth and legend, weird pilots tasked to imagine the future now that the past was gone forever — would their father have even known them had the pick-up truck guy not recognized them first?
Dash sat blowing on his skinned knees. Their father approached, reached his hand out towards his children, towards Dash, his child injured here in the road. Three of his fingers were broken, their fingernails missing. Dirty tape held them together. His eyes glistened.
“Dash,” he said. “Promise — ”
Promise stepped protectively between her brother and their father, and their father halted, almost but did not speak.
Somewhere up the road, the other van’s engine remained audible, possibly grew louder. Their father looked from the road to his children, then to the first prisoner who stood ready to depart
“Christopher — ” he said.
And then their father’s arms were around them, both of them, his desperation hot as fever. And they wilted in his embrace, even as they breathed deeply his smell, and savored his stubble, the weight of his arms, things they had not realized they had longed for all their lives.
He rose, regarded them a moment longer. He began to turn.
“Wait,” said Promise, and she ran to a specific place on the side of the road, returned dragging behind her the duffle bag full of batteries, less the eight she’d taken. She gave it to the first prisoner. “To buy things,” she said. And the first prisoner nodded, and he thanked her. Then to their father:
“Christopher,” he said again. “I’m sorry but…the other van…”
Their father teetered on the balls of his feet; the world reeled around them. “I love you, both of you,” he said. “I’m sorry — ”
“Wait,” said a child’s voice again, this time Dash. “One more thing.” And he rose on smarting knees, hobbled off into the same darkness from which Promise had just returned. He came back with a second gift.
“Here,” he said, and he handed his father the other photo album. Their father took it in his broken fingers. And the skull bore witness.
“Your mother,” he said. “Wait a week before you tell her. In case they come for her.”
“We will,” Promise said, face brave, straining at bravery.
And then the men were gone, the white of their uniforms fading between the trees, and the twins were left alone once more, ten years old, hands clasped in the dark curve of the road.
Crickets chirped. A dripping came from somewhere inside the broken van. The dome light flickered. Neither of the twins moved.
Up the road, they could hear the future coming.
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