The Shibboleth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Tip o’ the hat to you, Mr. Quincrux, for telling me something I didn’t already know. I’ll use it for my ends. Not yours.

  When we land, one of the bully boys from the Flying Burrito Brothers pops my saline drip, shoves a wad of cotton in the crook of my arm, and tells me, “Hold it or you’ll bleed everywhere,” and escorts me out of the plane and onto the tarmac. It’s bright and blustery outside. Big mountains, wreathed in pine trees. There’s a Quonset hut hangar and a couple of other military-looking vehicles parked in the lee of the building. An evil-looking box sits on top of a building, looking suspiciously like a ground-to-air missile launcher.

  I feel like I should have a bag, but all I’ve got are the clothes on my back. I’m sorry now I made a nest of all the clothes I bought at Target. I guess they’ll give me some threads. I don’t know.

  I check my pockets. Wallet still there, chock-full of Jerry’s cash. Keys to the Accord still there too.

  The rest of the Flying Burritos saunter onto the tarmac from the rear of the plane, bags in hand. They’re silent, looking grim. They’ve lost one of their own today, and even though they didn’t like her (or him, this I know from her own memories squirming within me), it’s a shock when a team member goes down. Because if it can happen to one, it can happen to any of them.

  There’s a definite lack of good vibrations coming from them toward me.

  A faint tickling sensation feathers my mind. The tadpole in the palm. But this time I’m not the tadpole. I’m the palm.

  It’s the girl. She’s standing on the tarmac, a black nylon duffel bag hanging from one inert hand. She stares at me. The thousand-yard stare.

  She’s trying to get in.

  I saw her jump. She leaped up and flew. But now she’s trying to get in my head? I thought you either had the telepathic abilities or you had the explodey, physical abilities. Quincrux never levitated. Neither did the Witch. Not under her own power.

  Seems I have some things to learn. But for right now, I have some things to teach.

  I face the girl. She’s pretty, brunette. Slight build with her female parts hidden behind the black military fatigues. No insignia or badge. Not real military, but she shops at the same stores.

  I swat the niggling doubt of her mind away like a fly. Not too harshly, because there’s something hungry inside her. Something that calls to my own hunger. But the pressure isn’t that great. She’s not nearly as strong as me.

  She takes a step backward, unsteady on her feet. Her nose begins pouring blood. I cast out my mind, dig my claws into her consciousness. Not too deep, but deep enough to leave a thought in her head. Naughty girl.

  Surprised, she wipes at her nose and waves off the attention of her team members. They give me black looks and bundle her off to a waiting troop transport. It roars to life and clatters away, down into the valley.

  Soldiers wait for me. No red-carpet chauffeur like the girl and her pals.

  Two of them approach me, rifles at the ready. They frog-march me over to a drab green troop transport, seat me in the back, and sit down opposite me, holding their rifles loosely. The barrels seem huge.

  “You got that thing on safety?” I ask the nearest man.

  He ignores me and bangs on the partition between us and the driver, hollering for the driver to haul ass. The motor ratchets up, and we’re off, trundling down a gravel mountain path, away from the airfield. I grip the transport’s rough bench. It seems like we drive for miles, but all I can see is the drab olive tarpaulin that covers the bed of the transport. The soldiers sway and watch me. When the transport stops, they muscle me out. The transport sits in front of a massive, dull gray blast door seated in the raw stone of a mountainside. It’s framed in six-foot-thick concrete. It’s the kind of door that’s intended solely to keep the zombies/nuclear explosion/mutants out or the zombies/nuclear explosion/mutants in. The sinking sensation in my stomach indicates the latter.

  With a squeal and flashing yellow light, the door slides open, revealing a tidy motor pool where a woman stands, hands on her hips, scowling at me.

  The soldier grabs my shoulder and yanks me forward to stand in front of her. It’s the blonde, tattooed woman I saw when I inhabited Quincrux and checked out his office. She takes three steps forward, like a drill sergeant approaching to inspect a recruit. Her lip curls into a sneer.

  It’s like she’s trying to walk straight, military, but her body betrays her. Her hips sway, and her boobs jiggle. She keeps her hair shorn tomboy short and dyed white while the twining, dancing black tribal tattoos wind up her neck and peek out from her up-rolled sleeves onto her forearms, which are knotted with thick twists of muscle and end in flat, brutal, square hands that look like they could crush rock. Or heads.

  Mixed feelings and desires burn through my body like a forest fire. On the one hand, she’s got gargantuan boobs. On the other, she could rip me in half.

  I’ve got the memories of so many people. Screwing men and women. And that sometimes twists and squirms inside me, and I can’t look at it too closely. What does that make me? Bisexual? I wouldn’t have eaten those memories if it hadn’t felt good, warm, suffused with light.

  This woman confuses me.

  I cast out my mind, surrounding hers. She’s a knucklehead, definitely. And there’s something else—a tremulous, thick vibration to the ether. It’s sluggish. Cloying. And that presents a mystery. I can tell when the drugs hit me and the wet blanket falls, but this is different. It’s external. It niggles. It wouldn’t stop me from going behind her eyes and working her over.

  But right now, it’s a fight I don’t want.

  I’m tired, honestly. It’s not the drugs they hit me with or my drive to New York or my stint high on the roof where the shibboleth burned away all the dross of my existence. I’m just tired. Tired of being alone. Tired of always fretting and struggling against the bars of my cage. Tired of the shame and outrage of moving from cage to cage. Tired of fighting being incarcerado.

  She hoists a clipboard in one powerful mitt and glares at me. “Cannon, Shreve?”

  “That’s me.”

  She sniffs and looks me over, her buttons straining as her chest rises and falls. She doesn’t like what she sees. “You’re scrawnier than I would have thought.”

  “What, you don’t remember when we first met?” I say it lightly. I don’t know if she knows I inhabited Quincrux for that short time earlier … today? Was it yesterday? The drugs the Flying Burrito Brothers hit me with have left me missing some hours.

  Her face clouds, and she narrows her eyes. “We’ve exhausted too many resources—including one of our team members—nabbing your sorry ass, Cannon, but now we have you, and the director tells me that we’re going to salvage the losses out of your hide—”

  “The director?”

  “Hiram Quincrux. The director of the Society.” She clears her throat. Probably not used to being questioned or interrupted. “As our director has already told you, the Extranatural Society is a federally funded project that was created in the sixties to harness, control, and develop the post-humans that present themselves within the American populace—”

  “Wait. What?” I ask.

  I didn’t think it was possible for her to sneer more, but her upper lip contorts itself into disgust. It’s like a double sneer. “The American people. Though, we do also operate in Central and South America.”

  “No, the ‘post-human’ thing.”

  She looks at me. “With your abilities, surely you can’t consider yourself still human?” She laughs, but it is not kind. “We’ve moved on, Cannon. We’ve outgrown the human race.”

  And I had felt it before, on the roof. That all my humanity had been burned away, sublimed into the quivering air, pregnant with a million possibilities and supercharged with the shibboleth. But her stating it now, so blandly, tagged with its own catchall moniker—post-human—that jars me. That this society can take something so extraordinary and rare and reduce it to a hyphenated word terrifies me.
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  “Welcome to your new home. In the morning, we’ll start the testing. I recommend you give one hundred and ten percent. Otherwise …” She dusts her hands like a farmer might his hat. “Wash out.”

  “Wash out?”

  “You don’t want to discover what that involves, Cannon.”

  She obviously hasn’t read my psychiatric report, then.

  “No extranatural abilities will be used except during testing or training or at the command of an administrator. My name is Ruark, and I am the chief executive officer of this organization.” Strange. Is that a first name or last? “You will not address soldiers unless given explicit permission. If you disobey any of these directives, you will be punished. And believe me, Shreve, you’ve never been punished in your life like you get punished here.” She gives me a meaningful stare and walks over to stand near a black box protruding from the concrete wall by the blast door. It has a flashing yellow light, some galvanized metal electrical tubing racing away from it, and a small sign with a lightning bolt visible.

  One soldier moves to stand by her; another flanks me.

  She glances at the first soldier. “Go ahead and crank up the Helmholtz a couple notches.”

  The soldier jabs at the keypad with his finger.

  The vibrations in the ether increase. It’s like a mental earthquake making it impossible to concentrate.

  “That is called a Helmholtz field. Pentagon developed it. It limits telekinetic and telepathic powers. This is just an in situ Helmholtz. There’s a giant Helmholtz generator on top of the mountain that can blanket this area with a massive pulse. For miles and miles around, there are these little babies—” She pats the box. “Some hidden, some in the open. They fire randomly and at different strengths. So if you can fly, like many of our inductees, and you try to leave without permission, you will encounter one of these fields before you can escape. And very few live through the altitude drop.”

  “So, it’s not really a society, then, is it?” I say.

  “What?”

  “It’s a prison if you have to use those things to keep us here.”

  “Call it what you want. If you find yourself in one of these fields, whatever tricks you might have up your sleeves, you won’t be able to play them. So don’t get any ideas, got me? We can take away everything about you that you think is special.” She becomes still, arms by her sides. “Go ahead and try.”

  It’s rigged, a trick. But whatevs. I am about to find out.

  The ether thrums and shivers, and I’m in the vast spaces between stars and the short jump between minds. After all, we’re all the same. Star stuff and hairless apes. It’s hard to concentrate with the etheric vibrations, like trying to do long division while a car alarm sounds, but I’m able to find her.

  I go in, with brutal and ferocious force, choking her off and out. She fights me, hard. She’s tenacious and fierce, but I am the stronger. Part of me—a part that I don’t like to think about—comes alive with the struggle. It’s the Witch inside me, gleeful and hungry, oh so hungry, and her hunger drives me on, past the poisoned heights of the ether, past Ruark’s defenses.

  The ravenous wolf inside me raises its snout and howls in triumph when I’m inside. I feel expansive and contracted and savage all at once as I look out from behind her eyes and banish Ruark, boot her out.

  In and down, past whorls of memories and great shelves of events ringing like bells—a smorgasbord of memories I could eat until I died, but somehow, they don’t look so good to me now. The part of me that lusted, that hungered for the easy and the anodyne—the escape of pleasure—it’s gone. Lost to me.

  I shuffle through her memories enough to discover her particular talent. She’s a telepath like me—they call us bugfucks here—and borderline insane OCD. Mostly in regards to clothing, but it’s also her hair and the accoutrements of life that need to be ordered and collated. Counted, labeled, numbered. Folded lovingly. And money. She’s a regular Ebenezer Scrooge, she is. Counting pennies makes her happy.

  But her ability? Her talent? It’s so normal, it’s hard to discern it’s even telepathic.

  She’s a truth machine. If you lie, she knows it.

  I can taste blood. Her nose must be streaming. From her viewpoint, I look over at my empty meatsuit. I look husked and hollow, hair a clotted mess in the failing light of the Montana mountains.

  Sometimes I worry that when I’m not home, when I’ve busted loose of the cage, what happens if someone else like me comes along and walks right in and takes over? Possesses my skinsuit?

  It’s a harrowing thought. And this is a society of bugfucks and mentalists. Who knows how many kids will be here who can do the same things I do? I’ll have to be very careful.

  I go back home, and I’ve never felt more relieved to be back within my body, the light weight of my limbs and my bony chest and my dick and nuts all in their proper positions.

  Mine. All mine.

  Ruark coughs, splutters. Turns to the soldier and yells, “I told you to turn that field up!”

  He looks bewildered in the face of her rage. Her nose pumps blood over her lips and down her chin into the neck of her uniform, discoloring it.

  “What was the setting?” She is furious, and I understand why. It’s a violation when someone takes over. And she felt safe. It’s like Jerry’s story of the snake. She thought one thing, and then the world turned, pivoted, and became different.

  “Ma’am, it was on 6.5. That’s the recommended setting you sent in your last memo.”

  She glances at me, eyes blazing. “Crank it up to 8.5,” she says.

  “But, ma’am, at that level, it will put a strain on the bunker’s electrical grid—”

  “Did I ask you to discuss power reserves? Turn it up, you moron.”

  He cranks a dial, looking uncomfortable.

  But I can feel it. It skitters and howls. It thrums. The ether is poisonous now, like an acid eating away at the membranes of the mind. It’s hard to think at all with that part of my awareness being scoured. I can feel the shibboleth withdrawing, retreating inside of me like sap sinking into a tree with the coming winter.

  Ruark looks at me, defiant. I rouse the shibboleth. I find it in me to go up and out into the space/not space. It’s painful, the juddering, shivering mindscapes between lit match heads. But I can do it. It hurts not like calcium-brittle bones, nor the deep-seated rot of cancer, but like a fever of the spirit—as if at any moment the cohesion of my being, my thoughts and hopes and emotions, will just erode away and dissolve into nothingness forever.

  For now, I can manage it. I can make another assault, make her dance to my fiddle. The shibboleth heeds my call, and the pain is bearable.

  I am stronger than this.

  That frightens me, more than I can say. I’ve unseated Quincrux. Instead of the Witch eating me, I ate her. Where does it all stop? After I’ve unseated God himself? When I’ve supplanted the thing in Maryland? Where does my appetite end?

  I am stronger than her Helmholtz field, for now. But it might be better if I don’t let her know that.

  So I go back home. I let my shoulders slump. I hope she won’t notice that my nose isn’t bleeding.

  Ruark’s expression turns hard and gleeful all at once. A cruel smile thins her lips, already coated in gore.

  “Good,” she says. “Very good. New operating procedures will be put into effect immediately.” Only now does she wipe her nose, but delicately, as if determining the extent of the mess.

  “You asked for it,” I say.

  The sun has passed over the rim of the world, and the open door of the motor pool looking out among the pines has been cast into gloom. A door slides open in the far wall, and two more soldiers exit, holding guns and looking at me without much warmth. Fluorescent lights tick, flicker, and illuminate the area in a blue, artificial glow. The air stinks of gasoline, exhaust, and oil.

  “You’re strong, kid. Good for you.” There’s blood in her teeth as she says this. Her tattoos look l
ike intricate bruising in the failing light. “But you’re just a flea compared to the director. And we have your little brother, understand?”

  I feel small now. Beaten flat.

  “We can always arrange a little attitude adjustment for you. At first, we’ll only break his arms.”

  I’ve killed people before. Stolen memories of men in battle dying in the sights of my gun, choking the life from a Viet Cong soldier with my bare hands in the mud, his bayonet piercing my thigh. And more recently, taking everything that was Ilsa Moteff into myself. I can do it, let her loose to run rampant, like some tiger in a movie, burning bright, hungry and terrible. The beast in me, free to stalk on vaporous feet.

  I could so easily wring Ruark as dry as a sponge.

  I don’t.

  “Indicate in the affirmative if you understand your—and his—situation.”

  “I understand.”

  One of the soldiers hands Ruark a handkerchief. “You should clean yourself up, ma’am. Getting dark now, and the mountain lions will come down from the heights if they smell blood.” He moves to the opposite side of the blast door from the Helmholtz box and waits, looking at Ruark. Near him is a control panel that features a keypad and a large red button.

  Ruark steps over the bunker’s threshold and moves to stand by the transport we arrived in.

  She scrubs her face with the handkerchief. When she’s through, holding the bloody rag, Ruark nods at the soldier, and he enters numbers into a keypad and then depresses the button. A yellow light flashes into action, and the air is sundered by a short siren. The blast door squeals and shrieks and then begins to close with a rumble. The view of the pines narrows.