I’ve been an inmate, a patient, and a ward of the state. But whatever you call us, it amounts to the same thing. Incarcerado.
“When I came in, they called us initiates, but that smacked of religion, and many of the brainiacs didn’t want us to sound like a cult. That was before the government got so involved.”
“So the army hasn’t always been involved …”
He laughs, stands, and exits the small office via a heavy wooden door. “No, the government got involved when they realized that the Society could provide them with talent that they couldn’t get elsewhere, right? Bugfucks. Flyers. Jocks and hotheads and various other post-humans.”
“Ruark used that phrase. Post-human.”
“Yeah, it’s kinda a catchphrase around here.” He points at a framed poster on the wall. It’s been there since the seventies, judging by the fonts and weathering. It reads:
POST-HUMANS
DO NOT USE YOUR ABILITIES IN THE DORMS.
REMEMBER, WE’RE ALL ON THE SAME SIDE.
A smiley face glares at us from the poster’s center. Taped beside it is a white sheet of paper, reading: COURTESY OF HEINRICH HELMHOLTZ. YOU’RE WELCOME, MUTANTS.
Someone has scrawled asshole and an arrow pointing toward Helmholtz.
Roberto leads me to another set of steps. “No elevators in the dorm. And you’re on the fourth. Top floor.” His breath starts coming in heaves as we take the stairs. “Here’s the rules: No girls in the dorm after ten pm, and I’ll know if there’s one here.” He waggles his fingers at me like he’s performing magic. “That’s my talent. It’s territorial in nature. I know everyone within my domain, and this building is mine.” He shrugs. “So no girls. If you’re into dudes, there’s not much we can do about that.”
“But how will you know? About the girls, I mean? I can feel the Helmholtz field.”
“It switches off and on, irregularly. The fields draw a lot of power, so they can’t run continually.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Don’t get any ideas, kid.”
“I’m not. Just curious. Seems like with the army involved they’d have engineers or something—”
“Right. The army?” He chuckles. “The admin and lab coats come up with the theory, but we put it into practice. And there’s just no way to run a Helmholtz twenty-four seven.” We’ve reached the next floor. Boys come from their rooms, some of them in various states of undress. Wrestling, catcalling. Full of horseplay and happiness. But it’s quieter than Casimir and less desperate and sad than Tulaville Psych.
“How long have you been here, Roberto?” I ask, looking about. Some of the boys aren’t laughing and horsing around. They’re staring at me with bald and frank gazes, uncaring and unfriendly.
“Fifteen years since I became an employee. Tried to find a way for my talent to work in the field, but it seems my lot is a bit more domestic.” He gestures at the walls of the boys’ dorm. “Because of my ability, this is my home. I’m the nurse, the maintenance man, and the night guard. Other folks go on missions. I live here. So, I’ve got that going for me. Chalk one up to the crapshoot of genetics.”
“Other employees, what do they do?”
He looks at me sharply. “You probably already know the answer to that. We do what we’re told.”
“And you’re told what to do by Quincrux.”
He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Yeah, kid. He’s the director.”
“Like what?”
“Whatdya mean, like what?”
“Like what does he tell employees to do?”
“Use your imagination. I don’t know. Army stuff. To go nab potential inductees, monitor the radar, make assignments, do scheduling and administration, man the bunkers and laboratories.” He looks at me closely. “What do you think?”
I remain silent, but I think we’re his weapon. The soldiers aren’t here to make sure we don’t go crazy and hurt folks. They’re here to make sure we can’t be used against the American government.
We take another set of stairs up. No talking now. It’s a long haul to the next floor, and when we get there we immediately take another flight.
Seriously winded at the top floor, Roberto gasps, “This way,” and leads us to a room at the far end of the hall. The door stands open and there’s a kid, a very tall kid, standing framed in it.
It’s Jack.
THIRTY
I didn’t know what to expect. It’s been a year, and suddenly my friend, my brother in all but name, looms above me.
He comes forward and grabs me in a fierce bear hug and lifts me off the floor. “Shreve!”
“Hold on, bro,” I say. I’ve never really been too comfortable with hugs, honestly.
Jack tosses me around a bit—holy crap, he’s gigantic now—and finally, after mashing the air from my lungs, sets me down on the ground. He’s six foot five. Six foot six? And gangly. A field of angry zits covers his face like a chinstrap, running from under his ear, across his jaw, to his other ear. Puberty is a bitch.
He’s still got all twelve fingers, though.
“Holy smokes, Jack. You’re humongous.”
At first he smiles. Then the smile fades, and we’re just left there looking at each other.
From the room behind Jack, Hollis says, “Hey, Shreve. Remember me?” His black eye has faded, and his lips look almost normal now.
“Hey, man. Good to see you’re still here.”
“Haven’t washed out yet.”
Another kid lies on his bed. He’s short and squat and thick with muscles. He glances at me and says, “What’s up?” and turns back to the comic he’s reading.
“That’s Tap. They’ve paired him with Hollis.”
“Paired?”
“Jocks and bugfucks, right?” At my blank look, “Telepath paired with a telekinetic. You know, brains and brawn?”
It makes sense.
I take a look at the room. It’s a large space with two bunk beds. The corners are slanted with the shape of the roof—we’re on the top corner of the building, with a view of the mountains and river out two big casement windows set inside dormers, each with its own hand crank to open it wide. It’s hot, but there’s an oscillating fan in the corner that stirs the air some. It hums and rattles.
Jack’s watching me closely. And there’s a suspicious little frown tugging at his lips. Not five minutes together and he’s already distrustful. Welcome home, Shreve buddy.
“Come on. Let me show you the roof,” Jack says.
“Uh, roofs aren’t my favorite.”
“Don’t be chicken.”
Hollis looks like he’s going to join us, but Jack shakes his head and I say, “Hey, I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”
Jack cranks the casement window open. He steps up on the sill, stoops and turns his body at an uncomfortable angle, and climbs outside. After a moment, his head peeks back in and he says, “You coming?”
I work my way through the window out onto a three-foot-wide ledge that looks like it circumnavigates the entirety of the building. The air stills with coming night, and I’m thankful there’s no wind to screw with my balance. A vertiginous drop stretches before me, and the few small lights of the buildings of the Extranatural Society’s Montana Campus twinkle below.
I shimmy around the side of the dormer and discover what looks like a small, handcrafted wooden ladder leading up. It doesn’t look too sturdy. But I spy Jack’s sneakered foot disappearing over the stone lip of the roof.
Damn, I’m not going to let Jack be taller and braver than me.
I climb up and over. There’s a little tarred-in square of roof with nylon folding chairs like people bring to football games. Jack’s sitting in one of them, his hair a shaggy snarl around his head, his long legs stretched out. He waits until I sit down to fish out a pack of cigarettes and light one. The square looks tiny in his over-fingered hand. He looks like the stretched-out carnival mirror image of a boy playing at being a man.
I look up at t
he sky and the stars beginning to prick the heavens with light. It’s as rosy as a vodka and pink grapefruit in the western sky and the silhouette of the mountains just a jagged line across it. Big sky. A brilliant spray of stars. Then blackness. Maybe that’s just an imitation of life.
“So,” I say, smelling the tobacco. “You’re all grown up now, huh?”
Jack looks at me, but it’s dark enough that I can’t puzzle out his expression.
“Believe it or not,” he says, and again I’m struck at how deep his voice is, “I knew you were going to say that.”
“Those cancer sticks make you feel good?”
He brings the cigarette to his mouth and draws the smoke deep into his lungs and expels it. Trying to act cool, like what I’m saying isn’t getting to him. But it is.
“Yeah, they do.”
I stay quiet for a bit. “You drinking now, too? They got booze here? Weed?”
“There’s no candy dealers, Shreve. But I’m sure you can figure some scam.”
Boom. Nice one.
“Thanks for sending the letters, bro. I especially liked the picture of you and that girl. She had a bunch of fingers, too.”
He takes the smoke from his lips. Stays silent.
“What was her name? Your girlfriend?”
“Ember.”
“Amber? That her name?”
“Ember. Like a smoldering bit of charcoal. An ember.”
“Ah. Ember. She still your girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Congrats.”
“How’d they get you?” Jack says. “I heard you killed the Witch.”
“What are we talking ’bout here? You and your girlfriend or the Witch?”
“The Witch.”
“They sicced her on me. And …” How far back do I go? “It’s been a hard year, Jack. Shit got real for a minute. You got huge and started smoking. But I grew, too. Maybe even more than you did.”
“You still look the same to me. Maybe a little thinner.”
“I’m not getting any taller, that’s for sure.” I laugh a little, but it hurts some. My throat is still raw. “But I have gotten bigger.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Okay. Give me your hands.”
“What?”
“Give me your hands.”
“That’s gay.”
“It’s not gay. I’m not gonna do anything. I just want to see your hands.”
“No.”
“So, you’re still ashamed of them, even now? When you’re surrounded by folks just like you?”
He huffs and sighs and then sits forward and sticks out his mitts in my direction. I take them in mine.
“You remember when we were on the run from Quincrux? Before the Dubrovniks?”
He’s hesitant, but he says, “Yeah. I remember.”
“And you didn’t believe me, right? You couldn’t believe that someone would do that, or thought that I might be making it all up, or even that the Dubrovnik asshole was just having fantasies he couldn’t tell from real life. You remember?”
“Yes.” It’s grudging, but he says it.
“Remember how I made you see? How I went in and forced you to walk down into that pit in that freak’s mind?”
Silence.
I grip his hands tight, until he starts trying to pull them away.
“While you’ve been up here eating corn on the cob and mooseburgers and whatever else they’ve been spoon-feeding you up here, I’ve had to make space on the inside. You understand?”
He jerks his hands away. Not quite the reunion he imagined, I’ll wager. Not really how I pictured it either.
He shakes out another cigarette. Fumbles because his fingers are too big and too many to get it right. I snatch the pack from him, hold out my hand until he puts the blue Bic lighter in it, and light the cigarette, drawing on it only enough to get a cherry going and then handing it back to him. I’ve had lots of practice lighting cigarettes for children. And pouring drinks.
I take a deep breath and tell him what’s happened to me. Most of it, anyway.
THIRTY-ONE
I gloss over the testing. Not much to say about being in the nuthatch, and I strategically omit all mention of both Rollie and my conversations with the Riders. Rollie, because it’s too painful and I feel full of guilt, and the Riders because, even though Jack is a knucklehead, Quincrux could probably penetrate him like popping a balloon. There’s the possibility that Quincrux will read him, or anyone that I speak with here. I don’t want him passing along everything I know.
I told Quincrux I would obey. I didn’t say I’d be his bitch. He kept me in the dark. I can keep him there too.
“So, your girlfriend.”
“Shut up, man.”
“She was on the team who nabbed me.”
He grins. “She told me that. Said you bolted. Running and running.”
“Hey, it’s what we’re good at.”
He chuckles but doesn’t respond. Maybe he’s not much of a runner anymore. Maybe he never was.
“She’s a lot older than you.”
“Three years. But—”
“Yeah, you both got the fingers.”
“Not that. We were the same in more ways than that. Her parents—”
Oh. “Well, she nabbed me.”
He nods in the gloom. “She’s really good.”
“At the flying and the jumping.” Sheesh, I sound like Jerry.
“At everything.”
There’s the silence I was looking for.
“So what’s your fundamental dysfunction, Jack? Your letter sounded desperate, and Quincrux said you’re not doing well. They’re worried you’re gonna wash out. He wants me to be your handler. Guess that’s why we’re paired.”
He smokes his cigarette. However big he’s gotten, he still has the awkwardness of a kid.
“Hey, just because your balls have dropped doesn’t mean I’m not interested.”
“I don’t need you to ride in and rescue me.”
“You wrote the letters asking me to come. And who’s talking about rescuing? And you’re the one who was always rescuing me, remember?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“We used to make a great team.”
“Yeah, but you bugged the shit out of me, constantly.”
“My one talent is abrasiveness, it’s true.”
He laughs, this time fully and without reservation. “Damn straight,” he says.
I go on the attack. “So, what’s the problem? You still flying sloppy? Can’t lift stuff when they want you to?”
He ignores that. I can tell I’m getting under his skin. Jack puffs on his square a little. Then says, “Tell me what happened to the Witch.”
“They caught me in New York. East River. They were all floating and jumping about. They put the whole park asleep except for me and a guy with a Rider—”
“They’re still out there?”
“You think they’d just go away? Yeah, man. People can’t sleep, the world’s shot to hell.”
“It’s just—” He waves his hand, and I get a good gander at all those fingers. “It’s just hard to believe when I can’t sense them myself.”
It’s true. In the past, he’s taken so much on faith. He believed me when most people would have just written it off.
“They were just hanging in the air, the bunch of them—”
“Red Team.”
“Red Team?”
“There’s a pecking order here, you know. There’s the employees—extranaturals who’ve pretty much grown up here and work for the Society—people like Roberto and Tanzer. There’s the army guys, who just point guns at us to make sure we do as they say. Then there’s the teams.”
“And the Red Team was the one that nabbed me.”
“Yeah. There’s Orange Team; they’re the top dogs, mostly tactical stuff, antiterrorism. You won’t see them; they’re in the field almost all the time. When they’re here, they keep to thei
r bunker.”
I think about that for a while. How close I came to being stuffed down a hole.
“Most of us.” He waves me to the edge of the building. “See those lights over there? Right on the skirt of that mountain, that’s a residential section for the older Society members. The scientists.”
“I passed an apartment complex on the way in. Golf carts in the parking lot.”
“Yeah, no cars here. No vehicles except for the army’s.”
“They don’t want them to leave.”
“Not without some reason to make them return.”
“That’s the way it is? Incarcerado?”
“Of course. But it’s not that bad here, anyway.”
“So, it’s a nice cage. You’d rather be here than anywhere else?”
“Where else would I go, Shreve?” He holds up his hands, fanning them. Good point. Where else could he go? “And, I can fly. If I want to leave, I can leave. But I won’t.”
I think about that for a while. Jack is unencumbered by the baggage of family. He doesn’t have parents, or siblings, or anything to tether him to the outside world.
In the end, I’m his only baggage.
“So, what about the other teams?”
“The Greens, they’re next in line—less tactical and more surveillance, I think, but it’s hard to know exactly.”
“Because it’s all hush-hush.”
“Right. Need-to-know basis. If you start asking questions, you’ll be detained by the director.”
“And the Red Team?”
“They’re the backup to the Orange Team, or at least that’s what Ember tells me.”
“I got nabbed by the junior varsity team. Perfect.”
Jack chuckles; then it dies and he says, “And their coach. What happened to her? Him?”
“Back to the Witch. I got in her head, Jack. I ate her memories. All of them. She’s in me now.”
He’s quiet for a long while.
“That’s what you meant about making space on the inside,” he whispers.
I nod. It’s all I can do. She’s in me, under my skin. Like a hunger. Like desperation.
I don’t know what he’s thinking now; we’ve grown so apart and changed so much. But we never needed to fill the silences with chatter, and that remains the same. He flicks his cigarette over the lip of the roof, and it makes a cherry-tracer as it falls, burning out in its arcing trajectory. It’s chilly now, and off in the distance I hear a scream like a half-bird, half-woman having an angry orgasm. Everything goes quiet once more, and the Helmholtz field picks up in intensity, thrumming, and I can feel it percolating through the mesh and foam of my flesh. The stars are blazing in the heavens in their multitudes.
The Shibboleth Page 21