The scream comes again, urgent and alien.
“What the hell is that? Someone messing with us?”
Jack says, “Mountain lions. They come down at night, prowl the campus. They have to fatten up for winter.”
“That’s kinda messed up. Why don’t the soldiers shoot them?”
“They do, sometimes. But if it’s not the lions, it’s the wolves, Shreve.” I can’t see him shrug, but I still know him well enough to sense it when he does. “They’re just doing what’s in their nature, and I think Quincrux likes the idea of them prowling around. For most of the jocks, it wouldn’t be a problem. The bugfucks, well, it might be dicey.”
“I’m sure a mauled kid would give Quincrux a hard-on.”
“Probably two.” He grins. “There’s a couple dudes here with diphallia. It ain’t pretty.”
“You’ve seen it? I mean them?”
“Community showers, man. Roberto says that back in the thirties, when this place was built, men didn’t care if they saw each other naked. Each floor has a communal shower.”
Silence.
“The world is full of wolves and lions, man. But so far, none in the showers.”
That’s good news.
The ether thrums, angry. It’s like I’m becoming attuned to the fluctuations of the Helmholtz field without even being conscious of it. The field increases, and then suddenly it’s gone so quickly it’s like someone has flipped a switch. Maybe they have.
“Did you feel that?”
“What?”
“The dampening field?”
“A little. I usually only know it’s on when I try to do something and I can’t. That was scary, the first time. I thought it had gone away.”
“I can imagine.” He’s not sensitive to it, but he’s a telekinetic. That’s something to know.
There’s a rustling of clothing from above and a whoosh of furious wind and for an instant I think of raven’s wings, some great bird descending upon us.
Suddenly, the girl is there, crouching on the roof with us. She stands, smiles at Jack.
“Hey, you,” she says, and takes his hand. She wears a denim jacket, open wide to show her Black Flag T-shirt. They hug and then, despite me standing there, kiss. It’s not quite an adult kiss. It’s kittenish. It’s lovey-dovey. Sweet.
She digs in her jacket and withdraws a pack of Marlboros. She has no trouble popping a square out of the pack, putting it to her blushing lips and snapping a Zippo underneath it, once, twice, like lightning flashes, until it’s smoldering and filling the air with the cheap stinking smell of mass-produced, chemical-infused tobacco. What every growing girl needs.
“Ah. Now I see. You’re the good influence.”
“Shreve …” Jack says, holding up a hand.
“I don’t promote, and I don’t offer. He’s a big boy,” she says and then grins, winking at Jack.
“Shreve, don’t be a prick.”
I glance back at her. “He’s just a kid. You’re what, eighteen? I don’t even know if you two are legal.”
She puffs her cigarette, wreathing her head in blue smoke. “So what are you, his guardian angel?”
Both of them stare at me, locked together arm in arm. Look at me with a shared knowledge, a shared bond. One that I’m not a part of.
“I guess not.” It’s harder than I thought, letting go. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay, man,” Jack says.
I extend my hand to Ember. “I’m Shreve,” I say. “We met only briefly. Before.”
She snorts, and Jack laughs. “Yeah, you were a jackrabbit.” She giggles and moves her arms in a mincing, small gesture, like a rodent on a wheel. “Running, running.”
“I stopped running, eventually.”
Her smile dies on her face, curdling. “Yeah, you did. Jack called him ‘the Witch.’”
“He wasn’t always a man. But she was always evil.”
I don’t know her very well, so the expression on her face is unreadable to me, but if I was going to take a wild swing at what she was feeling, I’d say horror. Disgust.
“How did you do it?” Ember asks. She really is pretty. I can see it now even in the low light.
I open my mouth, pause, and then clack my teeth together, a parody of hunger. Yeah, a pure bit of bravado, but I don’t like her taunting me. “I’ve got a question that you might be able to answer.”
She looks at me warily. I hold up my hands, placating. “Just a question.”
“Okay,” she says slowly. “Shoot.”
“I thought you could be a jock, or you could be a—” I pause here, thinking about how distasteful the word I’m about to say is. “A bugfuck. But you can fly and you tried to get inside my head. How does that work?”
Ember touches her nose with the back of her hand, gingerly, as if remembering. “Yeah, my nose bled for hours after that.”
I nod and it’s hard, but I keep my face muscles from delivering the smile that really, really wants to come out. “You seem to be both jock and bugfuck. That happen often?”
“Some,” she says, looking relieved. Like she thought I was going to ask if they’d done it yet. I can tell just by looking at them, they haven’t. “They say it happens in girls occasionally. When I asked, they said it has never occurred in a boy.”
“Never? Who’s they?”
“Employees. Mr. Michaels, our continuing ed teacher. Other post-humans. Members of the Society.”
“You ask them all?”
“I’ve been here a while.”
“That’s interesting.”
“If you say so.”
Jack looks uncomfortable. “You want to get some dinner at the canteen?” he asks.
For a moment I sit there, thinking of all the times I’ve been in cafeterias and community food dispensaries. I think about Ox and Fishkill and Mr. Fingernails and Rollie and all the hard looks and stares and the hungry boys looking to ease their boredom of life by causing pain in the crucible of the incarcerated.
Jack stands waiting, shoulder to shoulder with Ember, leaning into each other.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You sure?”
I raise the hem of my shirt, showing my stomach. “Ever since the Dubrovnik woman stuck me, I just don’t have much of an appetite.”
Pain crosses his face. I don’t know if it’s the memory of what happened in that house or it’s the sight of my scars that causes it.
“Well, I’m in,” Jack says, disengaging his gigantic frame from the girl. I’m sure he has to eat quite often. Looking at his elongated bones makes my legs hurt. I can’t imagine the night pains he’s endured with his body distorting itself like that. “You able to get down on your own, Shreve?”
The girl gives a toothy grin. Look at the feeble bugfuck. He can’t fly.
“Yeah, sure. Might hang out up here for a bit.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll bring you something back.”
I nod. “Thanks. You know, I thought I was gonna bust you out of here. But now I’m here, I think this is where I’m supposed to be. I just wish it had been my choice.”
“I’m glad you’re here, man,” he says, and then they both crouch and launch themselves into the air in a flutter of clothes and rippling wind. It’s hard keeping track of them. I have an instant of worry that the Helmholtz will kick on and they’ll go plummeting to the earth. But it’s not really my place to worry about Jack anymore.
I sit down and lean back in the folding chair and look at the sky again. When I close my eyes, I feel a panic, as though they’ve stuffed me back underground. A panic because I’m on a roof in a strange place. In the dark.
And there’s still the thing sleeping in the East.
I might not have to worry about Jack. But there’s Vig. And Jerry and Booth. And everyone else. The world is full of them.
I cast out my awareness, out over the space/not space, searching for those minds that haven’t been awakened enough to stop the sleepless emanations coming from Maryland
. The only thing I can do here is to shore up the unsuspecting folk who’ll be subsumed by the sea of sleeplessness. It’s not as bad, this far west. But I burn through the populace as quickly as I can, a forest fire of the mind.
I do it for as long as I can until I start feeling the cohesive fatigue that comes from touching the minds of so many souls. Moving through them like wind over a billion heads of wheat swaying in the fields, I flicker, each one taking something out of me. My strength dims. I become diffuse smoke and as massive as the sky. I work through Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls. Thousands and thousands of people I visit. I’m like an invisible Santa Claus you never knew gave you a gift, slipping inside the chimneys of the mind.
I have no sense of time, out in the ether—it could be moments and it could be hours. But finally, I pull back the loosely tethered awareness from the black plains and open my eyes.
Always, in the East, I feel the slumbering beast. It stirs and shifts, massive and invisible. There might be other eyes upon it in these etheric heights, but I cannot sense them, or they me.
It stirs.
THIRTY-TWO
It’s cold now as I climb down. If I fall, I’ll hit the earth with a soft explosion of dust and ash, to be blown to the four corners by frigid wind. Getting back into the dorm room is more difficult than leaving it, and there’s one instant of terror when I lose my balance, teeter.
Hollis is in the room when I come through the window. Tap, our other roommate, is absent.
“Hey.”
“’Sup,” Hollis says. Still trying to be tough.
I move to my bunk—the one above Jack’s, just like back at Casimir—and climb up. Cradle my head.
“So, how’d they get you?” I ask, glancing at his still-bruised face.
“On the way to the gym.”
“They got a gym here?”
“Sure. It’s Montana. It gets cold in the winter, I hear.”
“Where you from?”
“San Bernardino.”
“That in California?”
“Yeah.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen. You?”
“Seventeen. Almost.” I think a bit. “Who did that to you?”
“I don’t know who they were. Couple of guys and a girl.”
“You don’t know why?”
“Jack says they do it to all the noobs. Keep them in line. See what kind of power they got. Might be because of Tap. He doesn’t like me much. He’s a competent flyer, but they paired him with me. I’m having trouble with training. Like Jack.”
“So both you and Jack are having trouble? Like, how?”
“Tap doesn’t listen to me when I try to help him. He can’t lift me or doesn’t want to. Jack doesn’t even try.”
“They had you paired with both of them?”
“Yeah. For just a little while. Neither of them wants to be handcuffed to a bugfuck.”
“That’s right. You said you could influence time.”
“Sorta. The perception of it.”
“Do it to me.”
“What? Right now?”
“Sure.”
“It’s better when it’s outside.”
“Why?”
“Easier to notice the change.”
“Show me.”
He gets out of bed, takes off his watch, and hands it to me. “What time is it?”
I look at the watch. “Little after six.”
He smiles and pauses. “You sure about that?”
“Yeah. See?” I hold up the watch, notice the face now reads after eight.
His hair’s wet now, and he’s changed into warm-ups. Like he’s ready for bed in a blink of an eye. But oof, my body aches. I’ve been still too long.
“That’s a neat trick.”
“Thanks. Probably can’t do it again to you. It’s especially hard to affect other telepaths.”
That makes me think about time. “How long have you been here?”
“Two weeks.”
“So, when we met in the testing, you were fresh off the boat.”
“Pretty much.”
“That was two weeks ago?”
“Almost. You said in the testing that they had you in a bunker. What was that like?”
“Dark. And now it seems like it was longer than I thought.”
“You lost track of time.” He laughs. Hollis does a good job covering up his fear and nervousness. Where Jack used to go all still, Hollis gets loose. Familiar. But he’s scared. Doesn’t take a mind reader to see that. Suddenly, the laughter dies. “They want us scared,” he whispers.
“Yes.”
“They’re doing something to keep us from sleeping.”
“You can’t sleep?”
“I can sleep, but it’s not restful, if that makes any sense.”
“They’re not doing that.”
“Then who is?”
“Something else.” I wave my invisible antennae in the air. No Helmholtz. I slip out and settle on Hollis like a vapor. No Rider, and his consciousness is as tremulous and wavering as a flower blooming in the snow.
I slip behind his eyes and light the match head of his consciousness. He blinks.
You should be able to sleep now, I say inside his mind.
How did you do that?
I waggle my fingers at him. Magic.
He smiles, but it only lasts a moment. Emotions stall out on his face. He frowns, puzzling things out. Then, kind of sheep-ishly, he smiles, a bewildered yet elated look.
Holy crap! I’m talking to you with my mind? Does this happen all the time?
I laugh. No, you’re the first. But you shouldn’t have any trouble sleeping now.
So, everything that’s happened recently?
What’s happened? They’ve had me incommunicado.
“War. Terrorism. Mass murders. You name it.” Hollis looks surprised at the sound of his own voice.
What’s causing this?
It’s something sleeping in the East. An entity. Alien.
“Get out of here. Like from outer space? Area 51?”
“More like the darkness between stars. Bodiless.” How do I tell him it’s the mythical dragon? That it doesn’t require form to exist?
He stands and winces a little. His wounds are still sore.
“They must’ve really worked you over.”
“I think I broke a rib.”
Wordlessly, we’ve agreed to stick with our normal voices, incarcerado within convention.
“You want to go get something to eat?”
“Not hungry.”
“Okay.” He sits down and then stretches out on his bunk. “I’ll just hang here with you.”
Hands cradled behind my head, staring up at the ceiling, I drift off for a moment. I don’t want to close my eyes, but it’s been a big day.
He’s reading a paperback when I come out of my doze. The ether is still open, quiescent, and I when I ask Hollis where the restroom is, he tells me, stifling a yawn.
I trudge down the empty hall, stretching, and enter the communal bathroom.
I never even sense them until they spill out of the stalls.
My body compresses as if clutched in a great fist, bones creaking and stressing, my air gone. A wolfish dark boy darts forward and cracks me in the eye, rocking my head back and sending bright stars and imaginary tweety birds whistling in circles around my head.
When I regain my senses—still can’t breathe—I see the other wee brutes stepping forward from stalls. It’s my old friend Solomon Blackwell—the guy I bum-rushed in New York as he sat behind the wheel of a van—and he’s got his hand up and out in a grasping pose, as if clutching a torch. Our gazes meet and he twists his hand and I feel my body twist in response.
Neat trick.
A battered metal trash can whips across the bathroom with a motion from a dark-complexioned boy. It makes a dull hollow bong as it caroms off my skull.
Blackwell is kind enough to let me fall with the blow. I do so with all the g
race of a drunken, poleaxed steer.
When I can get my mouth working, I say, “You must be the ladies of the Welcome Wagon. Not really in the market for any Tupperware.” My face hurts pretty good. The warm red sticky stuff courses down from my forehead and makes my left eye, the outraged blooming one, hard to open.
These idiots stare at me like I’m speaking Mandarin. Hell, maybe I am. Blackwell chucks his head like a horse tossing against the reins, and I fly up and smack the ceiling with an ooof. Come flapping back to the ground, an over-cooked steak dropped from a skillet to splat on the floor.
“Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?” he says, like he’s the star of some crap B movie.
It sounds like a rhetorical question so I don’t bother answering. My mouth is full of blood anyway.
I can’t see very well, or at all really, so the shuffling and slapping sound I hear must be these assholes standing over me and performing ritual hand gestures. High fives all around.
One of them kicks me so hard in my crotch I can taste my own dick.
“And that’s for Glouster. You do not mess with Red Team.” Glouster must be the poor sap whose testicles I punted in the elevator while fleeing Jerry’s. Hard to believe Glouster would hold such a grudge, that was so long ago. I’ve been to the underworld and back since then.
I try to get out into the ether to stop them, take one of them over and flail into the others, turning their bodies traitorous. But everything spins, pitching and yawing. Blood fills my eyehole, pools in my ear. Drips across the bridge of my nose and onto the tile floor of the bathroom.
The last thing I hear before everything goes dark is “Look! He’s pissed himself!” Followed by cheery laughter.
Hell, yeah, I pissed myself. That’s what I came to the bathroom to do, anyway.
The Shibboleth Page 22