The Conformity

by John Hornor Jacobs

  I duck as the body of some poor soul wings its way past me in a fleshy smudge, spattering my face with something wet and distinctly human. The stench is horrific.

  The soldier lurches forward, filling all the sky. It yawns over me, thousands of mouths screaming JOIN US in every language known to humankind. Its shadow falls over me and suddenly the tower shakes, lurches as the torso of the soldier crashes into it, human bodies spilling away from its central mass like some protoplasmic fluid, rushing toward me.

  Things fall apart.

  The tower falls.

  I fall with it.

  five

  I’ve fallen before, and there’s release with the plummet, like a kite with its string cut. Except that I never seem to fall up. Time congeals in freefall. Our monkey brain doesn’t know how to deal with the reality of imminent death, so it enters into a stilled brain-time where events play out like film in extreme slow motion, the mind races so fast. There’s a frisson between how fast consciousness moves and the seeming slowness of the world it perceives.

  And I have time now, enough time for memory in the plummet. Jack cannot save me. Tap and Casey are gone with the rest of the Irregulars, locked in the lethargy of the real world. Beautiful Danielle, hair an inkstroke behind her. I’m beyond all of that now.

  Now I have time to think of days gone by, of warm summers when all the world was new and two brothers sat together in a field, brilliant with light and teeming with dancing motes rising into the air. A field. Heat. The smack of a (stolen) baseball into a (secondhand) glove.

  Time to remember the press of flesh, the warm mouth of love, sharp with sugar and cinnamon and fluoride as Coco’s tongue finds mine (her father would kick my ass).

  Time enough to flip lazily, suspended in thick opaline air, the truck out of control and tumbling, crunching, shattering. The truck I’d stolen earlier, a million beads of blood filling the air and slowing to a crawl in their bestilled trajectories.

  Time to remember Booth, my friend, the smell of the man, the warmth of his smile and the humor of his enmity as he takes me in a bear hug.

  There’s all the time in the world.

  Time enough for my monkey brain to give one last mortal spasm and cast the dice.

  Time enough to leave my body and touch the minds of all those surrounding me. Time enough to know Jack once more, and Bernard—thrumming with rhythm. To feel the craggy contours of Tap’s recalcitrant mind, the sharp steel of Danielle. The strength of Casey. Time enough to touch Ember and Blackwell and Solomon and Galine and Chakrabarti and Holden and everyone else.

  Time enough to take their light to me, like some wheeling astronaut gathering up stars.

  Time enough for the shibboleth to thrum within me.

  And expand.

  I rise.

  Cruciform, I rise.

  I’ve done this before, taking the power of others, their extranatural abilities. But it’s different this time, I know. Something of it lives within me.

  I am an arrow, stilled in flight.

  I rise, and the clamor of their minds is a din I cannot put aside. Surprise, fear, hatred, disgust—all these emotions churn and roil in the ether like noxious vapors pouring off each mind.

  I open my eyes.

  It has all snapped back to speed and the water tower crashes to the ground below me with a cacophonous din, raw and thunderous and echoing, blotting out all other sensations for a moment. Sight dims, the feel of wind and cold, the smell of the dead and the still-living—all of it fades as the sound of the crashing water tower erupts and rises in a shock wave.

  The Conformity soldier falls too—Jack and the Red Team have done their work, taking out its legs—so that when the blasted thing hits, it spreads like oil, bodies thick and greased and wet spilling out over the land in a bloody slick.

  I inhabit two worlds now, the world of the flesh, the meatspace, and the world of ether, of incandescent light, souls like embers, souls like match flames.

  The lights of thousands flicker and die.

  The soldier is no more.

  My eyes burn, sightless and unblinking. Tears hot and steady pour from me.

  I can only sob with the darkness.

  six

  Shreve! The other soldier, it’s coming!

  I tear my gaze away from the blood-grimed wreckage of the Conformity soldier. It’s hard to bear, that amount of death.

  Flight is new to me, and for a moment I wish for the monkey-brained slow-time imminent death had gifted me, so I could exult in the new sensations on my own terms.

  Incarcerado no more.

  But there’s too much ruin to feel joy.

  Blackwell, accompanied by Ember and Galine, come to hover near me, noses streaming blood. Seems I had the volume up to eleven.

  They stare at me in wonder. Ember, wind altitude ruffling her hair, moves closer, reaches out to touch my shoulder, wide-eyed and unbelieving. “How can you—”

  I am you and you are me, I send, and she starts. I have a near uncontrollable urge to giggle. Though we always disagree.

  “How the hell can you do that? It’s incredible!” Blackwell’s shouting. I get the feeling he shouts a lot. He looks distracted, though. He touches the receiver in his ear. “Roger that.” He grimaces, looking down at the remains of the Conformity soldier below us. “The Director says we’re to fall back to Bunker H. All Society personnel are safe, blast doors locked. We fall back so we don’t kill all the poor motherfuckers in that damned—”

  He points. The first soldier, the one that set off the alarms and roused us all, slouches toward us, coming up the valley, sundering trees with great creaks and crashes and booms.

  Right. Enough people have died today, I send.

  Jack appears beside me, hands out, keeping aloft on a flurry of micro-bursts.

  “Holy shit, man. Holy shit—”

  “Right, bud. I’m flying.”

  “How’d you work that?”

  “The shibboleth.”

  “What?”

  Oh, I’ve never told him about it.

  “It’s the password, Jack. This thing we all share.”

  “This isn’t a Starbucks. What the fuck, Shreve?”

  Ember laughs but keeps her gaze locked on me.

  “The devil got his angel wings,” Galine says, her mouth twisted into an inscrutable sneer. It could be directed at me or directed at herself. I don’t know. I do know she’ll never forgive me for the first time I hijacked her extranatural ability.

  Tap is with us now, making circles around us floaters because, like a shark, his talent doesn’t tolerate stillness or rest. “Get your asses in gear. The Director—”

  Shreve. His voice is cool, cold even. Armstead Lucius Priest speaks directly into my mind. Please get them back to the bunker, posthaste. We shall not try to destroy the second soldier. I cannot countenance even more blood on my hands.

  I want to say, We do what we have to do, but instead I just say, Yes.

  “Okay, Bunker H. Let’s go. Fall back.”

  The Conformity soldier bellows, SERVE US. WORSHIP US.

  We fly.

  seven

  Landing is trickier than I thought it would be. In the air, it’s hard to judge speed; the earth moves beneath you but doesn’t rush up to meet you and smack you around. As I hit the ground, my ankles and knees crumple with the momentum and I’m able to pull myself into a forward roll.

  That’s gonna smart, man-child, Bernard says as he trots over to help me up.

  More extranaturals, members of the Red and Green Teams, land lightly around us, most of them staring at me openly, some in wonder, some with looks less wonder-ous. The word I’m looking for still ends in -ous, but it starts with murder.

  I can’t understand why they’d be jealous, but the more I know about people, the less I understand. Army troops and assorted team members—clad in merry green and red colors—make a ring around the bunker opening, weapons and armaments pointed at the source of the infernal noise, the crash
ing of trees, the moaning.

  SERVE US. WORSHIP US.

  For a moment I wonder, if we prostrated ourselves before the giant thing, would it let us be? Would it take a percentage of us and let the rest go?

  The blast doors stand open, fourteen inches thick and made of dull gray metal, revealing Armstead Lucius Priest. He’s had a bloody nose recently. Negata stands near him. No sign of blood on his face. I file this away for questioning later. When Negata’s gaze meets mine, he gives me a small inclination of the head, which, for Negata, is like a high five and fist bump together.

  Priest steps forward, limping, his face a cowl of distress. Concern, maybe. Fury? Though he’s wearing Quincrux’s meatsuit, I can’t yet read his expressions.

  “Come!” he says, voice raised. “We must get inside.”

  Every instinct I have is not to go back into that hole. Hiding in a hole doesn’t sound to me like the optimum response to the Conformity soldier. But I don’t want to have to kill all the poor souls caught up inside that monstrosity.

  The reality of what I’ve done is beginning to become clear.

  Twenty thousand people.

  Something about Priest hardens, as if he can read my thoughts. “Do not think upon it!” he says. “If you brood on it, your mind will break. You have done what you should have to protect yourself, your friends. The future of our world. We are the last with the ability to fight it.” He points at my chest with his cane. “Come inside! It is almost upon us!”

  And at that moment there’s a loud crash and boom. Some of the Army remnants and extranaturals respond with another chatter of gunfire, punctuated by the intermittent thwup thwup of grenades being launched. I can see Tap and Danielle emptying their weapons while Jack stands, arms out, hands splayed, ready to go explodey at a moment’s notice. Beyond our small defensive circle guarding the blast doors, three boulders rise from the ground and one large log levitates, and I can feel in the ether the stress and strain of all the individual shibboleths.

  Davies yells, “It’s here! Letsgoletsgo—” and all my ability to make a decision is taken as Bernard, Danielle, and Casey sweep me inside the blast doors and to the back of the motor pool garage, near the elevator. We turn, breathless, to face the closing steel doors, but they seem too slow, far too slow.

  Framed beyond the doors, an angry spray of pines disintegrates into kindling as one massive leg swings into view. JOIN US. WORSHIP US. The hideous sewage smell of the soldier blasts into the confines of the bunker’s garage. Bernard pitches over and vomits onto the concrete floor, and he’s joined by Army guys and team members so that the stench of bile mixes with the awful miasma of the soldier.

  The Conformity soldier bellows and moans with its thousands of mouths. It knows we’re here, hiding in this hole like some frightened woodland creature.

  Suddenly the view between the doors is of naked, straining, ichor-streaked bodies, each mouth screaming JOIN US SERVE US WORSHIP US.

  Jack leaps to the opening, hands held out in front of him. The shock wave that erupts from him drives forward with the strength of his anger. By the time it hits the wall of flesh filling the bunker’s door, it’s moving at a thousand miles per hour. It rips through flesh, liquefying it, blasting everything—the abandoned Jeeps, shattered remnants of trees, the bodies of the subsumed, everything—out and away from the bunker and down the mountainside.

  The soldier bellows and moans as the blast doors clang shut.

  BOOM. BOOM.

  We pant in the fluorescent-lit space of the bunker motor pool. Ember goes to Jack, touches him lightly on his arm. Hugs him. But even in his embrace, she looks at me. Curious, maybe. I got my devil wings.

  It’s silent for a long while except for the booms of the soldier assaulting the door.

  Once, when I was just a snot-nosed kid, a car plowed into the school bus I was on. Not too much damage, but a lot of kids banged heads or smacked their faces on the front seats. Afterward, waiting for the other school bus to come pick us up, we stood on the side of the road, all our lunchboxes in grubby little hands, backpacks on our backs, and stared at each other with hushed shock.

  That’s what this is like.

  “Casualties?” Priest asks Davies, who, it seems, is now in command of the remains of the Army. I’d heard rumors about desertion—the US government has moved to NORAD, martial law declared—but now, looking at the ten or fifteen bedraggled soldiers remaining, I can see how far the military situation has eroded.

  “Billings, McKee, Jeffries, Donaldson—we lost contact with them when the second Conformity soldier attacked the tower.”

  Priest nods, grave. “And teams? Losses?”

  “Other than bloody noses and spanking bad headaches—courtesy of Li’l Devil—no. All accounted for,” Blackwell says, glancing at me.

  “And the Irregulars are all here,” Tap says.

  Priest bows his head, thinking.

  BOOM. BOOM. The blows from the soldier shake the earth. Hard to countenance the fact that it’s battering the door with human bodies. The reverberations travel up my legs from the floor. I can feel them in my teeth, my molars.

  “Come, let’s get the majority of you on a lower level,” Priest says.

  “It can huff and puff, but it won’t get through those doors,” Davies says, voice like gravel crunching under car wheels. He’s a salty one—unshaven, craggy, missing only an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.

  Priest stares at him, head inclined—for a moment I’m reminded of Quincrux—and then he nods. “Still, let us get some of them below. Captain Davies, Mr. Blackwell, Mr. Solomon, would you please devise a roster of watch for this level? Equal portions of extranatural and military, if you’d be so kind.”

  All three of them make sounds in the affirmative and trot off to put their heads together.

  “A word, Shreve,” Priest says, placing a pale, soft hand on my shoulder as I moved toward the elevator. “Just a moment.”

  When Jack joins us, Priest opens his mouth to protest until I say, “No, he’s with me. We go together or not at all.”

  Maybe it’s the fact that I’m making rules now. Maybe it’s the dismay at our situation. Maybe his shattered leg—courtesy of Jack almost two years ago now—pains him. Maybe it’s the weight of centuries pressing down on him. Armstead Lucius Priest sighs.

  “Very well,” he says, and he sits down on the bench next to the elevator door, crossing his hands on the head of his cane, to wait for the rest of the soldiers and extranaturals to descend into the bowels of the earth.

  eight

  The elevator car shudders and shimmies in the descent. Priest seems preoccupied with something I cannot discern, though I could probably suss it out if I dared dive into his brainmeats. I don’t. I will not risk it. I fought the Witch. I struggled with Quincrux. I do not know Priest’s strength, and I do not want to.

  As we rock in the elevator carriage, faint booms can be heard as the Conformity soldier throws itself at the mountainside.

  “Mr. Cannon …” Priest frowns. Maybe he’s accessing Quincrux’s memory banks, maybe he’s just unsure what to say. “Shreve. I am most pleased with your development. Indeed, with everyone’s development. It is only in times of adversity that one discovers what one is capable of.”

  I really hate it when one uses the word one when one should just say YOU.

  “One does what one can.”

  “You mock me.”

  “Only a little.”

  He smiles, and damn me if it doesn’t look a little sad. It’s an honest smile, at least, which is more than Quincrux ever gave me.

  “Our lives are strange, are they not?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We know many people who have occupied different bodies.”

  As he says it, I can’t help but think of Moms. She’s always been many people occupying just one body. I can’t seem to hate her anymore.

  “Yeah. Many into one. Like the Conformity.”

  “Yes. You and I,
we contain multitudes.”

  “Legion.”

  “Yes. I am curious, though. How did you manage it?”

  “Manage what?”

  “Your ability to fly. Have you been hiding that ability?”

  “No.”

  Priest rocks with the movement of the elevator. We’re descending far, far into the earth. The air is cool and somewhat wet. If the lights went out, I would scream.

  Weariness descends on me. Suddenly my legs feel weak and my head spins.

  Oh, man, Jack sends. That’s one helluva hangover.

  There’s a bench at the back of the elevator. I sit there, waiting until my head stops spinning.

  “You do not look so well, Shreve,” Priest says, concern in his voice.

  “It’s the letdown. Bernard hit us with a shot of rhythm, and now—”

  “Ah. The aftereffects have begun to set in.” He shakes his head. “Extranatural abilities are wondrous—a higher rung in human development—but the ascent comes at a cost. As in all things.”

  I can only nod and cradle my head in my hands. Jack doesn’t seem to be faring much better.

  “Pardon my curiosity. But in all my long years—and I mean sheaves of years—I have never known any extranatural to develop new powers so late in life.” He shakes his head. “It’s one of the great fallacies of the old to believe that they have experienced it all. I am not immune. This revelation of your undiscovered talent came as a shock to me. And I do not relish shocks.”

  I look at Jack, and he’s got this wary look on his face, like we’re speaking gibberish to each other—which I guess we are. But I wanted him here, so I wink, and I can see him settle.

  Is this guy for real? Jack sends.

  Yeah. He is.

  I don’t like him. He’s too much like Quincrux, Jack concludes.

  He is, but he isn’t. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because some of Booth is in there too.

  Well, if shit goes pervy, I’m blasting him, Jack sends, matter-of-fact. And he will, I have no doubt. The force he released at the Conformity soldier was monumental, like the raw energies of the universe. The anger behind it was equally wild.