Bernard trots over to the workbench by the Jeep. Tap begins pumping gasoline from an oversized drum into a smaller one to top off the transport’s tank. Danielle and Casey rummage through a large mechanic’s toolbox while Jack and I begin removing the canvas covering from the back of the vehicle.
I grab a wrench and begin removing the struts and ribbing of the transport bed as best I can.
“We need to move it, people,” Davies barks. “It’s now one p.m. The day is wearing on, and I do not want to do this in the dark.”
This is a man used to giving orders. A natural at it. And I can see the calming effect that a firm hand has on everyone else. In the end, we’re kids, and despite it all—the extra fingers, the flying, the exploding, the seriously fucked-up childhood-into-adolescences—having an adult in charge eases tensions and provides security.
Check this out, Danielle sends to the group. She wheels a large red box around the front of the derelict Jeep. Plasma cutter. Back up, y’all. It’s my show.
You know how to use that? Tap sends, incredulous.
My mom owns a construction company. I can do any job a man can do. Usually in half the time.
Dayum, girly-girl, Bernard sends. Beautiful and handy. Now that’s a powerful combination. Quick auditory impression of a drum fill ending in a rimshot.
Shut it, Danielle says. But she winks at him. And I don’t even have to peep him to know that his gooey center just got gooey-er.
Danielle wheels the cutter into place, pulls on the protective mask, and goes to work, filling the motor pool with blue flashes of light and the mechanical stink of melted metal.
Smells like a volcano in here, Jack sends.
I help Jack and Tap remove the struts as Danielle cuts them away, while Casey and Bernard get the gear ready for loading. When it’s all complete, we load the transport and stand there looking at one another, as if wondering what’s next. But we all know what’s next.
The Conformity soldier.
“Might as well get this show on the road,” Davies says. He approaches the last keypad lock, taps numbers into its face, and returns to the transport as a yellow light begins to twirl and a buzzing alarm sounds, indicating that the doors are about to roll back. And they do.
Fresh air whips through the crack and sweeps the smoke of the plasma torch away. The mountainside is wreathed in pines, and a wide valley opens below us. Far wider than the narrow gully that’s the home of the campus for the Society of Extranaturals, this valley stretches thirty, forty miles across.
There will be no place to hide out there.
There are times to acknowledge one’s fears, to look them right in the face and claim them, and other times to push them away, deny they exist. The thing is, I wouldn’t be so absolutely terrified if it was zombies, or an apocalypse of vampires, or nuclear war, or almost anything other than the loss of one’s individuality into that giant, towering monstrosity.
Or worse, the loss of these people. People I care about.
There it is. Can’t hide it. Can’t push it away.
My bowels are watery and my legs weak. But Davies clambers into the cab of the transport, and Negata joins him. Casey and Bernard huddle in the bed—now our makeshift landing area. The ignition growls and the engine ratchets into gear, belching diesel fumes into the air.
Let’s go, Davies sends. I’m amazed at how quickly he’s taken to the telepathic communication, but the man is a veteran. I doubt much fazes him. Shreve, now’s the time to do your thing, he says.
The transport takes off, out the double blast doors and down the gravel mountainside road, leaving Tap, Jack, Danielle, and me standing in the opening.
You can do this, man? Jack asks.
I just nod.
Well, there’s no time like the present, Danielle says, and she chucks a grenade into the launcher of the M14 she holds and launches herself into the air.
Come on, noob, Tap says. I can’t wait to see you wallow about up here with the big boys.
Big girls! Danielle sends. I get a quick image of Tap in drag.
Jack and Tap rise quickly, the speed of their passage making their clothes riffle. Soon they’re little black smudges against the wispy cirrus clouds that streak the afternoon sky.
It’s cold out here. I shiver.
Now it’s up to me. I’m alone on the bosom of the mountain.
The sky waits for me.
Before, it was a matter of desperation. Then that intractable part of me, the base part, would not give up life, and somehow it caused the shibboleth, this strange ability of ours, to shift and grow within me. Like the Grinch’s heart growing five sizes too big.
I’ve become so much larger on the inside. And so much smaller on the outside. I feel like I’m shrinking.
You’ll need to do your best to cover your ears, I say to them all.
What? Ears?
Your mental ones, at least. It’s about to get ugly.
What do you mean?
I close my eyes, blotting out the queries and exclamations.
Darkness of my own making.
Something happens then that I do not expect. The shibboleth surges within me, as if it’s a living thing and I am just its vessel. My eyes open.
When I go into the ether, it seems to lock to my body in relationship to everything else. Before, in the ether, there never seemed to be any logic to space and my location in it, but there’s a twist now, and with my inner eye I can see the bright flames of the Irregulars in the troop transport rattling down the mountain, left and right and left and right, making the switchbacks on the craggy and winding road.
Above me I see the sparks of Danielle and Tap and Jack.
I turn, both my body and my shibboleth self, and stare westward, where we left the Conformity soldier battering the doors to Bunker H.
It’s there, the towering accumulation of human flesh. Burning like a pillar in the mind of some demented god—and maybe that’s what it truly is, the trials of some deity sent here for us to endure.
I will not have that.
Fuck him.
I reach out and touch Jack, Danielle, Tap. Lightly. I re-familiarize myself with them, their gifts, their strengths. Their loves and losses. They are the tethers that keep me whole. I am the conduit for their lifeforces. For their own burning embers.
In my mind, I rise above the mountain into the ether. And my body obeys. I see with two sights, that of the waking world and that translucent burning realm of the shibboleth.
The Conformity soldier stills. Wind fills me. The howl of wind and surge of blood are my companions, whispering Shrrrreeeve Shreeeeve. Shreeve.
Into the arteries of air. Into the sun I rise. I let all pretense fall away to nothing. I open my hands and let the pain and loss and desperation of all existence fill me and burn bright.
I incandesce as a star.
“Come and get me, you son of a bitch!” I yell, and the whole expanse of ether shakes with the force of my voice.
And the Conformity comes.
ten
It moves quicker than you’d think, that city on the hoof. There’s a tremendous boom and the thing is clambering up and over the mountain like some ooey-gooey misshapen billy goat. In mere moments its torso peeks over the ridgeline, and the fucker bellows with a thousand mouths, JOIN US. SERVE US.
Jack and Danielle are by me now, hanging in the air like bits of flotsam in the crystal clear currents.
That’s one ugly mofo, Tap sends as he sweeps forward in a tight, aggressive arc. Never stops, that one. Where are you leading it?
Away from campus. Into the valley so we can maneuver.
Jack gives a mental snort and says, You gotta start thinking like a flyer. All you got to do is gain altitude and the playing field opens up.
I got that, I say, but I’m not here to punt a football. I’m here to lead that thing away. You gotta put the bait in the water.
The Conformity soldier bellows again, an agonized multiform wail, vast soundscapes of pain
and misery. It’s standing on top of the ridge, and then it contorts, as if gravity is collapsing it upon itself. Contracting.
Oh no, Jack sends as the Conformity stretches its body out, lengthening and launching itself into the air.
The ether echoes and thrums with the telekinetic exertion of the soldier. Jack and Danielle dash away like shooting stars. Tap arcs downward in a reckless and masterful trajectory over and through the trees and rocks of the mountain.
The Conformity fills the sky above me, descending. At the last possible moment, I jerk myself away from where I hang, particulate in the air. It’s almost a mental exertion for me now, rather than a physical one, moving in space. I move myself in the ether like a dashing thought and my body, the vessel I inhabit in meatspace, moves in response.
The soldier lands with a thunderous crash on the ground, displacing air in a hurricane-force gale scented with the stench of shit, piss, blood, jizz. Like a cloying fog.
WORSHIP US. JOIN US.
The sound is so loud and so near. The vibrations of the impact shudder through my body, liquefy my innards. The Conformity soldier raises the dripping, steaming conglomerate arm—so amazingly fast—and swings at me. I spew hot bile into the air in an arc but move away, barely in time.
Go, Shreve! Go! It’s coming after you! Casey sends, urgent and intense. I can picture her face, drawn and worried. I send a quick reassuring image—a piece of cake, though hunger is the last thing I feel—and fly away, out over the valley, the soft rolling white hills and fields asleep beneath snow. It’s cold now.
You need a little spring to your step, Shreve, Bernard sends. A quick flurry of beats, images of hands, the wondrous jumble of sixteenth notes trilling up the scale and back down, and my heart spasms in my chest and the rhythm of haste fills me. I’m panting in the frozen Montana sky, my breath exploding from my mouth in skirls of vomit-reeking steam, ripped away by the wind.
You see Peter Pan and his Lost Boys floating about, hung like perfect ornaments on strings, and that’s not what it’s like at all, flying. It’s a desperate submersion into fear and dizziness because the human body, crowned by that good ole monkey brain, has no frame of reference for the sensations pouring torrentially into your nervous system due to floating three hundred feet in the air. Falling without falling. Falling with no consequence. And maybe we are just like Peter Pan, immortal and ageless, and it’s just living on the ground that kills us by degrees. I don’t know. But flight is monumental fear without end, vertigo stretched into infinite configurations and permutations.
But I’m only hazarding my body, and it truly is a small thing, after all.
My tongue feels like a raccoon wiped its ass with it, but I don’t let that delay me from moving away from the bellowing tower of meat. I dash east, fast as I can, swimming in the airstreams.
The Conformity soldier follows. Boom boom. Boom. Each step punctuated by the cracking of stone and the destruction of trees.
Slow it down, Shreve, Davies sends. The damned thing is right on our ass!
I had forgotten those in the transport. Looking toward the earth and the spray of trees wreathing the snowy mountain’s foothills into the valley, I spy the green Army vehicle trundling down another series of switchbacks, taking them as quickly as possible, but still far too slowly. Snow and ice sit in clusters where the trees keep the roads in shadow for most of the day. It’s treacherous driving. The soldier will be on top of them at any moment.
JOIN US. SERVE US, it moans, and now I feel the tug of its psychoactive ability. It’s strong, so strong, like some ungodly tractor beam tugging at the meat of my body. The Conformity has sucked in thousands, hundreds of thousands—I’ve seen it myself—but now, now that its attention is focused on me, it’s hard to bear the scrutiny. I am a morsel in its one-mind-from-many. I am a spark to be taken inside the inferno. I am desired, yet I am infinitesimal in its sight. Was this what Negata wanted me to feel? Was this what he wanted me to understand? That I’m nothing?
In the ether, the Conformity soldier’s gravity is like a telepathic wind, a sinkhole where all the lights of humanity are drawn into a ball, become crushed by their own titanic mass, and turn inward, imploding into a black hole.
It wants us. It calls to us with its terrible powers. But we are nothing.
So strong.
As hard as I try to get away, I remain still in meatspace and the ether. I cannot move, and the soldier comes closer.
Now’s the time to use those guns, if you got them. Slow that bastard down, Davies calls.
Ember responds, raising her weapon and firing, hair streaming behind her in a wild mess. But it is a struggle.
Yelps of outrage and fear come to me from the Irregulars’ minds. Straining against the inexorable pull of the thing, language deserts us, and I have flickering glimpses out of their eyes, and I feel them looking out of mine. Frantic gesticulations and grunts and exclamations, but we are like ghosted images laid one on top of another. Jack whirling, falling, making countless explosions of anger to push himself away. Tap locked in an invisible stalemate. Danielle holding herself still in the air while still trying to raise her gun. Ember fires and chucks a grenade into the launcher’s chamber and fires again, but the stress of holding herself away from the draw of it is agonizing. I can feel it. I’m in their minds, all of them, simultaneously.
I could make this whole yard of boys kill each other, Quincrux had said, so long ago. Gleefully.
We are becoming a collective, a linked entity in our own right, to fight the pull of the monstrous gravity of the soldier. Through Casey’s eyes, I see Negata in the bed of the troop transport heft a RPG to his shoulder. He seems calm and unaffected with the struggle, the slight tug of his lip downward into a grimace the only indication he’s doing something abhorrent—attempting murder.
Things slow. Bernard half falls toward the truck bed, alarm written in broad strokes across his normally genial face. Casey crouches on the wheel bed, grasping the edge with her phantom hand so hard the metal catches and dimples in a squeal. The explosion of smoke is just beginning to pour out of the back of the long tube that Negata holds, as the metal needle-nose of the rocket detaches and lances forward.
The Conformity’s stomach explodes in a fireball. Charred remains of bodies fall from it like ash tumbling from an urn’s mouth.
The fierce pull of the soldier ebbs, dies. For a moment we’re loose from its terrible gravity. The edges of the creature become muddy, indistinct, as if the center no longer holds. It bellows, a rough indistinct sound. It staggers but does not fall.
Go, go! Bernard sends. I do not want that fugly mofo to fall on us.
For a long moment the soldier simply remains still, as if collecting its wits.
The transport gains some distance, makes a turn onto a straightaway that looks as if it spans a mile, and I get a flashing image of whipping wind and trees whizzing by from Casey.
Shreve, move away. Away from the transport, away from the campus. Over here! Jack sends, and I spot him moving in a blur south, away from the truck’s path.
JOIN US. SERVE US, the soldier gibbers, stepping forward, each step spanning a hundred yards. Boom.
Here we go again, Danielle says.
eleven
It becomes a clumsy, airborne dance. Me jabbing the soldier in the psychic testicles with a chopstick, waiting for it to get all pissy, and then fighting the suck of its telekinetic gravity long enough for one of the team to kick it in the gut with a grenade or RPG. Rinse and repeat.
Now it’s just a waiting game. A war of attrition.
If we kill the “brain” extranaturals in the thing’s groin, it’ll all come tumbling down, Casey sends. You said it’s linking to the main Conformity back east there?
Hard to explain the connection to the Conformity. It’s slaved to it, like a puppet, I send. But we don’t want it to fall.
Tap grimaces. I can feel his facial muscles tightening. It’s almost as if we’re all having each other’s feelings,
emotions.
You want to kill it? Jack asks.
We’re gonna run out of ammo eventually. And we’re killing them, anyway. Each step, each blast it takes, people die. It’s MADE OF PEOPLE, for chrissakes! Ember says.
I shake my head. No. We have to try to keep it whole until Priest is ready. He’s going to try to take it over. To save who we can.
Tap’s got an angry set of shoulders. But his lips are blue, and he’s shivering. Bernard’s infectious biorhythms have ebbed, and now fatigue is setting in. I feel it in my bones and see it in all of their faces. Casey’s face is taut, pale. Danielle’s is a mask—she won’t admit to exhaustion, even to herself. Jack hugs his long, narrow torso. But in Ember there’s a fury building, and I can feel that invisible pressure like water in a hose, blood in a tick.
Flying takes concentration and effort. We can’t take much more of this without deep-sea wetsuits, a good meal, and some fucking hot cocoa.
Priest! I send, broadcasting my words into the ether like a kid doing a cannonball into a placid pool. We can’t keep this up forever!
Jack winces and Ember says, Watch out there, trumpet boy. I don’t need another bloody nose.
I descend from the sky, toward the troop transport racing along a tree-wreathed, snowy road. Landing in the moving bed is harder than I thought—I have to gauge my forward movement with the truck’s and hope it doesn’t slew left or right as it hits a patch of snow or ice. I have a vertiginous moment when I think I’m going to overshoot the wooden slats of the bed and bounce off the cab’s roof. I make it, but only barely, catching myself with my hands on the roof, keeping my body from slamming into the back of the cab.
No answer from Priest.
I send my awareness out into the ether, abandoning all conscious inhabitation of my body. I move across the mountain and miles back over the etheric darkling plain, where a trail of blazing soul-flames moves like a stream, trickling down a path. A few embers float above and around the stream, and I realize this must be the Red and Green Teams, escorting the evacuating population of the Society for Extranaturals campus. They’re almost at the end of the valley at the paved access road, and then, with luck, it’s a quick jaunt to Old Highway 10.
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