And there, on the slope of the mountain, is Priest.
It’s hard to describe the sensation of being perceived in the ether. I have only felt it once before, from the entity that’s causing the Conformity, when it slept. It’s like the sensation of sunlight on skin, a real feeling, as if some sort of psychic particles radiate with Priest’s attention.
Priest becomes aware of me, and I feel it.
Is it time? he asks.
Yeah, boss. We can’t keep this up forever. If you’re gonna do something, it needs to get done.
While the rest of our Society members have evacuated I have been collecting myself. I sometimes feel … disjointed.
If I had shoulders I would shrug, but it’s just my burning shibboleth self. Well, time for contemplating your navel is over. Let’s light this candle.
I get a flash of mirth from Priest, and then his flame, that burning bit of personal combustion that is naught but Priest, throbs and begins to grow.
Shreve, it has been a pleasure coming to know you. You should remove yourself to the heights and watch as you can.
Now it has come to this, he has to get all maudlin on me. Yeah, boss, nice to meet you too. But the idea is to survive, right? That’s the plan.
He chuckles, which is impressive because he has no physical form right now. We are, in essence, just that: essence. And I don’t mean spices. We are souls communicating as only bugfucks can. Mind to mind. But the mind holds dear to the idea of physical space and so landscapes of the mind are created.
Remove yourself now, and bear witness.
What he’s doing deserves recognition, and I’m the only one here to give it.
I will watch, I send. And I will remember. After all, you’ve got whatever’s left of Booth knocking around in there.
I can feel his sadness more than see it reflected in any aspect of his shibboleth form.
Shreve, stay out of trouble, son, he says, and I know it’s Booth speaking. You’re as reckless as the day is long.
He hugged me once, when I was hurt, and made much of my world brighter. I will not forget.
Mr. Cannon, he says now, with a different inflection, colder, more removed. We are not so different, you and I. This has become apparent. But—something twists in the ether and Quincrux is gone.
All the ghosts have said farewell.
Remove yourself, Shreve, and I will begin, Priest says.
With a thought I rise, up and away.
Imagine a stone tossed into a pool. Now imagine that stone detonating with the force of a hydrogen bomb. That’s the intensity of Priest’s telepathic yawp.
It goes up in a release of psychic energy so massive it’s hard to keep conscious with the fierce pressure of it. I’m buffeted by the force. I find my mind spinning, careening out of control, and in the aftermath of the blast part of me in the ether shivers and feels like a tooth’s nerve suddenly exposed to the cold. But then that sensation dies and, far off, in the distance—the pseudo-space of the ether that the bugfuck mind creates—I sense an awareness of what has occurred here.
I worry that he’s expended so much power and effort with the challenge, he won’t have the strength for the fight. But maybe that was his plan, after all. I don’t know.
The Conformity soldier turns its attention toward Priest.
I dash back to my flesh, gasping, becoming aware of the physical world like a man taking the first desperate breath of air after too long under water. Blood bubbles and pops in my nostrils, thick and gummy.
The Conformity soldier stands immobile, knee-deep in Ponderosa pines, its body turning now toward the western mountains that we have just fled. The transport rocks and shudders on its shocks, picking up speed—putting more distance between us and the tower of flesh now arrested in movement.
It groans, desperate, and the timbre of the sound has changed. I hear simultaneously screaming and moaning and all the expulsatory sounds a human body can make. And then the soldier slowly sinks to the earth. It’s not falling to its knees because it has no true knees. Instead the soldier’s body loses shape and condenses in upon itself, forming a ball, a glomerulus of flesh.
Whatever psychic power controlled the Conformity soldier has been drawn by Priest’s challenge. The entity is here now. The dragon from beyond the stars.
The full weight of its scrutiny bears down upon us. My head throbs, and my nose streams blood. It’s like an alarm, the taste of blood, sending my body into overdrive.
What was once the soldier rises again from beyond the tree line, floating into the sky. And the sight of it, no longer shaped in mockery or emulation of human form, gives me an instant of pure, heart-stopping terror. It is a dripping, moaning star, coalesced of misery, despair, and the meat of the malleable human race. Just clay, we are, waiting for something strong enough to shape us into its mold, to suit its purpose. We are infinitesimal—I have always known it—but this piece-of-shit monster has to not only rub our faces in it, it has to wipe its ass with humanity. All of it, all of us, we are nothing to it.
It rises, and as I watch, the transport rocking beneath me, it begins to distend, become oblong.
Shreve, I don’t like this, Casey says.
Bernard yelps, Aw, naw. Naw, naw, naw. I’ve seen this movie.
It’s splitting! Ember yells.
Jack lands beside me on the transport bed. He quickly moves aside and is followed by Tap and Danielle. They look not only exhausted but hypothermic.
The Conformity shifts like an amoeba, and then there are two of them, two globules of flesh instead of one.
Go faster, I send, hoping my panic doesn’t startle Davies into crashing. Everything is happening too fast now for reaction, and no amount of extranatural abilities can help us if we smash into a boulder or a brace of pine trees.
A plane waits for you, Shreve, Priest sends. Go to Bozeman. I will contend with the—
No more.
One of the spheres of flesh begins to rise, floating west, toward the campus and Armstead Lucius Priest. The other begins to move toward us.
Faster! Tap says. It’s not walking anymore!
Working on it, Davies sends. Hold tight.
The transport clanks and rumbles, and the engine shifts to a higher gear and the speed increases. I sink down on my ass and throw my arm across the matte-black cover of the extranatural bomb. It’s a rough ride even though we’re not on a mountain road anymore but an old blacktop, clear of snow. Trees whizz by, blurry and indistinct. Wind tears through the transport bed, and I begin to shiver.
It’s too cold! I’m freezing! Danielle sends, and Ember broadcasts a quick image of teeth clattering and pokey nipples.
The window at the rear of the cab slides open, and Bernard shoves out an overshirt and a military jacket. Climb in if you can, young bucks, he sends. Ho-lee shit. Look at that.
The Conformity has released the second globe to resume its chase. It reshapes itself into the rough, messy semblance of a man while still levitating in the sky. You can only feel horror and terror for so long. Then it’s like watching a volcano erupt—yeah, it’s tremendous, yeah, there’s danger, but ho-hum, my nerves are about shot.
Is this what it means to be shell-shocked?
We’re twenty minutes from Bozeman, Davies sends. Let’s see how much distance I can get between us and it.
Danielle climbs through the transport window as we huddle down in the lee of the cab, where the bed meets chassis. Ember manages to climb through as well, but when Tap goes to push his torso through, they wave him away. Cab’s full.
The newly reformed Conformity soldier lands with a deafening boom and the exhalation of thousands. It’s now half the mass of the previous soldier—only two hundred feet tall rather than four hundred.
But the thing that amazes me is that monsters can continually reinvent themselves: the Conformity soldier has adopted a new form of locomotion, lunging jumps resembling the gait of an astronaut on the moon. Still steaming, still dripping. Still moaning, gibberin
g. But, its mass diminished, it’s moving faster now than it was before.
Despite its vigor we begin pulling away, allowing the flyers outside the cab—Tap, Jack, and yours truly—a moment to catch our breath.
Tap pants, and Jack draws his knees up to his chest. I have something I must witness.
Into the ether.
Back to where I was, in the etheric heights, Priest stands like a naked flame burning in the night.
Everything old becomes new again. It feels like the first time I’ve looked at the awareness of the Conformity itself while in the ether, blazing and burning, like an electric current racing through to the inner eye. I witness the innumerable sparks of the souls it possesses, but beyond that, layered above it, is an emptiness, a void. A vacancy that allows the sparks to flame bright and then die.
The shimmering miasma approaches Priest, standing on the invisible mountainside. Priest’s volume grows as the Conformity approaches, becoming an inferno.
The two are overlaid on top of each other, the towering flame of Priest and the fog of the Conformity, and I sense a great conflict of titanic energies coming together in contest.
And then only the Conformity remains.
twelve
Much of Bozeman lies devastated. It’s a flat, skillet-shaped valley ringed in majestic, snow-crowned mountains. Black smoke rises from multiple locations, and it looks like finger-of-God tornadoes did the jitterbug all around the town—leaving overturned cars and trucks, houses and business reduced to rubble, windows blown out, gouts of gas-main fires licking at the heavens, burning gas stations pluming oily-black columns of smoke into the sky. Sirens but no cops. No fire trucks.
And so very few people.
Most of those folks we see carry weapons. I think back to Priest telling me that this is where the Conformity soldiers gathered the mass they needed to assault the Society’s campus.
These poor people. It’s hard to bear that I—that we—killed thousands of families when the soldier by the water tower fell. They could have lived in these trailers, these little houses. Now they’ll never return.
It looks like a war zone out there, Casey sends.
It is a war zone, toots, Tap sends. Always on the verge of being a tremendous prick, he’s been pushed over the edge by exhaustion.
We make our way past trailer parks and pillbox houses. Down nice streets lined with trees. I notice some drapes being pulled aside, warily.
The beginning of the end, Bernard says, and his normal joviality—joviality even in the face of terror—is gone. He sounds tired and small and frightened.
Davies sends, Priest said a plane will be waiting. The last card he had to play.
You think we should get on a plane? Remember what happened in Maryland? That fighter fell out of the air, Danielle says.
Most likely from pilot error, Davies said. The Conformity affects human flesh, right? Like bugfucks and jocks. It affects only us.
That sounds right, but I don’t know.
Not all extranaturals are like that, Ember sends. Of all of the Irregulars, she’s been a member of the Society the longest. Stonechuckers manipulate the physical world beyond just human bodies, right?
Yeah, Jack responds grudgingly.
That does sound right.
There was a girl once who was a tinkerer. She could do things to technology. Make it fizz out. Drain batteries of their charges. Make computers stop functioning.
What are you saying? I ask.
This thing eats humanity and takes its powers, right? It takes extranatural abilities and then uses them to take over more people.
Bernard says, I feel you. But I don’t like what you’re saying.
So, what’s to say that it can’t take the extranatural abilities of everyone it subsumes? Both overt talent and hidden?
Like some recessive-gene shit? Tap sends.
Maybe.
That’s what Tanzer thought, too, I say. Priest said she thought every person inside the Conformity had some form of extranatural ability. Undeveloped, stunted maybe. But there. Otherwise, why doesn’t it take everyone?
Silence now. It’s almost like I can hear the mental gears clanking and engaging. The Irregular collective chews on this information like masticating a particularly nasty piece of gristle.
It hasn’t stopped the transport, Davies says.
Maybe it’s stupid. It fell for the misdirection, Jack says. The soldiers don’t have good problem-solving abilities. But the Conformity itself?
I remember Quincrux once saying, “I am old and know all the wiles of man.” Not thinking, I let that image slip into that part of my consciousness that I share with these few Irregulars.
That sounds about right, man-child. Bernard’s bonhomie seems forced, overly jovial in the light of this desperate situation. The Conformity is a real bitch.
So we’re cool to take the plane, right? Danielle says.
The transport jumps a curb. The chassis rattles and the engine revs up, going into a higher gear. In the transport bed, Jack, Tap, and I slide on our asses as the vehicle wallows about. I’m thankful when it slides to a stop without tossing one of us from the bed.
I’m having a hard time feeling my hands. Pushing myself into a standing position is painful, and all my currently unincorporated flesh has become crotchety and stiff with the frigid temperature.
The transport is on a snowy, flat area in front of a double ring of razor-wired chain-link fencing—obviously a field kept clear due to security reasons. Beyond the fence I can see piles of dirty snow and the black of tarmac, rows of Quonset huts in the distance. There’s a dull green plane—a C-130—sitting on the vast expanse of the runway.
The collective moaning of the Conformity soldier sounds above the rumbling of the truck and behind us, behind us in Bozeman, I hear the crash and crumble of buildings, the snapping of high-tension wires like guitar-strings. The thunder of explosions. It’s coming. It’s near.
You might want to vacate the bed, Davies says, because I’m going right through that fence.
Tap and Jack don’t have to be told twice. They launch themselves into the sky like rockets. Once I dip my toes in the ether, out of the constant stress and din of the meatspace world, I rise up.
The transport grinds into gear and then barrels off toward the tarmac. It’s moving fast when it hits the fencing, tearing through and bouncing down a drainage gulley and up the other side, slewing sideways in the snow.
Turning, I see the soldier is visible now. It has lost more mass—more people dead—as it wades through the trees and houses, gibbering and bellowing. A few people rise into the air to meet it. It’s swelling its ranks again, adding to its mass. It screams, it wails.
JOIN US. SERVE US. WORSHIP US.
Time to stop dicking around. From above, everything below forms squares, rectangles of muted colors, browns, grays. It’s a drab existence humans live when seen from a bird’s-eye view. I fly away from the soldier, over the white earth, the gray rectangles of parking, the long brown building, the arrayed crosses of planes. The airport is strangely undamaged, but most air travel has been over for weeks.
I fly over the tarmac; it looks like a particularly evil skid-mark on the grimy underwear of the snow-gray runway area, scraped clean by plows. The ass-end of the C-130 is open, the transport parked nearby. Casey and the rest of the Irregulars spill out of the vehicle. Negata moves like a ghost, and I realize, because I haven’t been in contact with him—he isn’t part of the collective mind of our group—I had forgotten he was with us. And maybe that is his ability. Maybe that’s what he wants me to learn. How to be forgettable.
The Conformity soldier bellows, moans. More cracking and snapping of wires. In the distance, past the snowy tracks of the transport, past the ruptured chain-link fence through which we came, beyond the fields, the tree line splits and the soldier thunders into view. It steams and drips.
It’s here, I say to all concerned. Get on the plane.
I land in the transport
bed, next to the extranatural bomb.
Come on, Jack cries. Casey, Danielle, Bernard, and the rest are inside the plane now, and its props begin buzzing, a thick, unbearably loud basso rumble, blotting out the soldier’s weird ululations.
Go! I send, broadcasting a quick image of the C-130 lifting off. I have to trigger the bomb. We need the time.
We’re not leaving without you, Casey says.
I can fly, remember? Just open the cargo doors once you’re up.
The Conformity soldier changes again. The thing loses shape, condensing back into the grotesque huge floating ball of flesh.
Uh, it’s flying now, man, Bernard sends. You best get your ass on board.
I pop open the hatch to the bomb, make sure the genome is firmly in place and not damaged, and press the button. The pink fluid drains into the black box, and I can feel some sort of ozonic field, like the Helmholtz but more intense. Like feedback from radio, at first it’s just static, white noise, but it grows.
Come on, idiot! Tap sends in the equivalent of a psychic shout.
I lift off the troop bed, glancing toward the Conformity. It’s hovering over the fence now, thundering. For an instant I have the impression of thousands of grimacing mouths, thousands of eyes drawn into expressions of rage. The thing is pissed off, and now it’s broadcasting it.
The plane is pulling away, moving fast, the screws of the props hauling it through the air, and I follow, not as fast. I’m numb, my body buffeted by wind so cold it’s hard to breathe.
The plane screams as it ascends, and the Conformity swells and rises to meet it.
There’s a great squelch of static in the ether, the detonation of the bomb. It’s like an invisible grenade. It’s the coagulation of ether into amber, a thick viscous impenetrable solution. And I am caught inside of it.
I know no more.
I can’t tell if I’m dead yet.
My head’s full of wind, a howling cacophonous torrent. I’m falling but not toward the ground. My clothes are ripped and ruffling violently. I’m hanging in the air, even though I’ve been unconscious.
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