My God, Shreve, wake up! I can’t hold on anymore!
Casey. Above me, the ass end of the C-130 is open, the Irregulars huddled inside.
She’s got me in the palm of her invisible hand. Her arm has grown long, indeed.
It hasn’t been much time, a minute or two. Looking behind me, I can see the airport rapidly retreating from view, and the Conformity hanging in the air, motionless.
Thank you, Hollis. Thank you, my friend.
You are a hero. You saved us.
I go into the ether again, dangling on an invisible thread. There are strange echoes and vibrations there, in the space-not-space of the shibboleth world. I can only think that it’s because of the detonation of the extranatural bomb, but there’s something more.
I don’t have time to investigate. The wind is brutal, we’re traveling so fast, like swimming in a pressure-washer stream. I feel as though my face will be peeled away from my skull at any moment, leaving my skull slicked with blood, the flesh of my face and cranium flapping behind me like a grotesque hoodie. Until the moment I get inside the plane’s cargo hold the sensation increases and then … cessation of wind.
I might be deaf now. I can hear nothing.
It’s moving again! Danielle sends, urgent and terrified. It’s moving fast.
I’d spin the plane into a tizzy if it could hear my beats, Dani, Bernard sends.
An idea prickles in the back of my mind.
Can you spin a slow beat? Make the Conformity slow down?
Don’t know, he says in my mind, very slowly. From where we stand at the back of the cargo hold, the mesh webbing ruffling with the suck of our passage and the howl and buzz of the propellers, it’s easier for us all to go into our shared headspace—to blot out the overwhelming sensations from the real world. I need some contact with it. Eye contact, you know, always worked before. But that was with people. Real folks, not that—
He stops. The plane is really ascending, at thirty-five, forty-degrees, and it feels like we’re going straight up in the air because the back cargo door shows no view of sky, no hint of blue. All we see is a bird’s eye view of the snow-covered mountaintops and dark green forested ravines of the Rocky Mountains.
We hit a spot of turbulence, and I’m nearly thrown from the plane. I scuttle over to the nylon webbing where Ember, Jack, and the rest of the Irregulars have latched on, white-knuckled. Casey stands free, no doubt holding on to a bulkhead with her invisible arm.
I can help you, Bernard. I can get its attention.
Radio silence.
Eventually, he sends. Don’t know if I want that damned thing peeping me, you know?
I’m about to argue, but the plane levels out and the cargo hold begins to close. I don’t want to lose sight of the Conformity, but when the hatch shuts all the way, the cessation of noise other than the muted thrumming of the props is like a balm. I’m beginning to be able to think again.
“Why’d the pilot shut the door?” I ask, using my real voice. In the still air of the cabin, I’m beginning to realize how cold I am. My hands are almost blue, and my teeth begin chattering uncontrollably. Shivers rack my body.
“You look like frozen cat shit, Shreve,” Tap says, and he takes off his jacket and throws it at me. It’s so warm to the touch, it almost scalds me. I pull it over me, half lying on the mesh and curvature of the airplane’s bulkhead. Exhaustion washes over me.
“We’re picking up speed,” Davies says, and I realize that must be true, now that the cargo hold door is shut. “I’ll go talk with the pilot, see what’s up.”
I close my eyes.
I must have passed out, because when I wake, I feel warm all over. Jackets cover me and there’s an arm thrown over my chest and someone delightfully soft fully pressed along the side of my body.
Don’t get any ideas, Shreve, Casey says in my mind.
About what?
She ignores that. You were freezing. We worried that you were going into hypothermia. We had to heat you up somehow and body heat was the best bet. We drew straws and Bernard lost.
So Bernard and I spooned, and I wasn’t awake to enjoy it?
I get a mental snort of mirth from her. He refused, and you looked like you were going to die.
So …
So, I saved your ass again, boy-o.
Thanks. A thought occurs to me. I start, halfway sitting up. She pulls me back.
The Conformity?
“Still coming,” Ember says, and I notice she’s standing by us. I can’t help but wonder if she’s been eavesdropping on our conversation. The walls are breaking down, and sometimes, when I close my eyes, I find myself dislocated for just an instant, looking out from someone else’s eyes.
Jack clears his throat. “It’s following, but with the hatch door closed, we’re outpacing it for the time being.”
We can get to Oregon, maybe, before the fuel runs out. The pilot is pushing the plane as hard as he can, Davies says, and I get a long look at the cockpit through his eyes. The pilot, a lean, pockmarked little man with oversized hands and bright green eyes, sits near him, wearing a flight suit. He’s talking, flipping switches and tapping gauges. Then the image is gone and I’m back among the Irregulars. And Negata. He’s sitting quietly by the bulkhead door, buckled in, eyes closed. He seems perfectly at rest, unfazed by everything that’s occurred.
“How long was I out?” I ask.
“Twenty, thirty minutes,” Tap says. “Napping on the job.”
“Nice. Thanks for the jacket,” I say, and I mean it. I don’t really like Tap, and he doesn’t really like me. And that’s fine. Not every meal has to be delicious. Not every person has to be my friend. But I respect him.
There’s something happening here, and I need time to figure it out. All I want to do is lie here, bask in Casey’s warmth, away from wind and cold. But I have to look. On the etheric heights we fly when I open myself up to the shibboleth world overlaid upon ours. And there, the darkness is pinpricked with thousands of clustered lights, following, over the dark fields and spaces.
JOIN US, it says in one voice. ALL IS ONE. WE/I WILL BE WORSHIPPED AND SET IN THE HEAVENS AS A STAR.
The force of its scrutiny is like a tether drawing me to it. All of its telepathic power is focused on me, and I can feel the vast expanses of its experience, its malevolence, its disregard for life or love or light yawning before me like the abyss. And that is what it is—the apotheosis of nothingness, the essence of oblivion.
I can only meet it with defiance. I’ll not submit. I’ll not join.
I’ll never join it.
With all the mental volume I can muster I scream into the ether.
Fuck you, buddy!
It’s not elegant, I know. But the entity doesn’t deserve anything more.
If I had a hand, I’d shoot it the bird.
Fuck you!
Something in me swells, the shibboleth thrums and expands again, and then I feel pinioned by light, linked in an electric daisy chain. Casey is with me here in the ether. And Bernard and Tap and Jack and Danielle and Davies.
All of us are one.
To defy the Conformity, we’ve become one.
Our minds have merged; our thoughts have dissolved into a seething boil.
All is one. One is all.
I am you and you are me.
There’s a rhythm now, to the ether, a beat. We swell with the phantom percussions.
Watch me now. Eyes right here, we say. Mirth and light. It seems our Bernard aspect is still in business. Doom. Boom doom. Doom. Boom doom.
It’s a lethargic beat, a dribble of molasses. The Conformity congeals, slows.
Doom, boom. Doom, boom, baby, we say in the ether.
We feel a surging elation now as the slow, driving beat begins to sink into the Conformity and it drifts away. Slowing. Slowing.
Doom.
The sensation of multi-awarenesses merged is almost overpowering. The walls have crumbled; the notion of I is gone altogether. We are proto
plasm; we are unified.
Boom.
And then the one part of us, the hard part, gives another terrible ethereal shout, Fuck you! And an invisible shockwave of pain and anger and hurt and regret blasts away from us with tsunamic force.
The Conformity is gone.
Disentangling ourselves is confusing and not a little painful. It seems I am the controlling awareness, so as I release each aspect of me—Jack, Ember, Casey—it’s as if I’m cutting away a bit of my soul.
And maybe I am.
That’s seriously fucked-up, Shreve, Jack says. At the end, he blasted the Conformity so that it couldn’t follow us. Bernard’s aspect slowed it, but Jack’s dealt the final blow. It’s hard to compartmentalize, each of our personalities and abilities suffusing the others. It’s not simple now, if it ever was to begin with. There’s a film, a residue of each of the Irregulars’ personalities, remaining with me. And the after-echoes of their personalities.
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“I feel dirty,” Jack says.
“It’s only dirty if you do it right,” Ember says, winking.
We’ve reverted to normal speech. All of us, for that short time, were so close, so much more intimate than any sex, any marriage, any confession; by speaking instead of communicating telepathically, we’re trying to set the walls back up for our own protection. Maybe for our own sanity.
In my junkie days of eating memories—devouring the emotional content of the bright, ringing moments of the unwary—I experienced every kind of pleasure, but this is different. Then, I’d invaded and consumed. With Ilsa Moteff, the Witch, I ate her and took all of that evil into myself. But now? The sensations weren’t secondhand; we experienced the defiance of the Conformity together, joined.
Everyone remains quiet, and I realize that Casey is still pressed against me. I can feel the warmth of her hand on my stomach, her small breasts flattened against my side. I marvel at the walls of our bodies and the pressure of her hands. For a moment, the plane drones through the air, we sway back and forth in the cargo hold, and everyone remains silent, lost in their own impregnable thoughts, individuals once more.
Everything is quiet.
But the ether thrums in a way that’s hard to describe—it’s as though a great hammer has fallen on a bell and the note that rings out hangs forever in the pregnant air, a permanent vibration. There’s no pain, no discomfort with the ethereal sound, but it rings forth and I look to my companions’ faces to see if they hear it. Ember stares at me, wide-eyed and alert.
What is that? she sends.
Before I can answer, the plane’s props stop roaring, and the axis of the world shifts, tilting, and my stomach lightens and rises in my body cavity. Looks of alarm and mental exclamations follow, like an eruption of radio chatter.
The plane is falling out of the air.
Falling again. Always falling.
Time congeals, and I reach out again to the minds there, now parts of me. The Davies awareness in the cockpit reveals a dead instrument panel and a frantic pilot.
We must get out.
I’m not expansive enough to control everyone and everything that must be done, so I release my friends from the collective mind. Thoughts flicker in braintime, faster than light, and we know what to do.
Falling. The wind howls outside with the speed of our descent.
It all happens at once. Davies bursts through the cabin door, dragging the thrashing pilot with him. I whip the jackets away from myself and launch across the cabin toward Negata, screaming “Unbuckle!” Negata and the pilot are the only souls on the plane not part of our mental union.
Tap, pushing himself away from the cabin wall, grabs Casey while Danielle snatches Bernard into a great hug. Ember moves toward Davies.
Jack, near floating now, raises his hands, splaying his fingers. He gives me a wild look and sets his shoulders. He screams when the blast rips from him, tearing out the rear of the plane.
We’re sucked out into the air, along with crates and jackets and trash and weapons. There’s a million particles of blood like a spray of stars whirling out into the gunmetal-gray sky, cold as stone, and I realize the blood is coming from me. Bodies pinwheel in the roaring air currents. We’re buffeted like leaves in a tornado. Minds scrabble at my consciousness, and I let them in and we become one, our own union, and the shibboleth seeps into us all and we begin to slow in the mad, deadly descent toward the earth rushing up at us.
But then the ground is there and everything goes dark.
thirteen
–asleep in his nest of laundry, Bugs Bunny in drag on the television, singing opera, volume low, and his chest so small rising and falling as the box fan hums and the close air of the trailer smells of cigarette smoke and burning plastic like a whiff of the end of everything, or just a trailer fire. Vig stirs when I move him, lifting him up and onto his bed, his little hand whacking me on the neck and then flopping over. He chuffs air through his open mouth and says something that sounds like “momma, momma, don’t” but he quiets as I get him under the covers and I take his place in the nest of dirty laundry on the floor, like a dog sleeping at his master’s feet. I lay there wishing I could find unconsciousness, that I could close my eyes and sink into the oblivion of nothingness instead of this life where we’re abandoned but Moms doesn’t have the courtesy to properly leave. There’s some of Moms’s vodka left. For an instant I think of going to the kitchenette, taking out the bottle and drinking until I dissolve into nothing. But the loathing I feel at the idea, I could never get beyond that. Never. Vig stirs in the bed, I can feel him as he shifts, the floor is so thin and the trailer so flimsy. No sound from Moms. She passed out hours ago but the trailer still stinks of smoke, will always stink of smoke. I watch Bugs riding on the fat horse, singing, the sound of the television low, so low, the electric ratcheting of the VHS nearly blanketed by the fan’s white noise, and laying in dirty clothes wishing for sleep, dying for sleep–
CASEY
We fall like angels cast from heaven. There’s screaming and shouts and snow and weeping, but all I can really focus on is his face.
He’s not handsome in any definable way. He’s got this wolfish, intense face, like he’s always hungry. And his eyes are too alert, really, like he sees every part of you, even those that you don’t want anyone to see.
And bad things happen around him.
It’s both pleasant and a little abhorrent when we bond as a group. Like fucking—there’s the loss of self when he enters me (or am I entering him?) and begins to move, but there’s the warmth and the pleasure and, I hope, the love there too. Not that I’ve fucked any of the Irregulars.
I look at Shreve lying there in the snow, remembering when the collective mind shattered. Negata kneels over him, touching Shreve with light hands, his breath billowing out in front of him. Shreve’s head is swollen and smeared in blood. His breath comes in stitches.
Ember screams and screams and all I can do is wish that she’d shut the hell up but she keeps screaming, “They’re dead! They’re dead!” and scrabbling about on all fours.
Eventually, I stop looking at Shreve’s face and stand to go look at the bodies.
I don’t know if something in me broke when our minds shattered or if it’s breaking now, looking at Bernard’s and Danielle’s remains. We can’t find Davies and the pilot at all. It’s hard to come to grips with how torn and distorted their bodies have become: it’s almost impossible to recognize where Danielle ends and Bernard begins. They’re a great bloody smear on the roadside.
We’re on the side of a road on a mountainside. The western slope. Not in Montana anymore, I don’t think. The air and terrain seem different. I don’t know how I know, but I do. Maybe Idaho. Oregon?
Off to our right, in a snarled wreckage of trees, blooms an orange flame pouring black oily smoke into the darkening sky. The fuming carcass of the plane. It’s so cold, I imagine trudging through the drifts and warming myself at the fuel and plastic fire.
> Jack grabs Ember, pulling her into a tight hug and whispering something in her ear, and she quiets down. When she stops making noise, it’s like a blessing. Negata looks at me and says, “Shreve is alive. I cannot tell whether he is in danger, but we all need to get inside.”
Negata speaks! That recognition is like a single firecracker set off in an auditorium. A very small pop in a wide space that in any other situation might be quite interesting.
Tap says, “There’s a sign over there. Looks like a big building.” He tromps off in the hissing, falling snow.
Jack and Ember huddle together, and I must have drifted off because the next thing I know is that Negata has his hand on my shoulder, tugging me back to Shreve, saying, “I need your help.”
I never knew what to make of Negata. He was present during my testing, like Ruark’s shadow.
“You have a radio? A phone?”
He shakes his head, a quick, precise gesture.
“Davies did, but—”
“Davies is dead. And Shreve will be too if we don’t get him somewhere warmer.” He takes off his jacket—more black military-issue—and lays it over Shreve. “Give me a moment.”
He moves like a big cat into the trees by the road, away from the plane crash. The way he moves is almost ballet-like.
The smell of the fire is noxious—like burning tires—but some of the trees around it have caught, tingeing the odor with the slightly more wholesome stink of burning pine. One of the trees, totally incinerated, cracks and falls over into a drift, half extinguishing the flames.
“The drive’s cordoned off, but there’s some sort of lodge up here,” Tap says. There’s something about Tap that’s a little skeevy. Not like he’s a panty-sniffer or anything—and we’ve shared minds, so that’s a little weird—but he’s like a big, intemperate dog that only wants to eat and shit and fuck. He’s not stupid, but base. Trish used to talk about all the ways she was going to sex him—God, she talked too much—because he is good-looking in a brutish sort of way.
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