The Conformity

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Negata emerges from the trees dragging two long branches. When he gets to where I kneel by Shreve, he removes the jacket we’ve draped over him and feeds the thick branches through the sleeves of the jacket.

  “It will have to do.” He spreads the jacket, now framed by the wood, on the ground. “Help me move Shreve onto it.”

  I stand. They say you should never move the injured in case of neck injuries. And Shreve’s head is sure to roll about when we lift, so I wave Negata back. He looks at me strangely but does as I instruct.

  I flex the ghosthand. It’s kind of weird that I’ve started thinking of it like that, naming it and all. It’s sort of like guys naming their dicks. But all guys have dicks, and only I have the ghosthand so I guess that makes it okay. It’s better than when they wanted to call me Handjob.

  Shreve called it the shibboleth, and I don’t really know what that means. To me it’s the ghosthand and my imagination. Pretty simple, really. So I imagine it swelling and flattening and growing large enough to scoop all of Shreve up in its palm and then I lean forward and lift, slowly. If you were only watching, as Negata is, it would appear that Shreve just levitated off the ground two feet, floated over a couple of feet more.

  I set him down on the travois as gently as possible.

  Afterward, my skin sheens in sweat and a wave of fatigue passes over me. I can do a lot with my ghosthand, but if I lift a big weight, it still has a direct effect on my body, as though I picked up Shreve and put him on my shoulders. Which, seeing how freakin’ skinny he is, I probably could.

  Negata doesn’t smile or do much of anything except give a small, tight nod. I don’t think his mother breastfed him enough, maybe. But he moves to a branch, grips it like a handle, and chucks his head, indicating he wants me to help him.

  I look around. I feel like we should do something for Danielle’s and Bernard’s corpses, but there’s not much we can do. They’re not going to get any deader.

  I take up the branch in my ghosthand, and we drag Shreve up the snow-covered mountain road toward where Tap waves to us.

  I try to unlock the door, but it’s deadlocked, and while I can easily picture my fingers as itsy-bitsy little lock-picking nubbins, I don’t know how locks work well enough to pick the thing. Eventually, Jack has to blast the front door in so we can enter.

  It’s a massive old hunting lodge, made from thick timbers and stone. From what I can see in the dim light it looks like it housed park rangers at some point. I don’t know why I think that, maybe because there’s no flat-panel televisions, or computers, or stereos, which doesn’t make sense because whoever owns this place has to have a lot of money. It’s a big freakin’ lodge.

  It’s dark and silent in the main hall of the lodge, smelling slightly of mothballs and ashes. To the left of the entrance there’s a fireplace you could cook an ox in. The heavy drapes are pulled back, and the weird half-light you get from snowfall casts a pallor over the rough stonework. The sounds of our footfalls echo, and the scraping of the stretcher’s branches sounds over-loud in the dead air.

  “Let’s find some lights,” Jack says. He walks over to a shadowed area and feels around for a switch. Ember joins the hunt while Negata and I, with Tap’s help, drag Shreve toward the fireplace, standing in a pool of weak and watery light from a drape-less window.

  “I’ll go find some firewood, if there’s any. Does anyone have a light?” Jack asks.

  Ember gropes for her phone, finds it, and then says, “That’s weird. It was fully charged back when we were in the Jeep.”

  “So, no lights,” Jack says. “And the electricity must be off, too.” Clicking sounds. Jack must be fiddling with the light switch. Negata watches implacably.

  Tap says, “Screw it,” and walks over to a larger dark shape, picks something up—I realize it’s a wooden chair—and smashes it on the floor, once, twice, three times, and then brings the pieces over to us, where we’ve laid Shreve down. He tosses them in the fireplace and begins tearing at the cushion with thick, blunt fingers, ripping out the white stuffing. “Lighter? Matches?” Ember saunters over, lights a cigarette she pulls from her jacket, and then slaps the lighter in Tap’s palm.

  In moments, Tap’s got the cushion’s innards burning—it smells terrible, like plastic—and the wooden chair begins to smolder. Smoke fills the room until I unlatch the flue. Silly boys, they’d all suffocate if I wasn’t here to rescue them.

  The fire is very small in the large fireplace. The orangish-yellow light reveals a sooty wooden box with a small amount of old newspaper and kindling. Tap goes to work.

  Jack and Ember shut and brace the massive wooden front door, and for a little while we all stand around, peering into the dim, wide room, watching the breath come visibly from our open mouths. It’s hard to stay still with Danielle and Bernard and Davies out there somewhere, dead in the dark. I should be feeling more now, I guess. Danielle was my closest friend and Bernard was just … Bernard. Everyone loved him. But I feel nothing.

  I check Shreve’s pulse. It’s there, but thready.

  “You think the Conformity will find us here?” Ember asks.

  Negata shakes his head, slowly. “I do not know. But the Conformity is drawn to telepaths of Shreve’s and Priest’s intensity. With all due respect to Ember, I do not think it will be drawn here as long as Shreve is unconscious. And maybe not after, if the boy can remain … how do you say? Inconspicuous.”

  “So we’re rooting for Shreve to be in a coma?” I ask. Negata blinks in the flickering light of the fire. It’s like the cold doesn’t even affect him, standing there in only his shirt. I’m shivering, and I still have my jacket.

  “No. I do not know how, but everything has become focused on this boy.” He looks down at Shreve, who’s pale now, very pale. Negata’s face is grim.

  If Bernard were here, he’d say something light to ease the tension and then Danielle would tell him to shut up.

  “We should check the joint, man-children,” I say. “Let’s look for some eats and sleeps.”

  They look at me like I’m crazy, and maybe I am, some.

  Then Jack says, “Shut up, Bernard.”

  For a moment, it’s like they’re here with us, in the room. Ember smiles, wan and tired. It’s been a tremendous bitch of a day, on the real. Tap says nothing, and I can’t read Negata. But Jack looks at me strangely, cocking his head. And he must feel it too.

  We trudge through the lodge. Tap’s found the woodpile at the back of the building, and he stokes the fire after some help loading frigid, snow-encrusted logs in. Jack and Ember play grab-ass and suck-face in the kitchen until I begin poking them from across the room with my ghosthand. Our friends are dead and the world is ending, and all they can do is rub their junk all over each other and swap saliva.

  The kitchen’s a small affair with a large dry pantry full of industrial-size cans of cheap tomato sauce and tinned vegetables. They manage to get the gas oven on—though Jack nearly burns his eyebrows off lighting it. We stand over the hissing thing for a while, holding our hands in the warming gap.

  It’s getting dark, real dark, no more of this phantasmic reflected blue light. Ember discovers a couple of candles and a flashlight and a new pack of batteries all in a utility drawer. More matches and many packets of votive candles. Whoever used this old lodge, they were prepared for long periods without electricity.

  “Finally, some real light,” Jack says, tearing into the new packet of batteries. He loads the flashlight and then thumbs the blister-button. It only clicks. No light.

  “Batteries must be dead.”

  We all take up candles and walk down a long, wood-paneled wall, shielding the candle flames with our hands. Like we’re pioneers instead of the extranatural badasses that we are.

  “Any of you mutants know how to glow or something?” I ask.

  “Is that you or Bernard talking?”

  “All me. Well, almost all of me. We buried my arm in the backyard.”

  “What?”
>
  “Yeah, Mom worked at the hospital, you know? Small town. Once I was stable and healing, they let us take it home. We had a funeral for it and everything. All my friends came.”

  “Trippy,” Ember says. Ember and I have never bonded, really. Not much in common, and she’s a bugfuck, so you never know when they’re sniffing around upstairs.

  Also, a man-eater. Since I’ve been with the Society she’s gone through three, four guys. All much younger. She likes to play matron to their randy student. I’m sure she fucks them into submission.

  We find lots of individual bedrooms, most of them with stripped and graying mattresses on the beds. The ones with any blankets or covers, we take as much of the linen as we can carry. Most are coarse, military-grade wool blankets. But warm.

  I’m having a hard time keeping the layout of the place straight in my mind, most likely due to the general gloom and darkness; it all seems just dull stonework and massive knotty timbers and bland, unadorned rooms. But at the end of the main hallway that runs the length of the building we find a larger room with bunk beds and its own fireplace. A couple of big, wooden trunks reveal more moth-bitten blankets.

  We all drape ourselves in scratchy wool and wander about like kids under sheets playing ghosts. Jack and Ember disappear. Negata stays downstairs, seated near the fire but with the drapes pulled aside, watching the snowfall and the darkness. Tap and I rummage around in the kitchen, which has warmed considerably. We find a large tin of soup and manage to open it, heat it over the gas stove. It’s salty, but satisfying.

  When we’re done, we rejoin Negata and watch the night with him.

  There’s not much to do except wait for Shreve to come around, show some signs of life. The other teams from the Society … we have to assume they’re dead or have been taken into the Conformity.

  When we’re quiet and still, the absence of Danielle and Bernard seems all the louder. And Shreve lies between us, breathing shallowly.

  “Fuck,” Tap says. I’d think it was apropos of nothing except I was thinking the same thing.

  “It’s a bad deal.” For a moment I’m angry. Angry at myself because that’s all I can think of to say. Angry at the world for sinking to this level of shittiness. “Fuck,” I say.

  Negata doesn’t glance at us, but occasionally he looks at Shreve.

  “You looked like you thought of something earlier,” I say.

  Negata remains silent, but Tap perks up.

  “When Ember’s phone didn’t work.”

  “Where are Ember and Jack?” Negata asks.

  Tap snorts.

  “One of the bedrooms, maybe,” I say. “Maybe upstairs, looking around. The lodge is seriously dark.”

  Negata simply nods in acknowledgment.

  “Where are we, anyway?” I ask.

  “Idaho,” Tap says. “Near Oregon.” He lifts a wad of papers he’s clutching in a meaty fist. “This is a workhouse for the Game and Fish Commission and the Devil’s Throne Park Rangers.”

  “The middle of nowhere, then.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Negata seems to be thinking. “In answer to your question, Miss Klein, I did have a thought.”

  “Love to hear it.”

  “It is complicated. And not fully formed.” Negata pauses before and after each word. Nothing about the man is hasty or unconsidered. His English accent is almost perfect when he speaks slowly.

  “That’s okay, I can live with uncertainty.”

  He turns his head toward me, considering. “This is an admirable trait. Many people cannot.”

  “So what’s this idea?”

  “Why did the plane fail?”

  That’s a good question. A very good question.

  “The insomnia? There was that earlier plane crash. Maybe a maintenance guy hadn’t been getting enough sleep and didn’t put oil in the right place.” It sounds good coming out of my mouth, but I don’t know if I believe it.

  “Why is the electricity out?”

  Tap says, “Because the Conformity has taken all the population! No one to work the plants, no one to make sure if a line goes down it gets put back up. You know, infrastructure. Roads and power lines and telephone lines and shit.”

  “Why did Ember’s phone fail?”

  “What’s with this? What are you hinting at?” I ask.

  He raises a hand. A flat, blunt hand, square and deadly. “It may be as you say, Miss Klein. And most likely is.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No.”

  “What do you think?”

  He looks back to the window. The white’s coming down in big, thick flakes, so heavy you can almost hear it. The fire in the plane will have been extinguished now. Danielle’s and Bernard’s bodies will be tucked in under a blanket to sleep. For a moment I picture them, lying faceup and eyes open, as crystalline snowflakes land on their milky white eyeballs and cover their blue-gray lips.

  “I think that the entity has changed the reality of our universe. On a subatomic level. A quantum level.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand,” Tap says.

  “The Conformity draws extranaturals to itself. It uses this power to fly, to create soldiers. With each person it absorbs, it gains their energy and also their ability. It is harvesting mankind.”

  “Well, that’s just about the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” I say.

  Tap glances at me, alarm written all over his blunt, dim features. If he’s picking up on this, it’s got to be bad.

  “I think—” Negata says, very slowly. “No, I fear that the universal phenomenon that allows us to manipulate electricity doesn’t work anymore. Maybe the entity has eliminated the matter of the universe’s ability to retain an electrical charge, positive or negative.”

  Tap’s face scrunches up with what seems like intellectual pain. Like he’s lifting weights or something.

  “So, you’re saying—” Tap says, rubbing his temples. “That bastard has killed electricity?”

  Negata stares at us, unblinking. “Yes.”

  I clear my throat. “Hey, you two geniuses don’t need to strain yourselves. If the Conformity changed the nature of physics to not allow positive and negative charges, we’d be dead as doornails. There’s electrical crap going on everywhere in your body.”

  Negata nods—obviously, he’s realizing the truth of it—and Tap just stands there mouth-breathing and looking about for somewhere to drag his knuckles.

  “It is possible, Miss Klein, that the Conformity has negated electricity in some other manner.”

  “Sure, but those are all the little questions. The hows of it all. The big questions are what have me worried. The whys.”

  “So, what are you suggesting, Miss Klein?” Negata asks.

  “The one thing we know about the Conformity is that we’re no good to it dead. It might not give a shit about injuring itself, but we’re raw material for it.”

  “I’m following,” Tap says. “It needs us for the juice.”

  “And it can think, yeah? The Conformity has adapted to us. Instead of being totally led away when the old man lit the candle, it split in two and sent one after us and one after Priest, right?” When they say nothing, I go on. “I was on top of that water tower with Shreve when we turned the Helmholtz field on it. The soldier—” I scrunch my eyes closed and think back. The thousands of mouths opening, bellowing, screaming, moaning. “It was surprised when we hit it with the Helmholtz. We alarmed it.”

  “Fuck yeah, we did, the bastard,” Tap says. “But so what? We killed that one.”

  I shake my head. “Don’t you get it? It’s all connected. Obviously, the soldiers are autonomous at times, but they’re part of the greater fabric … flesh … of the whole.”

  Tap looks at me blankly.

  It takes a lot of effort not to roll my eyes. “We hit it with the Helmholtz—an electrical field—so as we were escaping, it hit us with an anti-Helmholtz field. Right? One that negates all electricity.”
/>   “But how, I might ask.” Negata remains still, eyes like black pools, watching me closely.

  “It doesn’t really matter. Look at what Shreve can do. Look at us. Any one of us extranaturals can do lots of damage. Imagine the kind of telekinetic power it takes to keep a Conformity soldier, or the Conformity itself, together. Levitating! It’s incredible.”

  Tap nods, slowly. “It has the power to blanket large areas with fields. Maybe, at this point, the whole earth.”

  I turn back to look at Shreve. At times I think he’s going to shift, open his eyes, and smile. Say my name. But he hasn’t yet.

  “That’s the why I’m trying to puzzle out,” I say. “Why is it doing this?”

  “And do you have any theories?” Negata asks.

  “It’s reshaping the world to suit it. And it’s moving toward that end.”

  “What end?” Tap says, his voice going up an octave.

  fourteen

  –no food for two days except the meat sludge served me at school and she’s there with fat Billy Cather watching TV on the couch when I come in, she’s drunk, her lips and chin red and raw from sucking face with Cather’s fat stubbled mug. Moms checks her shirt, making sure the buttons are in line or maybe checking for cum stains and negligently waves her hand when I ask after Vig. “Out in the woods,” she says. When I turn to go find him, she says, “Get me a pack of Kools, hon, willya?” and when I hold out my hand for the money, she turns to Cather expectantly. It only takes him a moment to pull out a grubby five and put it in my hand. I wish she’d get more from him, because right now she’s screwed him only for a pack of smokes and whatever booze he brought over. Leaving, I head straight to Cather’s trailer and climb through the bathroom window—his trailer’s almost as messy as ours—and clean out his kitchen cabinets, dumping cans of Dinty Moore and refried beans and fruit salad in a plastic bag I find under the sink. In his filthy bedroom at the back of the trailer, I scrounge all his change before going to find Vig who’s somewhere in the woods, behind the house, near dark. I’m so very angry, furious, and it feels like a fever that’s on me, this anger, yelling for my brother in the dark, carrying stolen food. He’s half feral when I find him and he pops the lid off the fruit salad and drinks the syrup like Moms with her vodka and then dips his fingers into the can, his filthy grubby fingers, and all I can think is “someday we’ll live somewhere clean, someday we’ll live someplace clean” as I take his sticky hand and we walk to the Git-N-Go to get Moms Kools and go–