The Conformity

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Cold.

  I can’t feel my fingers. I hold them out before me, like Superman as he flies, not to pose, but to funnel the icy wind away from my face.

  Land passes beneath us and for an instant, when the wind changes direction under the gunmetal-gray skies, everything stills and quiets: the howling wind, the throbbing rush of my blood in my veins, my pounding temples. The world stands still. Or maybe I am still and the world continues to move, driven by inertia.

  But the wind changes again and the howling fills my ears and racks my body once more.

  I watch the earth, trying to remember.

  A patchwork quilt from above, the little town. A white empty space to the north. A frozen lake.

  My anger is like waves in me, swelling and receding, the pain and the heat that anger brings. I worry what that means now, for myself. For Shreve and the rest of the world. Sometimes I feel like if I let my true rage come out, the whole world would go up in flames, those I love, those I hate. The innocent and guilty alike.

  Those I love.

  I’m freezing now, I’ve never been so cold before. I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again. Even thinking about Ember doesn’t warm me up. Not the memory of her hands and mouth on me, not the thought of when I took her clothes off the first time. I have only fear and anger. I want to crow! I want to cry. It’s so dangerous. So scary.

  We need to set down out of sight, I say.

  What the hell for? Tap says.

  You think we should just fly into the town square?

  Why not?

  We’ll get shot, that’s why! I send. Dense as a steer. As far as I remember, most people don’t fly.

  We do.

  Yeah, we do. But what’s to keep them from thinking that we’re part of the Conformity?

  Because we don’t smell like shit and piss and walk around like Godzilla, that’s why, Tap sends.

  How the hell will they know that? We can fly. That’s enough to blow their minds.

  He’s quiet for a long while. Fine, he sends, eventually.

  We land on what must be a highway leading into town. Hard to tell because the snow is high and hasn’t been packed down by any vehicles. I do see some tracks, possibly human. Other tracks of creatures that run on four legs make braids and tangles in the white powder.

  So cold, parts of me feel like they’re not mine anymore. My feet, my hands, they’re numb, like big, blood-filled sacks of flesh. I’m beyond myself. Tap, bulky and thick in the extra jacket, tucks his head down into his chest. There’s smoke coming from up ahead on the left.

  We should stop there and get a read on this shitburg.

  It’s the first time Tap has contacted me, mind-to-mind, since we merged in the plummet from the sky. Necessary, that merging, so that we could fly, so that Casey and Negata could live. But we lost Danielle and Bernard and Davies and the pilot anyway.

  But the worst was when I was inside Bernard’s mind, and he was inside mine, when he died. A static-filled fuzziness, like all your consciousness is just an Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving its way toward oblivion. Scrabbling, full of desperation. And then darkness. It’s hellish and beatific all at once.

  Bernard. Danielle.

  Sometimes they’re with me. Danielle’s sharp wit and sharp tongue, Bernard’s beats, the music of him, his rhythm, his love of life. Scent on a shirt your friend has worn. Or your girlfriend. Slip it over your head and then your head is full, for a moment, with that unknown-but-familiar scent. The essence of someone else filling your nostrils, foreign, a little unpleasant. But them. When I was ten I tried to get the Arkansas foster care agency to find my parents’ effects, but they were gone. I just wanted to smell them, to see if I could tell something about them from smelling their clothes. But they’d all been sold.

  I have that moment from time to time. My nose is filled with them.

  “You smell that?”

  “No,” Tap says, bullish and gruff. I don’t know if he’s just saying that because he’s a stubborn bastard or because it’s the truth.

  “For a second I thought—”

  “You thought what?”

  “Nothing.”

  He mutters something, but Tap is always muttering something.

  Up and over the rise, following the white memory of road, pushing snow in front of us until we have to start high-stepping where it gets deep in drifts. On the air I smell woodsmoke, and off in the distance a dog barks, a lonely sound, so small in the wide expanse of world around us. The land itself could be Montana except for the fog-wreathed mountains. Not as raw, maybe, and the forests are lusher, dense with evergreens. Dark, impenetrable.

  Stillness. Everything around us is hushed. The low-lying gray clouds. No wind.

  Our breath comes heavy as we walk.

  Eventually, we reach a place near where the smoke rises. In the distance I can see the gray pillars that signal more fires. From the air, I didn’t see any of the scarred countryside that comes from Conformity soldier attacks. But I didn’t do a close pass.

  Careful now, I send to Tap. Only communicate mind-to-mind.

  I’m always careful, Tap says.

  Of course. Nobody can tell you anything. But I don’t send that. We should let Casey and Ember know we’re about to make contact.

  Tap snorts, disgusted. Caution isn’t his style. Like Shreve.

  Approaching a house, I send, thinking of Ember, the feel of her mind. Shreve has talked about how distance affects talents and how it has something to do with what he calls the ether. Before, with all of our conversations, we were close. We had no problem speaking telepathically. But now? So many miles between us, and Shreve’s not here to boost the signal.

  Tap stops, breathing heavy, billowing steam from his mouth and nose. He looks at me, waiting. If there were grass, he’d eat it.

  Faintly, very faintly, comes, Be careful, Jack. And you need to hurry. It’s like an echo coming from far painted hills.

  Tap shrugs and starts trudging forward again. I follow.

  It’s a small house, and it looks like any house in any neighborhood in any city I’ve been in. But this one is surrounded by dense woods, and as we approach, I can hear the tinkling blue of a small stream nearby under ice. Two white mounds stand in the space before the building itself—a sedan and a truck, I’d guess. Smoke dribbles skyward from the chimney, and the idea of warmth makes me that much colder.

  Tap takes the steps up onto porch, and in the silence of the day, I can hear someone grunt. The drapes near the front window are whisked back before we can knock. A dark, bearded face with one wild eye peers at us and then the drapes close again before I can take in any more details.

  “What do you want?” The man’s voice is gruff and hoarse.

  “Please, sir. Our friend is hurt and we need a nurse or a doctor,” I say.

  There’s a long pause. Tap holds up a fist like he wants to punch someone.

  “There’s no doctor or nurse here.”

  “I realize that, sir. But seeing as we’re walking, we hoped you might be able to tell us something about the town, and where we can find a doctor.”

  Another long silence.

  “It’s freakin’ cold out here,” Tap says, angry.

  Shut up, idiot. Yelling at him won’t help.

  It’ll make me feel better.

  Yeah, think it’ll make you any warmer?

  He’s got nothing to say to that.

  Behind the door, I hear the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being pumped. My stomach drops.

  “I’m sorry we bothered you!” Tap and I make a hasty retreat from the house, back into the snow-covered yard.

  As we pass the cars, I hear the door opening and stop, tense. Ready to launch myself into the air.

  “Wait.” The man comes onto the porch, holding the shotgun pointed, if not at us, then in our general direction. The black hole of the shotgun’s bore makes my legs weak. I can’t fly faster than a bullet. I’m so much weaker than a speeding train. My fifteenth birthday i
s next week, and I’m scared.

  The man looks us over, eyes narrowed. He’s older, gray-whiskered and washed-out, standing in overalls with a heavy sweater and Coke-bottle-thick glasses. “Follow the road into town,” he says, gesturing with the gun’s barrel. “You’ll pass a strip mall on the left, a grocery store. You’ll need to take a right at the first light—they’re not working anymore, just like our cars and TVs and—” He stops. Searches for the words. “First the goddamned insomnia, and now this.”

  “When did it all stop?” I ask.

  He sucks his teeth, making his white-stubbled cheeks look cadaverous. “Few days back. But the world went to hell long before that.”

  I nod. It’s true.

  “Take the right. Go fast. I don’t suggest getting near the church.”

  “The church? Why not?”

  “Just take my word, son. Any building with an eyeball painted on it … you’ll want to avoid.”

  “An eyeball?”

  “That’s right. An eyeball. Ain’t gonna say any more.” He shakes his head, purses his lips, and spits into the snow. “Keep going. You’ll see the clinic right past the library.”

  “Can we come in? I can’t feel my feet,” Tap asks. The way he says it, even I wouldn’t let him in. He’s a sour one.

  “They’ll warm up the faster you move them,” the man said, gesturing again with shotgun barrel.

  “Thanks for the info, mister,” I say. And we truck out of there.

  It’s maybe a mile more to the town. We pass shuttered and dim houses on the left and right of the highway. What windows are visible show no faces. Drapes remain still. No birds flying, no dogs barking now. Few signs of life anywhere.

  Tap mutters and gripes about the walk, but any thoughts of flying the rest of the way into town evaporate when we see the first house with an eyeball painted on the front door. It’s not the flying that’s problematic (other than the cold). It’s that we’re not bulletproof.

  Tap approaches the house. I want to tell him to stop, but fear, in others, is something Tap enjoys more than anything. You’d think a front door painted with a symbol would look weird, but it doesn’t. I can imagine a real sign painter doing the job. There’s a word underneath it.

  “What’s that say?” Both Tap and I jump at the sound of his voice.

  Can’t tell, really. “Panoply”? No. It’s “Panopticon,” I send.

  “Panopticon?”

  Shut up, man. We’re not here to draw attention to ourselves. Just to find a doctor.

  What the hell does panopticon mean?

  No idea, I send.

  We keep moving. Snow, light, making a soft hissing sound that blankets all other noise. We’ve been out in the cold for hours now, and we need to get out of the elements soon if we want to keep all our toes and fingers from frostbite.

  More houses now and there, ahead of us, bundled tightly in thick, down-filled winter clothes, is a figure, trudging through the white. I want to call to him (or her), but the wildness of the man who first gave us directions gives me pause. And the strange paintings on the door. Looking around, I see more of them on the fronts of houses. Small, modest homes. Some with smoke coming from chimneys, yet dim and unlit. With eyes on the doors.

  Tap raises his hand to hail the figure, but I stop him. The eye and the word panopticon and the silence all around make me wary.

  Let’s not contact anyone until we find the clinic. That’s the job. That’s why we’re here, I send.

  I’m freezing, Jack. We’ve got to get there soon. Let’s fly the rest of the way, since we know where it is now, generally.

  I gesture off to the left of the road we’re walking. Drapes fall quickly as Tap turns to look. Up ahead, the down-clad figure has stopped and turns in our direction. They’ve spotted us, Tap. Flying now would be especially bad.

  Explain to me why again, Tap says. Of all of us Irregulars, Tap’s probably the best at expressing tone and feeling mind-to-mind. Almost like Shreve. The problem with Tap is that it’s usually only one tone and one feeling.

  Come on, I respond.

  We make the intersection—the figure scurries off, head down and hustling—and trudge down the white-blanketed street, among the whisper of evergreen needles and the shushing of our feet through the snow. I feel watched. Like an old fairy tale, children lost in the woods. And maybe we are.

  A grocery with its big front plate-glass windows boarded up with plywood and decorated with one large eye. Black streaks rise on the cinder blocks above the windows and doors—it looks like there’s been a fire. Ahead of us, a thin dribble of oily black smoke rises skyward from the remains of a convenience store, its building husked and the gas pumps a twisted mess of petroleum-stinking black metal. Gas explosion.

  And the panopticon eye is scratched into the char on the hood of a blackened car.

  Well, that’s seriously fucked up. Looks like the apocalypse happened while we’ve been playing house, Tap says. That eye creeps me the fuck out.

  What could’ve happened here? A picture is forming. The world’s been sleepless, and now there’s the Conformity. Shreve said that New York was disintegrating before the entity rose. I can’t help but think it’s gotten worse and the infection has spread to these smaller towns.

  “The center cannot hold,” Shreve would say. If he says anything ever again

  Let’s hurry, I say, and Tap nods vigorously.

  There’s an open lot, and the snow has drifted on the roadside as we trot forward. We pass a low-slung dark log building with a Payette Library sign in front of it and on our left—between the marina, condo, and boat rental signs—the glimmer of a wide, white expanse that must be the lake. The wind now comes off the lake in gusts. Cuts through the jackets and numbs my already frozen arms, hands, legs. I see a small strip mall. Fir trees along the front walk, with a small sign that reads D. Willamette, MD, along with some other names with strings of letters after them. A dentist. A veterinarian. Bingo: a medical center.

  A woman’s voice interrupts our beeline to the door with Willamette’s name. “That’s far enough.”

  Only now that she’s moving can we see her. She’s draped in some sort of white camouflage, perfect for the snow, and holds a hunting rifle in her hands. She’d been sitting on a bench. She must have been watching us for a long while.

  “You with them?” she asks.

  “The eye people? No,” I respond.

  She looks at me. It’s hard to tell her age; she’s heavily dressed in winter gear, and the camouflage she’s got draped around her makes her seem a white blob against the snow and the off-white of the building’s painted walls. The rifle’s black bore points directly at my chest. Does not waver.

  “Well, move along. Nothing for you here. No drugs. No booze. There’s a liquor store if you keep going the way you were headed. And a pharmacy past that.”

  “We don’t want drugs. We need help. Our friend’s hurt. In a coma. Are you a doctor?”

  She’s silent for a long while.

  “Veterinarian. And a coma’s bad news.”

  “Is there a people-doctor in town?” Tap asks.

  “No. This new church …” Her face sours. “They don’t like people who go their own way. Like doctors. Or police. You’re either with them or against them. Once the crazies started marking houses and holding their prayer sessions, those who had cabins or places to go lit out.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “This is all I’ve got.” She gestures at the building behind her.

  She shifts her weight and pulls away the camouflage and the cowl of her heavy coat, revealing her face. Mid-fifties, with a lot of laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. Smart blue eyes. Lips tight with unhappiness.

  “And that’s why you’re sitting out here with a rifle,” Tap says.

  She looks at Tap and nods slowly, as if reluctant to admit it. She’s proud, it’s easy to see. And rugged. Protecting what’s hers. Like a frontier woman.

  “Can we come i
nside and warm up?” I ask, tugging my blanket—no, cape—around my shoulders.

  “No.” Zero hesitation.

  Tap turns to me as if she’s not even there. “So, this old broad is a dead end. Where to next? Do we go back?”

  “Shreve will die if we don’t get help.”

  “What’s wrong with your friend?” the woman asks.

  “He fell. A long way. He’s got some internal injuries, we think. And a huge knock on the head,” I say.

  “What’d he fall from?”

  “A plane.” I probably should lie, but something makes me think she’d know it.

  She laughs. “Okay. Stop wasting my time and move along. If they haven’t got wind of you yet, the crazies will be sniffing around here soon enough.”

  “I’m not lying. The plane we were in crashed near Devil’s Throne.”

  “Then how did you get here? That’s twenty miles away, as the crow flies.”

  I say nothing and look at Tap, shaking my head.

  We should tell her. Show her, Tap sends.

  She’s got a gun. She’s already freaked out as it is. What if she just blasts us?

  Screw it.

  “Like this,” Tap says, twisting his body into the air and holding it aloft, five feet from the ground, hands out.

  Her eyes bug out and she raises the rifle, pointing it at Tap. I raise my hand and show her my palm. Ready for the worst.

  “You’re part of that … that—”

  “No, we’re not,” I say, trying to make my voice sound firmer than it feels.

  “That thing. We saw it on the news, before the power went out. You’re part of it. You’ve come to take us over. Get out of here.”

  She sights on Tap, still hovering there.

  “We’re not part of the Conformity. We’re not! We’re just trying to help our injured friend. Please—”

  “Go. I should kill you before you can hurt anyone. Get out of here before I shoot!”

  “Ma’am, you’re making a terrible mistake.” For the second time today, I back away with my hands up. She holds the gun on us, unwavering. Tap settles back on the earth. He backs away, not turning, hands up. Twenty yards away, beyond the cars, we turn and trudge back the way we came.