Ember shrugs. “It’s the Conformity.”
“How do you know that?” Tap says. “You don’t know that.”
“No,” she responds. “You’re right, I don’t.” She takes out an MRE labeled MEATLOAF WITH GRAVY, rips the top part off, and dumps the contents out on the bed. She snatches up a packet and, with her teeth, tears the top open. From her jacket breast pocket she removes a metal spoon—over the last days, we’ve taken to carrying everything we need on our persons at all times—and digs in. Around a mouthful of meatloaf she says, “The Conformity turned off the juice, right? We agree on that much.”
Tap nods, reluctantly.
“Then what’s to say the fucking thing hasn’t washed the color away? It feeds on misery and can alter the fundamental aspects of the universe.” She digs her spoon into the meal packet, stirring. “More people it takes over, the more power it has. Maybe soon it’ll be able to black out the sun or … shit, I don’t know … eliminate gravity. Alter quantum physics. Feed on our emotions, maybe.” She takes another bite.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re just speculating.”
“That’s right, dude. There’s only one way to know for sure, and I’m not going to trot right up to one of those shitballs and ask. But whatever the case, the world’s had the color sucked right out of it. I’d say the Conformity is the prime suspect.”
There’s nothing I can say to argue with her. There’s no way to prove she’s right or wrong, but what she says feels right.
Ember looks into the opening of her meal packet, glances at the frozen corpse of the girl in the corner, and purses her lips. She cleans her spoon off with her mouth and tucks it back in her pocket. “This tastes like shit,” she says, and chucks the meal into the void. “Let’s get out of here.”
You okay? I say to her alone.
The fucking thing has sucked the color out, Jack. There’s a dead girl in the corner. How do you think I am?
Before I can say anything, she takes three quick steps toward the jagged opening in the wall of the dorm and leaps into the air.
“Come on, man,” I say to Tap. “Let’s go.”
thirty-three
CASEY
“This is where I leave you,” Nelson says when we emerge from the tree line and the horses find their footing on the pavement of the highway. All is silent, and there’s a hush in the trees and on the mountain.
“Come with us,” Shreve says. “What we’re doing is important. Possibly the most important thing—”
“No,” Nelson says, his face clouding. “I’ve got my horses to think about. And—” He looks at our back-trail, a large furrow in the snow. And then his gaze goes to the pass we just came from, beyond. “My whole world is there, and I can’t leave it.”
“But, you’re alone—” I begin.
“Here’s the thing, kids.” He looks back at us, an expression of sadness on his face. “It might not seem like it, but you’ve got a million paths in front of you. You’re young, and life is full of possibility. But me? I’ve used up all of my possibilities.” He shrugs. “There’s but a single path in front of me,” he says, looking at Shreve. “And it goes back. To home.”
Shreve says nothing, a strange look on his face. Negata manages to bring his horse alongside Nelson’s and offers a hand. They shake.
“Thank you,” I say, simply. Nelson nods at me and turns his horse around and follows the trail back. Very quickly, he’s hidden by tree line.
We follow the highway north. Shreve huddles in on himself, silent.
“What’s wrong?” I ask and then realize the ridiculousness of that question.
He shakes his head. Says, “Nothing.”
We’re on 93 outside of a little town called Lolo when the big burly man steps out from behind one of the firs lining the highway, holding a rifle.
“Dismount! Drop all your weapons!” he bellows, walking forward quickly. He’s got a bead on Negata, the closest rider to him. “I will blow your face off, man!”
Negata slips off the horse like water off a duck’s back and steps away from the animal, a little to the side, a little forward so that the man’s rifle moves away from us.
“Mister,” Shreve says, pitching his voice to be heard. “You’re making a big mistake.”
“That right?” the man says. “How do you figure? I got two compadres behind trees with their guns on you.” He glances at Shreve. “So why don’t you get off the fucking horse, kid, before I lay your friend out.” He takes another pace forward, his eye to the sights. The cant of his shoulders and tension of his whole body is palpable. A big guy, he looks hungry and desperate.
“We can’t do that,” Shreve responds.
The man whistles, and two more men step out from the side of the highway. One’s got a pistol, and the other’s holding what appears to be something metal.
“Does that guy have a sword?” I ask.
The men glance at me, probably surprised to hear a female voice. It’s been a long time since the specter of rape has passed by, ever since I gained the ghosthand, but these guys don’t know what I can do.
Shreve does, though. He looks at me and nods. I know what to do.
All I have to do is slip my ghosthand into his chest and give his heart a small squeeze, and his face drains of color and he pitches over into the snow, rifle and all.
Negata leaps forward, kicks the gun away into the snow, and begins to feel for a pulse. The other two men, at the sight of their fallen comrade, yelp in alarm. But I’ve already yanked the pistol out of the second man’s hand and floated it over to Shreve, who catches it out of the air, checks the load.
“Empty. These jokers are toothless,” he says, though he keeps an eye on the fellow with the sword. He’s a younger man with stringy blond hair, dressed in a motley assortment of ski clothes and winter wear. Eyes bugging.
“You’re part of it!” the sword-bearer yells, shaking his head. “You’re one of them!”
Shreve tosses the empty gun back to the man I snatched it from. “We’re not gonna hurt you guys.” He darts a glance at the man on the ground. Negata has begun administering CPR. “Or, we’re not gonna hurt you guys any more than we already have,” he says, holding up a gloved hand. “We just want to know about the road ahead.”
The young man with the sword walks forward, holding the blade up like he’s Conan or something. I can snatch it right out of his mitts if I need to, but why not let the guy keep it for a while? He’s terrified already. On the other hand, terror is just one step away from hysteria, and hysteria is dangerous.
With his approach, I can see that the sword looks like a prop from a fantasy movie. Maybe he’s one of those people who dress up in armor on the weekend and talk with thees and thous. Who knows? I’m not going to let him get any closer. It’s a big sword.
I stretch out the ghosthand and place an invisible palm on his chest, halting his forward movement. He staggers a bit, looking around himself, as if to discover the wall or fence he’s run into.
“Let’s not make a mess of this, buddy,” Shreve says. “Are there soldiers ahead?” He pauses, reevaluating his wording. “You know, big towers made of people. Grabbing folks. Moaning and dripping and yelling weird stuff. You know.”
The sword-bearer shakes his head. It’s a little frantic. The guy is frazzled, that’s for sure. He’s probably hungry. Maybe they wanted the horses for food as much as transportation.
“One appeared two weeks ago, right after the electricity went out,” he says, voice hoarse. His knuckles are white on the pommel of the sword. “Took a lot people from Missoula, maybe a fifth. Or more. Then it …” He sobs once and then looks surprised that the sound came out of his own mouth. “Then it divided. Holy Christ, the thing split in two!”
Shreve nods, somberly. “Did both the soldiers go the same way?”
The man lowers the tip of the sword. “Soldiers? Why do you call them soldiers?”
Shreve waves his question away. “Doesn�
�t matter. Which way did they go?”
“One went northwest. The other followed the interstate east.”
Negata stands, looks at the man with the sword. “You may collect your friend now. He’s breathing on his own, but he’ll need to be watched.” He returns to his pony and leaps upon its back—graceful despite the heavy winter clothing—and takes up the reins again.
“Thanks for the info, dude,” Shreve says. “I’d suggest you guys give up on being highwaymen. It’s not working out too well for you.”
Negata kicks his horse forward, and Shreve follows. I bring up the rear, watching the men. They look at us with hungry faces as we ride past.
“But you’ve got more horses than you need!” the sword guy says. “You’re just leaving us to die!”
Negata doesn’t react, but I can see Shreve’s shoulders hitch, like he’s waiting on a blow.
We ride past, leading the ponies, leaving the would-be robbers behind us in the snow. A flight of ravens erupts from the tree line with loud caws, banks and wheels above us, and disappears.
The next day, we’ve skirted Missoula and begun riding east on the interstate median. From horseback, 95 is covered in snow and doesn’t so much look like a road as a never-ending field, stretching off into infinity, the white mounds of abandoned cars and the highway signs and mile markers the only things marring the illusion.
“It’s only after everything stopped that I realized how much of life,” Shreve says, lifting his hand to indicate the snow-covered road, “of human life, was dedicated to holding back … disorder.”
“Chaos,” I say. “Someone would have plowed this road.”
Negata sniffs and says, “An unplowed road is hardly chaotic. It is merely inconvenient.”
Now that we’re moving—slowly, very slowly—Negata’s opened up. The little man seems to want to share with us now. Maybe because time’s running out. For everyone. When we realized the color has been leeched from the world, maybe that was the stone that cracked his icy surface.
“What I find interesting,” Negata says, drawing his horse in line with ours, “is how little chaos the Conformity has caused. Some small devastation, but not as much as one would think. The world has simply gone into a state of decay. People gone. Absence.”
I think I get what he’s saying. In most wars—and if we have to compare this to something, it might as well be a war—there are explosions, buildings in flames, people dying slowly and in pieces. But that’s not what’s happening here. America is like an empty house now, slowly falling apart.
Negata turns in his saddle to look at us closely and continues to think out loud. “Maybe this is due to the nature of the Conformity—it gathers people unto itself. It has its own internal order. Whatever its goals—the absolute harvesting and subjugation of humanity, the reshaping of the universe—it isn’t here for destruction’s sake.” He looks around us at the derelict cars. “Otherwise, I think this planet would be in cinders.”
As Negata speaks, my flesh—even in the cold—breaks out in gooseflesh. “You know,” I say, “that’s almost the worst thing … the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah,” Shreve says. “The idea that it’s got its own idea of order—oh, man. Where does that leave us?”
“In the end,” Negata says, “we are merely fuel. We are its flesh. This entity—this consciousness from beyond the stars—has found a way to fashion a body for itself. And that body is the human race. Or the part of humanity that is best suited to it.”
“The extranaturals,” I say. “Us.”
Shreve says nothing. He’s not chewing his lip; he’s not railing against our fate. I’m riding close enough to see his face under the hood. It’s placid, if uncomfortable. He’s decided on something. He’s made up his mind. I don’t know what it is, but I can tell by the way his jaw is locked that he’s going to act.
When he does, I’ll be there to catch him.
thirty-four
EMBER
Can’t let the boys see how upset I am—not because I need to be all tough, but because the panic and desperation are catching. Saw Tap’s tears, and if he’s so broken that he’ll cry in front of us … we’re in bad shape. Tap’s like Shreve, to a certain extent. They’ll never let you see their weakness.
Like me, I guess, too.
Feel lost. Desolate. Not just because the campus lies in ruins, or because our cozy little life has been wiped away. There are so many dead. So many frozen bodies littered about as if they were candy-bar wrappers, just wadded up and thrown away. We mean so little to the Conformity in the end. Each life is just an infinitesimal spark, worthless in the larger scheme of things.
The little girl in the dorm room. White-eyed and half covered in snow.
Dani, Bernard, I wish I could have done something for you.
There’s nothing there, inside me. Was terrified at first when the ghosts came. Felt as though I was losing control of myself. But then there was a comfort knowing that Dani and Bernard were in me, somewhere at least.
After sex, when both Jack and I fade to black, I have dreams that are not my own. Wake to strange rhythms, pulsing and pounding in my head, and images of people I love that I’ve never seen or met before but that remind me of Dani and Bernard. And the strange thing is, we were never close in life. Weren’t buds. Were just kids who went to the same school—thrown together by chance. But now, they live inside of me. Don’t know what I’d do if I could be rid of them. Would that mean they’d be dead forever? Is any part of them alive even now?
Jack and Tap follow closely in the howling currents of air, and that’s fine because they can’t see my tears up here, and if they did, I could blame them on the wind.
The first day’s a bust—we must have taken the wrong route on Highway 10. We bunk down in an abandoned motel, all sharing the same room. I wanted to be with Jack, alone, but he insisted. Worried for Tap, he said—he shouldn’t be by himself. I gave in but didn’t like it. Because the sex is like a drug. Sex is like a drug, uh huh uh huh, baby. Know that’s been sung so many times before in a bajillion different ways, but that’s because it’s true. Not just the physical sensation, the hushed breath and taste of his lips and him moving under me, or above me. It blots out higher thought, and all that’s left is the urgency of my body, the urgency of his, and the rest of the world is gone away, remote. There’s nothing that can dethrone me from that mindless seat of heaven.
But last night, we all bunked together and there was none of the mindless release. We piled under blankets and sleeping bags—with Tap on the other bed—with nothing to do but think about how fucked up our situation is. Pretended to watch television on the dead idiot box. Talked about the old shows we used to love back when electricity existed. Thought about our families. Jack was very quiet then.
Finally fell asleep, kept imagining a frozen little dead girl in the corner, holding a silky blanket and staring at me with white eyes.
Backtracking our route this morning, keeping the highway below our feet as we fly, and making our way east and then south.
They’ll stay together, I think, Jack says as we circle a small town that consists of a gas station, a weathered post office, a bar, and a trailer park.
Why do you think that? I ask. Why won’t they just head off to wherever the hell they want to go?
They’re members of the Society. They’ll want to continue to be around people like themselves, right? Jack says.
Tap’s not scornful, but there is doubt in his mental tone. There were Army and lab coats in the evacuees. They’ll want to go home.
Well, sure, I say, but if they’re all split up, it’ll be because they’re scared of the Conformity. If I was traveling in a large group, I’d worry that a soldier would be drawn to us.
I guess so, Jack concedes. But whatever. We need to find the Army vehicles and from there we can find Reese.
Maybe seventy miles south I spot the line of dull gray Jeeps and troop transports lolling on the side of the h
ighway. We land long enough to determine that the vehicles are stripped of belongings and there’s no one hanging around. At the next exit there’s some indication that the evacuees came this way. Behind the Town Pump truck stop there’s a huge steel building, the bay garage doors standing open but deserted. We land in a gravel parking lot, weapons ready. The parking lot sits surrounded by reclaimed lumber and the rusting hulks of thousands of cars, neatly stacked.
“Two big campfires over here,” I say. “Looks like they burned half a building.”
“And here’s where they spent the first night. This would’ve been a bit over a week or so ago,” Jack says, pushing back the garage door all the way. It’s a warehouse-like garage, concrete-floored and easily over five thousand square feet. There are wooden pallets arranged in a grid, one of which still has a tent on it.
“Looks like they made their own little campsite inside,” I say.
“They’re close, then,” says Tap. “With no vehicles, they couldn’t have gone far.”
“Some of the Red Team were with them,” I add. “The jocks like us, they probably would have flown the coop.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t have stuck around,” Tap says.
“I don’t know,” Jack says slowly.
“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’?”
“Reese is with them. And the Bomb.”
“So?” Tap’s natural surliness is returning.
“They’re not gonna let themselves go unprotected, you know? In the testing—” Jack thinks for a little bit. “Did either of you go up against Reese in the Testing? Or the Bomb?”
“The Bomb did her stuff on me,” Tap says, and then whistles. “Ooof. Hurts so good. I don’t think my boner went away for a month.” He shakes his head, shifts the weight of his M14 to his left hand, and adjusts his bandolier. “But I didn’t get the Liar.”
“I got the Liar,” I say. “He made me think my hair was on fire. That my grandma was dead.”
The Conformity Page 20