The Conformity

by John Hornor Jacobs

  “Then you both got off lucky. I was on the receiving end of both of them. Here’s the deal—if there are two extranaturals to watch out for, it’s those two. The only person who could probably withstand their power is the one person we can’t talk to right now.” He looks around, walks over to the dead campfire, and kicks at a piece of lumber. “More than likely, the Liar will have taken control, unless the Bomb got to him first. We’ll have to be super careful.”

  “Why?” Tap asks.

  “Because the Liar can convince us to do anything by just saying one sentence. He could tell us that he’s the messiah, and we’d believe him,” Jack says.

  “That’s some serious bugfuckery, man.” Tap looks up at the sky. “We’ve got lots of daylight left. Let’s do this.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait? We should scout out the situation first,” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea …” Jack says, rubbing his chin. “Once we spot them, maybe just one of us will go in, right? They might bugfuck one of us, but they can’t bugfuck all of us.”

  “Okay,” Tap agrees. “Who’s it gonna be?”

  “It should be me,” Jack says. “They know I’m …” He stops here. Rubs his chin again. He doesn’t know how to describe his relationship with Shreve because boys aren’t self-aware enough to be honest and just say Shreve’s my brother. “Close to Shreve. And I can speak for him.”

  “It should be Tap,” I say. Tap wheels on me, spluttering. “Or me.”

  “Why?” Tap asks.

  “Jack, you’re the only big gun we have here. If Tap or I go in and don’t come back, you can go in blasting.”

  “I’m not going to attack other members of the Society.”

  “Why not? If the Liar uses his ability on me, he’s attacking us. There’s no difference.”

  “No difference? You don’t die when he uses his ability on you. No, it has to be me. If I don’t come back with him, you find Shreve.”

  “How?” I say.

  “Scream your head off.” He looks grim. “You’re the strongest of us, Ember. You’re a bugfuck yourself. If you scream into the—” He searches for the right phrase, but I already know what he’s talking about. “The space between all of us. The Irregulars.”

  “The ether.”

  “You scream there, Shreve will hear,” Jack says.

  He’s right. And that makes me afraid. Because if Shreve can hear, what else will be listening?

  thirty-five

  JACK

  Smoke passes into the sky in a gray diagonal from a cluster of houses by a small river, choked with ice floe. I can see figures moving among the houses, chopping wood. Carrying things.

  I’ll investigate, I say, waving Tap and Ember away. You two hang back. I’ll holler if I’m in trouble.

  I land in the drive of the largest house. It’s much bigger than it looked from the air—a rich person’s getaway home on a trout stream in the Rockies. Probably well stocked.

  A guard yelps when he sees me standing there, looking up at the massive front of the home. He’s sitting in a folding chair on an upper gallery of the house, one of those built-in patios that you see in ski lodges and rich folks’ homes. There’s more plate glass in this building than on a skyscraper. Good view of the mountains and valley. Didn’t see me coming, though.

  “Halt!” the guard hollers, lifting his rifle.

  “I’m a member of the Society,” I say, raising my hands. I don’t recognize the man pointing the gun at me. He seems familiar, but I can’t remember anything about him. “I was part of the team that led the Conformity soldier away. Who’s in charge here?”

  “Doctor Hemming. Stay there. I’ll get him.” He backs up to the sliding glass door behind him and slides it open, disappearing inside. Within moments three more gunmen are on the gallery, dressed in fatigues. Army guys. One I recognize from the campus. They’ve got me covered. From the corner of my eye I notice a bit more movement at the corners of the house.

  I raise my hands high. “I’m unarmed!”

  “I know who you are, Jack,” a voice says from the gallery. A small, mousy woman moves to the railing of the gallery and looks down at me. Tanzer.

  “Did you want something?” she asks. “I’m sorry, but we can’t offer you anything—we are trying to conserve food and ammunition.”

  “I don’t need anything from you,” I say, craning my neck to get a better look at her. “Just some information.”

  “You can ask. I’ll do my best to answer.”

  “Can you get your guys to lower their weapons?”

  Tanzer smiles, but it’s brittle and insincere. “Jack, I know what you can do. I ran your testing, though you may not have known that. And to my knowledge, your abilities don’t allow you to stop—or dodge—bullets. So, I’m sorry, no. We can’t let down our guard.”

  “Uh, did something happen? You know me. I’m not violent.”

  She laughs. “I doubt I’ve ever met anyone with more capacity for violence than you.”

  Well, that’s not the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. I can feel my back tighten, and before I know it my hands are balled into fists.

  She says in a quieter voice, “I don’t mean to taunt you, Jack. I’m sorry, but things have gotten … difficult.”

  “How so?”

  “When the extranaturals took control—”

  “Who?” I say. It’s rude to interrupt, I know. But this is important. “The Liar?”

  “Yes. He took control of what’s left of the Red and Green Teams and told us we’d be better off waiting here. Of course, he was right.”

  “You sure he wasn’t, uh, lying to you?”

  “No, I can’t be sure. But I don’t think he was. He just explained that they’d be able to move faster without the Army or research personnel.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m just an administrator. A tech, really, with low-level telekinesis. I can lift a few pounds and float it around. There are a few other folks like that here. Non-flyers. Non-bugfucks. Low-watt bulbs, you know?”

  Right. I know the type. Extranaturals whose abilities wouldn’t be good for much more than parlor tricks. Or being subsumed by the Conformity.

  “You know which way the Liar went when he left you?”

  “No.”

  “You mean you didn’t see which way?”

  “No, I have no idea. I can remember them leaving but …” Her face clouds and her forehead scrunches up. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember.”

  “Okay,” I say. Reese got to her. “Listen, we’re working on the Conformity.”

  “Working on it?”

  “Working to defeat it.”

  She looks incredulous. “You have a plan?”

  For a moment everything stills and I can feel my heart hammering in my chest. I can feel the surge of blood in my veins. I’ve got nothing.

  We’ve got nothing.

  Our plan is to get the Liar and bring him to Shreve. That’s it. What kind of plan is that?

  “Okay,” says Tanzer simply, after I’ve been silent a few seconds. “Do me a favor, will you?”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “Make sure you’re far away from here when you try to kill yourself.”

  What’s wrong? Ember asks when I rejoin them in the sky.

  We’re idiots. That’s what’s wrong, I say.

  I get varying degrees of mental alarm from them. There’s a wide field below us with a small barn, so I descend and go inside, pulling an MRE from my backpack. I don’t want to make a fire, so I just sit down on a bale of hay and open the MRE and begin to eat, not even paying attention to the flavor. It’s salty and meaty. That’s all I know.

  Tap and Ember follow me inside.

  “What’s the deal, hoss?” Tap asks.

  I quickly unspool the memory of my conversation with Tanzer right into their minds.

  “So you didn’t tell her anything,” Ember says when she and Tap have absorbed the flashback.

  “What’s
there to tell? We’re getting the Liar and bringing him to Shreve. That’s our immediate plan. But what happens after that?”

  Tap walks over and takes my gum. He tears open a piece and shoves it in his mouth.

  “So what?” he says. “Why are you getting so jumpy?”

  “Because we’re running all over creation, but we have no idea why.”

  “So?” Tap says.

  “So, we don’t know if Shreve knows what he’s doing. How are we going to deal with the Conformity?”

  Ember laughs. “That’s what you’re worried about?” She shrugs and sits down beside me, puts her hand on my thigh. “Put your mind at ease, then, lover. I can promise you Shreve has an idea what he’s doing. He’s got some kind of angle. We’re talking about Shreve, here.” She laughs. “That kid has always got some kind of angle. Never met anyone with more agendas than Shreve, except maybe Quincrux.”

  She rubs my leg. I can feel my back unkink. The anger ebbing.

  “Or Priest,” I say. “And look what happened to him.”

  “Forget all that for the moment. If we start to despair now, before we’ve even done anything, we’re all going to die.” Her hand feels good. She’s warm, and her warmth is seeping into me through her contact. “Just remember. Priest had a plan—”

  “Fat lot of good it did him.”

  “But it did save us—most of us—and the rest of the Society. Crazy to think about it, but Shreve’s as close as we’ve got to Priest,” Ember says, and leans in.

  “That’s what’s worrying me.”

  “No.” She bows her head for a moment and then snatches my spoon and takes a bite from the MRE packet. “Dani and Bernard seemed to believe in their message. And they’re dead.” She blinks. “Or kinda dead. All the clutter and confusion of living swept away. So that’s saying something.”

  “Saying what?” I ask.

  “Something,” she says.

  “It’s saying,” Tap interjects, “that they trusted him enough to do one last thing for him.”

  “You know Shreve,” Ember says. “What do you think?”

  “He’s got a plan,” I say. “But it definitely won’t work out like he thinks it will.”

  I understand how the Native Americans always knew where the settlers were: where there’s fire, there’s smoke. It’s the oldest giveaway in the book.

  They’ve set up their homestead in a lodge, way back in the aspens, so we have to make two close passes before we can see anything. Funny how their hidey-hole mirrors ours on Devil’s Throne, except that ours sucked pretty hard and theirs looks like a mansion. Who knew there were so many rich people in Montana?

  “He’s here,” Ember says. “I can feel it.”

  She doesn’t have to say more than that. I don’t know how she does it. I don’t know how Shreve does it. They just do. Bugfucks. Maybe that’s why I was so eager at first to follow along with the “plan.” Because in the end, I don’t really comprehend the nature of being a telepath. All I know is what I can do. I can fly. I can move things: air, water, rock, earth. Walls. Myself.

  So. Get the Liar. Bring him to Shreve. That’s what I’m going to do.

  But the Liar, he can just say one thing and it’ll all go to hell. He could be like the Conformity itself just by saying, “You will do everything I command,” and he’d have an army behind him. He could tell me I can’t fly and I’d believe him. The pressure of that realization becomes unbearable.

  Not much conversation’s needed, and I’m in no state to talk anyway. Tap, Ember, and I keep a tight formation on our circuit and then drop out of sight of the lodge.

  “Back in an hour, or you start screaming, right?” I say.

  “Right. But how will we know?” Ember says.

  “Know what?”

  “When an hour’s up.” She lifts her arm and pulls back the sleeve, showing bare skin. “No watches.”

  “Your best guess, then.”

  Ember’s face is taut and pale, and I can see she’s worried. But there’s nothing for it except to buckle up and fly on in.

  It’s only a small hop over the aspens and onto the back deck of the cabin.

  Blackwell and Galine are posted as guards, and they perk up at my approach, raising rifles—one a hunting rifle—and taking shooting stances.

  “Jack,” Blackwell says. “We thought you were dead.” He doesn’t lower the rifle.

  Galine scans the skies. “Who else is with you?”

  “Just me,” I say. They look unconvinced. “Though there are people waiting for me. Just so you know. They’ll be …” I’m not prepared for this cloak-and-dagger stuff, and I feel myself resorting to dialogue from all the movies I’ve seen. “They’ll be alarmed if I’m not back very soon.”

  “Alarmed?”

  “And agitated. So, let’s do this quickly, shall we?”

  “Do what?”

  “The Liar. I need to talk with him. Alone.”

  Blackwell doesn’t say anything, just chucks his head at the French doors, indicating to Galine to go inside.

  “What happened with your team?” I ask. “After the soldiers took the campus?”

  His need to talk about himself wins out over his personal distaste for me.

  “Rode hell-bent for leather, as fast as we could.” He looks about. “Made it a ways before all the cars died. After that, it was obvious that wrangling the pencil-necks and normies was a no-win situation, so the rest of the Red Team, and Reese, we decided to move on our own, since being shepherds wasn’t really in the game plan—”

  “‘We decided,’ or Reese told you what was going to happen?” I ask.

  “We decided, man.”

  “And you made it here. That was your game plan?”

  “The game plan is always first and foremost to stay alive.”

  I think about that. “So you set up shop here?”

  “Yeah. We got one wounded—friendly fire—but once she’s better, we’re going even more remote. The way we figure it, the more people around, the more likely that evil asshole thing will come for us. You should keep that in mind.”

  After a moment or two, the doors open again and Galine motions me inside.

  The cabin isn’t what you’d think of as a cabin. The ceiling’s forty feet above us and crowned by a massive chandelier made of antlers. A lot of animals died to make that chandelier. There’s an upright bear in the corner of the great room. A moose head glares down at me from above the fireplace. One girl—her name’s Cat, I think I remember—lolls in an overstuffed chair near the fire with a copy of People in her hands. In the oversized stone hearth a fire burns, the wood popping and cracking. There are a couple of extranaturals sitting at the dining table—the house is set up in a wide, open layout, the kitchen connecting to the great room—with books open in front of them. They look me up and down as I enter and then return their attention to their reading material. Not worried about my presence.

  Cameron Reese stands at the foot of a large stairway leading up to what I assume are bedrooms. He’s dressed in a Misfits T-shirt and ratty jeans. His Mohawk’s grown out since I last saw him during the testing, and he’s got a little blond vandyke and a nose ring. Multiple earrings. Lots of metal on his hands. Dressed for the occasion, I guess. Nice to feel important.

  Looking at him, I’m instantly wary. They call him the Liar, and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Although I could probably throw him a mile or two, if I was angry enough.

  “Jack, right? Hey, man, how you doin’?” Reese smiles. “Galine here,” he says, gesturing to her standing behind him on the stairs, “tells me you’ve got something to talk to me about. Come on. We’ll go in here.”

  Reese turns and pads down a hallway. None of his cohorts follow, though Galine and the girl from the overstuffed chair wait at the end of the hall, watching.

  “Not taking any chances, are you?”

  Reese doesn’t laugh. He puts his ringed hand on a doorknob, twists, and pushes the door open, revealing
a private theater with two rows of plush, almost-recliner seats. Entering, Reese says, “Man, you know how it is out there. Everything’s crazy. People are desperate.” He walks over to the wall and twists a rod, opening the blinds. Thin, watery light pours into the room. “Shit’s getting seriously weird. No electricity. Like, it doesn’t work. This house has a generator, full of gas too.” He sits down in one of the seats. “And now everything’s gone black and white, like some crazy old movie. What’s next?”

  “I don’t know what’s next, but we do have an idea of what’s happening.”

  “Really?” Reese’s eyes light up. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  I don’t really know where to start, but Reese takes my hesitation as distrust. He says, “Listen, man. You’re wary. I know that. You know what I can do, and you know the nickname they gave me.” Reese mouth twists in distaste. “I didn’t ask for any of this, and I don’t want it. I just want to get back to where I was before.”

  “The campus is destroyed. There’s nothing—”

  “The campus? I don’t want to go back there. I was a prisoner. Quincrux was gonna force me to become his own little espionage unit. He—” His voice thickens and he flexes his hands into fists, realizes he’s doing it, and releases. “He had my mom. My sister. He was holding them hostage so I’d do what he wanted.”

  Of all the possible scenarios I’d imagined involving the Liar, they never involved him starting to cry. The tears well up in his eyes and run down his cheeks.

  “What I want is to go back to life before all this. Before everything became so fucked up.” He looks helplessly around the theater. “I just want to go home.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “Can I ask a question?”

  He nods, wiping away the tears.

  “What happened to everyone? We found Tanzer and all the lab coats. Some of the Army guys. What happened to the rest of them? The Bomb?”

  He looks uncomfortable. “After the vehicles stopped working, things got tense pretty fast. Some guy made a play for the Bomb, and her guards shot him. They went off with her on their own. No idea what happened to them.”

  “What about Tanzer and her group?”