The Conformity (12 page)

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 protoplasm; 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.