The Conformity (27 page)

Jack manages only five minutes in the air before he has to land. Much like Tap, once he's untethered to Madelyn, he falls to the ground.

“What's the deal?” I ask. “How is it so hard to carry someone?”

“See?” Tap says. “See? She's like an elephant!”

“Hey!” Madelyn says, and I do believe she's actually blushing. “Watch it, kid.”

“I guess it's my turn, then,” I say. “How far have we come?”

“Not very,” Tap responds, looking at the trees around us. “Maybe a couple of miles. Jack was wallowing about up there like a sinking tanker.”

“She's
heavy
,” Jack says, glancing at Madelyn. “I've got to give a continuous pulse, so fast it's crazy.”

“Okay, when you boys are done whining, let's strap her to my back.”

Jack hops up almost immediately and approaches me.

“This is getting a little old, hog-tied over and over again,” she says. We tie her steady. She takes a big breath. “I'm ready. God, this will be embarrassing if you can't even get off the ground.”

When I fly there's a few things happening. It's an awareness, really, of everything around me, like I'm in a bubble and that space becomes lighter than air and I rise up, ascending, and then it takes only the smallest breath of telekinesis to send me dashing on my aerial way.

With Madelyn, everything is off, slightly. My body rises sluggishly, and I have to concentrate on the lightness of my (our) beings. We rise slowly, but rise we do, and it takes only a few moments to adjust to her being strapped to me. But once we're up, it's not much more effort than normal flight, even if the control of our actual trajectory is a little problematic. It's like a boat wallowing about. Our forward movement is sluggish.
Glacial
might be the better word and just as cold.

Jack and Tap circle us like sharks during the flight, and we go for a good long while—an hour or more—before I need to land.

“Wow, Ember,” Jack says once we're back on terra firma. “You were up there forever.”

“What, you thought I couldn't carry her because I'm a girl?”

“No,” he says quickly, blushing. “It's just … just …”

“I did,” Tap says, staring openly, arms akimbo. A challenge. “You're not as strong a flyer as either Jack or me, yet you were able to keep the anvil up there longer. How's that happen?”

At the word
anvil
Madelyn squawks, but the boys ignore her. Jack looks at Tap and shakes his head, and they're talking mentally but keeping it from me.

“You ever think that brute force doesn't solve everything?” I say.

Tap shakes his head. “Nope, it's pretty much the key that'll unlock any door.”

“You're an idiot.”

“Screw you. I can fly circles around you, and you know it. How did you keep her up there for so long?”

“God, you're dense,” I say. “I
think
different than you.”

His eyes bug, and he wants to say something but he knows he's got nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“I think we can all agree you'll be the pack horse from here on out,” Jack says, putting his arm around me.

I'm still pissed—at Tap
and
Jack—for doubting I could do it, so I shrug off his arm and ignore the hurt expression on his face.

“We're still going five miles an hour. We could walk faster than this,” says Tap. “So you might be able to lift her, but you're not doing us much more fucking good than that.”

“Maybe calling her the pack horse was the wrong phrase. Maybe we should call her the wagon,” Jack says.

“What?” I say. Madelyn looks puzzled.

Jack says, “Do we have any more leashes or rope?”

“Why?” Tap asks, but I already understand what he means.

“I've got an idea,” Jack says.

Tap yells over the wind as he and Jack strain against the wind and the tethers. We're going at a pretty good clip now. We've crossed the lake and should get to the lodge before full dark. The two dog leashes are clipped to the boys' belts—we had to turn them around and hook the clip on the buckles—and they draw us through the air like two draft horses hitched to a wagon.

“Some superheroes we are,” Tap grumbles to Jack. Normally it would be hard to hear, but they're only at the end of the retractable leashes and well within earshot. “Glorified horses!”

“More like asses,” Madelyn says. I can hear the amusement in her voice. Despite everything—the end of the world, the weird cult and mob rules, the Conformity soldier materializing in the center of her hometown—Madelyn seems pretty chipper to be flying three hundred feet in the air over Idaho wilderness, being pulled by adolescent extranaturals.

“You seem remarkably upbeat,” I say. Figure I can concede and make some small talk with the person who's strapped to me. With her pressed to my back, I'm warmer than I've been in a while. It would be weirder if I pretended like she wasn't there.

“We're
flying!”
Madelyn says, and I feel her squirm against my back. “Holy shit. Humans can fly!”

The joy in the declaration is unmistakable. Remember the first time my feet left the ground, in the corn maze outside of Lawrence. It was Halloween, and we'd driven the thirty minutes out to the October Country Pumpkin Patch and Corn Maze, and Grandma, wearing her sun hat and sundress, pointed to the maze and said, “Why don't you go get lost for a bit while I have some sweet tea with Mr. Calander,” and I squeed and ran off. Didn't mean to take her literally but got lost anyway and for an hour or more found myself trapped in the maze until desperation took over and some invisible part of me, a phantom organ maybe, spasmed in my chest and I made myself rise and
pull
, moving higher over the earth, until I found myself out floating above the amber fields—in the maze no longer and lighter than air, high up where words could not touch me. Free. Maybe people on the ground mistook me for a balloon or some strange part of the attraction of the October Country and discounted their own eyes. Later, when Grandma scolded me for being late and “gone for gee-deed hours, you miscreant witch-child,” her words hurt less than they ever had before because I held that moment of ascent tight within me, a secret joy I could never share. The joy birds must feel when shucking off the chains of the earth.

“Yeah, I know.” Sometimes life brings you little things that make the larger, painful ones diminish. For a little while. “Yes. Holy shit, humans can fly.”

The lodge is empty when we return. Find a note on the pallet where Shreve, up until very recently, lay unconscious. It's written in small, crabbed, capital letters like some troll shouting on the Internet.

JACK—

HAD TO GO, MAN. FELT THE CONFORM TRY TO MANIFEST. DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED THERE, BUT I SUSPECT A CLOSE CALL. DON'T TRY TO FIND ME. IF I USE THE JUICY-JUICE, THE THING IN MARYLAND WILL KNOW AND COME FOR ME. FOR US.

I NEED YOU AND E TO FIND THE LIAR. HE'S GOT A PART TO PLAY—EVEN IF I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS YET. SORRY I SOUND LIKE I'M WEARING A WIZARD ROBE AND HAT, I'M NOT. START LOOKING FOR HIM AT THE CAMPUS, OR WHAT'S LEFT OF IT.

YOU WILL KNOW WHEN TO FIND ME. I PROMISE.

LATRO ALLIGATRO—

SHREVE

Jack takes the note, reads it silently, his face still, and hands it to Tap, who then reads it aloud as if we're all morons. Madelyn watches him, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Jesus H., he acts like I don't even exist,” Tap says. He shifts his weight and drops the note to the floor. “We don't look for him?”

“Reading comprehension problems?” I say.

“Yeah, whatever. I don't do everything Shreve tells me.”

“Then you're even a bigger idiot than we all suspected,” I say.

“So, we're on our own,” Tap responds. The guy just isn't getting it.

“We've got each other,” I say as Jack bends over to pick up the note and tuck it away in one of his pockets. “And the doc over here.”

Madelyn looks surprised. “I have my animals to attend to,” she says, and she chews her lip. “And I'm dead weight to you. But you know where to find me, if you need something.” She pauses and looks at each of us in turn. “It's too late now, but you'll have to take me back in the morning.” She looks weary now, lines etched in her face. The elation from our flight is gone, and what's left is stress, exhaustion.

Wonder if I'll look like that when I'm her age.

Who am I kidding? I'll never make it to her age.

The lodge is cold in the morning. Spent the night huddled together, Jack and I, in the remaining blankets. Madelyn and Tap slept separately, though I could swear I saw him glance longingly at her slumbering form. But he's too weak to admit he needs the warmth.

Outside, the sky's still gray but the snow has become flurries and the wind is not as brutal. After a few moments of tethering, we rise up in the wagon formation and head back to McCall. It's quicker going, and before most of the day is through we're gliding above the frozen lake and settling in the clinic's parking lot. The church still smolders, sending a small granite line of smoke into the sky.

On the ground, we untether Madelyn and the boys, and when she's free she touches my shoulder and looks at me closely, considering. Her eyes are watery blue. Once they were probably electric, but now time has leeched the color from them.

“I can't begin to understand the burden that's been placed on you kids,” she says, squeezing my bicep. My first instinct is to pull away. Issues of physical contact,
I
like to be the initiator. It's better to touch than get touched. But I don't. Madelyn isn't so bad, and I don't feel any burning need to put the beatdown on her. Rather she not touch me whenever the hell she feels like it, though.

Maybe she picks up the vibes I'm putting out, because she removes her hand. But she continues talking.

“What you kids have shown me has been …” She pauses, trying to find the right word. “It's been
wondrous
. Incredible. You know? I feel like I'm a girl again in some ways and Peter Pan has pulled me from my window out into the sky. Does that make any sense?”

Sure it makes sense. Don't understand why she's monologuing now.

“But there's a flip side to wondrous,” Madelyn says, shaking her head. She looks at Tap when she says, “Peter Pan can fly, but he's got the Lost Boys. It has a darker side, like many fairy tales, and what waits in the shadows are things that usually—” She stops, thinking again, her face clouded. The parking lot is a study in windswept snowdrifts curled and etched into soft, white shapes. The firs lining the street beyond stand dark and silent. There's only us four in a hushed, frozen world.

“Usually what?” Jack asks, his voice low.

She shifts her gaze from Tap to Jack. She stays quiet for a long while—longer than any dramatic pause should be. “They eat your youth,” she says, voice flat. “Maybe they already have. You three are jaded, and you're just kids. Maybe it's because this is a war, maybe because of your abilities. I don't know.”