The Conformity (8 page)

When he walks forward, vanishing from sight, I reach out for him. He's swallowed by darkness. “Negata, don't—”

I hear a mechanical clank, and suddenly lights flash, flicker, and buzz. An electrical hum. The door swings shut behind us. We stand in a corridor much like the rough-hewn one we traveled before, twenty feet wide and equally tall, but this one stretches off into infinity, a straight passage through the heart of the mountain, flickering lights bursting into incandescence every fifty feet. The floor is smooth, like that of a garage. To my right I notice a pair of oversized golf carts near charging stations.

“So, we're taking those?”

“Yes.”

Negata walks to one of the carts, unplugs it from the wall, and chucks his head at me, indicating I should take charge of the other one.

We pull the pair to the door to the armory. He stops me on the way back.

“As you lure the Conformity away from here, I want you to think about the sensation of being noticed.”

“I don't get it.”

“The attention of the entity behind the Conformity will be upon you. I want you to become aware of the sensation.”

“Why?”

He turns and opens the door to the armory. “Because you cannot become unnoticeable until you know what it is to be conspicuous.” He holds the door for me. “Understood?”

“Okay.”

“This is good.”

Inside, everyone's geared up. We usher them into the corridor and load up the electric carts. Ammo, weapons, MREs. Nothing more. No personal items. No baggage. We're either refugees or nomads now. Or both. I can't decide.

I stop Davies before he slides behind the wheel of the cart. “I need to talk with you, just for a moment.”

“What is it? Time is tight—”

“You've got walkie-talkies?”

“None in the armory. So no. We're just going to have to focus on planning.”

“No.” I point at the Irregulars. A motley group. “We're connected.”

“What do you mean?” He looks puzzled, and that's to be expected. I've been in his head before. I know I can unlock the doors and putter around in his brainmeat, but it's important that this be voluntary.

“I can get in people's heads.”

He nods, wary.

“We're connected,” I say. “And they can speak to me and each other over distances.”

Davies whistles.

“I can give this to you.”

“No.”

“It's a matter of survival, Captain. We need every advantage we can get.”

“That mean you'll be able to read my thoughts?”

“I can already do that.”

His hand involuntarily twitches. I imagine it's wanting to hold a gun or my throat.

I hold up my hands. “I'm not! But I can.”

The muscles in his cheek are like steel bands. Mr. Toothgrindicus is here to stay. But there's a small shift to his shoulders, as if he's bearing some unseen weight.

“It'll just be like me flipping a switch—” Or so I hope. “And then we'll all be able to communicate. Well, except for Mr. Negata.”

“Why not Negata?”

“He doesn't exist. In the ether.”

“The ether?”

I wave away the question. “The telepathic world. He's a ghost. He can't be seen.”

Davies stares hard at me, like he's evaluating something in me only he can see. “Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“Give me your hand.”

We shake, and then he says, “Okay. Do it.”

I waste no time. I'm on him and moving in his consciousness like an arsonist. Blazing. His eyes widen and then no more.

He pats me on the shoulder and moves to the carts. Casey looks at me expectantly. Danielle, Bernard, and Tap watch as I clamber into the cart and Davies takes the wheel. Jack sits with Negata, who simply stares down the corridor.

I'd like you all to welcome Captain Davies to our little shindig. He's the newest member of the Irregulars,
I send. The ether thrums, the shibboleth stirs within me. I am a conduit, a switchboard.

The Irregulars send various jocular images and words of welcome to Davies, who looks gruff and slightly embarrassed. He grips the cart's steering wheel and mashes the accelerator.

The vehicles make small whirring sounds as we accelerate down the hall, and everyone remains silent. The tires buzz on the smooth concrete of the corridor floors. The reality of our situation settles, and I can sense small personal mental conversations flickering in the minds of my companions like heat lightning flashing on a far-off horizon.

Everything is hushed now, and expectant.

It's a strange feeling, riding on golf carts underneath a billion tons of rock, sliding almost soundlessly down an endless corridor to an unknown fate. But hey, that's why we get paid the big bucks, right?

After ten or fifteen minutes, Tap says, “Are we there yet?”

Davies, without missing a beat, says, “Don't make me stop this car, son.”

The group laughs; there's an easing of tension. In the distance, a familiar-looking streaked-metal blast door appears and grows as we approach.

“Tanzer tells me this was originally a Cold War hidey-hole for high-level government officials and their families,” Davies says. “God help the common man.”

“It looks as if it
would
take a nuclear explosion to get through those doors,” Jack says.

Davies stops the cart, climbs out, and approaches the keypad. He presses in an inordinately long string of digits, and then a grinding sound echoes down the stone passage. The blast doors begin to swing inward, opening, revealing another motor pool, similar to the one on the other side of the mountain we've just traveled underneath like some mutant species of dwarf.

A Jeep is up on blocks, wheels off, hood up, but a large troop transport—dull army green and marked with a white star on the door—looks ready for action.

“I'd suggest you get your shit in order, people, before we open those outer doors. I don't know how fast that thing will be on us, but our job is to lure it away. Bernard, Casey, Negata, and I will be in the transport. Shreve, Jack, help me to take off the tarpaulin covering the bed. There should be tools over there to remove these struts.” He pats the bed framing.

Bernard trots over to the workbench by the Jeep. Tap begins pumping gasoline from an oversized drum into a smaller one to top off the transport's tank. Danielle and Casey rummage through a large mechanic's toolbox while Jack and I begin removing the canvas covering from the back of the vehicle.

I grab a wrench and begin removing the struts and ribbing of the transport bed as best I can.

“We need to move it, people,” Davies barks. “It's now one p.m. The day is wearing on, and I do not want to do this in the dark.”

This is a man used to giving orders. A natural at it. And I can see the calming effect that a firm hand has on everyone else. In the end, we're kids, and despite it all—the extra fingers, the flying, the exploding, the seriously fucked-up childhood-into-adolescences—having an adult in charge eases tensions and provides security.

Check this out,
Danielle sends to the group. She wheels a large red box around the front of the derelict Jeep.
Plasma cutter. Back up, y'all. It's my show.

You know how to use that?
Tap sends, incredulous.

My mom owns a construction company. I can do any job a man can do. Usually in half the time.

Dayum, girly-girl,
Bernard sends.
Beautiful
and
handy. Now that's a powerful combination.
Quick auditory impression of a drum fill ending in a rimshot.

Shut it,
Danielle says. But she winks at him. And I don't even have to peep him to know that his gooey center just got gooey-er.

Danielle wheels the cutter into place, pulls on the protective mask, and goes to work, filling the motor pool with blue flashes of light and the mechanical stink of melted metal.

Smells like a volcano in here,
Jack sends.

I help Jack and Tap remove the struts as Danielle cuts them away, while Casey and Bernard get the gear ready for loading. When it's all complete, we load the transport and stand there looking at one another, as if wondering what's next. But we all know what's next.

The Conformity soldier.

“Might as well get this show on the road,” Davies says. He approaches the last keypad lock, taps numbers into its face, and returns to the transport as a yellow light begins to twirl and a buzzing alarm sounds, indicating that the doors are about to roll back. And they do.

Fresh air whips through the crack and sweeps the smoke of the plasma torch away. The mountainside is wreathed in pines, and a wide valley opens below us. Far wider than the narrow gully that's the home of the campus for the Society of Extranaturals, this valley stretches thirty, forty miles across.

There will be no place to hide out there.

There are times to acknowledge one's fears, to look them right in the face and claim them, and other times to push them away, deny they exist. The thing is, I wouldn't be so absolutely terrified if it was zombies, or an apocalypse of vampires, or nuclear war, or almost
anything
other than the loss of one's individuality into that giant, towering monstrosity.

Or worse, the loss of these people. People I care about.

There it is. Can't hide it. Can't push it away.

My bowels are watery and my legs weak. But Davies clambers into the cab of the transport, and Negata joins him. Casey and Bernard huddle in the bed—now our makeshift landing area. The ignition growls and the engine ratchets into gear, belching diesel fumes into the air.

Let's go,
Davies sends. I'm amazed at how quickly he's taken to the telepathic communication, but the man is a veteran. I doubt much fazes him.
Shreve, now's the time to do your thing,
he says.

The transport takes off, out the double blast doors and down the gravel mountainside road, leaving Tap, Jack, Danielle, and me standing in the opening.

You can do this, man?
Jack asks.

I just nod.

Well, there's no time like the present,
Danielle says, and she chucks a grenade into the launcher of the M14 she holds and launches herself into the air.

Come on, noob,
Tap says.
I can't wait to see you wallow about up here with the big boys.

Big girls!
Danielle sends. I get a quick image of Tap in drag.

Jack and Tap rise quickly, the speed of their passage making their clothes riffle. Soon they're little black smudges against the wispy cirrus clouds that streak the afternoon sky.

It's cold out here. I shiver.

Now it's up to me. I'm alone on the bosom of the mountain.

The sky waits for me.

Before, it was a matter of desperation. Then that intractable part of me, the base part, would not give up life, and somehow it caused the shibboleth, this strange ability of ours, to shift and grow within me. Like the Grinch's heart growing five sizes too big.

I've become so much larger on the inside. And so much smaller on the outside. I feel like I'm shrinking.

You'll need to do your best to cover your ears,
I say to them all.

What? Ears?

Your mental ones, at least. It's about to get ugly.

What do you mean?

I close my eyes, blotting out the queries and exclamations.

Darkness of my own making.

Something happens then that I do not expect. The shibboleth
surges within me, as if it's a living thing and I am just its vessel. My eyes open.

When I go into the ether, it seems to lock to my body in relationship to everything else. Before, in the ether, there never seemed to be any logic to space and my location in it, but there's a twist now, and with my inner eye I can see the bright flames of the Irregulars in the troop transport rattling down the mountain, left and right and left and right, making the switchbacks on the craggy and winding road.

Above me I see the sparks of Danielle and Tap and Jack.

I turn, both my body and my shibboleth self, and stare westward, where we left the Conformity soldier battering the doors to Bunker H.

It's there, the towering accumulation of human flesh. Burning like a pillar in the mind of some demented god—and maybe that's what it truly is, the trials of some deity sent here for us to endure.

I will not have that.

Fuck
him.

I reach out and touch Jack, Danielle, Tap. Lightly. I re-familiarize myself with them, their gifts, their strengths. Their loves and losses. They are the tethers that keep me whole. I am the conduit for their lifeforces. For their own burning embers.

In my mind, I rise above the mountain into the ether. And my body obeys. I see with two sights, that of the waking world and that translucent burning realm of the shibboleth.