The Conformity (9 page)

The Conformity soldier stills. Wind fills me. The howl of wind and surge of blood are my companions, whispering
Shrrrreeeve Shreeeeve. Shreeve.

Into the arteries of air. Into the sun I rise. I let all pretense fall away to nothing. I open my hands and let the pain and loss and desperation of all existence fill me and burn bright.

I incandesce as a star.

“Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”
I yell, and the whole expanse of ether shakes with the force of my voice.

And the Conformity comes.

ten

It moves quicker than you'd think, that city on the hoof. There's a tremendous
boom
and the thing is clambering up and over the mountain like some ooey-gooey misshapen billy goat. In mere moments its torso peeks over the ridgeline, and the fucker bellows with a thousand mouths,
JOIN US. SERVE US.

Jack and Danielle are by me now, hanging in the air like bits of flotsam in the crystal clear currents.

That's one ugly mofo,
Tap sends as he sweeps forward in a tight, aggressive arc. Never stops, that one.
Where are you leading it?

Away from campus. Into the valley so we can maneuver.

Jack gives a mental snort and says,
You gotta start thinking like a flyer. All you got to do is gain altitude and the playing field opens up.

I got that,
I say,
but I'm not here to punt a football. I'm here to lead that thing away. You gotta put the bait in the water.

The Conformity soldier bellows again, an agonized multiform wail, vast soundscapes of pain and misery. It's standing on top of the ridge, and then it contorts, as if gravity is collapsing it upon itself. Contracting.

Oh no,
Jack sends as the Conformity stretches its body out, lengthening and launching itself into the air.

The ether echoes and thrums with the telekinetic exertion of the soldier. Jack and Danielle dash away like shooting stars. Tap arcs downward in a reckless and masterful trajectory over and through the trees and rocks of the mountain.

The Conformity fills the sky above me, descending. At the last possible moment, I jerk myself away from where I hang, particulate in the air. It's almost a mental exertion for me now, rather than a physical one, moving in space. I move myself in the ether like a dashing thought and my body, the vessel I inhabit in meatspace, moves in response.

The soldier lands with a thunderous crash on the ground, displacing air in a hurricane-force gale scented with the stench of shit, piss, blood, jizz. Like a cloying fog.

WORSHIP US. JOIN US.

The sound is so loud and so near. The vibrations of the impact shudder through my body, liquefy my innards. The Conformity soldier raises the dripping, steaming conglomerate arm—so amazingly fast—and swings at me. I spew hot bile into the air in an arc but move away, barely in time.

Go, Shreve! Go! It's coming after you!
Casey sends, urgent and intense. I can picture her face, drawn and worried. I send a quick reassuring image—a piece of cake, though hunger is the last thing I feel—and fly away, out over the valley, the soft rolling white hills and fields asleep beneath snow. It's cold now.

You need a little spring to your step, Shreve,
Bernard sends. A quick flurry of beats, images of hands, the wondrous jumble of sixteenth notes trilling up the scale and back down, and my heart spasms in my chest and the rhythm of haste fills me. I'm panting in the frozen Montana sky, my breath exploding from my mouth in skirls of vomit-reeking steam, ripped away by the wind.

You see Peter Pan and his Lost Boys floating about, hung like perfect ornaments on strings, and that's not what it's like at all, flying. It's a desperate submersion into fear and dizziness because the human body, crowned by that good ole monkey brain, has no frame of reference for the sensations pouring torrentially into your nervous system due to floating three hundred feet in the air. Falling without falling. Falling with no consequence. And maybe we are just like Peter Pan, immortal and ageless, and it's just living on the ground that kills us by degrees. I don't know. But flight is monumental fear without end, vertigo stretched into infinite configurations and permutations.

But I'm only hazarding my body, and it truly is a small thing, after all.

My tongue feels like a raccoon wiped its ass with it, but I don't let that delay me from moving away from the bellowing tower of meat. I dash east, fast as I can, swimming in the airstreams.

The Conformity soldier follows.
Boom boom. Boom.
Each step punctuated by the cracking of stone and the destruction of trees.

Slow it down, Shreve,
Davies sends.
The damned thing is right on our ass!

I had forgotten those in the transport. Looking toward the earth and the spray of trees wreathing the snowy mountain's foothills into the valley, I spy the green Army vehicle trundling down another series of switchbacks, taking them as quickly as possible, but still far too slowly. Snow and ice sit in clusters where the trees keep the roads in shadow for most of the day. It's treacherous driving. The soldier will be on top of them at any moment.

JOIN US. SERVE US,
it moans, and now I feel the tug of its psychoactive ability. It's strong, so strong, like some ungodly tractor beam tugging at the meat of my body. The Conformity has sucked in thousands, hundreds of thousands—I've seen it myself—but now, now that its attention is focused on me, it's hard to bear the scrutiny. I am a morsel in its one-mind-from-many. I am a spark to be taken inside the inferno. I am desired, yet I am infinitesimal in its sight. Was this what Negata wanted me to feel? Was this what he wanted me to understand? That I'm nothing?

In the ether, the Conformity soldier's gravity is like a telepathic wind, a sinkhole where all the lights of humanity are drawn into a ball, become crushed by their own titanic mass, and turn inward, imploding into a black hole.

It wants us. It calls to us with its terrible powers. But we are nothing.

So strong.

As hard as I try to get away, I remain still in meatspace and the ether. I cannot move, and the soldier comes closer.

Now's the time to use those guns, if you got them. Slow that bastard down,
Davies calls.

Ember responds, raising her weapon and firing, hair streaming behind her in a wild mess. But it is a struggle.

Yelps of outrage and fear come to me from the Irregulars' minds. Straining against the inexorable pull of the thing, language deserts us, and I have flickering glimpses out of their eyes, and I feel them looking out of mine. Frantic gesticulations and grunts and exclamations, but we are like ghosted images laid one on top of another. Jack whirling, falling, making countless explosions of anger to push himself away. Tap locked in an invisible stalemate. Danielle holding herself still in the air while still trying to raise her gun. Ember fires and chucks a grenade into the launcher's chamber and fires again, but the stress of holding herself away from the draw of it is agonizing. I can feel it. I'm in their minds, all of them, simultaneously.

I could make this whole yard of boys kill each other, Quincrux had said, so long ago. Gleefully.

We are becoming a collective, a linked entity in our own right, to fight the pull of the monstrous gravity of the soldier. Through Casey's eyes, I see Negata in the bed of the troop transport heft a RPG to his shoulder. He seems calm and unaffected with the struggle, the slight tug of his lip downward into a grimace the only indication he's doing something abhorrent—attempting murder.

Things slow. Bernard half falls toward the truck bed, alarm written in broad strokes across his normally genial face. Casey crouches on the wheel bed, grasping the edge with her phantom hand so hard the metal catches and dimples in a squeal. The explosion of smoke is just beginning to pour out of the back of the long tube that Negata holds, as the metal needle-nose of the rocket detaches and lances forward.

The Conformity's stomach explodes in a fireball. Charred remains of bodies fall from it like ash tumbling from an urn's mouth.

The fierce pull of the soldier ebbs, dies. For a moment we're loose from its terrible gravity. The edges of the creature become muddy, indistinct, as if the center no longer holds. It bellows, a rough indistinct sound. It staggers but does not fall.

Go, go!
Bernard sends.
I do not want that fugly mofo to fall on us.

For a long moment the soldier simply remains still, as if collecting its wits.

The transport gains some distance, makes a turn onto a straightaway that looks as if it spans a mile, and I get a flashing image of whipping wind and trees whizzing by from Casey.

Shreve, move away. Away from the transport, away from the campus. Over here!
Jack sends, and I spot him moving in a blur south, away from the truck's path.

JOIN US. SERVE US,
the soldier gibbers, stepping forward, each step spanning a hundred yards.
Boom.

Here we go again,
Danielle says.

eleven

It becomes a clumsy, airborne dance. Me jabbing the soldier in the psychic testicles with a chopstick, waiting for it to get all pissy, and then fighting the suck of its telekinetic gravity long enough for one of the team to kick it in the gut with a grenade or RPG. Rinse and repeat.

Now it's just a waiting game. A war of attrition.

If we kill the “brain” extranaturals in the thing's groin, it'll all come tumbling down,
Casey sends.
You said it's linking to the main Conformity back east there?

Hard to explain the connection to the Conformity. It's slaved to it, like a puppet,
I send.
But we don't want it to fall.

Tap grimaces. I can feel his facial muscles tightening. It's almost as if we're all having each other's feelings, emotions.

You want to kill it?
Jack asks.

We're gonna run out of ammo eventually. And we're killing them, anyway. Each step, each blast it takes, people die. It's MADE OF PEOPLE, for chrissakes!
Ember says.

I shake my head.
No. We have to try to keep it whole until Priest is ready. He's going to try to take it over. To save who we can.

Tap's got an angry set of shoulders. But his lips are blue, and he's shivering. Bernard's infectious biorhythms have ebbed, and now fatigue is setting in. I feel it in my bones and see it in all of their faces. Casey's face is taut, pale. Danielle's is a mask—she won't admit to exhaustion, even to herself. Jack hugs his long, narrow torso. But in Ember there's a fury building, and I can feel that invisible pressure like water in a hose, blood in a tick.

Flying takes concentration and effort. We can't take much more of this without deep-sea wetsuits, a good meal, and some fucking hot cocoa.

Priest!
I send, broadcasting my words into the ether like a kid doing a cannonball into a placid pool.
We can't keep this up forever!

Jack winces and Ember says,
Watch out there, trumpet boy. I don't need another bloody nose.

I descend from the sky, toward the troop transport racing along a tree-wreathed, snowy road. Landing in the moving bed is harder than I thought—I have to gauge my forward movement with the truck's and hope it doesn't slew left or right as it hits a patch of snow or ice. I have a vertiginous moment when I think I'm going to overshoot the wooden slats of the bed and bounce off the cab's roof. I make it, but only barely, catching myself with my hands on the roof, keeping my body from slamming into the back of the cab.

No answer from Priest.

I send my awareness out into the ether, abandoning all conscious inhabitation of my body. I move across the mountain and miles back over the etheric darkling plain, where a trail of blazing soul-flames moves like a stream, trickling down a path. A few embers float above and around the stream, and I realize this must be the Red and Green Teams, escorting the evacuating population of the Society for Extranaturals campus. They're almost at the end of the valley at the paved access road, and then, with luck, it's a quick jaunt to Old Highway 10.

And there, on the slope of the mountain, is Priest.

It's hard to describe the sensation of being perceived in the ether. I have only felt it once before, from the entity that's causing the Conformity, when it slept. It's like the sensation of sunlight on skin, a real feeling, as if some sort of psychic particles radiate with Priest's attention.

Priest becomes aware of me, and I feel it.

Is it time?
he asks.

Yeah, boss. We can't keep this up forever. If you're gonna do something, it needs to get done.

While the rest of our Society members have evacuated I have been collecting myself. I sometimes feel … disjointed.

If I had shoulders I would shrug, but it's just my burning shibboleth self.
Well, time for contemplating your navel is over. Let's light this candle.

I get a flash of mirth from Priest, and then his flame, that burning bit of personal combustion that is naught but Priest, throbs and begins to grow.

Shreve, it has been a pleasure coming to know you. You should remove yourself to the heights and watch as you can.

Now it has come to this, he has to get all maudlin on me.
Yeah, boss, nice to meet you too. But the idea is to survive, right? That's the plan.

He chuckles, which is impressive because he has no physical form right now. We are, in essence, just that: essence. And I don't mean spices. We are souls communicating as only bugfucks can. Mind to mind. But the mind holds dear to the idea of physical space and so landscapes of the mind are created.

Remove yourself now, and bear witness.