The Conformity (4 page)

“Hold off on the fucking volume, would you, Shreve?” He chucks another round into the launcher and sights on the soldier, which now bringing its arm forward. He gives a quick glance at Casey, whose nose also pours blood.

Tap manhandles the weapon.
Thwup!
Kachunk.
Thwup!
The sound of grenades being launched. They make bloody craters in the conglomerated flesh of the soldier and explode with dull chuffs. Three members of the Red Team whiz by, blazingly fast, and I hear more chuffs of launchers, watch the wet, red impacts they make in the morass of walking flesh.

The soldier's arm stops its forward movement as the small city swinging toward us on the tower is severed from the main body of the beast. Hundreds of people, freed now from the telekinetic form, go flying, the momentum of their passage hurling them directly at us.

Thoughts flicker like lightning between us.

Casey, I've got you!
Tap moves quicker than you'd think; two long steps and he's grabbing her around the waist and launching himself into the air.

No!
she sends.
Shreve's on the tower—

My mind is barraged with images coming from Jack—hands out, pulsing—quick glimpses of Ember, Blackwell, Galine, and the rest of the Red Team flying in formation, launching grenades, chucking rocks at the Conformity soldier's legs, using glamours and wardings to slow the teeming thing's approach, great heaving impacts that send groaning shudders through the creature.

I duck as the body of some poor soul wings its way past me in a fleshy smudge, spattering my face with something wet and distinctly human. The stench is horrific.

The soldier lurches forward, filling all the sky. It yawns over me, thousands of mouths screaming
JOIN US
in every language known to humankind. Its shadow falls over me and suddenly the tower shakes, lurches as the torso of the soldier crashes into it, human bodies spilling away from its central mass like some protoplasmic fluid, rushing toward me.

Things fall apart.

The tower falls.

I fall with it.

five

I've fallen before, and there's release with the plummet, like a kite with its string cut. Except that I never seem to fall up. Time congeals in freefall. Our monkey brain doesn't know how to deal with the reality of imminent death, so it enters into a stilled brain-time where events play out like film in extreme slow motion, the mind races so fast. There's a frisson between how fast consciousness moves and the seeming slowness of the world it perceives.

And I have time now, enough time for memory in the plummet. Jack cannot save me. Tap and Casey are gone with the rest of the Irregulars, locked in the lethargy of the real world. Beautiful Danielle, hair an inkstroke behind her. I'm beyond all of that now.

Now I have time to think of days gone by, of warm summers when all the world was new and two brothers sat together in a field, brilliant with light and teeming with dancing motes rising into the air. A field. Heat. The smack of a (stolen) baseball into a (secondhand) glove.

Time to remember the press of flesh, the warm mouth of love, sharp with sugar and cinnamon and fluoride as Coco's tongue finds mine (her father would kick my ass).

Time enough to flip lazily, suspended in thick opaline air, the truck out of control and tumbling, crunching, shattering. The truck I'd stolen earlier, a million beads of blood filling the air and slowing to a crawl in their bestilled trajectories.

Time to remember Booth, my friend, the smell of the man, the warmth of his smile and the humor of his enmity as he takes me in a bear hug.

There's all the time in the world.

Time enough for my monkey brain to give one last mortal spasm and cast the dice.

Time enough to leave my body and touch the minds of all those surrounding me. Time enough to know Jack once more, and Bernard—thrumming with rhythm. To feel the craggy contours of Tap's recalcitrant mind, the sharp steel of Danielle. The strength of Casey. Time enough to touch Ember and Blackwell and Solomon and Galine and Chakrabarti and Holden and everyone else.

Time enough to take their light to me, like some wheeling astronaut gathering up stars.

Time enough for the shibboleth to thrum within me.

And expand.

I rise.

Cruciform, I rise.

I've done this before, taking the power of others, their extranatural abilities. But it's different this time, I know. Something of it lives within me.

I am an arrow, stilled in flight.

I rise, and the clamor of their minds is a din I cannot put aside. Surprise, fear, hatred, disgust—all these emotions churn and roil in the ether like noxious vapors pouring off each mind.

I open my eyes.

It has all snapped back to speed and the water tower crashes to the ground below me with a cacophonous din, raw and thunderous and echoing, blotting out all other sensations for a moment. Sight dims, the feel of wind and cold, the smell of the dead and the still-living—all of it fades as the sound of the crashing water tower erupts and rises in a shock wave.

The Conformity soldier falls too—Jack and the Red Team have done their work, taking out its legs—so that when the blasted thing hits, it spreads like oil, bodies thick and greased and wet spilling out over the land in a bloody slick.

I inhabit two worlds now, the world of the flesh, the meatspace, and the world of ether, of incandescent light, souls like embers, souls like match flames.

The lights of thousands flicker and die.

The soldier is no more.

My eyes burn, sightless and unblinking. Tears hot and steady pour from me.

I can only sob with the darkness.

six

Shreve! The other soldier, it's coming!

I tear my gaze away from the blood-grimed wreckage of the Conformity soldier. It's hard to bear, that amount of death.

Flight is new to me, and for a moment I wish for the monkey-brained slow-time imminent death had gifted me, so I could exult in the new sensations on my own terms.

Incarcerado no more.

But there's too much ruin to feel joy.

Blackwell, accompanied by Ember and Galine, come to hover near me, noses streaming blood. Seems I had the volume up to eleven.

They stare at me in wonder. Ember, wind altitude ruffling her hair, moves closer, reaches out to touch my shoulder, wide-eyed and unbelieving. “How can you—”

I am you and you are me,
I send, and she starts. I have a near uncontrollable urge to giggle.
Though we always disagree.

“How the hell can you do that? It's incredible!” Blackwell's shouting. I get the feeling he shouts a lot. He looks distracted, though. He touches the receiver in his ear. “Roger that.” He grimaces, looking down at the remains of the Conformity soldier below us. “The Director says we're to fall back to Bunker H. All Society personnel are safe, blast doors locked. We fall back so we don't kill all the poor motherfuckers in that damned—”

He points. The first soldier, the one that set off the alarms and roused us all, slouches toward us, coming up the valley, sundering trees with great creaks and crashes and booms.

Right. Enough people have died today,
I send.

Jack appears beside me, hands out, keeping aloft on a flurry of micro-bursts.

“Holy shit, man. Holy shit—”

“Right, bud. I'm flying.”

“How'd you work that?”

“The shibboleth.”

“What?”

Oh, I've never told him about it.

“It's the password, Jack. This thing we all share.”

“This isn't a Starbucks. What the fuck, Shreve?”

Ember laughs but keeps her gaze locked on me.

“The devil got his angel wings,” Galine says, her mouth twisted into an inscrutable sneer. It could be directed at me or directed at herself. I don't know. I do know she'll never forgive me for the first time I hijacked her extranatural ability.

Tap is with us now, making circles around us floaters because, like a shark, his talent doesn't tolerate stillness or rest. “Get your asses in gear. The Director—”

Shreve.
His voice is cool, cold even. Armstead Lucius Priest speaks directly into my mind.
Please get them back to the bunker, posthaste. We shall not try to destroy the second soldier. I cannot countenance even more blood on my hands.

I want to say,
We do what we have to do
, but instead I just say,
Yes.

“Okay, Bunker H. Let's go. Fall back.”

The Conformity soldier bellows,
SERVE US. WORSHIP US.

We fly.

seven

Landing is trickier than I thought it would be. In the air, it's hard to judge speed; the earth moves beneath you but doesn't rush up to meet you and smack you around. As I hit the ground, my ankles and knees crumple with the
momentum
and I'm able to pull myself into a forward roll.

That's gonna smart, man-child,
Bernard says as he trots over to help me up.

More extranaturals, members of the Red and Green Teams, land lightly around us, most of them staring at me openly, some in wonder, some with looks less wonder-ous. The word I'm looking for still ends in
-ous
, but it starts with
murder
.

I can't understand why they'd be jealous, but the more I know about people, the less I understand. Army troops and assorted team members—clad in merry green and red colors—make a ring around the bunker opening, weapons and armaments pointed at the source of the infernal noise, the crashing of trees, the moaning.

SERVE US. WORSHIP US.

For a moment I wonder, if we prostrated ourselves before the giant thing, would it let us be? Would it take a percentage of us and let the rest go?

The blast doors stand open, fourteen inches thick and made of dull gray metal, revealing Armstead Lucius Priest. He's had a bloody nose recently. Negata stands near him. No sign of blood on his face. I file this away for questioning later. When Negata's gaze meets mine, he gives me a small inclination of the head, which, for Negata, is like a high five and fist bump together.

Priest steps forward, limping, his face a cowl of distress. Concern, maybe. Fury? Though he's wearing Quincrux's meatsuit, I can't yet read his expressions.

“Come!” he says, voice raised. “We must get inside.”

Every instinct I have is not to go back into that hole. Hiding in a hole doesn't sound to me like the optimum response to the Conformity soldier. But I don't want to have to kill all the poor souls caught up inside that monstrosity.

The reality of what I've done is beginning to become clear.

Twenty thousand people.

Something about Priest hardens, as if he can read my thoughts. “
Do not think upon it!
”
he says. “If you brood on it, your mind will break. You have done what you should have to protect yourself, your friends. The future of our world. We are the last with the ability to fight it.” He points at my chest with his cane. “
Come inside! It is almost upon us!
”

And at that moment there's a loud crash and boom. Some of the Army remnants and extranaturals respond with another chatter of gunfire, punctuated by the intermittent
thwup thwup
of grenades being launched. I can see Tap and Danielle emptying their weapons while Jack stands, arms out, hands splayed, ready to go explodey at a moment's notice. Beyond our small defensive circle guarding the blast doors, three boulders rise from the ground and one large log levitates, and I can feel in the ether the stress and strain of all the individual shibboleths.

Davies yells, “It's here! Letsgoletsgo—” and all my ability to make a decision is taken as Bernard, Danielle, and Casey sweep me inside the blast doors and to the back of the motor pool garage, near the elevator. We turn, breathless, to face the closing steel doors, but they seem too slow, far too slow.

Framed beyond the doors, an angry spray of pines disintegrates into kindling as one massive leg swings into view.
JOIN US. WORSHIP US.
The hideous sewage smell of the soldier blasts into the confines of the bunker's garage. Bernard pitches over and vomits onto the concrete floor, and he's joined by Army guys and team members so that the stench of bile mixes with the awful miasma of the soldier.