The Conformity (10 page)

What he's doing deserves recognition, and I'm the only one here to give it.

I will watch,
I send.
And I will remember. After all, you've got whatever's left of Booth knocking around in there.

I can feel his sadness more than see it reflected in any aspect of his shibboleth form.

Shreve, stay out of trouble, son,
he says, and I know it's Booth speaking.
You're as reckless as the day is long.

He hugged me once, when I was hurt, and made much of my world brighter. I will not forget.

Mr. Cannon,
he says now, with a different inflection, colder, more removed.
We are not so different, you and I. This has become apparent. But
—
something twists in the ether and Quincrux is gone.

All the ghosts have said farewell.

Remove yourself, Shreve, and I will begin,
Priest says.

With a thought I rise, up and away.

Imagine a stone tossed into a pool. Now imagine that stone detonating with the force of a hydrogen bomb. That's the intensity of Priest's telepathic yawp.

It goes up in a release of psychic energy so massive it's hard to keep conscious with the fierce pressure of it. I'm buffeted by the force. I find my mind spinning, careening out of control, and in the aftermath of the blast part of me in the ether shivers and feels like a tooth's nerve suddenly exposed to the cold. But then that sensation dies and, far off, in the distance—the pseudo-space of the ether that the bugfuck mind creates—I sense an awareness of what has occurred here.

I worry that he's expended so much power and effort with the challenge, he won't have the strength for the fight. But maybe that was his plan, after all. I don't know.

The Conformity soldier turns its attention toward Priest.

I dash back to my flesh, gasping, becoming aware of the physical world like a man taking the first desperate breath of air after too long under water. Blood bubbles and pops in my nostrils, thick and gummy.

The Conformity soldier stands immobile, knee-deep in Ponderosa pines, its body turning now toward the western mountains that we have just fled. The transport rocks and shudders on its shocks, picking up speed—putting more distance between us and the tower of flesh now arrested in movement.

It groans, desperate, and the timbre of the sound has changed. I hear simultaneously screaming and moaning and all the expulsatory sounds a human body can make. And then the soldier slowly sinks to the earth. It's not falling to its knees because it has no true knees. Instead the soldier's body loses shape and condenses in upon itself, forming a ball, a glomerulus of flesh.

Whatever psychic power controlled the Conformity soldier has been drawn by Priest's challenge. The entity is here now. The dragon from beyond the stars.

The full weight of its scrutiny bears down upon us. My head throbs, and my nose streams blood. It's like an alarm, the taste of blood, sending my body into overdrive.

What was once the soldier rises again from beyond the tree line, floating into the sky. And the sight of it, no longer shaped in mockery or emulation of human form, gives me an instant of pure, heart-stopping terror. It is a dripping, moaning star, coalesced of misery, despair, and the meat of the malleable human race. Just clay, we are, waiting for something strong enough to shape us into its mold, to suit its purpose. We are infinitesimal—I have always known it—but this piece-of-shit monster has to not only rub our faces in it, it has to wipe its ass with humanity. All of it, all of us, we are nothing to it.

It rises, and as I watch, the transport rocking beneath me, it begins to distend, become oblong.

Shreve, I don't like this,
Casey says.

Bernard yelps,
Aw, naw. Naw, naw, naw. I've seen this movie.

It's splitting!
Ember yells.

Jack lands beside me on the transport bed. He quickly moves aside and is followed by Tap and Danielle. They look not only exhausted but hypothermic.

The Conformity shifts like an amoeba, and then there are two of them, two globules of flesh instead of one.

Go faster,
I send, hoping my panic doesn't startle Davies into crashing. Everything is happening too fast now for reaction, and no amount of extranatural abilities can help us if we smash into a boulder or a brace of pine trees.

A plane waits for you, Shreve,
Priest sends.
Go to Bozeman. I will contend with the—

No more.

One of the spheres of flesh begins to rise, floating west, toward the campus and Armstead Lucius Priest. The other begins to move toward us.

Faster!
Tap says.
It's not walking anymore!

Working on it,
Davies sends.
Hold tight.

The transport clanks and rumbles, and the engine shifts to a higher gear and the speed increases. I sink down on my ass and throw my arm across the matte-black cover of the extranatural bomb. It's a rough ride even though we're not on a mountain road anymore but an old blacktop, clear of snow. Trees whizz by, blurry and indistinct. Wind tears through the transport bed, and I begin to shiver.

It's too cold! I'm freezing!
Danielle sends, and Ember broadcasts a quick image of teeth clattering and pokey nipples.

The window at the rear of the cab slides open, and Bernard shoves out an overshirt and a military jacket.
Climb in if you can, young bucks,
he sends.
Ho-lee shit. Look at that.

The Conformity has released the second globe to resume its chase. It reshapes itself into the rough, messy semblance of a man while still levitating in the sky. You can only feel horror and terror for so long. Then it's like watching a volcano erupt—yeah, it's tremendous, yeah, there's danger, but ho-hum, my nerves are about shot.

Is this what it means to be shell-shocked?

We're twenty minutes from Bozeman,
Davies sends.
Let's see how much distance I can get between us and it.

Danielle climbs through the transport window as we huddle down in the lee of the cab, where the bed meets chassis. Ember manages to climb through as well, but when Tap goes to push his torso through, they wave him away. Cab's full.

The newly reformed Conformity soldier lands with a deafening boom and the exhalation of thousands. It's now half the mass of the previous soldier—only two hundred feet tall rather than four hundred.

But the thing that amazes me is that monsters can continually reinvent themselves: the Conformity soldier has adopted a new form of locomotion, lunging jumps resembling the gait of an astronaut on the moon. Still steaming, still dripping. Still moaning, gibbering. But, its mass diminished, it's moving faster now than it was before.

Despite its vigor we begin pulling away, allowing the flyers outside the cab—Tap, Jack, and yours truly—a moment to catch our breath.

Tap pants, and Jack draws his knees up to his chest. I have something I must witness.

Into the ether.

Back to where I was, in the etheric heights, Priest stands like a naked flame burning in the night.

Everything old becomes new again. It feels like the first time I've looked at the awareness of the Conformity itself while in the ether, blazing and burning, like an electric current racing through to the inner eye. I witness the innumerable sparks of the souls it possesses, but beyond that, layered above it, is an emptiness, a void. A vacancy that allows the sparks to flame bright and then die.

The shimmering miasma approaches Priest, standing on the invisible mountainside. Priest's volume grows as the Conformity approaches, becoming an inferno.

The two are overlaid on top of each other, the towering flame of Priest and the fog of the Conformity, and I sense a great conflict of titanic energies coming together in contest.

And then only the Conformity remains.

twelve

Much of Bozeman lies devastated. It's a flat, skillet-shaped valley ringed in majestic, snow-crowned mountains. Black smoke rises from multiple locations, and it looks like finger-of-God tornadoes did the jitterbug all around the town—leaving overturned cars and trucks, houses and business reduced to rubble, windows blown out, gouts of gas-main fires licking at the heavens, burning gas stations pluming oily-black columns of smoke into the sky. Sirens but no cops. No fire trucks.

And so very few people.

Most of those folks we see carry weapons. I think back to Priest telling me that this is where the Conformity soldiers gathered the mass they needed to assault the Society's campus.

These poor people. It's hard to bear that I—that
we—
killed thousands of families when the soldier by the water tower fell. They could have lived in these trailers, these little houses. Now they'll never return.

It looks like a war zone out there,
Casey sends.

It is a war zone, toots,
Tap sends. Always on the verge of being a tremendous prick, he's been pushed over the edge by exhaustion.

We make our way past trailer parks and pillbox houses. Down nice streets lined with trees. I notice some drapes being pulled aside, warily.

The beginning of the end,
Bernard says, and his normal joviality—joviality even in the face of terror—is gone. He sounds tired and small and frightened.

Davies sends,
Priest said a plane will be waiting. The last card he had to play.

You think we should get on a plane? Remember what happened in Maryland? That fighter fell out of the air,
Danielle says.

Most likely from pilot error,
Davies said.
The Conformity affects human flesh, right? Like bugfucks and jocks. It affects only us.

That sounds right, but I don't know.

Not all extranaturals are like that,
Ember sends. Of all of the Irregulars, she's been a member of the Society the longest.
Stonechuckers manipulate the physical world beyond just human bodies, right?

Yeah,
Jack responds grudgingly.

That does sound right.

There was a girl once who was a tinkerer. She could do things to technology. Make it fizz out. Drain batteries of their charges. Make computers stop functioning.

What are you saying?
I ask.

This thing eats humanity and takes its powers, right? It takes extranatural abilities and then uses them to take over more people.

Bernard says,
I feel you. But I don't like what you're saying.

So, what's to say that it can't take the extranatural abilities of everyone it subsumes? Both overt talent and hidden?

Like some recessive-gene shit?
Tap sends.

Maybe.

That's what Tanzer thought, too,
I say.
Priest said she thought every person inside the Conformity had some form of extranatural ability. Undeveloped, stunted maybe. But there. Otherwise, why doesn't it take everyone?

Silence now. It's almost like I can hear the mental gears clanking and engaging. The Irregular collective chews on this information like masticating a particularly nasty piece of gristle.

It hasn't stopped the transport,
Davies says.

Maybe it's stupid. It fell for the misdirection,
Jack says.
The soldiers don't have good problem-solving abilities. But the Conformity itself?

I remember Quincrux once saying, “I am old and know all the wiles of man.” Not thinking, I let that image slip into that part of my consciousness that I share with these few Irregulars.

That sounds about right, man-child.
Bernard's bonhomie seems forced, overly jovial in the light of this desperate situation.
The Conformity is a real bitch.

So we're cool to take the plane, right?
Danielle says.