The Conformity (13 page)

We're on the side of a road on a mountainside. The western slope. Not in Montana anymore, I don't think. The air and terrain seem different. I don't know how I know, but I do. Maybe Idaho. Oregon?

Off to our right, in a snarled wreckage of trees, blooms an orange flame pouring black oily smoke into the darkening sky. The fuming carcass of the plane. It's so cold, I imagine trudging through the drifts and warming myself at the fuel and plastic fire.

Jack grabs Ember, pulling her into a tight hug and whispering something in her ear, and she quiets down. When she stops making noise, it's like a blessing. Negata looks at me and says, “Shreve is alive. I cannot tell whether he is in danger, but we all need to get inside.”

Negata speaks! That recognition is like a single firecracker set off in an auditorium. A very small pop in a wide space that in any other situation might be quite interesting.

Tap says, “There's a sign over there. Looks like a big building.” He tromps off in the hissing, falling snow.

Jack and Ember huddle together, and I must have drifted off because the next thing I know is that Negata has his hand on my shoulder, tugging me back to Shreve, saying, “I need your help.”

I never knew what to make of Negata. He was present during my testing, like Ruark's shadow.

“You have a radio? A phone?”

He shakes his head, a quick, precise gesture.

“Davies did, but—”

“Davies is dead. And Shreve will be too if we don't get him somewhere warmer.” He takes off his jacket—more black military-issue—and lays it over Shreve. “Give me a moment.”

He moves like a big cat into the trees by the road, away from the plane crash. The way he moves is almost ballet-like.

The smell of the fire is noxious—like burning tires—but some of the trees around it have caught, tingeing the odor with the slightly more wholesome stink of burning pine. One of the trees, totally incinerated, cracks and falls over into a drift, half extinguishing the flames.

“The drive's cordoned off, but there's some sort of lodge up here
,”
Tap says. There's something about Tap that's a little skeevy. Not like he's a panty-sniffer or anything—and we've shared minds, so that's a little weird—but he's like a big, intemperate dog that only wants to eat and shit and fuck. He's not stupid, but base. Trish used to talk about all the ways she was going to sex him—God, she talked too much—because he is good-looking in a brutish sort of way.

Negata emerges from the trees dragging two long branches. When he gets to where I kneel by Shreve, he removes the jacket we've draped over him and feeds the thick branches through the sleeves of the jacket.

“It will have to do.” He spreads the jacket, now framed by the wood, on the ground. “Help me move Shreve onto it.”

I stand. They say you should never move the injured in case of neck injuries. And Shreve's head is sure to roll about when we lift, so I wave Negata back. He looks at me strangely but does as I instruct.

I flex the
ghosthand
. It's kind of weird that I've started thinking of it like that, naming it and all. It's sort of like guys naming their dicks. But all guys have dicks, and only I have the ghosthand
so I guess that makes it okay. It's better than when they wanted to call me Handjob.

Shreve called it the
shibboleth
, and I don't really know what that means. To me it's the ghosthand
and my imagination. Pretty simple, really. So I imagine it swelling and flattening and growing large enough to scoop all of Shreve up in its palm and then I lean forward and lift, slowly. If you were only watching, as Negata is, it would appear that Shreve just levitated off the ground two feet, floated over a couple of feet more.

I set him down on the travois as gently as possible.

Afterward, my skin sheens in sweat and a wave of fatigue passes over me. I can do a lot with my ghosthand, but if I lift a big weight, it still has a direct effect on my body, as though I picked up Shreve and put him on my shoulders. Which, seeing how freakin' skinny he is, I probably could.

Negata doesn't smile or do much of anything except give a small, tight nod. I don't think his mother breastfed him enough, maybe. But he moves to a branch, grips it like a handle, and chucks his head, indicating he wants me to help him.

I look around. I feel like we should do something for Danielle's and Bernard's corpses, but there's not much we can do. They're not going to get any deader.

I take up the branch in my ghosthand, and we drag Shreve up the snow-covered mountain road toward where Tap waves to us.

I try to unlock the door, but it's deadlocked, and while I can easily picture my fingers as itsy-bitsy little lock-picking nubbins, I don't know how locks work well enough to pick the thing. Eventually, Jack has to blast the front door in so we can enter.

It's a massive old hunting lodge, made from thick timbers and stone. From what I can see in the dim light it looks like it housed park rangers at some point. I don't know why I think that, maybe because there's no flat-panel televisions, or computers, or stereos, which doesn't make sense because whoever owns this place has to have a lot of money. It's a big freakin' lodge.

It's dark and silent in the main hall of the lodge, smelling slightly of mothballs and ashes. To the left of the entrance there's a fireplace you could cook an ox in. The heavy drapes are pulled back, and the weird half-light you get from snowfall casts a pallor over the rough stonework. The sounds of our footfalls echo, and the scraping of the stretcher's branches sounds over-loud in the dead air.

“Let's find some lights,” Jack says. He walks over to a shadowed area and feels around for a switch. Ember joins the hunt while Negata and I, with Tap's help, drag Shreve toward the fireplace, standing in a pool of weak and watery light from a drape-less window.

“I'll go find some firewood, if there's any. Does anyone have a light?” Jack asks.

Ember gropes for her phone, finds it, and then says, “That's weird. It was fully charged back when we were in the Jeep.”

“So, no lights,” Jack says. “And the electricity must be off, too.” Clicking sounds. Jack must be fiddling with the light switch. Negata watches implacably.

Tap says, “Screw it,” and walks over to a larger dark shape, picks something up—I realize it's a wooden chair—and smashes it on the floor, once, twice, three times, and then brings the pieces over to us, where we've laid Shreve down. He tosses them in the fireplace and begins tearing at the cushion with thick, blunt fingers, ripping out the white stuffing. “Lighter? Matches?” Ember saunters over, lights a cigarette she pulls from her jacket, and then slaps the lighter in Tap's palm.

In moments, Tap's got the cushion's innards burning—it smells terrible, like plastic—and the wooden chair begins to smolder. Smoke fills the room until I unlatch the flue. Silly boys, they'd all suffocate if I wasn't here to rescue them.

The fire is very small in the large fireplace. The orangish-yellow light reveals a sooty wooden box with a small amount of old newspaper and kindling. Tap goes to work.

Jack and Ember shut and brace the massive wooden front door, and for a little while we all stand around, peering into the dim, wide room, watching the breath come visibly from our open mouths. It's hard to stay still with Danielle and Bernard and Davies out there somewhere, dead in the dark. I should be feeling more now, I guess. Danielle was my closest friend and Bernard was just … Bernard. Everyone loved him. But I feel nothing.

I check Shreve's pulse. It's there, but thready.

“You think the Conformity will find us here?” Ember asks.

Negata shakes his head, slowly. “I do not know. But the Conformity is drawn to telepaths of Shreve's and Priest's intensity. With all due respect to Ember, I do not think it will be drawn here as long as Shreve is unconscious. And maybe not after, if the boy can remain … how do you say? Inconspicuous.”

“So we're rooting for Shreve to be in a coma?” I ask. Negata blinks in the flickering light of the fire. It's like the cold doesn't even affect him, standing there in only his shirt. I'm shivering, and I still have my jacket.

“No. I do not know how, but everything has become focused on this boy.” He looks down at Shreve, who's pale now, very pale. Negata's face is grim.

If Bernard were here, he'd say something light to ease the tension and then Danielle would tell him to shut up.

“We should check the joint, man-children,” I say. “Let's look for some eats and sleeps.”

They look at me like I'm crazy, and maybe I am, some.

Then Jack says, “Shut up, Bernard.”

For a moment, it's like they're here with us, in the room. Ember smiles, wan and tired. It's been a tremendous bitch of a day, on the real. Tap says nothing, and I can't read Negata. But Jack looks at me strangely, cocking his head. And he must feel it too.

We trudge through the lodge. Tap's found the woodpile at the back of the building, and he stokes the fire after some help loading frigid, snow-encrusted logs in. Jack and Ember play grab-ass and suck-face in the kitchen until I begin poking them from across the room with my ghosthand. Our friends are dead and the world is ending, and all they can do is rub their junk all over each other and swap saliva.

The kitchen's a small affair with a large dry pantry full of industrial-size cans of cheap tomato sauce and tinned vegetables. They manage to get the gas oven on—though Jack nearly burns his eyebrows off lighting it. We stand over the hissing thing for a while, holding our hands in the warming gap.

It's getting dark, real dark, no more of this phantasmic reflected blue light. Ember discovers a couple of candles and a flashlight and a new pack of batteries all in a utility drawer. More matches and many packets of votive candles. Whoever used this old lodge, they were prepared for long periods without electricity.

“Finally, some real light,” Jack says, tearing into the new packet of batteries. He loads the flashlight and then thumbs the blister-button. It only clicks. No light.

“Batteries must be dead.”

We all take up candles and walk down a long, wood-paneled wall, shielding the candle flames with our hands. Like we're pioneers instead of the extranatural badasses that we are.

“Any of you mutants know how to glow or something?” I ask.

“Is that you or Bernard talking?”

“All me. Well, almost all of me. We buried my arm in the backyard.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Mom worked at the hospital, you know? Small town. Once I was stable and healing, they let us take it home. We had a funeral for it and everything. All my friends came.”

“Trippy,” Ember says. Ember and I have never bonded, really. Not much in common, and she's a bugfuck, so you never know when they're sniffing around upstairs.

Also, a man-eater. Since I've been with the Society she's gone through three, four guys. All much younger. She likes to play matron to their randy student. I'm sure she fucks them into submission.

We find lots of individual bedrooms, most of them with stripped and graying mattresses on the beds. The ones with any blankets or covers, we take as much of the linen as we can carry. Most are coarse, military-grade wool blankets. But warm.

I'm having a hard time keeping the layout of the place straight in my mind, most likely due to the general gloom and darkness; it all seems just dull stonework and massive knotty timbers and bland, unadorned rooms. But at the end of the main hallway that runs the length of the building we find a larger room with bunk beds and its own fireplace. A couple of big, wooden trunks reveal more moth-bitten blankets.

We all drape ourselves in scratchy wool and wander about like kids under sheets playing ghosts. Jack and Ember disappear. Negata stays downstairs, seated near the fire but with the drapes pulled aside, watching the snowfall and the darkness. Tap and I rummage around in the kitchen, which has warmed considerably. We find a large tin of soup and manage to open it, heat it over the gas stove. It's salty, but satisfying.