The Conformity (14 page)

When we're done, we rejoin Negata and watch the night with him.

There's not much to do except wait for Shreve to come around, show some signs of life. The other teams from the Society … we have to assume they're dead or have been taken into the Conformity.

When we're quiet and still, the absence of Danielle and Bernard seems all the louder. And Shreve lies between us, breathing shallowly.

“Fuck,” Tap says. I'd think it was apropos of nothing except I was thinking the same thing.

“It's a bad deal.” For a moment I'm angry. Angry at myself because that's all I can think of to say. Angry at the world for sinking to this level of shittiness. “Fuck,” I say.

Negata doesn't glance at us, but occasionally he looks at Shreve.

“You looked like you thought of something earlier,” I say.

Negata remains silent, but Tap perks up.

“When Ember's phone didn't work.”

“Where are Ember and Jack?” Negata asks.

Tap snorts.

“One of the bedrooms, maybe,” I say. “Maybe upstairs, looking around. The lodge is seriously dark.”

Negata simply nods in acknowledgment.

“Where are we, anyway?” I ask.

“Idaho,” Tap says. “Near Oregon.” He lifts a wad of papers he's clutching in a meaty fist. “This is a workhouse for the Game and Fish Commission and the Devil's Throne Park Rangers.”

“The middle of nowhere, then.”

“Pretty much.”

Negata seems to be thinking. “In answer to your question, Miss Klein, I did have a thought.”

“Love to hear it.”

“It is complicated. And not fully formed.” Negata pauses before and after each word. Nothing about the man is hasty or unconsidered. His English accent is almost perfect when he speaks slowly.

“That's okay, I can live with uncertainty.”

He turns his head toward me, considering. “This is an admirable trait. Many people cannot.”

“So what's this idea?”

“Why did the plane fail?”

That's a good question. A very good question.

“The insomnia? There was that earlier plane crash. Maybe a maintenance guy hadn't been getting enough sleep and didn't put oil in the right place.” It sounds good coming out of my mouth, but I don't know if I believe it.

“Why is the electricity out?”

Tap says, “Because the Conformity has taken all the population! No one to work the plants, no one to make sure if a line goes down it gets put back up. You know,
infrastructure
. Roads and power lines and telephone lines and shit.”

“Why did Ember's phone fail?”

“What's with this? What are you hinting at?” I ask.

He raises a hand. A flat, blunt hand, square and deadly. “It may be as you say, Miss Klein. And most likely is.”

“But you don't think so.”

“No.”

“What do you think?”

He looks back to the window. The white's coming down in big, thick flakes, so heavy you can almost hear it. The fire in the plane will have been extinguished now. Danielle's and Bernard's bodies will be tucked in under a blanket to sleep. For a moment I picture them, lying faceup and eyes open, as crystalline snowflakes land on their milky white eyeballs and cover their blue-gray lips.

“I think that the entity has changed the reality of our universe. On a subatomic level. A quantum level.”

“What do you mean? I don't understand,” Tap says.

“The Conformity draws extranaturals to itself. It uses this power to fly, to create soldiers. With each person it absorbs, it gains their energy and also their ability. It is harvesting mankind.”

“Well, that's just about the worst thing I've ever heard,” I say.

Tap glances at me, alarm written all over his blunt, dim features. If he's picking up on this, it's got to be bad.

“I think—” Negata says, very slowly. “No, I fear that the universal phenomenon that allows us to manipulate electricity doesn't work anymore. Maybe the entity has eliminated the matter of the universe's ability to retain an electrical charge, positive or negative.”

Tap's face scrunches up with what seems like intellectual pain. Like he's lifting weights or something.

“So, you're saying—” Tap says, rubbing his temples. “That bastard has killed electricity?”

Negata stares at us, unblinking. “Yes.”

I clear my throat. “Hey, you two geniuses don't need to strain yourselves. If the Conformity changed the nature of physics to not allow positive and negative charges, we'd be dead as doornails. There's electrical crap going on everywhere in your body.”

Negata nods—obviously, he's realizing the truth of it—and Tap just stands there mouth-breathing and looking about for somewhere to drag his knuckles.

“It is possible, Miss Klein, that the Conformity has negated electricity in some other manner.”

“Sure, but those are all the little questions. The
how
s of it all. The big questions are what have me worried. The
why
s.”

“So, what are you suggesting, Miss Klein?” Negata asks.

“The one thing we know about the Conformity is that we're no good to it dead. It might not give a shit about injuring itself, but we're raw material for it.”

“I'm following,” Tap says. “It needs us for the juice.”

“And it can think, yeah? The Conformity has adapted to us. Instead of being totally led away when the old man lit the candle, it split in two and sent one after us and one after Priest, right?” When they say nothing, I go on. “I was on top of that water tower with Shreve when we turned the Helmholtz field on it. The soldier—” I scrunch my eyes closed and think back. The thousands of mouths opening, bellowing, screaming, moaning. “It was surprised when we hit it with the Helmholtz. We alarmed it.”

“Fuck yeah, we did, the bastard,” Tap says. “But so what? We killed that one.”

I shake my head. “Don't you get it? It's all connected. Obviously, the soldiers are autonomous at times, but they're part of the greater fabric … flesh … of the whole.”

Tap looks at me blankly.

It takes a lot of effort not to roll my eyes. “We hit it with the Helmholtz—an electrical field—so as we were escaping, it hit us with an
anti-Helmholtz
field. Right? One that negates all electricity.”

“But how, I might ask.” Negata remains still, eyes like black pools, watching me closely.

“It doesn't really matter. Look at what Shreve can do. Look at us. Any one of us extranaturals can do lots of damage. Imagine the kind of telekinetic power it takes to keep a Conformity soldier, or the Conformity itself, together.
Levitating!
It's incredible.”

Tap nods, slowly. “It has the power to blanket large areas with fields. Maybe, at this point, the whole earth.”

I turn back to look at Shreve. At times I think he's going to shift, open his eyes, and smile. Say my name. But he hasn't yet.

“That's the
why
I'm trying to puzzle out,” I say. “Why is it doing this?”

“And do you have any theories?” Negata asks.

“It's reshaping the world to suit it. And it's moving toward that end.”

“What end?” Tap says, his voice going up an octave.

fourteen

–no food for two days except the meat sludge served me at school and she's there with fat Billy Cather watching TV on the couch when I come in, she's drunk, her lips and chin red and raw from sucking face with Cather's fat stubbled mug. Moms checks her shirt, making sure the buttons are in line or maybe checking for cum stains and negligently waves her hand when I ask after Vig. “Out in the woods,” she says. When I turn to go find him, she says, “Get me a pack of Kools, hon, willya?” and when I hold out my hand for the money, she turns to Cather expectantly. It only takes him a moment to pull out a grubby five and put it in my hand. I wish she'd get more from him, because right now she's screwed him only for a pack of smokes and whatever booze he brought over. Leaving, I head straight to Cather's trailer and climb through the bathroom window—his trailer's almost as messy as ours—and clean out his kitchen cabinets, dumping cans of Dinty Moore and refried beans and fruit salad in a plastic bag I find under the sink. In his filthy bedroom at the back of the trailer, I scrounge all his change before going to find Vig who's somewhere in the woods, behind the house, near dark. I'm so very angry, furious, and it feels like a fever that's on me, this anger, yelling for my brother in the dark, carrying stolen food. He's half feral when I find him and he pops the lid off the fruit salad and drinks the syrup like Moms with her vodka and then dips his fingers into the can, his filthy grubby fingers, and all I can think is “someday we'll live somewhere clean, someday we'll live someplace clean” as I take his sticky hand and we walk to the Git-N-Go to get Moms Kools and go–

TAP

If I could do damn near anything I wanted, I'd be chugging beer on a beach with big-breasted supermodels with Eastern European names and minimal English. I would not be freezing my balls off with a Japanese guy and a one-armed chick who talks too much, a comatose dickhead, and two lovebirds in some abandoned government sweat lodge.

But there you have it. Everything is ending thanks to the super-blob sucking up all the people and, if what Negata says is true, sending us down a path to destruction. The universe unraveling like a moth-eaten Christmas sweater.

The end of the world always sounded fun when Megadeth screamed about it. I didn't think it would be so fucking boring. And cold. I'd strangle a puppy if I could wash my nuts in warm water.

But whatevs.

Shreve continues to be useless, conveniently in a coma, and the rest of them, as usual, need someone to take care of business when they're too weak to do what has to be done.

Two days now since the plane fell and we fell with it. No electricity, no news. No Conformity or soldiers either (so that's a plus) but the woodpile's shrinking. We started with a cord of wood, but this is a big-ass building and the logs are well-weathered, burning like bastards. And there's no ax in this whole dump.

I find Negata and Casey with Shreve by the main fireplace.

“Not long before we start freezing our asses off. I need an ax,” I tell them. I can't get a handle on Negata. His face is like a mask. That, or the Japanese pack all their facial expressions into the fine art of blinking. “You know, a little chop-socky on the woodpile?”

Casey's been in my brain, and I've been in hers—all thanks to Dillweed here, lying on the floor. They've made him all comfy and cozy for his nap. With my foot, I nudge his leg.

“Don't do that, Tap.”

“Anything from him? Or is he out of action like—”

“Like Bernard? Or Danielle?” She looks at me like she's just sucked a lemon. “No, he's not dead.”

I nudge him again with my foot just to be sure.

Her mentioning Kicks and Dani makes me nervous, and for reasons that are strange to me, yeah? I mean, not just because they're dead. But because there's some retarded shit going on.

Like last night, I was coming in from the woodpile—only me and Jack are willing to tote wood—to get the bunk room warm enough so that our toes and noses and nipples don't freeze right off in the night. It had been cloudy, but the snow had stopped, you know, and without the reflected glow of electric lights nighttime is now absolutely pitch-black dark, so I had to get the logs almost by feel. As I turned back to the lodge, clouds opened up and the moon and starlight swept through the clearing making everything stand out, sharp, you know, like a video with the contrast cranked to the crushing point.

So as I stood there breathing into the night, my neck hairs began bristling. Something was watching me. There might be bear around here, or worse, mountain lions, hungry as fuck in this bitch of a winter. So I stood as still as I could and peered at the forest.

Two shapes became clear. One bulky, one somewhat lithe, standing near each other. Other shapes in the trees. Dark fir trees, darkness upon darkness, gray and brown and green blending into black. Familiar faces I could almost make out in the dark. Behind them a taller silhouette.

I did not wait around to see what they were. I'm sick of this watery, salty, canned soup, and I've got the runs now and don't ever intend on giving the squirts to some bear or mountain lion. Those bastards can eat rabbit or squirrel and fuck right off. God, I hope they haven't sniffed out Danielle's and Davies's and Bernard's corpses.

But I'm getting cabin fever. And we can't stay here forever, so I need to see where we are. Find some other food. Some pasta or canned meat or something. I seriously can't take any more ketchup and chicken noodle.

I nudge Shreve's foot again. “I'm gonna make a scouting run. Look.” I hold up a brochure for Devil's Throne I found in one of the rooms. “To the southeast is a town called McCall. I fly down there, check it out. Maybe grab some food—canned veggies and shit—and pop back.”

They look like they're going to argue. But they don't.

“Find a doctor,” Negata says. “Or a nurse. Shreve needs some professional attention.”

“Right. Gimme your jacket. And those gloves.”

Negata hands me his jacket and gloves and says, “Take Jack with you.”

“Nah, I'll work better alone.”

Casey frowns. “You'll take Jack with you. What if you run into a soldier, or one of the Conformity itself? Don't be stupid enough to think you could handle any of that alone. All you can do is fly.”

She must have lost her sense of humor with her arm in that car wreck.

“I'm a pretty good shot.”

“Not good enough. Jack's going with you.”

We've all been avoiding speaking mind-to-mind since Shreve collected us into our own little mini-Conformity, but now Casey sends,
Jack, Ember, get your asses down here.