The Conformity (2 page)

Give me your hand,
she sends,
and I'll pull you up.

It's three hundred feet!

No, it's just like climbing on top of a van. Give me your hand, bucko.

She's manipulating her perception to manipulate her talent. How long will it be until she can find a man's heart from a mile away and squeeze the life out of him? Would Quincrux have made her his assassin? I think that's very much what he would've done.

Casey's silhouette kneels—backlit by the sun now peeking over the eastern rim of mountains—and grabs hold of some metal framing with her single visible arm to steady herself. I reach up and feel her invisible hand clasping mine tightly. It's like stone covered in a thin layer of memory foam, and suddenly I find myself being pulled upward, alarmingly fast, up and up.

Casey grunts when I get right to the edge and leans back, hard, to get me over the metalwork railing at the top. There's more ice and snow up here, making footing treacherous. The wind is ungodly strong, pulling at my hair, my clothing.

When my body flops over, she falls backward onto her ass, breathing hard. Even with her magic arm, her body still feels the strain and stress of lifting. And that couldn't have been easy.

“You've got to lay off the lasagna, Shreve,” she says, and I laugh because we both know I need to do just the opposite.

She rises, a strange movement almost akin to levitation. More and more, Casey's able to disassociate her phantom limb from her body. As long as she can think of different ways to perceive her arm, or distance, her power will keep growing.

From this vantage, the whole valley lies spread out before us—white and black and gray, wintery and stark—and we're looking straight down the bore of the mountains. The siren's wail falls away, and the Conformity soldier's polyphonic moans rise. Groaning. Creaking. Gibbering. Wailing.

More trees crack and pitch over, the crashes reverberating up the valley toward us.

The Conformity soldier hoves into view—a big-ass walker, not the round, flesh-star–like thing that formed in the air above Towson, but something it shat out mirroring the shape of humankind. The Conformity itself has grown too large, floating the skies like a swollen tick engorged with blood. It calves off parts of itself to roam the cities, sucking up humanity into its massive flesh. Two legs, two arms, a head, formed of countless subsumed people and going walkabout. A mockery, really, of the bifurcated man.

This one, the one that's bellowing and steaming into the Montana air, is twenty thousand bodies strong if it's a single one. A city on the hoof. Thousands of people stitched together by some massive and unknown telekinetic power, binding and fusing them so that they comprise the form of one gargantuan humanoid. As tall as this water tower, the monstrosity raises a leg slowly, steps forward, booming. Vapors pour from it. Even from this distance, I can tell it's warm—as warm as humans are, and churning with its own juices.

Another step, another soft
boom
. As it raises its leg once more, the bloody ruin of human bodies remains like a footprint behind it.

The walkie-talkie hisses and erupts with distorted talking. “—Team keeping position on target. Red Team keeping position.” Blackwell's voice, deep, aggressive.

“Red Team, open fire. I repeat, open fire. By the numbers, if you please.” It sounds like Tanzer, her curt, officious voice. “Keep between it and the water tower and generators.”

“Copy that.”

The chatter and pop of gunfire echo up the valley, a small, tinny noise in comparison to the vast soundscapes of anguish the soldier makes across the frozen landscape.

Flyers are visible in the air now, two clusters of extranaturals making quick maneuvers past the lurching Conformity soldier.

Jack, where are you?

One of the flyers—a black dot in the sky—peels away and grows larger.

Red Team's initiating delaying tactics, buzzing the damned thing to lead it to you. They're about to take out its legs and—holy shit, man!

There's another tremendous sound echoing in the vault of heaven, and part of the mountain rumbles. Casey and I look away from the Conformity soldier toward the sound.

In the V made by the meeting of two mountains behind us stands another Conformity soldier.

two

They say that if you overplan a bank heist and something goes wrong, not only are you going to lose the loot, somebody's going to die. The key is to plan just enough that everyone knows the process, but not so much that if something unexpected comes along everyone freezes, shocked into inaction while they try to figure out how to deal with the change.

We scripted the
fuck
out of a possible assault.

Here's the deal: a soldier comes in from either end of the valley, because of course a soldier would come in at the valley ends and not
over mountains
. That's the way a person would walk, right? And they look like people, don't they? So, according to plan, the monstrosity toddles upstream and the Green and Red teams delay it with armaments—M14s with grenade launchers, RPGs, the big-gun extranatural powers. They draw its attention away from the buildings and airfield long enough for all the noncombatant extranaturals to get in bunkers.

The soldier is distracted by the teams. Swatting at flies.

Once it's near enough to the water tower, we hit it with the Helmholtz. Some of the Nerd Turlingtons in R&D said they had a way to boost the field strength in a tight area so that we could isolate the Conformity soldier in the field but still have our combatants—namely the Green and Red Teams—outside of it, still flying and not falling to a messy death. It's just a matter of pointing the array at the soldier. Somehow, that job fell to Casey and me. Danielle, Tap, and Jack are assigned to team support and communications. Bernard reports to engineering.

All teams are redundant. All teams are autonomous. Every-thing goes according to plan, no worries. Everything goes horribly pear-shaped? Well, there'll be extra folks on hand to take care of bidness.

Why don't we just hit the Conformity soldier with missiles?

Because it's made of people. Like Soylent Green, except not as tasty.

But
made of people. Human beings.
Friends, maybe.
Family
. We'll have to do some damage to the Conformity, but we have to try to save the people caught up in the mass, the towering city of flesh.

They may be gone forever.

But we must try.

We first saw the soldiers in one of the planning sessions Priest held with Davies, Negata, Tanzer, Blackwell, Solomon (Green Team captain), and various other nerds and lab coats present in the big conference room in Admin. Priest—still wearing the body of Hiram Quincrux—passed a weary hand over his eyes and said, “The Conformity has awoken. It gathers strength, taking more and more of humanity unto itself. It demands worship. And sacrifice. Miss Tanzer, if you'd be so kind.”

Tanzer placed the briefcase on the study desk and popped the latches. Inside was a laptop. Quincrux's computer. She opened it and jabbed at the keyboard, entering the passwords for access. A video began to play.

“This was taken yesterday over Annapolis,” Tanzer said. On the screen, the Conformity hung in the sky like some gargantuan airborne parasite, dark and mottled. Its scale was hard to fathom, though the skyline gave some point of reference—it might have been a mile or more in diameter. “Our best guess is that it's subsumed at least half a million people.”

Jack shivered. I felt like I was going to vomit.

“They're still alive?” Jack asked.

“As far as we can tell. Its temperature holds steady at 98.6 degrees.”

My gorge rose.

“Here's the worst part,” she said.

The Conformity distended, growing ovoid, lengthening. It pulsed.

“What's happening?” Blackwell asked.

“Watch.”

A faint line of demarcation appeared on the surface of the hideous thing. It began to split.

“I've turned off the sound so you don't have to hear the—” She wiped her hands on her pants. “—screams. But it appears to be going through a form of cellular mitosis. It is dividing.”

“Oh, God,” Blackwell said, his words coming out choked. He stood by Solomon, all the color drained from his face. I vaguely remembered him wearing an Orioles T-shirt once in the dorms.

“Unfortunately,” Priest said, “this is not all. Miss Tanzer, please show them the video of the ‘Conformity soldier,' if you will.”

She opened another file, and a new video filled the screen. “This was taken from a security cam in Philadelphia.”

The view was of a long city street, lined with buildings. Something massive lurched across the screen, passed out of view. Then it lurched on-screen again.

Roughly of human shape, it towered over the nearest buildings.

“We're calling them soldiers. They operate independently of the Conformity, but they're definitely in communication with it.”

“Telepathically?”

Priest looked at me sharply. “Yes.”

It felt colder in there, just talking about the thing. For a moment, an image of millions of sightless eyes and soundlessly screaming mouths flashed in my mind. A melding of flesh and agony. Then it was gone.

A walking tower of flesh. Not as large as the Conformity itself, but huge. As it staggered down the street, windows broke outward, shattering glass in a wave front. Bodies of fresh humans floated toward it, caught up in some telekinetic field, adding to its mass.

“What's its area of effect?” Jack asked.

“For the two Conformities, many, many miles.” A pained expression passed his features. “A large percent of the eastern seaboard is now under its sway. Due to what happened to the jet during Hiram's ill-advised mission, all air travel has been grounded except in the most dire circumstances.”

I gnawed my lip. Ever since Booth's death, I couldn't think of much except finding Vig, dreaming of ways to bring him here, maybe. Keep him safe. For the moment Jack was good here; I needed to go back to my brother. In a weak moment, I'd given in to my urges and taken Vig's location from Tanzer's mind, and I didn't think she'd noticed. But Atlanta was four thousand miles away. Once again, I would need to steal a car.

As the session ended and the others filed out, Priest looked at Jack and me. “Please, you two, sit back down. I wanted to speak to you. I would like to apologize for all of the hardships you have endured.”

“Why?” Jack asked. “It's not your fault.”

“I'm afraid some of it is. Hiram was my student, and it seems it fell to you two to bear the brunt of some of his—” He searched for the word. “Enthusiasms.”

“He was an enthusiastic sonofabitch,” I said.

A small laugh escaped from Jack, and I wondered if Armstead Lucius Priest was well-versed enough in bitterness to hear it in that sound. Priest bobbed his head in understanding, but I wondered.

“In penance for some of my past sins, I offer to answer any questions you might have, in hopes of getting you to commit fully to our cause.”

“Why?” It was strange—I kept expecting this man to cock his head, stare at me with dead eyes, Quincrux once more. Getting to know someone is just a set of expectations. His mannerisms, the ease of his smile, the way he held his body, the shadow of unshaven beard on his jaw told me this was not the man he once was.

“It is my wish that you remain here with us. I need you to be an active part of the planning. You have a special sensitivity to the Conformity. You have the abilities and strengths of Hiram Quincrux, but without the cruelty. I need you … how do they say it these days?” He smiled, sadly. “I need you on board. As if this endeavor were some sort of dinghy.”

“What I'm concerned about is my brother,” I said, standing and walking nearer to Priest. “I could take a Jeep. I need to get him, bring him here.”

Priest's face grew still. He bowed his head, pursed his lips, thinking. “Shreve, this thing, this dark movement toward conformity that the entity possesses—it is my fault it is here.” His voice sounded raw. I realized that, whoever this guy was, the body he wore had been thrown across the testing room and into a bank of plasma screens just a few days prior. He had to be sore all over.

“I was proud. Overconfident. I was the strongest mind of many generations, and I abandoned my body to fly to unknown planes and far-off etheric heights, only to return to discover myself unseated from my body.” He trembled with real terror. His willingness to show his vulnerability was frightening in and of itself. On the inside, you show vulnerability, you're meat. “While I was out in my arrogant pursuits, I left the perfect vessel to be filled. The greater the mind, the greater the void when that mind is absent. And the void calls. The void wants to be filled.”

“So, while you were slipping out, something else was slipping in.”