The Conformity (20 page)

When I've got Tap in my grip, my left arm hooked around his rib cage, my right hand free to direct pulses, I lift him off the floor and we're caroming out into the night and it's only then I see the torch-bearing man lift his other hand and there's the dark shape of a gun in it.

Boom
.

The sound is massive in the small space of the library. Something hits my face, burning like fire, and I slam into the broken frame of the window. I sense more than see Tap wheeling into the snow outside.

I am blind. Something hits me, all my wind is gone, and it's cold when my body comes to rest.

Voices. Hands.

Darkness.

twenty-one

–agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis–

EMBER

Jack, Jack … can you hear me? Jack?

Nothing.

Starting to get worried.

Jack and Tap haven't returned by morning. Casey wants me to go back inside Shreve and rattle him about. She's being very bossy about the whole thing.

After drinking the instant coffee that Negata boiled to bitterness in the wood fire, I make another run at Shreve, just to get Casey off my back. His mind has the consistency of a wall of soft, porous rock. It crumbles as I try to get through, but it's still not letting me in.

Awake in there now, I think. He's doing something, and he might not be altogether at home. But I can't tell why or what.

Frontiersland. From what I can tell from our CPR class and the limited medical training they gave us back at the campus, Shreve looks like he's doing much better. His pulse is strong; his breathing is deep and steady. His color is good. His eyes, when you peel back the lids, respond as they should to light—though I have to be careful not to drip any wax on his corneas.

Negata left this morning to scout the area. The cloud cover has passed. The snow has stopped, and now it's a brilliant white outside. The temperature inside the lodge has risen marginally, and we've thrown back the shades to let all the light we can inside the great hall where we've bunked down.

Casey tends the fire, sweeping up ash. Collecting bowls and tins of old soup that we heated near the flames to keep from having to go to the kitchen and let in the colder air from other parts of the lodge. She fetches snow and melts it in a big bucket she's taken from some pantry. We've become pioneer women, cooking by the fire, tending house. And that really pisses me off for some reason.

Pissed off. But not pissed on. The
thing
, the walking city of people, there's no sign of it. Any moment I'm gonna hear a foghorn or something and it'll come through the firs, trees cracking.

The waiting is the hardest part.

One smoke left, and I'm saving it.

When Negata returns, he looks cold and exhausted. But he's carrying an ax.

“I have found a supply hut a half mile down the road with a sledge. Some cross-country skis. I will eat some food and then go down the mountain as far as I may. I think I saw a chimney there, through the trees, and will see if I can find any medical supplies.” He looks at Shreve. “But I do not think now that this is an ailment of the body.”

“Look for transportation,” Casey says.

I snort. “Like a horse?”

“Exactly,” she says, nodding.

“So, is this what it was like back in the eighteen hundreds? Seems like so much effort just to stay warm and catch a ride.”

Negata purses his lips. A very small gesture. “All of life is a struggle. Most people spend the lion's share of their energy trying to deny the fact that we live in a hard world.”

“Didn't seem that way until just a few days ago,” I say.

He looks at me, face blank. “Truly? I would think you'd feel otherwise with your obvious … differences.”

“I'm talking physical hardships.”

“It amazes me that we continue to separate the physical world from the mental and spiritual,” Negata says.

“Bugfucks and jocks, dude,” I respond.

“Exactly. Yet Shreve and you are more than this. You are both.”

He's got a point. Casey's face sours. She doesn't like Shreve's and my names spoken in the same sentence. It prickles me some that I'm grouped with him, but in some ways, it's a mark of honor. Li'l Devil is feared, and I don't mind some of that rubbing off on me. “Why don't you just go find a horse or something?” I say.

“Yes, and while I do that, you will need to go see if you can locate Jack and Tap,” he says. “I know it has not yet been twenty-four hours, however …”

“They've been out overnight. Right,” I say.

“Ember needs to try to communicate with Shreve again, not go running off after Jack and Tap. We decided, did we not—” Casey says with a little prim and proper adjustment of her torso, like an English schoolteacher settling into a couch for a cup of tea. “That she would remain here as the only other flyer in the group?”

“Have you attempted to contact them telepathically?” Negata asks.

“Of course,” Casey says sharply. “I've even
felt
for them with my arm. But I'm too far away. There are proximity issues.” Imagination fails once the distance is too great. Our minds can only ignore physical separation so much before the mental construct or spiritual tether snaps.

Negata inclines his head slowly. “Then I think it would be best if we stick with the original plan, at least for today. If Jack and Tap haven't returned by tomorrow …”

A cloud passes over the face of the sun and the light in the great room dies, the room becoming darker than seems normal for morning. Shadows gather.

Casey gasps and asks, “What's happening?”

Beyond the pallet where Shreve lies, Bernard and Danielle stand. They're whole, not bloody messes. But they're there and not there all at once. It's like the possibility of them plays out in my mind, bypassing all retinal brain activity, but superimposed in real space. They are near. They are far. They are bodiless. They are possibilities.

“We have come,” Danielle says. Her mouth moves haltingly, like she's trying to remember how to speak.

“From far …” Bernard says. Behind him, another shadow flickers into existence. Davies, his cheeks hollow. He'd been in contact with us too. A member of the collective, if only for a while.

“Not far,” Danielle says. She looks troubled; her skin becomes mottled with more shadows. It ripples from pink to gray to blue. Her lips are ghastly. Her eyes covered in snow. Then she's pink and normal again. “No distance …” She pauses, rippling again, and now I see the same thing happening to Bernard and Davies.

Maybe it's just us, and not the visual manifestation of our dead friends, that's causing the rippling, changing appearance of them. They're broadcasting from inside our own minds and projecting themselves onto the real world. But … doesn't this make “their” world more real now and ours, well, a little less real? Or just different.

“Can you see them?” I ask Negata.

He looks at me, puzzled. “No. You are seeing what?”

“Danielle. Bernard.” I point to where they stand.

Danielle shakes her head, and her hair swirls around her as if she was immersed in water, a slow liquid movement. “We have come with …”

“With a message,” Bernard says, the words falling like wet stones dropped from a statue's mouth. “A message.”

“A message? From who?” Casey asks, her eyes growing wide and her face gaining this eager, almost hungry look.

“From Shreve,” Davies says, finally joining the ghostly conversation.

“What?” Casey says. “What's the message?”

The trio looks at me. I remember all the horror movies I've seen where the ghosts look upon the living in that one moment when their needs and desires remain unfathomable and indistinct and then … freaky ugly ghost face. But Bernard, Danielle, and Davies just stare, their faces rippling cycles of corpse gray, frozen snow-rimed, and pink and healthy. Thank whatever gods above that we're not getting the bloody smear effect.

Negata says, “Girls, you might want to—” He raises a hand and points to Casey's nose. It's pouring blood.

Ooof. My head throbs, like hammers and hydraulic pressure and some demented factory worker ratcheting up the gears. I can taste blood. I wipe at my nose and the back of my hand has a long, crimson streak on it.

“Ember,” Danielle says, “you must find the Liar.”

“The Liar? That kid, Reese Cameron?”

“Yes. He is needed.”

“That's it?”

“Yes. We must go. It is …” Danielle shimmers and ripples again. “It is hard.”

“To return,” Bernard says.

“Wait!” Casey's voice is raw. “Did Shreve leave a message for me? Will he wake up? Did he say anything?”

But they're already becoming shadows once more, slipping into the veil of normal optical stimuli and out of the world of possibility.

“Wait! Did he—”

They're gone. We remain silent for a long while, letting Casey compose herself. Might have been a tear there, at the corner of her eye—for the three ghosts or for Shreve sending me a message and neglecting her, who knows?

So that settles that.

Go find the Liar.

But not before I find Jack.

twenty-two

–Dies iræ! Dies illa

Solvet sæclum in favilla–

TAP

When I come to, the crick in my neck and the gag and ropes make me seriously want to kick someone in the vagina. The crazy woman with the bruiser. She's talking now, but all I can see is that we're in some sort of office—nice office, lots of books and a thick oriental rug and a big desk—but they've got us tied fast to these chairs and facing each other. The ropes are crazy tight. I can't feel my toes and fingers.

Jack's face looks like shit. It's bright red and beading with little pinpricks of blood and tears; snot runs down his face and chin. Blasted with rock salt, looks like, right in the puss. And, holy shit, does he seem pissed. But he's looking at someone behind me so I turn my head to get a look. It's dark in here, and they've got what looks like a massive church candelabra standing on the mantle above the (sadly) cold fireplace. It'd feel like we'd gone back in time five hundred years if it wasn't for our wardrobes.

The eye of the shotgun isn't the best thing I've seen all day. He's got it up nice and close to my face so that there'll be no funny business. I don't know if Jack can use his powers tied up—maybe he can, maybe he can't, but he has always been very handsy when flying and attacking. From outside the room I can hear the murmurings of people and the voice of the lady. The crazy one. She's got a thick, fruity voice that reminds me a little bit of Bernard's, but the shit she's spewing is the worst sort of mindfuck Bible talk.

“For when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands to burn offerings and make sacrifices, but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people. Walk in obedience to all I command you, that it may go well with you. But they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubborn inclinations of their evil hearts. They went backward and not forward.”

There's a mutter of agreements and the shuffling of feet. Sounds like a regular tent revival in there. The bruiser, keeping the shotgun trained on me, backs away and steps out of my range of vision. But I've got to assume he's letting her know that I'm awake.

“Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?” she says, her voice strong and vibrating, like she's ending on a high note. “This is the word. This is the word of the All-Seeing God. The Panopticon. All things are possible within his vision, and he has come among the sheep to gather our flesh to his and our wills within his greater will. We are born into the end times, and now we call to us the Rapture.”