The Conformity (30 page)

“But, you're alone—” I begin.

“Here's the thing, kids.” He looks back at us, an expression of sadness on his face. “It might not seem like it, but you've got a million paths in front of you. You're young, and life is full of possibility. But me? I've used up all of my possibilities.” He shrugs. “There's but a single path in front of me,” he says, looking at Shreve. “And it goes back. To home.”

Shreve says nothing, a strange look on his face. Negata manages to bring his horse alongside Nelson's and offers a hand. They shake.

“Thank you,” I say, simply. Nelson nods at me and turns his horse around and follows the trail back. Very quickly, he's hidden by tree line.

We follow the highway north. Shreve huddles in on himself, silent.

“What's wrong?” I ask and then realize the ridiculousness of that question.

He shakes his head. Says, “Nothing.”

We're on 93 outside of a little town called Lolo when the big burly man steps out from behind one of the firs lining the highway, holding a rifle.

“Dismount! Drop all your weapons!” he bellows, walking forward quickly. He's got a bead on Negata, the closest rider to him. “I will blow your face off, man!”

Negata slips off the horse like water off a duck's back and steps away from the animal, a little to the side, a little forward so that the man's rifle moves away from us.

“Mister,” Shreve says, pitching his voice to be heard. “You're making a big mistake.”

“That right?” the man says. “How do you figure? I got two compadres behind trees with their guns on you.” He glances at Shreve. “So why don't you get off the fucking horse, kid, before I lay your friend out.” He takes another pace forward, his eye to the sights. The cant of his shoulders and tension of his whole body is palpable. A big guy, he looks hungry and desperate.

“We can't do that,” Shreve responds.

The man whistles, and two more men step out from the side of the highway. One's got a pistol, and the other's holding what appears to be something metal.

“Does that guy have a sword?” I ask.

The men glance at me, probably surprised to hear a female voice. It's been a long time since the specter of rape has passed by, ever since I gained the ghosthand, but these guys don't know what I can do.

Shreve does, though. He looks at me and nods. I know what to do.

All I have to do is slip my ghosthand
into his chest and give his heart a small squeeze, and his face drains of color and he pitches over into the snow, rifle and all.

Negata leaps forward, kicks the gun away into the snow, and begins to feel for a pulse. The other two men, at the sight of their fallen comrade, yelp in alarm. But I've already yanked the pistol out of the second man's hand and floated it over to Shreve, who catches it out of the air, checks the load.

“Empty. These jokers are toothless,” he says, though he keeps an eye on the fellow with the sword. He's a younger man with stringy blond hair, dressed in a motley assortment of ski clothes and winter wear. Eyes bugging.

“You're part of it!” the sword-bearer yells, shaking his head. “You're one of them!”

Shreve tosses the empty gun back to the man I snatched it from. “We're not gonna hurt you guys.” He darts a glance at the man on the ground. Negata has begun administering CPR. “Or, we're not gonna hurt you guys any more than we already have,” he says, holding up a gloved hand. “We just want to know about the road ahead.”

The young man with the sword walks forward, holding the blade up like he's Conan or something. I can snatch it right out of his mitts if I need to, but why not let the guy keep it for a while? He's terrified already. On the other hand, terror is just one step away from hysteria, and hysteria is dangerous.

With his approach, I can see that the sword looks like a prop from a fantasy movie. Maybe he's one of those people who dress up in armor on the weekend and talk with
thee
s
and
thou
s. Who knows? I'm not going to let him get any closer. It's a big sword.

I stretch out the ghosthand
and place an invisible palm on his chest, halting his forward movement. He staggers a bit, looking around himself, as if to discover the wall or fence he's run into.

“Let's not make a mess of this, buddy,” Shreve says. “Are there soldiers ahead?” He pauses, reevaluating his wording. “You know, big towers made of people. Grabbing folks. Moaning and dripping and yelling weird stuff. You know.”

The sword-bearer shakes his head. It's a little frantic. The guy is frazzled, that's for sure. He's probably hungry. Maybe they wanted the horses for food as much as transportation.

“One appeared two weeks ago, right after the electricity went out,” he says, voice hoarse. His knuckles are white on the pommel of the sword. “Took a lot people from Missoula, maybe a fifth. Or more. Then it …” He sobs once and then looks surprised that the sound came out of his own mouth. “Then it divided. Holy Christ, the thing
split in two!
”

Shreve nods, somberly. “Did both the soldiers go the same way?”

The man lowers the tip of the sword. “Soldiers? Why do you call them soldiers?”

Shreve waves his question away. “Doesn't matter. Which way did they go?”

“One went northwest. The other followed the interstate east.”

Negata stands, looks at the man with the sword. “You may collect your friend now. He's breathing on his own, but he'll need to be watched.” He returns to his pony and leaps upon its back—graceful despite the heavy winter clothing—and takes up the reins again.

“Thanks for the info, dude,” Shreve says. “I'd suggest you guys give up on being highwaymen. It's not working out too well for you.”

Negata kicks his horse forward, and Shreve follows. I bring up the rear, watching the men. They look at us with hungry faces as we ride past.

“But you've got more horses than you need!” the sword guy says. “You're just leaving us to die!”

Negata doesn't react, but I can see Shreve's shoulders hitch, like he's waiting on a blow.

We ride past, leading the ponies, leaving the would-be robbers behind us in the snow. A flight of ravens erupts from the tree line with loud caws, banks and wheels above us, and disappears.

The next day, we've skirted Missoula and begun riding east on the interstate median. From horseback, 95 is covered in snow and doesn't so much look like a road as a never-ending field, stretching off into infinity, the white mounds of abandoned cars and the highway signs and mile markers the only things marring the illusion.

“It's only after everything stopped that I realized how much of life,” Shreve says, lifting his hand to indicate the snow-covered road, “of
human
life, was dedicated to holding back … disorder.”

“Chaos,” I say. “Someone would have plowed this road.”

Negata sniffs and says, “An unplowed road is hardly chaotic. It is merely inconvenient.”

Now that we're moving—slowly, very slowly—Negata's opened up. The little man seems to want to share with us now. Maybe because time's running out. For everyone. When we realized the color has been leeched from the world, maybe that was the stone that cracked his icy surface.

“What I find interesting,” Negata says, drawing his horse in line with ours, “is how
little
chaos the Conformity has caused. Some small devastation, but not as much as one would think. The world has simply gone into a state of decay. People gone. Absence.”

I think I get what he's saying. In most wars—and if we have to compare this to something, it might as well be a war—there are explosions, buildings in flames, people dying slowly and in pieces. But that's not what's happening here. America is like an empty house now, slowly falling apart.

Negata turns in his saddle to look at us closely and continues to think out loud. “Maybe this is due to the nature of the Conformity—it gathers people unto itself. It has its own internal order. Whatever its goals—the absolute harvesting and subjugation of humanity, the reshaping of the universe—it isn't here for destruction's sake.” He looks around us at the derelict cars. “Otherwise, I think this planet would be in cinders.”

As Negata speaks, my flesh—even in the cold—breaks out in gooseflesh. “You know,” I say, “that's almost the worst thing … the most terrible thing I've ever heard.”

“Yeah,” Shreve says. “The idea that it's got its own idea of
order—
oh, man. Where does that leave us?”

“In the end,” Negata says, “we are merely fuel. We are its flesh. This entity—this consciousness from beyond the stars—has found a way to fashion a body for itself. And that body is the human race. Or the part of humanity that is best suited to it.”

“The extranaturals,” I say. “Us.”

Shreve says nothing. He's not chewing his lip; he's not railing against our fate. I'm riding close enough to see his face under the hood. It's placid, if uncomfortable. He's decided on something. He's made up his mind. I don't know what it is, but I can tell by the way his jaw is locked that he's going to act.

When he does, I'll be there to catch him.

thirty-four

EMBER

Can't let the boys see how upset I am—not because I need to be all tough, but because the panic and desperation are catching. Saw Tap's tears, and if he's so broken that he'll cry in front of us … we're in bad shape. Tap's like Shreve, to a certain extent. They'll never let you see their weakness.

Like me, I guess, too.

Feel lost. Desolate. Not just because the campus lies in ruins, or because our cozy little life has been wiped away. There are so many dead. So many frozen bodies littered about as if they were candy-bar wrappers, just wadded up and thrown away. We mean so little to the Conformity in the end. Each life is just an infinitesimal spark, worthless in the larger scheme of things.

The little girl in the dorm room. White-eyed and half covered in snow.

Dani, Bernard, I wish I could have done something for you.

There's nothing there, inside me. Was terrified at first when the ghosts came. Felt as though I was losing control of myself. But then there was a comfort knowing that Dani and Bernard were in me, somewhere at least.

After sex, when both Jack and I fade to black, I have dreams that are not my own. Wake to strange rhythms, pulsing and pounding in my head, and images of people I love that I've never seen or met before but that remind me of Dani and Bernard. And the strange thing is, we were never close in life. Weren't buds. Were just kids who went to the same school—thrown together by chance. But now, they live inside of me. Don't know what I'd do if I could be rid of them. Would that mean they'd be dead forever? Is any part of them alive even now?

Jack and Tap follow closely in the howling currents of air, and that's fine because they can't see my tears up here, and if they did, I could blame them on the wind.