The Conformity Read online

  Text copyright © 2015 by John Hornor Jacobs

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jacobs, John Hornor.

  The Conformity / by John Hornor Jacobs.

  pages cm. — (The Twelve-Fingered Boy trilogy)

  Summary: “Shreve, along with Jack and his girlfriend Ember, travel to Maryland to solve the mystery behind “the elder,” the ancient, malevolent force hidden near Baltimore, which has been sending psychic tremors out into the world causing mayhem, mass suicides, and the beginning of the end of civilization.” — Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-7613-9009-1 (trade hard cover : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-1-4677-6182-6 (EB pdf)

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J152427Co 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013028517

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – BP – 12/31/14

  eISBN: 978-1-46776-182-6 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-46777-900-5 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-46777-899-2 (mobi)

  one

  The sound, when it comes, is hard to take in all at once. It’s too big for immediate comprehension. At first it’s just the blaring sound of the Klaxons beating in the arteries of air, rising and falling in ear-rupturing waves, but then, layered above it, there’s the moan that’s more than a moan and more than a scream. It’s the cacophonous groans of thousands of human mouths, straining. Agonized. It’s the sound of misery. It affects me at a root level. I sit bolt upright in bed, shocked. My nuts draw up, my skin crawls, and my heart begins hammering in my chest like my rib cage is a penitentiary and it’s gonna bust out, incarcerado no more, and start boogying down the highway.

  The rib cage holds, but the heart keeps hammering.

  Jack pops up from his bed—always the first to rise—with Tap right on his ass. They both rush over to the dorm window and peer out into the half-light of pre-sun morning.

  “Holy shit,” Jack says, and then immediately dashes over to grab his trousers. Somehow he tugs on boots as he’s standing. I’m up and dressed and slipping on running shoes when Tap, still at the window, barks, “The Conformity! One of those walkers—” and yanks open the dormer window, letting a blast of frigid air into the room. He steps up onto the ledge and launches himself into the air. Jack, dressed, climbs up to stand on the wide stone casement.

  Jack and I can’t fly tandem yet, so I race to the dorm room door and yank it open. I feel more than see Jack lifting off into the air with a pulse. He arcs across the sky.

  Soldiers! They’re in the valley! he sends in a strange mental yawp to the Irregulars, exultant and fearful.

  On my way to the armory, Danielle sends back, her mental voice cold and hard as steel.

  Casey? Where are you? I ask.

  Heading up the trail toward the water tower.

  Right, I respond. I’m coming.

  I’m hustling, man-child, Bernard sends. I’m hustling. Here’s a pick-me-up, he says, and then there’s a quick flurry of mental beats and staccato images and my body floods with energy, my muscles thrum, and I feel as though I could outrace the sun. The cold is pushed away. I’m warm now, like I’ve swallowed batteries and there’s some unknown dynamo ripping a relentless rhythm in my belly.

  Wow, Casey sends. My hair’s standing on end.

  The crash, though, when it comes, is really gonna be a bitch, Bernard adds.

  I carom down the hall, past the surprised looks of other half-clad extranatural boys—most of us bugfuck non-flyers—down the stairs, and burst through the double doors and outside into the half-light of morning. The freezing air is now just an afterthought. Last week’s snow is still clinging to the ground and piled in drifts along pathways, roads, campus sidewalks. My breath comes as vapor before my face.

  I can’t see it yet. The sirens are like a thin poison in the air, reminding me of the Helmholtz. It’s hard to think with the rising and falling of the sound. But then it dies.

  And the moaning, the screaming comes. Thousands upon thousands of mouths, groaning in agony. It’s like an ambulatory circle of Hell.

  There’s a crack and then another, the hard sounds of timber shattering. The booms of trees falling. And moaning.

  I run, arms pumping, across the valley. With Bernard’s beat, the electric tempo running in my blood, I could outrun a leopard, leap over a bus. Eating the distance, feet pounding on pavement, on dirt.

  A Jeep slews on the gravel path, carrying three Army soldiers, one of them Sergeant Davies. He spies me and double-takes, giving me an oh-shit-I-don’t-want-to-fuck-with-this-kid-but-I’ll-get-canned-if-I-don’t look that the Army guys get now that they’re pointing the guns outward, rather than inward at extranaturals. He motions for the driver to stop while the rear man hefts an M14 with grenade launcher and scans the skies. It’s a tremendous weapon, but he doesn’t look reassured because the sirens are screaming again and the cracks of falling trees split the air—like Godzilla himself is approaching.

  “Don’t you look excited, Li’l Devil,” Davies says as I pull myself into the back of the Jeep.

  “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I need to get to the water tower.”

  He nods, looking grave. “That’s close to Bunker H. We’ll escort you there and then collect the Director.”

  I didn’t know that’s where Priest lurked at night, but it makes sense. He asks Jack and me to attend training briefings often nowadays—a bit of organization we never had from Quincrux—but we don’t have a bridge club or play tiddlywinks or do whatever the hell they used to do for fun back when he was born, however many lifetimes ago. Biggest hobbies back then were crucifying Christians and toga parties, maybe. Who knows?

  “And engineering?” I ask. “Any word? Without enough power, the Helmholtz won’t have the juice to drop the soldier.”

  “None yet, but most of the power lines are underground so they won’t be—” His radio squelches, and a string of muddy sounds comes from it, words only soldiers can understand, apparently. He squeezes the transmitter and says, “Roger that,” then turns to me and says, “Teams are aloft,” precisely at the moment when five red blurs cross the sky immediately above us. The Red Team, heavy with armament.

  Davies shoves an oversized military walkie-talkie into my hand. “You’ll need it.”

  “Letsgoletsgoletsgo,” the driver says in the rapid-fire way I’ve come to expect more from war movies than from everyday life, but what can you do? World’s gone to shit. We’re just the pieces of corn making it more colorful before the end swirl down the toilet.

  The Jeep surges to life, spinning wheels and tossing gravel into the trees behind us. When the water tower comes into view, they slow long enough for me to hop out. Normally I would have face-planted
in the gravel, but Bernard’s beat still thrums in my body and I only stumble a little, catching myself with a burst of speed up the rise and past the razor wire. A small silhouette waves at me from the top of the tower—Casey. She’s already had time to climb or lift herself to the summit. She stands next to the fat antenna array of the souped-up Helmholtz field transmitter.

  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.”