The Shibboleth (33 page)

He smokes his cigarette. However big he's gotten, he still has the awkwardness of a kid.

“Hey, just because your balls have dropped doesn't mean I'm not interested.”

“I don't need you to ride in and rescue me.”

“You wrote the letters asking me to come. And who's talking about rescuing? And you're the one who was always rescuing me, remember?”

“You know what I'm talking about.”

“We used to make a great team.”

“Yeah, but you bugged the shit out of me, constantly.”

“My one talent is abrasiveness, it's true.”

He laughs, this time fully and without reservation. “Damn straight,” he says.

I go on the attack. “So, what's the problem? You still flying sloppy? Can't lift stuff when they want you to?”

He ignores that. I can tell I'm getting under his skin. Jack puffs on his square a little. Then says, “Tell me what happened to the Witch.”

“They caught me in New York. East River. They were all floating and jumping about. They put the whole park asleep
except for me and a guy with a Rider—”

“They're still out there?”

“You think they'd just go away? Yeah, man. People can't sleep, the world's shot to hell.”

“It's just—” He waves his hand, and I get a good gander at all those fingers. “It's just hard to believe when I can't sense them myself.”

It's true. In the past, he's taken so much on faith. He believed me when most people would have just written it off.

“They were just hanging in the air, the bunch of them—”

“Red Team.”

“Red Team?”

“There's a pecking order here, you know. There's the employees—extranaturals who've pretty much grown up here and work for the Society—people like Roberto and Tanzer. There's the army guys, who just point guns at us to make sure we do as they say. Then there's the teams.”

“And the Red Team was the one that nabbed me.”

“Yeah. There's Orange Team; they're the top dogs, mostly tactical stuff, antiterrorism. You won't see them; they're in the field almost all the time. When they're here, they keep to their bunker.”

I think about that for a while. How close I came to being stuffed down a hole.

“Most of us.” He waves me to the edge of the building. “See those lights over there? Right on the skirt of that mountain, that's a residential section for the older Society members. The scientists.”

“I passed an apartment complex on the way in. Golf carts in the parking lot.”

“Yeah, no cars here. No vehicles except for the army's.”

“They don't want them to leave.”

“Not without some reason to make them return.”

“That's the way it is? Incarcerado?”

“Of course. But it's not that bad here, anyway.”

“So, it's a nice cage. You'd rather be here than anywhere else?”

“Where else would I go, Shreve?” He holds up his hands, fanning them. Good point. Where else could he go? “And, I can fly. If I want to leave, I can leave. But I won't.”

I think about that for a while. Jack is unencumbered by the baggage of family. He doesn't have parents, or siblings, or anything to tether him to the outside world.

In the end, I'm his only baggage.

“So, what about the other teams?”

“The Greens, they're next in line—less tactical and more surveillance, I think, but it's hard to know exactly.”

“Because it's all hush-hush.”

“Right. Need-to-know basis. If you start asking questions, you'll be detained by the director.”

“And the Red Team?”

“They're the backup to the Orange Team, or at least that's what Ember tells me.”

“I got nabbed by the junior varsity team. Perfect.”

Jack chuckles; then it dies and he says, “And their coach. What happened to her? Him?”

“Back to the Witch. I got in her head, Jack. I ate her memories. All of them. She's in me now.”

He's quiet for a long while.

“That's what you meant about making space on the inside,” he whispers.

I nod. It's all I can do. She's in me, under my skin. Like a hunger. Like desperation.

I don't know what he's thinking now; we've grown so apart and changed so much. But we never needed to fill the silences with chatter, and that remains the same. He flicks his cigarette over the lip of the roof, and it makes a cherry-tracer as it falls, burning out in its arcing trajectory. It's chilly now, and off in the distance I hear a scream like a half-bird, half-woman having an angry orgasm. Everything goes quiet once more, and the Helmholtz field picks up in intensity, thrumming, and I can feel it percolating through the mesh and foam of my flesh. The stars are blazing in the heavens in their multitudes.

The scream comes again, urgent and alien.

“What the hell is that? Someone messing with us?”

Jack says, “Mountain lions. They come down at night, prowl the campus. They have to fatten up for winter.”

“That's kinda messed up. Why don't the soldiers shoot them?”

“They do, sometimes. But if it's not the lions, it's the wolves, Shreve.” I can't see him shrug, but I still know him well enough to sense it when he does. “They're just doing what's in their nature, and I think Quincrux likes the idea of them prowling around. For most of the jocks, it wouldn't be a problem. The bugfucks, well, it might be dicey.”

“I'm sure a mauled kid would give Quincrux a hard-on.”

“Probably two.” He grins. “There's a couple dudes here with diphallia. It ain't pretty.”

“You've seen it? I mean them?”

“Community showers, man. Roberto says that back in the thirties, when this place was built, men didn't care if they saw
each other naked. Each floor has a communal shower.”

Silence.

“The world is full of wolves and lions, man. But so far, none in the showers.”

That's good news.

The ether thrums, angry. It's like I'm becoming attuned to the fluctuations of the Helmholtz field without even being conscious of it. The field increases, and then suddenly it's gone so quickly it's like someone has flipped a switch. Maybe they have.

“Did you feel that?”

“What?”

“The dampening field?”

“A little. I usually only know it's on when I try to do something and I can't. That was scary, the first time. I thought it had gone away.”

“I can imagine.” He's not sensitive to it, but he's a telekinetic. That's something to know.

There's a rustling of clothing from above and a whoosh of furious wind and for an instant I think of raven's wings, some great bird descending upon us.

Suddenly, the girl is there, crouching on the roof with us. She stands, smiles at Jack.

“Hey, you,” she says, and takes his hand. She wears a denim jacket, open wide to show her Black Flag T-shirt. They hug and then, despite me standing there, kiss. It's not quite an adult kiss. It's kittenish. It's lovey-dovey. Sweet.

She digs in her jacket and withdraws a pack of Marlboros. She has no trouble popping a square out of the pack, putting it to her blushing lips and snapping a Zippo underneath it, once, twice, like lightning flashes, until it's smoldering and filling the
air with the cheap stinking smell of mass-produced, chemical-infused tobacco. What every growing girl needs.

“Ah. Now I see. You're the good influence.”

“Shreve …” Jack says, holding up a hand.

“I don't promote, and I don't offer. He's a big boy,” she says and then grins, winking at Jack.

“Shreve, don't be a prick.”

I glance back at her. “He's just a kid. You're what, eighteen? I don't even know if you two are legal.”

She puffs her cigarette, wreathing her head in blue smoke. “So what are you, his guardian angel?”

Both of them stare at me, locked together arm in arm. Look at me with a shared knowledge, a shared bond. One that I'm not a part of.

“I guess not.” It's harder than I thought, letting go. “Sorry.”

“It's okay, man,” Jack says.

I extend my hand to Ember. “I'm Shreve,” I say. “We met only briefly. Before.”

She snorts, and Jack laughs. “Yeah, you were a jackrabbit.” She giggles and moves her arms in a mincing, small gesture, like a rodent on a wheel. “
Running, running.
”

“I stopped running, eventually.”

Her smile dies on her face, curdling. “Yeah, you did. Jack called him ‘the Witch.'”

“He wasn't always a man. But she was always evil.”

I don't know her very well, so the expression on her face is unreadable to me, but if I was going to take a wild swing at what she was feeling, I'd say horror. Disgust.

“How did you do it?” Ember asks. She really is pretty. I can see it now even in the low light.

I open my mouth, pause, and then clack my teeth together, a parody of hunger. Yeah, a pure bit of bravado, but I don't like her taunting me. “I've got a question that you might be able to answer.”

She looks at me warily. I hold up my hands, placating. “Just a question.”

“Okay,” she says slowly. “Shoot.”

“I thought you could be a jock, or you could be a—” I pause here, thinking about how distasteful the word I'm about to say is. “A bugfuck. But you can fly
and
you tried to get inside my head. How does that work?”

Ember touches her nose with the back of her hand, gingerly, as if remembering. “Yeah, my nose bled for hours after that.”

I nod and it's hard, but I keep my face muscles from delivering the smile that really, really wants to come out. “You seem to be both jock
and
bugfuck. That happen often?”

“Some,” she says, looking relieved. Like she thought I was going to ask if they'd done it yet. I can tell just by looking at them, they haven't. “They say it happens in girls occasionally. When I asked, they said it has never occurred in a boy.”

“Never? Who's they?”

“Employees. Mr. Michaels, our continuing ed teacher. Other post-humans. Members of the Society.”

“You ask them all?”

“I've been here a while.”

“That's interesting.”

“If you say so.”

Jack looks uncomfortable. “You want to get some dinner at the canteen?” he asks.

For a moment I sit there, thinking of all the times I've been in cafeterias and community food dispensaries. I think about Ox and Fishkill and Mr. Fingernails and Rollie and all the hard looks and stares and the hungry boys looking to ease their boredom of life by causing pain in the crucible of the incarcerated.

Jack stands waiting, shoulder to shoulder with Ember, leaning into each other.

“I'm not hungry.”

“You sure?”

I raise the hem of my shirt, showing my stomach. “Ever since the Dubrovnik woman stuck me, I just don't have much of an appetite.”

Pain crosses his face. I don't know if it's the memory of what happened in that house or it's the sight of my scars that causes it.

“Well, I'm in,” Jack says, disengaging his gigantic frame from the girl. I'm sure he has to eat quite often. Looking at his elongated bones makes my legs hurt. I can't imagine the night pains he's endured with his body distorting itself like that. “You able to get down on your own, Shreve?”

The girl gives a toothy grin. Look at the feeble bugfuck. He can't fly.

“Yeah, sure. Might hang out up here for a bit.”

“Okay,” he says. “I'll bring you something back.”

I nod. “Thanks. You know, I thought I was gonna bust you out of here. But now I'm here, I think this is where I'm supposed to be. I just wish it had been my choice.”

“I'm glad you're here, man,” he says, and then they both crouch and launch themselves into the air in a flutter of clothes and rippling wind. It's hard keeping track of them. I have an
instant of worry that the Helmholtz will kick on and they'll go plummeting to the earth. But it's not really my place to worry about Jack anymore.

I sit down and lean back in the folding chair and look at the sky again. When I close my eyes, I feel a panic, as though they've stuffed me back underground. A panic because I'm on a roof in a strange place. In the dark.

And there's still the thing sleeping in the East.

I might not have to worry about Jack. But there's Vig. And Jerry and Booth. And everyone else. The world is full of them.

I cast out my awareness, out over the space/not space, searching for those minds that haven't been awakened enough to stop the sleepless emanations coming from Maryland. The only thing I can do here is to shore up the unsuspecting folk who'll be subsumed by the sea of sleeplessness. It's not as bad, this far west. But I burn through the populace as quickly as I can, a forest fire of the mind.

I do it for as long as I can until I start feeling the cohesive fatigue that comes from touching the minds of so many souls. Moving through them like wind over a billion heads of wheat swaying in the fields, I flicker, each one taking something out of me. My strength dims. I become diffuse smoke and as massive as the sky. I work through Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls. Thousands and thousands of people I visit. I'm like an invisible Santa Claus you never knew gave you a gift, slipping inside the chimneys of the mind.