The Shibboleth (38 page)

It's close to full dark, a wild spray of stars wheeling in the heavens, when Jack and Danielle land. It's clear she's been crying. It's hard to tell with Jack. His jaw is locked, the muscles of his cheek popping and shifting as if he's grinding his teeth.

Their lips are blue. Jack hugs his body, rubbing his arms. Bernard gives Danielle his jacket.

“You're frozen, Jack,” I say. “Let's get you back to the dorm.”

He sits down on a rock, holds his head in his hands. Stays that way for a long while. There's always these moments when you don't know what to do. There was a kid at Casimir, his dad died in a meth lab fire and when Booth came to tell him, he just nodded his head, kept nodding, like he'd gotten the information yet wasn't able to process it yet and Booth stood there balling and unballing his fists because he didn't know anything else to do with his body. Only when I'm touching someone's mind—when I'm invested in that violation—is there any closeness of understanding anyone else. We're born into pain and live our whole lives in it, isolated from everyone else by the gulf of flesh and space. Each one of us alone, to deal with our grief and love and loss in our own way.

Danielle sobs, covering her face in her hands and shivering in Bernard's jacket.

Jack's not crying when he says, “Saw the smoke reflecting the sunset. Black smoke. The wreckage. There were …” He stops, swallows. “There were pieces of them. An arm. A leg. Some body part I couldn't even recognize. And luggage and smoking clothing.”

“Any response? Cops or anything?”

He laughs, a hard bitter sound, like I'm an idiot. “Out here? We're miles and miles from the nearest road. They were probably trying to land at our airfield.”

“The world's ending out there, Shreve. Beyond these mountains. Everything's falling apart. And we're just sitting here, playing at being superheroes,” Jack says.

Some poor soul, maybe a pilot, maybe an airplane technician, hasn't slept for days. Missed something on the job.
All because of the thing sleeping in Maryland. The dragon stirring. Causing this insomnia. All those people died.

“Is there anything we can do?” I ask, helpless.

“Hope the mountain lions don't get indigestion,” he says, and I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. He's right.

“The director will do something about it,” Danielle says, knowing it's not true. They're all dead. The world is collapsing around us. Why bother?

Bernard puts his arm around Danielle. Jack stands there, fuming, furious. At me, maybe, for infecting him with something he didn't want. With the world for being stubborn and full of destruction.

Finally, when we all realize Quincrux or Ruark aren't going to come and do something, we slowly walk back up to campus, heads down.

I feel something press against my palm and realize Casey holds my hand in hers. Her secret hand. Her invisible one. I let it stay.

Silent.

Strange, the body still has wants even when the mind is clouded. My stomach rumbles unmercifully. My nuts throb.

Ember's sitting on the steps of the canteen when we arrive. Walking through the trees back from the airfield, I thought I heard something rustling in the undergrowth, but I remained calm and walked steadily away just as the sodium lights kicked on. Along with the Helmholtz. They're pouring on the juice, but what they need to do is shoot some mountain lions. My swollen nutsack's beginning to crawl. Something watched me.

“Where's the little dude?” Ember asks, moving to put her arm possessively around Jack's waist.

“He got called to Admin this morning,” Jack says, rubbing her shoulder.

“Oh, that's terrible.”

“You don't know the half of it,” he says.

I pass the guards, recognizing a not-so-friendly face. Davies. He's at ease with all the jocks and bugfucks, but there's something about him that reminds me of Negata. A waiting readiness. And he doesn't like me. He has cause not to.

Inside the canteen, the big chalkboard menu to the right announces it's Eye-talian night—with a large, unappetizing bloodshot eye drawn in loving detail—with lasagna and pasta with meatballs on the menu. I take the lasagna and sit down at a table with Bernard, Danielle, and Casey.

I'm ravenous. I tear into the ovoid block of “garlic” bread and fork a big mouthful of vinaigrette-drenched salad into my maw.

“So, the Bomb, man-child?” Bernie says. “She sock it to you in testing?”

Danielle and Casey smile and look at me. Everybody's so curious about the Montgomery girl. Anything to take their minds off the plane crash. “Yeah,” I say around my food. “My dick got harder than Chinese arithmetic.”

It's easier to be crass. It's a wall. I can't just say, yeah, she turned my body traitor and I would've killed you all, laughed doing it, if only to have sex with her. I would've sold my soul. Plucked out my eyes. Destroyed myself and lit the whole world on fire and watched it burn just to screw a girl. How do you say that?

So I go crass and stupid. It's easier.

But Casey's eyes are bright. “It got to you, didn't it? Not her, but the power they're playing with?”

I nod. She knows. It's like they're playing with both the raw
energies of the universe on the physical side and the tidal forces of the human heart. It's just too much.

Ember and Jack join us, sitting next to each other, hip to hip. He won't meet my eye, so I know he's told her.

We finish our food. Extranaturals wander in and out of the canteen, placing orders. Davies and his companion watch us, sleepy, bored, but never setting down their automatic weapons. US Army all the way, baby. At least they're not in full battle rattle.

Another soldier appears in the open door, shambling forward. He seems to be disoriented and unarmed. He's looking around the canteen.

Jack begins to stand. “Who's that guy? He's new aroun—”

The soldier's arm pops up, finger out, and like a compass point, he wavers and then settles on true north—my chest. His eyes roll back in his head. He screams, “It stirs! It rises in the East! The elder awakens!”

Everything seems to happen simultaneously. Jack's hand pops up, all six fingers splayed, as if he plans to blast the soldier back out the doors. Next to him, Ember dodges to one side, and Bernard, Danielle, and Casey follow suit seconds behind her—just in case the soldier has a gun. Davies hops up, unslinging his weapon. The other soldier looks to Davies.

The canteen crowd parts like the Red Sea, dashing away from the pointing soldier. One employee levitates crazily and goes crashing into chairs and a table, unable to hold his concentration in the Helmholtz haze.

I slip out of my flesh and go tap-tap-tapping at the soldier's noggin. It's steel; it's titanium. Now I know that all knuckleheads can be broken, it's even more jarring, the strength of the Riders.

And that's what that poor sod has got, a Rider.

The possessed man screams, “It stirs! It wakens! You must stop it!”

I snap back in my body. “Me? Why me?” It's a question I always ask.

“Enduring pain. The conformity will take us all!” the man says.

Davies raises his weapon. The other soldier withdraws a Taser and raises it like a pistol. Delicately, they move to each side of Rider-possessed man. The soldier keeps the Taser on target yet reaches for his tac-comm receiver and lifts it to his ear. With the clatter of canteen chairs and tables, the words he murmurs into it are inaudible.

“Doesn't sound like a winning combo to me,” I say, pitching my voice loud enough to carry over the terrified din of the room.

“You will be consumed!”

The man contorts, twisting like someone's stuck a frog gig into the small of his back and given it a good twist. Then he drops to the ground, first on his knees and then bowing over for his face to hit the concrete with a meaty
SLAP!
Davies lets his weapon swing loose on its strap, and he jumps forward, placing his knee in the small of the Rider-possessed man's back, careful not to touch skin, while his Taser-wielding compadre continues to give juice to the guy. The air is full of the
pop pop pop pop pop
of the electrical charge being pumped into the man's body, and
in my mind, that sound blends with the buzzing and crackling of the ether.

Between the two, they yank the man's arms behind his back, snap handcuffs on him, lift him up, and move toward the front entrance with practiced speed. They bust out of the canteen's double-barred doors and into the night air. The doors slowly swing shut behind them.

“I think it might be time to go back to the dorm,” Jack says.

Out the doors and into the rapidly cooling night. Davies and company stand near the guard shack, smoking cigarettes. There's a Jeep rumbling in the drive at the base of the stairs with more army guys, plus the one possessed by the Rider. His head swivels on a greased neck, like a turret, to focus on me as the Jeep pulls away. But he doesn't scream or yell again. His gaze bores into me as long as the angle of the car and the limitation of vertebrae and sinew allow him to. When they're gone, red taillights disappearing around a curve, the two guards say good-bye to their cohort in the guard shack and leave him standing outside, smoking and cracking his back.

Jack and Perdie are saying good night to the girls and turning to walk back to the dorm. I holler, “Hey, I'll catch up with you,” and ignore Jack's puzzled look.

“What about the mountain lions?”

“It's not that far, and there's guards.”

“What are you up to, man?”

“You wouldn't approve.”

He narrows his eyes but lets me go.

I hobble over to near where Davies grips a cigarette in his teeth and looks at me warily.

“Excuse me,” I say, going into the ether even as I speak.
It's almost like I'm calving off part of myself, a huge shelf of ice shuddering free of an iceberg and plummeting into the sea, but more deliberate. “Can I have a word with you?”

“No fraternization with the inductees. Move along.”

The Helmholtz is kicking, but I bully through it. The shibboleth is so strong, the limiting field is just a minor irritation now.

I take a few steps away from the guard shack and the canteen and make Davies follow.

“How're you sleeping, hoss?” I ask.

“Fine.”

“That's good. So you've done as I've …”
Ordered? Commanded?
“Instructed.”

He nods, but it's reluctant.

“Did Booth respond?”

“I am coming.”

Suddenly I'm afraid. A chill settles upon me, the chill of the thing sleeping in Maryland, the dragon in the East. I may have just jeopardized someone I care about. But things are moving now, and I cannot stop them.

“Okay. You may go. You will remember nothing of this.”

I turn to go back to the dorm. Davies shuffles back to the canteen, content to drink coffee and eat power bars and ignore the violation that just occurred. Somewhere in his hindbrain a rat on a spinning wheel has my name tattooed onto its tail.

I'm tired, but not too tired to realize I'm not above acting just like it.

My body is heavy, each step is a labor. I pass beyond the canteen and guard shack's Helmholtz field and into a moment's silence in the ether. It's as if there's been a month of rain and
finally the clouds pass over in the night and you realize the heavens are strewn now with a billion stars, each one indifferent to your plight, but still wheeling in their massive and glacial course across the sky. With each step my side twinges, my balls throb.

I walk, limping. Past the girls' dorm the ether becomes clouded again with Helmholtz interference, and then it lightens and disappears to nothing in my course across campus. It's cold again, and my breath comes in plumes, frozen water vapor hanging in front of my face before being snatched away by wind.

I think back to earlier today when the doomed airplane screamed across the sky. I think back to when the Liar convinced me I was going to die, and I wept for myself like a titty-baby. The shame burns in my throat. Before I looked like an old man, I thought. But now I am one, trapped in this hurt and exhausted boy's body.

I'm climbing now, rising up the mountainside and crossing the quad where Jack and Ember had their images stolen at Quincrux's behest. I stop, look at the tree, the vacant and empty tableau where they held hands.

I turn away from the tree and the bench and the building I once scrutinized so closely in photograph form, and there in a shadow cast by high, yellow-tinted sodium bulbs, I see the mountain lion crouching. It's there, off the path between buildings, arrested in its movement, watching me with eyes burning bright in the jungles of the night.

And this seems perfect. I am too tired even to be alarmed. The ether is quiet, but I can still hear the purr and thrum of the big cat's throat, spotting its prey. Maybe it sees I'm wounded. Maybe it sees I'm in pain.

Our gazes lock. It takes a quick three steps forward—
whisk whisk whisk
—and pauses once more, lowering its long, tan-sleek body down to the mulched, manicured campus grounds.

I am going to die.

Screw it. I can't even bring myself to care anymore. I've become what I never wanted to be. I've become what I hate. If this animal, this careless, remorseless spark in massive feline form is my doom, then let it be.