The Shibboleth (44 page)

And over it all, thrumming and skittering and juddering in the ether, is an immensely powerful Helmholtz field.

When we're all in the room, muttering, murmuring, a door opens and Quincrux enters, leaning slightly on his cane, trailed by Ruark on crutches.

The crowd quiets, three hundred people, waiting, breathless. Soldier bulls watch the crowd from the corners of the room, automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, ready to be brought to bear. I feel like a prisoner in a World War II labor camp. But I have to wonder, if Quincrux or Ruark truly ordered them to fire, what would happen? The pure menagerie of genetics on display here, while hidden, could erupt into
madness. Chaos. If shoved, these extranaturals will shove back with uncontrolled force.

In here, guns are an effective threat, but beyond that, they're just props. The real weapons are who and what the bulls are aiming at. Us.

And maybe some of the soldiers recognize that. I see fear on some of their faces. Scanning them, I catch the eye of one of the bulls and …
stop.

It's Booth.

Looking older now. Grizzled. The hair at his temples has gone gray. But it is him, I'm sure of it.

He winks at me.

Assistant Warden Horace Booth, esquire. At your service. Never been more glad to see his ugly mug.

I think awhile.

Jack nods, thinking. He can see it now.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Cannon?” Quincrux's voice comes over the speakers, and he glares at me from where he stands. I have an instant of panic, thinking he's listened to our whole conversation. Thinking on it, I realize it's possible. He's like the father vampire—all of us spawned from him.

I wish now, when I was in the mountain lion, I'd ripped Quincrux to shreds instead of pouncing on Ruark.

I stop, turn toward the front of the room. “Sir, no, sir!” I yell in my best Army of One voice.

He ignores the interruption. The crowd shifts and tries to settle, but it's hard staring down the barrels of so many guns.

Quincrux limps to a center point, a few paces from the nearest extranatural. Away from the bulls and Negata. Away from Ruark. Behind him spans the wall of video screens, searching for the signal. They frame him perfectly.

He's a showman, he is, and wants center stage.

“Inductees, employees,” he begins, leaning heavily on the cane. “In every one of your minds there is a question. Why are we here today?”

He lets that draw out. Working the crowd, the old huckster. He gestures at Ruark with the cane tip. Ruark motions to one of the technicians, who fiddles with a gadget that causes the screens to flicker and hiss into static.

“Many of you are aware of the crippling insomnia epidemic that has blighted our nation,” he says, slowly walking forward, letting the crowd part a little. “Many of you, your friends and families, might have suffered from it.”

The air smells of damp wool and ozone and deodorant. I look at the faces surrounding us. Ember glances from Jack to Quincrux, her eyes questioning, body held loose, at the ready.
Indeed, all of the Red Team seem at ease, yet ready to spring into action. Blackwell appears complacent, chuffing air through his nose. Looking at him, I realize my testicles haven't bothered me all day.

Roberto and Galine look on, faces placid, like still mountain pools. I spy other faces, some familiar, some unknown to me. All gazes are trained on Quincrux. I can't see Booth, but there's a cluster of extranaturals blocking my view of the wall. Many look confused.

How many of these people has Quincrux put the screws to?

Now, positioned directly in the center of the crowd, Quin-crux turns around, arms out like some tent-revival preacher, trying to capture gazes in his own. I'd always thought of him as unassuming, but he's gathered to himself a gravitas that goes beyond his average stature and bland exterior. His eyes blaze with the fervor reserved for zealots. Or madmen.

“Today, I will show you your
own power!
I will show you the strength and will of this glorious Society that you've been called to join.”

The plasma screens flash
Signal Acquired
and then flicker white, stabilizing.

The television displays thirty frames of video in a single second, maybe more with these plasma screens. Each image gets pushed out of the television screen and hits your eyes in a wave of phosphorescent light, incredibly fast, leaving tracers on your retinas. And there are hundreds of eyes, each one a moist, glistening surface covering an unimaginably greedy hole, desperate for understanding. We shiver with want and inaction.

In the left screen, the camera shows many soldiers with unfamiliar markings on their gear and armor. Full battle rattle. All
carrying automatic weapons, at the ready. Except for two who hold a matte-black metal box between them. The box sprouts antennae. The camera wavers, twists to scan first the left and then the right sides of the lawn immediately outside a large gray building, and I realize the camera is mounted to a soldier's helmet. The view stabilizes, and the screen fills with the image of two grunts holding the box while an unencumbered man approaches it in the shadow of the gray building. The building I recognize now.

Scaling paint and streaked with water stains.

The Towson Veterans Hospital.

So the box must be …
the stasis bomb.

In the center panel, an aerial view of Towson Veterans appears, from maybe three hundred meters of height. Too high to be another building. And that suspicion is confirmed when a figure—a flying figure—lances across the screen, bristling with weapons. I have a quick impression of orange, hunter orange. Nothing rhymes with it. Nothing matches it.

The crème de la crème. The Orange Team floats in the Maryland sky. As I watch, the cameraman of the Orange Team moves in relation to the hospital, and more floating members of the Society of Extranaturals hove into view.

I thought I knew what good flying looks like, but these guys are something else. There's two far-off blurs circling the area, four people hovering, laden with weapons and gear. Two more pairs circle each other in what looks to be a perfect, tight figure eight. Tandem fliers. Smooth and precise.

In the third screen there's a tarmac, a military airfield. The camera stares right down the throat of the runway. Support personnel and vehicles scurry about on obscure errands. A man in
a gray poncho and navy baseball cap waves two hooded flashlights in semaphore. Looks like Orange Team has air support.

I glance over at Jack, but he's not looking at me; he's staring to his right. He catches my eye and points at Booth. When I pick him out—the crowd has shifted with Quincrux's theatrics—Booth's eyes are rolled back in his head, and he shudders once, body twitching. Closing his eyes.

When he opens them again, I don't need to surf the ether to know he's got a Rider.

Booth drops his gun with a dull plastic clatter, alerting the soldier next to him that something is up. He moves like a stone statue suddenly imbued with life, pushing the crowd apart. His gaze is fixed on Quincrux.

“Working with the US Armed Forces—and through the diligence of Amy Ruark and her team—we've been able to pinpoint the source of the insomnia epidemic.” Quincrux points to one of the smaller flat panels, the one showing a green-yellow map threaded with red. “There, in Maryland! It is there our Orange Team will deal with the threat. Tactically. Watch and know that you too will one day be part of such a magnificent endeavor. This is the next stage for extranaturals. The next stage for humanity.”

He pauses. Booth pushes his way closer, just two ranks of people away from Quincrux in the press of extranaturals. Something hangs over us all, a palpable miasma. The air is pregnant with tension, burning with ozone. The ether rasps and buzzes frenetically, painfully.

Quincrux turns to Ruark and says, “Tell them to begin.”

Booth steps in front of Quincrux, arm out, pointing.

“Do not.
Do not!
You will wake the sleeper! Do not—” Booth stumbles, shudders, and shakes his head as if waking from some long nightmare. He raises his head, and in a voice more powerful he says, “Hiram, you must not do this.”

Soldier bulls push in, rifles raised and aimed at Booth.

Quincrux's torso jerks as if receiving invisible blows. He waves a hand frantically at the bulls. “Lower your weapons!”

I shove my way forward, trying to get nearer. To get closer. To help Booth, maybe. To help the Rider. I don't know.

“Hiram, listen,” Booth says in a voice not his own. “This is folly. I alone know what sleeps there. And
it will wake if you do this!
”

“Tase that man! Subdue him!” Ruark yells.

Negata stands still, locked in indecision or isolation, I can't tell.

“Lucius?” Quincrux asks. “Is that you?”

“Murder, Hiram? Harvesting these poor children's talents?” Booth inclines his head in a far more regal aspect than I would have thought possible. His expression is stern, but kind and infinitely sad. “I am so ashamed of you, my pupil—” He seems to be lost in thought. The crowd remains hushed, but I have a crawling sensation on my skin, as if something terrible is about to happen. “I was scattered, Hiram. And I found vessels to seat the shards of my spirit.”

“But that is not possible. It's been years.”

“Only now, when one of those bits of me came in proximity to you, was I able to center myself. To pour myself wholly into one vestment.” Booth—or the spirit of Armstead Lucius
Priest—shakes his head. “To find you have fallen so low. There is much blood on your hands.”

Quincrux shivers. A frown comes to his bloodless face. “I only meant to—”

“You have much to atone for.”

Ruark barks “Orange Team, engage. I repeat, Orange Team engage!” into a headset she's holding in her hand.

On the screen, the teams begin to move. For a moment everything is still while we watch the Orange Team accompany the troops into the hospital. A young man, whose face I recognize yet can't put a name to, holds out his hand, and the matte-black stasis bomb floats in front of him as they run forward. It's like some macabre psychic game of football, and this is the offense pushing through the defensive line.

The reception area is deserted. They take the stairs up, quickly, each soldier moving as a cog in a greater machine, the stasis bomb floating silently over stairs and down halls.

In the center screen, the flyers of Orange Team come in closer to Towson Veterans Hospital, the building swelling into view. Two super-dupers hang in the air, holding what look like the long, deadly tubes. RPGs.

Another flyer has her hands out, head bowed as if she's sensing something. Abruptly, she spasms and drops from the sky. The crowd gasps. One of the other flyers darts like a bolt after her as she falls. Their bodies join and slow, but they both hit the ground.

“Oh no,” someone cries from the audience. Other people moan. I see pained expressions on the other teams' faces—this is their worst fear, falling.

Yet the second camera zooms in closer on a wing of the
hospital even as the farthest right plasma screen displays the plane racing down the runway and lifting off.

Pushing through the crowd, I yell, “You have to call them off—”

Before anyone can stop her, Ruark pulls a firearm from her side and shoots the computer the headset is connected to.

The crowd jumps away from the sound of the shot as one. The faces of the employees, the inductees, show confusion, fear. At any moment, they'll become a mob.

Ruark whips around in a rage, facing Negata. “Restrain the Cannon boy.”

Quincrux looks from his lieutenant to Booth and back. “Why did you destroy the transmitter?”

She smiles, fawning. “No recall, you said. Events set into permanent motion.”

A terrible expression of confusion and loss illuminates his face, and for the first time, I think, Quincrux truly knows doubt. “Lucius, I—”

“Mr. Negata! Take this boy into custody!”

Negata glances at me and back to Ruark. For an instant I think he might speak—that he might speak and I'll know for sure I wasn't dreaming last night—but he simply shakes his head. Then he turns and, with the lightning grace he's always shown, exits through the door they entered from.

Moving fast, as if he was going for something.

“Negata!” Ruark screams, dropping one of her crutches. She limps after him. Then stops. Gun still in her free hand. She catches my eye, raises the pistol. She points it at me.

Quincrux is lost now, looking into Booth's face. “Lucius, I did what I thought best for the Society—”

“You were always power-mad, Hiram. And now it is your downfall. All of our downfalls. Look there.” Booth extends his finger at the screen.

The stasis bomb team makes their way down a dim, tiled hall, past open doors and gurneys, down grimy tile corridors lit with lurid yellow lights. They slow, and two soldiers signal that the team is on target—a chopping motion of the hands. Soundlessly they bound into the hospital room.