The Shibboleth (45 page)

The room I remember in my mind's eye.

He's still there, the emaciated bundle of bones wrapped in such paper-thin skin. His eyes are sunken, cheeks withdrawn, the shape of his skeleton easily visible underneath the ragged integument of flesh.

The man on the bed opens his eyes. And they are black—even in the HD video signal coming from the team member, they look as black as oil. Black and roving.

Full of darkness.

“It has awoken,” Booth says.

The body of the wasted man—
Armstead Lucius Priest
—rises from his bed, arms cruciform, floating into the air, trailing an IV and tubes. My skin crawls with the sight. But it's more than that. Something is happening in the ether.

The Helmholtz field is gone.

Negata! He's disabled it!

On the screens, the soldiers in the room yell silently to one another, clutching their heads as if in agony. The flying team falls from the sky, the camera plummeting toward the ground and going to static.

In the hospital room, the cameraman drops to his knees and crawls to one of the bomb men. Hands scrabble at the fallen
Orange Team member. He grasps something and manipulates it. The screen goes to static.

“He's triggered the stasis bomb,” Quincrux says. The crowd shifts and moans.

Ruark, looking from me to the screen, holsters her weapon and limps from the room, following Negata.

A signal is reestablished, and the aerial cameraman, obviously terribly wounded from his fall, musters the strength to raise his head. The hospital becomes visible once more. The building seems to give a silent shudder. Suddenly, the east end of the building sloughs off a shiver of dust, trembles, and cracks.

It implodes, leaving a perfectly black globe—a bubble—floating in the air, wreathed in smoke.

It rises.

High above, the black globe stops. Small figures rise up to meet it. At first they are indistinct, blurry particles rising from the earth to join with the black thing floating over the Maryland cityscape. Then more particles rise to meet it.

“Oh my God,” a girl in the crowd murmurs. “Those are people.”

And she's right. The motes are points of flesh, human beings snatched from their lives, their yards, their streets. Rising to meet the globe.

The cameraman isn't hurt so much that he can't bring himself into focus. He centers his gaze upon the globe. I can't imagine the strength he (or she, I don't know) must have. With a decided waver, he shoves off the ground and lifts into the air. Flying again.

There are cheers from the crowd. Until the view stabilizes.

Closer now. Hundreds of people rising to join the globe. Thousands of human bodies. The surface of the globe crawls with flesh, a jumbled collage of limbs, arms, legs, torsos, heads. And more flying to join it. It's a sun gathering star stuff to itself. It's a black hole that exerts its pull only on the flesh of humankind. Thousands upon thousands of people rise to become one with the mass of flesh. They writhe. They squirm.

And in the ether, through it, I feel violent emanations rippling outward from the east.

And I know.

They are all alive. Each person. Man, woman, child. The thing inside the stasis field looks out upon our world with a hundred thousand eyes, each one sightless, each mouth howling in silent agony at the forced collective. It surges, this living star made from human flesh. It pulses. It throbs.

The visual on the screen wavers and then tumbles, falling into the terrible writhing flesh. Fluid and monstrous and reduced to some protoplasmic essence. The opposite of the ether. The ether of meat.

When the images stabilizes again, it shows only a seething mass of mindless, sightless body parts. A planetscape of agony.

I hear people retching in the crowd and smell their vomit. There's sobbing and dreadful screeching hysteria, but mostly stunned silence. The guards, many of them pale and watching the crowd nervously due to the emotions the telepaths broadcast, stagger toward the exits. Employees and inductees clutch each other, terrified by their own inaction in the face of such horror.

“Look!” Someone cries. And I realize it's Ember's voice. “The plane!”

On the last screen, the land races beneath the jet—it moves tremendously fast. A fighter jet, I'm sure now. Water, bays, neighborhoods, open expanses of bays again, all race beneath it.

The
thing
—the sun made from human misery and the flesh of humankind—hoves into view. But the plane, shuddering, lurches and suddenly tumbles. The screen shows earth, sky. Earth, sky, earth, sky,
earthskyearthskyearthsky
. Wheeling again and again. The screen goes dark.

Silence.

But in the ether, one trumpeting message howled from a thousand mouths comes through distinct and terrible:
Worship us, for we are made of your flesh. Worship us.

“It has awoken,” Booth says, shuddering, and he slumps to the ground.

Quincrux, crying, sags to the floor, holding Booth's head. “I'm sorry, Lucius. I'm sorry.”

Ruark fled, Negata gone, Quincrux lost to remorse. Booth unconscious. There is no one left except me to say what needs to be said.

“Go, all of you. Go to your rooms. We will figure out what to do,” I say.

They look at me with open hostility.

It's one thing to go out into the ether and settle upon the unaware, lighting the match flames of their minds, bringing sleep. It is a wholly different proposition doing that to a collective of extranaturals, some of them strong bugfucks. But they are alarmed and distracted, and I am stronger. I am large, I contain multitudes.

I settle on them like a mist, a thought. A single thought, to leave. To go back to where they feel safe and wait there.

Many shake their heads, blinking. Many nod and file out, slowly. It's hushed, the sound of them, just the swishing of damp clothing and the soft breathing of the stricken. In the end, they leave.

Jack and I are left alone with Quincrux and Booth.

Quincrux's sobbing quiets. He's lost in his own realm of pain and remorse. I shouldn't feel this way—for everything he's done to me, for everyone he's killed—but I feel sadness for him. Before he was formidable. Now he has my pity.

Booth stirs.

“If there's one thing I know, Shreve,” he says, lifting himself onto one arm, “you're gonna be the center of a shitload of trouble.” And it's the old Booth. My Booth.

“You can't prove anything,
Assistant
Warden.” I smile at him. “Do you even remember anything? How the hell did you get here?”

“I learned I could change my appearance.”

“Your appearance was always important to you.”

He smiles, but there's pain in it. “True. But after Quincrux—after you—that kinda turned inward, I think. And I discovered I could make myself appear as whatever I wanted. I think I went a little crazy, stopped going to work. They suspended me.”

“No,” I say. It's hard to believe that Booth won't be stomping the tiles at Casimir anymore.

“Yeah. And then, I got this phone call. Just a few days ago. A soldier. He didn't know why he was calling, but he was distressed. And he gave me your message.”

“Is the Rider, uh, I mean is Lucius still in there with you?”

“Oh, yeah. He's here. Waiting. Watching.”

“So he was the Riders? All of them?”

“Yes. Scattered among all of them. Until he came in contact with Quincrux. That shorted him out, I think. Collected him. Suddenly, it was like a flood in my mind,” he taps his temple. “And I couldn't keep him out.”

I nod, remembering fighting off the Witch. Fighting off Quincrux. “And now?”

“Now?”

“What do we do? That thing's killing people,” Jack says, joining the conversation.

“I don't think it's killing them,” he says, looking at Jack. Taking in Jack's height and the changes puberty has brought to his old ward. He nods, turns his gaze back to me. “I can feel it too, you know?”

“I thought you could, back at Casimir. I tried to talk to you about it.”

“I remember that. My momma always said denial ain't just a river in Egypt.”

I laugh, and he shifts his body, trying to rise. Jack moves to help him.

“So what do we do now? Everything's gone to hell.”

From the door behind us I hear Ruark say, “I know what we're going to do.”

Before I turn, I already know what I'm going to see. She's holding her gun in one steady hand. A cold fury making her face look immobile and waxen.

She's got the gun on me.

“We have a whole arsenal of weaponized talent. We have an
army. We will make war with that—that
thing
.”

“Put down the gun, miss,” Booth says, holding up his hands. “We aren't gonna hurt you.”

She points the gun at Booth.

“Bullshit, I'm not,” I say, but as I do, the gun swings back to me. Fast.

“I can shoot you, Cannon, before you can get to me. Before you can get in my head.”

“Doubtful.”

“Don't test me.”

It comes down to this. To give up my body to save others. Now that the moment is on me, it seems like this is the movement my whole life has had, toward this choice.

I am about to slip into the ether—and maybe she can read it on my face. She takes two quick steps forward, but not toward me. Toward Booth.

“Maybe you don't care about yourself. You care about him,” she says, pointing the pistol at Booth's chest, point-blank.

I freeze. I can still escape into the ether, but what happens next happens too fast for even me.

Quincrux, eyes streaming and face swollen, rises from where he'd lain, dissolute, on the floor. “You will not!” he cries, grappling for Ruark's arm.

The gun discharges, incredibly loud in the big, empty room without the baffling of bodies to absorb the sound.

“
You will not!
” Quincrux screams.

“Shreve! Get down!” Jack yells. We've done this dance before.

I drop to the ground—catching a glimpse of Jack with his hand outstretched and fingers splayed—and both Quincrux
and Ruark are lifted off their feet to rocket away and hit the plasma screens with an explosive crunch and a flurry of sparks and billows of noxious smoke.

I scramble up and race to Booth. He's holding his chest.

“Damn,” he says. “Damn, boy. Always in trouble, ain't you?”

“Booth—”

“Shut up, boy.
He wants to talk
.”

“Booth, don't die.”

His eyes roll back in his head, but it isn't in death throes, not yet. When his eyes open again, someone else stares out.

“Shreveport,” the voice says. “Justice.”

“Yes. I'm here.”

“Bring Hiram to me. Bring him to me. I must have the right …
proximity
.”

That word again. I nod, understanding. “Can you save Booth too?”

“No, he will be lost. I am sorry, child.”

“Then no deal.”

Booth's face looks confused. “You must. The evil we have loosed upon the world … it must be stopped.”

“Not without Booth.”

“You are strong, child. I have watched you of old,” he says, and then he nods Booth's head in acquiescence. “I will save what of him I can. But you must hurry!”

I jump up. Jack is standing a few paces away, eyes wide, staring at Quincrux and Ruark and the ruined screens, looking amazed that the destruction came from him. Everything old becomes new again.

“Jack, help me get Quincrux over here.”

I run to the wreckage. Quincrux bleeds from many gashes, and I feel his neck—strong pulse. Ruark is inert as a sack of flour.

We hook Quincrux under the arms and drag him to where Booth lies. As gently as we can, we place his body close enough for Booth to touch.

“That is well,” Booth says and reaches out with a hand and brushes Quincrux's cheek.

It would be wholly unremarkable if I were watching it only with my eyes. But in the ether, that motion blooms with an eruption of color in the space/not space, like dye dropped into a vase of water. Blossoms of the shibboleth spill outward to coalesce and contract. And then it is gone.

Booth's body shudders and stills. He is dead.

Quincrux stirs.

I allow myself tears.

Tears for all of us.

In the morning, the rain has changed over to a hard, remorseless sleet. The fog twines and twists and roils about, wreathing the ground like a shroud. The campus takes on a muddy, treacherous demeanor, and from where we wait on the assembly field, I can make out many people slipping and falling on their way down the hill.

The man who once was Hiram Quincrux waits for them. He looks out on the gathered souls and says, “My name is Armstead Lucius Priest. I created this home, this
society
, for all of you.”

He continues speaking. We will go to war with the entity. The collective flesh that wants only more flesh to join it. To conform to its design. We will take the fight to it. How? We'll learn that in the coming days. We are strong, and it has only just awoken.

Slowly, one by one, the crowd begins to cheer.