Chapter 29: Into the Spotlight (Part III)

Frog directed Andrew and Roger to break and move around the crowd to the north and took Elaine and Howie with her into the mob from the south. The split company near the fountain between the MU and the chapel. The mass of people surrounding the stage on Hayden lawn had spread almost far enough to block easy egress between the MU itself and the Hayden Stacks. People had even flooded over the narrow cement moat that separated the Hayden Stacks building—a large, angular tan-and-white building that contained most of the books in Hayden Library—that they now stood on the planters and leaned up against the glass windows, squinting against the sunlight to see across the now jam-packed lawn.

As Frog and Howie armed their perfume dispensers, Elaine nodded and flipped open one of her many cell phones.

“We have to stay moving,” she said. “The moment that I start this, we’ll get a reaction out of the nam-shub. It is unclear of precisely how it will react, there’s a high probability it will try to stop us, and I’m giving it almost a ninety percent chance that this means physical intervention. As we’ve seen so far, the nam-shub is capable of injecting paranoia—”

Frog nodded her head to the side at a small cluster of students standing close together, chatting. “Zombie protocol?” she asked.

“Only if the entire crowd reacts,” Elaine said pausing for a moment as if listening to instructions. “From the evidence I have, the nam-shub doesn’t have that kind of control over any but heavily indoctrinated individuals. You also know the moment we break the indoctrination that these people will return to their psychonormative states. We may want to avoid injuring them.”

“Too bad,” Frog said, smiling wryly at Howie who did his best to look like he understood. He struggled with his perfume dispenser; Frog took it from him, twisted the cap until it snapped. Armed. “Never seen a zombie flick, have you?”

He shook his head.

“Delightful!” she said. “A zombie virgin! Remind me, if we survive this to introduce you to George Romero.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see. Meantime, keep the container straight. Yes. Squeeze the handle as we pass people. And try to smile. Pretend they’re Pod People or something, maybe they won’t notice that we’re not one of them. We’re just going to mingle and don’t let Elaine out of your sight.”

“Roger, can you hear me?” Elaine said.

“I’m here,” his voice emanated from the cell phone, “and we’re in position.”

“You’re on speakerphone. I want you to maintain radio contact at all times and follow the search pattern that will display on your screen. Andrew?”

“Also here. There’s a lot more people here than there were just twenty minutes ago. Do you still think this is a good idea?”

“We have all possible contingencies covered to a high degree of confidence,” Elaine said.

A bottomless basso thrum crested through the crowd and kicked up a breath of air. The giant speakers on the stage vibrated visibly, the soft cones behind their exterior mesh seemed to undulate and recede. The packed lawn reacted by freezing in place, all conversation came to a stop, and hundreds of pairs of eyes turned in expectation towards the stage. There, in the center, stood Emily Early surrounded by eight people who Frog recognized as members of her staff. Elaine urged their group forward and they started to weave into the assembly—with nobody else in motion she feared it would make their position obvious, like tracking an individual running between cornstalks. Elaine wove them through the forest of unmoving humanity always keeping dense groups between them and the stage as she shifted positions.

“We’re a go. Roger, Andrew, follow the instructions displayed on screen.”

Elaine clipped that phone to her belt, flipped the Enoch open and began pressing buttons. She dodged and waved, threading through barely noticeable openings into spaces in the crowd that Frog only saw after Elaine slipped through one and they emerged into another region of the crowd less dense than the pervious. All this while paying strict attention to the phone and not her path.

Frog gestured for Howie to start using his dispenser.

The reaction seemed almost immediate. In spite of the white-noise waveform produced from the speakers—which had slowly begun to ramp in volume, revealing Aristoxenus sub-harmonics amid what originally sounded like a single, subtle bass note—the groups they passed, and subsequently introduced to the pheromone perfume, lost their glazed look and started to shift restlessly. A wake of low conversation began to form behind them disrupting the vibrations from the speakers.

Frog split her attention between watching the group on the stage encircling Emily and following Elaine—no mean feat, even with her best acrobatic fencing moves, she still bumped into people as she turned to slip past them; Elaine did have the benefit of being a much smaller, thinner, less-curvy target in this endeavor. The angle and aperture of the gazes spotlighting from atop the stage warned Frog that the intrusion had not missed their notice. Elaine’s primary theory about heavy indoctrination seemed to be gathering evidence as they started to scan the crowd and move toward the end of the stage. The crowd around the stage still remained affixed and mesmerized so far—the nam-shub showed all appearances of directing its efforts through a few people without trying to use the crowd. Frog hoped that it would stay this way; the mass of humanity around them could become quickly extremely dangerous to them if the nam-shub could turn and use them. Of course, it would have made sense for it to do that already.

After passing through a particularly dense portion of the multitude, just skirting the stage, Elaine made a sharp turn away from the center and back into the center of the lawn in the direction of the “lighthouse” sculpture there. Frog knew, somewhere in this mass of humanity Roger and Andrew had just made a very similar maneuver, but mirrored on the other side, they would pass each other like ships in the night, trailing the antidote in their wake as they went.

As they orbited the round stone-and-glass structure, Elaine took one more look back at the stage and saw something she expected there. Hardening her gaze, she lifted the Enoch to her ear and began to speak.

“The parameters of the case have changed,” she said into the phone.