by Adam Nemett
Squeezed. Fired.
He watched the bullet speed through the air, a yellow trail through the darkness.
So tiny and so huge.
When it flicked off the glass behind Bob’s head with an unceremonious plonk, the pane didn’t even shatter.
David had missed.
Bob turned, looked back at David. He growled. Now he pushed Haley away from him. She was stable for a moment, and David wondered if he’d made a mistake and ruined a perfectly sexy moment. Then her body crumpled forward into the dirt, arms twisting unnaturally beneath her, and David knew for certain this was not sex he’d witnessed. Bob took his cock in his hand, and with muffled moans he unloaded his own shots onto the girl’s lifeless thigh. Slowly, his body slumped, exhausted. His head bowed to her.
“You’re dead,” Bob whispered, loud enough for David to hear. “I’m going to bury you.”
Haley lay still in the dirt, the creepy eyes from her mustachioed mask staring at David.
Bob leaped to his feet, pushing his dick back inside his pants and sprinting forward. Turning to run, David saw no one was left on the field. And then, without knowing why, he was throwing his paintball gun at Bob coming up fast behind him, then he yanked off his rubber gloves and threw them, too, the first gauntlet landing with a splat on the ground and the second one connecting with Bob’s mask as he finally caught up, lifted and dragged David across the field, all the way to the dirt behind the bleachers. One of David’s boots fell off.
“Hey, hey,” Bob whispered, as he ripped off David’s cape, tearing it loudly along a seam. “Hey, let’s duel! Hey,” he said. “No, hey, c’mon, hey.” He tore the batcowl off, rubber stretching and pulling at David’s hair beneath it. He pulled off the arm sleeves, biceps and shoulders, and ripped them open, exposing foam rubber. He pulled off David’s other boot and he punched David in the ribs, finding a soft spot between the folds of the molded chest plate, and then he pummeled him again in the side and then in the jaw, and before the pain set in and blinded David fully, he felt his dark blood mix with sweat and paint and dirt from the ground and it all ran into his mouth and gagged him with the particular taste of being so easily vanquished.
3
INCUBATION
i.
Whiteout is when the sky and land are the same color. The horizon disappears. Footsteps vanish immediately and you can’t figure out where things end or begin. The blizzard had dumped snow for three days, trapping them in The Egg, and as David watched the wind whip off the ground’s new, higher, whiter surface he thought of deserts, of Lawrence of Arabia, of vast expanses of sand where you peered deep into the wiggly distance and wondered, Is that someone?
He popped a Zeronal and thought about his thesis project.
He would call his parents back tomorrow.
— Ø —
“Five feet is a shitload of snow,” Lee mumbled. “The patio looks like an igloo village.”
David poured coffee, tried to wake up. Fu nodded, grinding pepper into a panful of eggs.
Pointing at the cross section of snow against the sliding glass door, David played along.
“And that looks kinda like an ant farm,” he said.
Lee glanced, shrugged. “Yeah, maybe if all the ants had died.”
“Death toll is at 114,” Mathias yelled from the sunroom, closing his laptop. Internet had been spotty at best. Same with their cellular signals. It was getting harder to function without internet, but also easier, because what choice did they have? Still, when the internet worked, they consumed greedily, stockpiling news and data and social media, checking NJ Power’s interactive outage map to see where crews were working and when power might be restored. Estimates remained unavailable. Meanwhile, the death tally now included two charter flights, plus some elderly folks in Virginia. But most of the dead were the restless ones, the brave yet stupid who’d left their homes, got disoriented, and kept walking into whiteout. David thought it must be odd to panic and freeze at the same time.
“Always tie a rope so you can winch your way back,” Lee said, like he’d done this before.
— Ø —
Blackout, on the other hand, is when everything shushes. You can’t see, but forgotten senses come alive. New opportunities abound for the creative minded. David remembered a bus tour through Manhattan when he was eight. The guide told them of the Blackout of 1977, in the infancy of hip-hop, when hi-fi stores were looted. “The next day, we had a thousand new DJs,” she’d said.
So blackouts were apparently the midwife of innovation. But they also made it hard to see.
— Ø —
The news called it Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, Snowtastrophe, the Big Dump, Snow-Man’s-Land, Snowtel California, Blizzard King, Blizzkrieg, and David’s favorite, the White Curtain.
“Jesus! Fuck my balls with a wood chipper!” Mathias finally screamed at the television, during an hour of regained power. “Okay! We get it! It’s a lot of fucking snow! Heavens to Betsy.”
Fu flipped the channel. And there was Mott again. The other all-pervasive storm plastered on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Mathias left the room, the visage of Mott on screens somehow making him boil even more. David knew why.
Back in Baltimore, David researched Mott. Getting lost in a Google rabbit hole, he’d eventually bumped into Mathias Blue. He found an article from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Mathias had participated in the NIST summer fellowship program a couple years back, and the article’s photo showed him standing between an elder physicist—none other than J. Stuart Mott—and a massive machine straight out of Willy Wonka. This machine, David learned, was the most accurate clock in the world. All networked computers and electronics used it to tell humans the precise time, to the nanosecond. The physics were beyond David’s understanding, but it sounded like a complex molecular version of watching the sun rise and set a billion times per second. David got wrapped up in these sites, trying his best to decipher optical frequency combs and UV lasers. If Mathias was into this stuff, David wanted to do his homework.
The power outage was another good time for research. The Egg had tons of books, aside from the cache David brought. Once he got settled, he got deep into a tome on World War II, especially the chapters on the London Blitz. It lasted more than eight months, and at one point Hitler’s Luftwaffe pummeled that city for fifty-seven days straight, a relentless barrage of bombs. They strategized that the sheer consistency of mayhem would eventually take its toll. But he underestimated British ability to manage emotion. Maybe humans in general were made to be resilient and positive in the face of calamity. Londoners took care of one another, built underground communes in the subway tubes. They kept calm and carried on.
But fifty-seven days? And when you don’t know if it’s ever going to end?
When David needed a hit of the outside world, he rationed his cell battery and stalked Haley Roth on social media.
Haley Roth is trapped.
Haley Roth is getting really into krav maga.
Haley Roth is searching for a new 1BR in Princeton. Open to suggestions.
David thought about this last one. He remembered the last time they’d talked, at her house after running into her at the supermarket back in Pikesville. He knew she knew about The Egg and decided this status update of hers was meant for him: a sign, a test, a fish for an invite. He commented:
Live with us in Pennington!
He typed this, then deleted it, then typed, then deleted. Then typed. Hit Enter.
Then he swallowed another of Lee’s Zeronal pills and got back to work. Haley was in Baltimore, at her parents’ house, which she still thought of as her house, where she could pretend she was back in high school or middle school or some other invincible time.
She got bored, though, stuck in this relic. When she fully exhausted their collection of board games, throwing Mouse Trap angrily across the living room, she unearthed her old sewing case from the summer before eighth grade at Camp Louise and discovered
a dozen skeins of colored thread. The muscle memory was strong. Soon she was tying knot after knot, crafting a friendship bracelet of blue and lighter blue. She had no particular friend in mind for this bracelet. It was just something to do.
She was seeing a therapist, Dr. Hittson, and her parents were doing all the right things—giving her space and not giving her space, knowing when to do one rather than the other. As an only child, she got all their attention. Even when she was being left alone, she knew they were thinking about her. Haley’s mom confided stories of lesser but similar evils from her own past. Not trying to compete, just trying to normalize. It only made Haley more sad and furious for womanhood—the commonness of this particular villainy. She cried softly often. When she needed to cry louder, she found solace in her walk-in closet, burying herself beneath old winter coats and letting loose. Get it out. All of it. Get it out.
Haley remembered back in the summer, rolling her eyes when Dad gave her pepper spray. Part of their off-to-college care package. During those first months at Princeton, she hated when Mom inquired about security escorts, not wanting her to walk back to her dorm alone if she was out late studying. Haley never wanted to believe the worst about strange people. She was perfectly capable, and people weren’t dangerous, were generally good, she believed. It’s one of the things she hated most: that Bob took that from her. She was determined to claw her way back.
She completed six friendship bracelets, patterns of increasing difficulty—stripes, chevrons, diamonds—before she thought, What am I even doing? It was therapeutic, though, she couldn’t deny. So she found her father’s old Boy Scout book on knot tying and began practicing with two lengths of rock-climbing paracord stashed in their garage. The square knot, the slipknot, the bowline, the half hitch, the noose. Knots could be useful, she imagined, if this frigid wilderness continued indefinitely, or if some final flood forced everyone to become sailors. She practiced knots for trapping, for restraining, for joining one thing to another.
She felt herself getting faster, the rope growing taut, able to hold more and more and more.
— Ø —
Ever since Halloween, David had become fascinated by his Problem of Evil seminar. Professor Hague started each class with the theoretical rundown: since evil exists, that means God is not particularly benevolent, or else not particularly powerful, or else not particularly real. Maybe he’s all-powerful but sadistic as hell. Maybe he’s kind but lacks the capacity to keep all his children happy. Or maybe he’s an invention, something produced in a secret lab millennia ago.
David wondered, Wasn’t there another option? What if God was powerful and good but had a secret Kryptonite-y weakness, exploited by the powerful and evil?
Like Superman.
— Ø —
David was surprised to find how cagey the guys were about their respective expertise, their theses. He’d been hoping to learn some doomsday-scenario skills and instead found his new housemates miserly hoarding their knowledge. He confronted Lee about this.
“Well, obviously, right?” said Lee. “Your skills are your insurance policy. I can make drugs, so in an extended grid-down scenario I’ll probably have snipers protecting me. Hold your formula close to the chest.”
It was Fu who first extended the olive branch.
“Hey, man,” he’d whispered in the kitchen one morning. “If you’re interested in radio communications, I’d be very glad to walk you through what I’m working on. But only if you want.”
David wanted.
Fu had apparently set up a backup comms center in their outdoor shed, with a separate, secure landline and modem, but the snow made it impossible to get out there. His main project was now anchored by some kind of ham radio apparatus.
“It’s valuable for news, but I’m listening more than talking,” he said. “We don’t want people to know where we are or what provisions we might have. We don’t want to amplify our position.”
Fu had his ham radio operator general license and briefly explained to David the importance of their BaoFeng UV-5R handhelds for short-range VHF communications. They looked like orange walkie-talkies to David, but he soon learned they were more powerful and important.
Still, above everything, all tasks relied on a power source, and as The Egg’s resident electrical engineer, power was Owen’s purview. He was kind of a hoss, even though he didn’t fully realize it and hadn’t succeeded much. He had a few different projects, each in a state of initiation but hardly functional—a single 250-watt solar panel, not yet out of its packaging; a bank of golf cart batteries daisy-chained together but not hooked up to anything else; plans for some kind of wood-powered gasifier that could run their generator if they got desperate. But Owen’s big idea had to do with piezoelectricity, using force to generate a charge, which David wasn’t prepared to learn from scratch.
He wished Owen would focus. Pick a project and make it happen.
After twelve hours without the power blinking back on, they gathered in the basement to get the generator working. For smaller stuff they had a hand-crank emergency radio—AM/FM with a flashlight and USB input for charging. You couldn’t run anything big, but a few minutes of cranking created enough juice to make a phone call or send an email, assuming you could get a cell signal.
“How does a generator even work?” asked David. He was embarrassed, but…
“Propane,” said Mathias. “We’ve got a good week’s worth.”
“And then what?”
Mathias squeezed David’s biceps and said, “Self-power!”
Until a next-generation power source could be found, they still needed heat, and the woodstove was the obvious default. Stocking the stove was everyone’s job. Owen especially liked dude stuff. The how-to tasks that show up in men’s magazines. He loved chopping wood, but when it came to technique he was a novice, just hacking away at cold logs.
“You are the Brute Squad,” David said.
Mathias was more methodical. “It’s like deconstructing the tree,” he said, “piecing it apart in the opposite way it grows.” He’d start along the perimeter, slicing off the bark. “Then you look for natural cracks that can be exploited as starting points. Drive in a few wedges. Lop off the outer layers. Once it’s exposed, you take its heart, the centermost ring. Everything after that is super easy.
“All of this is probably a metaphor for something,” he said.
— Ø —
David soon learned what it was a metaphor for. At nights, after they’d exhausted all other options—books, games, home improvements, basic necessity management, whatever thesis-ing they could undertake with the lights off—they’d talk. Sometimes it was organic, and sometimes it was structured, a particular question asked and then they’d go around the horn answering, telling stories.
They covered hometowns and high schools and paths to Princeton. They did top fives: movies, novels, starlets. Sometimes they invented outlandish apocalypse scenarios, trying to outdo one another with weirdness and carnage. One night, it was siblings.
Fu was the only only child. Lee had a sister who was transgender and estranged from everyone in the family besides him. Owen had two older brothers, both of them in the service, one somewhere in Africa, going after warlords, and the other in Afghanistan, ostensibly working for the Red Cross but probably this meant he was in the CIA, though Owen wasn’t sure. David talked about Beth, her boldness, the goofy games they used to play together, his hopes for her.
And Mathias told them about Edison, his twin brother. When they were nine, and their dad was stationed at the National Ground Intelligence Center near Charlottesville, there’d been a massive summer windstorm called the Derecho. It came on fast and without much warning. Mathias and Edison were outside playing, just five more minutes, when one of the first big gusts caught hold of a pine tree, its roots shallower than other trees, and sent it toppling toward Edison.
“I saw it happen,” Mathias said. “We were there, just playing, and suddenly this massive trunk was comi
ng down, like it had singled him out or been choreographed. It wasn’t a direct hit, but we were little, and a branch caught him on the head with enough force. We got him to University of Virginia hospital, but the storm ended up taking out the power there, too, so there were generators, those yellow emergency lights, but people were coming in from all over the county, and I guess the doctors were just stretched too damn thin. He died the next morning. I’d say that was pretty much the last time I trusted any system or agency intended to keep us safe. They didn’t. They won’t.”
Just then, also as if choreographed, The Egg’s power came back. The TV popped on. And there was J. Stuart Mott again, ranting. As soon as that feeling of relief came on them—the comforting hum of electricity in the walls—it popped off again. And everything was dark and silent once more.
“They won’t keep us safe,” Mathias repeated. “But we can.”
— Ø —
The storm got worse. It had been fun for a while, but once the snow reached their peephole, David got scared. With their sporadic internet, the guys monitored the Emergency Relief Agency’s Twitter feed on new areas affected, new deaths, new travesties.
Then, with America already buried under snow, China struck abroad.
China had bribed the Afghan government to win control of its lithium deposits, not to mention untapped stores of cobalt, iron, and natural gas. But lithium. That was the real prize. Laptop and cell phone batteries were only the beginning. With the auto market making a push into electric cars with Li-ion batteries and more houses relying on rechargeable battery banks for emergency power, speculators said lithium might soon be more valuable than oil. China could now mine those Afghan mountains.
After decades of American occupation and general dickishness, the Asian propaganda machine convinced the Kabul government it was time to expel the infidels from their holy lands. China hacked the U.S. Command and Control Centers in Afghanistan, rendering the troops blind and deaf. CNN called it the “Cyber Pearl Harbor.”