We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  It blew. And it begged for disruption.

  Time to get into character.

  David/Infrared sat behind the wheel of the MaxMobile, strategically parked at the courtyard’s only means of egress. It was warm, but still he shivered inside László’s blazer, adjusting his wireless earpiece and headset mic, an impressive sideways Mohawk glowing red from ear to ear. He checked his watch. The day’s final minute was rising toward midnight.

  “Clock’s ticking,” he spoke into the headset. “Get ready.”

  Squinting through a pair of dark welding goggles—his “infrared specs”—he surveyed the scene: To his left, Owen/Peacemaker was positioned by the Annex’s electrical fuse box, which they’d found to be almost stupidly accessible. To his right, Fu/Golden Echo sat on his Vespa, idling in the nearby loading dock. Up in one of the courtyard’s oak trees, Lee/Dr. Ugs held the barrel of that giant Super Soaker cannon-gun. Mathias’s silhouette was perched on a limb of another tree, straitjacket sleeves dangling between its gnarled branches.

  Infrared’s watch buzzed. “Cut it,” he said, thinking he sounded pretty damn cool.

  And Jesus, it actually worked! Lights in all the windows blinked off, leaving the dull blue glow of laptops and tablets switching over to battery. A collective groan-gasm rumbled.

  “You’re live in five seconds,” said Echo into Infrared’s earpiece, having patched into the dorm intercom. Infrared cleared his throat and affected his best authoritarian baritone.

  “Attention Forbes students,” he purred. “This is the Princeton Bureau of Fire Safety and Housing Inspection. After yesterday’s weather event we’re experiencing power outages campus-wide. Due to a security threat inside Forbes, we do apologize for the inconvenience but ask that all residents evacuate to the Annex Courtyard quickly and quietly.”

  Like clockwork, Infrared spotted students groping in the dark, droves of them beginning to exit Forbes into the night air. Soon, he was convinced the entire dorm was outside. The phrase “security threat” had considerable power these days.

  “Go,” he said into his mic. “Lock it down now!”

  And that right there was the last moment when things went according to plan.

  As the students evacuated Forbes, the exterior doors slammed and locked, trapping them in the courtyard. From above in the tree limbs, Lee planned to spray the Forbes crowd with a fine mist of water from his backpack-mounted cannon: a simulated rainstorm.

  They’d set up two large field tents, a makeshift soup kitchen for students to cluster under, avoiding Lee’s fake rain. In each tent was a clear cone-bottom tank: the first demonstrated their water filtration rig—layers of pebbles, sand, and charcoal—and the second tank was meant to offer similar hydration, but with small amounts of Zeronal and orally active DMT added, like a spiked punch bowl. Set and setting—the proper intentional frame of mind, as well as the appropriate physical location and companions—were essential to the Big Bang experience, and David didn’t want to unleash that kind of thunder on unsuspecting kids. So the vats were clearly marked, and Owen, David, and Mathias had their talking points, meant to educate and excite them on the both practical and pleasurable end-times endeavors.

  In truth, the whole night was a mess. The MaxMobile’s headlights were to provide light for an impromptu party, with Golden Echo riding circles around the gathered throng, music pouring from his RacketJacket. Instead, Fu’s Vespa wheels had skidded in the mud of the quad, throwing him headfirst from the bike. Mercifully, he’d landed in a mound of dirty snow left over from the blizzard, but he got a nasty gash along his calf. Lee, meanwhile, had apparently upped the dose of the spiked batch, and for good measure, he’d apparently also filled his water cannon with the same formula. Once it seeped into everyone’s skin, many kids reacted as if they’d received the heroic dose of DMT, and the vast majority spent the evening puking and then paralyzed in what looked like a mass cuddle puddle on the wet lawn of the Forbes courtyard.

  David tried to manage the crisis. But Mathias ended up tripping or else completely committed to his character, climbing into a tree beside Lee to orate about how winter break proved a harsh truth: dependence on outmoded systems and institutions, on book learning and liberal arts education, all fails when survival is at stake.

  “When the darkness comes and the power leaves, we must be the power,” he’d screamed. “We’re here because someone decided we’re gifted, or hardworking, or simply know how to play the game, but none of us is here by grades and test scores alone. Each of us boasts skills outside the ordinary. All your extracurriculars that wooed the admissions officers: someone in this mass knows how to restore engines. One of you is an Olympic biathlete, can traverse blizzard conditions while shooting a rifle. There are at least three beekeepers among us. Soon, we will ask you to tap your unique power and build a powerful persona around it. We, the Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes, have begun the process. Allow me to introduce them now, my USV brothers…”

  He named them and their roles: Peacemaker, the Muscle. Golden Echo, the Music. Dr. Ugs, the Mad Scientist. Infrared, the Manager. And he himself, Ultraviolet, was the Mouth.

  “Be warned,” his voice crescendoed. “This drug acts as a finger pointing to the moon. But it’s not the moon…” He pointed to the full white orb in the sky and said, “That’s the fucking moon!”

  The oration was solid. But otherwise, the night was disaster. When Lee hosed everyone down, Owen accidentally took a shot in the mouth, leaving him blissfully paralyzed in the back of the MaxMobile, and a bleeding Fu soon joined him. As campus police arrived, the MaxMobile peeled out, headed to Trenton’s Capital Health Regional Medical Center. Mathias and David abandoned their vats and scattered in opposite directions, toward backup rendezvous points.

  Bolting around a dorm corner, David tried to pull his welding goggles off his head, but the strap got caught in his hair. Costumes and accessories are a pain in the ass, he decided. Real superheroes should be unadorned. Less of a hassle. And never, ever a cape. Pure suicide. He matted down his Mohawk, trying to look as unheroic as possible.

  Just then, David spotted Haley Roth under a streetlamp a hundred yards ahead. He’d asked her to photograph and video the whole thing with her DSLR, so he knew she couldn’t be far from the action. And now here she was, waving a flashlight over her head like an air-traffic controller. She’s offering me a hiding place, David thought, beckoning me to follow. So he did, all the way to Prospect Gardens, the center of campus.

  They’d been communicating over email and text, but he hadn’t seen her since that day at Blair Arch. He sprinted fast but tried to steady himself and be cool. As he got close, Haley halted. She smiled. Then she roundhouse-kicked him in the gut.

  David dropped to her feet.

  “Wait!” he gasped, winded. “I’m a good guy!”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why I brought you here.”

  He lifted his gaze. Haley was a vision. White jeans tucked into black knee-high boots. Puffy blue jacket rimmed around the hood with white animal fur, mixing with her curly halo of blond hair, unshampooed, wild. It was night, but she had on giant black sunglasses, the lenses twinkling with flashlight flame.

  She looked like a goddamn superhero.

  “Are you from the future?” David asked, catching his breath.

  “No, I’m your fucking conscience. That was terrible. You can’t paralyze people, David. That liquid stuff is a nightmare. When I illustrated your comic book I didn’t think it’d actually work!”

  “I swear, that wasn’t the plan!” he implored. “Something went wrong. I would never give someone that drug against their will. It’s too intense. Lee must’ve got the formula wrong or—”

  In the distance, he spotted the fumbling flashlights of campus police.

  “Help me,” he said. “Please.”

  “Promise you won’t use Liquid Zero in these spectacles anymore,” she said.

  “Yes, I promise.”

  “And you need me. I’
ll raise your credibility. Otherwise, you’re just dorks in costumes, which also need work. Bring me into the tent, David.”

  David tried his best to regain composure, but her kick was spot-on and his breath was gone.

  “I already have my persona worked out,” she said. “And I can help you guys with self-defense stuff. Look at you! Besides Peacemaker and Ultraviolet, USV combat skills are piss-poor.”

  “Fine,” he hissed. “Now help me hide.”

  She turned off her flashlight. “Get on your back,” she whispered.

  Huh?

  There on the cold grass, she climbed onto David(!), shielding him with her soft blue body.

  Her elbow found a pressure point in his forearm and she pressed down hard enough for him to feel it in his teeth. In case he didn’t understand, she slid her leg between David’s thighs.

  “Do you want to have kids someday?” she asked.

  “Yes!” He beamed. “Definitely. Actually, I’m pretty good with kids and—”

  “Then don’t try anything stupid.” She pressed her knee slowly into his balls. “I don’t make out with colleagues.”

  “Understood,” he said. But blood now drained from his face and made its way south. It was a race against the clock.

  They lay in silence. David knew this moment would come. Truth was he didn’t want Haley to join the USV. He was happy with the status quo. She was his silent collaborator, his illustrator. He was the puppeteer, but she was the woman tugging his strings.

  “Where’s your three-piece suit?” she asked. He’d taken liberties with her costume design.

  “I’m Infrared.” David pointed to his head. “The goggles? And the hair? See?”

  “You should be… Business-Man!” she hissed. “Like Aquaman or Spider-Man.”

  “I want to be Infrared.”

  “Bummer,” she said. “I’d like you in a three-piece suit. Maybe a pocket watch? Super hot.”

  He thought for a second and said, “I could be Business-Man.”

  Flashlights danced on Haley’s hood. The campus police crunched through the garden, looking for the ones who’d started the thing at Forbes. But they only found themselves embarrassed by the anonymous couple snogging on the grass, girl on top.

  “Whoops,” one of them said. “You okay, ma’am?”

  “Oh, OMG, uh, just fine, officer!” She lilted it sweetly, adding a little giggle at the end.

  “Well… take it indoors, will you?”

  And the flashlights jogged off to find the real culprits.

  “You saved me,” David said. He wanted to bestow on Haley a superhero name. “I think… you are… the White Rabbit. Enticing, enigmatic, always late for an important date. Never enough time.”

  “Bushy tail,” she said, wiggling against him. Oh god.

  “Cute whiskers,” he said, and he grazed her upper lip with his finger. Like an asshole. She had a hint of a mustache, and David realized from her face that he’d landed on one of her self-conscious sore spots, left over from high school, perhaps. Stupid. He stammered, tried to cover: “I just mean… your costume… you could wear whiskers. You could be… the White Rabbit.”

  And just before she kneed him in the balls and left him writhing in the grass, she lifted her sunglasses, lowered her lips to David’s ear, and whispered, “I know who I am, buckaroo.”

  iv.

  When you hear the sordid histories of much-loved rock bands—the kinds with lengthy discographies and stadium-filling world tours—there’s inevitably the tale of that lackluster first gig. A paltry, disinterested audience, or maybe the drummer took a thrown Budweiser to the face. The USV’s first campus caper would go down in a similar book of history, in a chapter somewhere between “Humble Beginnings” and “Booming Success.” But it heralded a coming out. It’s the one that started everything. After all, the USV would someday fill stadiums.

  The sun was already rising when David and Haley pulled Christopher Walken into the visitors’ parking lot of Capital Health Regional Medical Center. David couldn’t tell whether his experience of the last bunch of hours—the flying time and pangs of déjà vu—were due to drugs or a new progressive leap of chronostrictesis, or maybe they’d simply driven the same stretch of road back and forth a million times that night.

  Haley had played her preordained role of getaway driver, having stashed Christopher Walken at the secluded arts building on the north side of campus. Mathias, riding Fu’s Vespa, followed Lee, Owen, and Fu in the MaxMobile at a suitable distance.

  It was Haley’s idea to stop by The Egg first, to grab fresh clothes and toiletries for the rest of the guys. David was smart enough to know that this wasn’t Haley offering a coy excuse to “go home with him.” He knew she had some ulterior motive, but he probably didn’t realize the extent to which this trip was pure reconnaissance.

  Like David’s first trip to The Egg, Haley, too, wanted to case the joint.

  David found himself happy to oblige. He steered her to Pennington, to Woosamonsa Court, to their space age buckyball domicile. As she pulled into the cul-de-sac and he saw Haley’s face light up, David suddenly realized what a chick magnet The Egg might be under different circumstances, for the right kind of chick. They parked and entered. He knew he was probably breaking some kind of bro code, but he took it upon himself to offer her a tour—the open globe of the living room, the reasonably well-appointed kitchen, a genteel wave toward the sunroom in the back, a quick spin through each of the upstairs bedrooms (none of them in an embarrassing state), where they tossed clothes into a duffel bag. The Egg showed well. Especially after she’d kneed him in the crotch and insulted the USV’s credibility—the “dorks in costumes” crack—David wanted to prove they were better than that: more sophisticated and serious. He felt their living quarters were reliable yet visionary, safe yet funky as hell.

  “How many people did you say live here?”

  “Just the five of us you illustrated,” David said. “Including me.”

  “You could fit at least twice that, comfortably,” she said, leaning toward the kitchen window, cupping her face against it to view the backyard.

  “We own the other two houses on the cul-de-sac,” David said. “They’re empty. We have plenty of room to spread out.”

  “Is that lawn as flat and private as it seems?”

  “Flatter!” David said, realizing she was getting it, seeing what he saw. “Private-er!”

  She smiled warily at him. “You’re weird,” she said.

  Haley was trying to keep a good poker face as she assessed each room, eyes darting to inspect the floorboards and trim, furtively running a fingertip along the speakers to measure dust, playing with paint colors in her mind. They had lots of books, which Haley respected, and zero video game consoles. The level of filth was reasonable for a house of guys, although the couches were a problem. They were mismatched and stained, and she had a visceral fear of old couches, specifically all the disgusting scraps of food and hair and sloughed-off human history hiding in the cracks of their cushions. They’d be the first things she’d replace.

  And the lighting. They had all these terrible battery-powered LED touch lights everywhere, with austere blue-white bulbs that hurt her eyes. Candles would be better. Tall ones and votive ones.

  She sensed David doing his best to stay professional, acting the part of unemotional real estate broker, in part to make it very clear that she was in no danger of him making an ill-advised move on her, given that they were alone in his house. And she appreciated this kindness. But she could sense his urgency, his need to impress her, so she decided to press her luck.

  “And that door goes to the basement,” said David on his way back to the car, adding, “That’s where all the interesting stuff happens.”

  “Great,” Haley shot back. “Show me.”

  She’d stopped in her tracks by the basement door. She showed no intention of leaving until David showed her. So he did. How could he help himself? Everything was so damn cool.

/>   On the way downstairs he felt his lips loosening, all of his dams busting open. He told her about how they’d carried him—“flown him”—down those stairs on his first tour of The Egg. He showed her their Electrocycle generator and battery bank, their shelving units full of apocalyptic provisions that came in so handy during winter break, offering small asides on how his time there influenced his grand, brilliant vision for founding the USV. Yes, compared with Haley’s, David’s poker face was for shit, and all the while as he pointed out his bedroom, and Mathias’s across the way, and Mathias’s mysterious refrigerator, and all the things that had intrigued him about The Egg on his first visit, he couldn’t hide a smug smirk of knowingness—the grand secret of Lee’s laboratory under the stairs—and Haley picked up on it and needed only a minute of pressing—“What else are you hiding in this underground lair?” she asked, looking him in the eyes, knowing him too well—and of course he broke, of course he spun the damn vise and stood there arms crossed as the hydraulics raised the stairwell, unearthing that hidden room, The Egg’s soul laid bare.

  Of course he showed her. Obviously, right? She was once a drug baron, too.

  “Give me the rundown,” she said, trying hard not to seem impressed and thrilled.

  David walked her through their core arsenal:

  • There was their stash of counterfeit Zeronal, gazillions of pills exactly like the Pfizer performance enhancer, totally safe, great for getting shit done. When taken alone.

  • There was the Liquid Zero, this paralyzing stuff they’d promised to never use again. Zeronal mixed with low-dose DMT and a muscle relaxer, but clearly they needed to dial back the neuromuscular agents.

  • And… there was the Big Bang pill, these red gelcaps that could change everything: Zeronal mixed with heroic-dose DMT—creating an extended trip to hyperspace.

  David unscrewed a gold canister, bringing the red pills close as if appraising diamonds.

  “You’ve never done DMT?” he asked, aware he might be mansplaining. She hadn’t. He’d assumed Haley had tried it all, and David liked that he had one rarity in his repertoire.