We Can Save Us All

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We Can Save Us All Page 30

by Adam Nemett


  If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Business 101.

  Just then, Peacemaker bustled down the stairs. He looked uncharacteristically frazzled.

  “Someone’s here,” he said.

  “We’re all here,” It Girl said, stretching like a cat in the sun.

  “I think it’s, um, your dad,” he said. He was staring at Mathias.

  Their leader pursed his lips. They waited for him to speak, but he looked spaced, paralyzed.

  “Hide him in the lab,” Owen said, and they all kicked into gear. “Nyla, stay with Mathias. Take the map and hard drives and turn on the incinerator, just in case. David, come with me?”

  “You want me to go?” He wasn’t used to being the public face of anything.

  “He asked for whoever was in charge,” Owen whispered. “What else could I say?”

  — Ø —

  In Woosamonsa Court were two black town cars filled with men in suits. Only Colonel Nathan Blue stood outside. He was examining the dormant fire pit and the circle of pavement surrounding it that had been hammered up to create a trench for floodwaters during a particularly bad Friday night storm. The colonel wore a midnight-blue military uniform, a trivet-sized block of decorations pinned to its breast. The man’s balding head was buttressed by dark hair, and he was entirely unsmiling. His unimposing body seemed to disguise an ability to do great, terrible things.

  He removed his sunglasses. Business-Man took off his own goggles and approached.

  “Colonel,” Business-Man said, voice shaky, trying his best to steady an outstretched hand.

  “I’m told my son is in Altoona,” he said. “Which one are you?”

  Again offering a hand to shake, he proudly said, “I am Business-Man.”

  “No,” said Mathias’s father. “You’re David Fuffman from Pikesville, Maryland. Your parents are Gil and Eileen and they’re in Pennsylvania right now with your sister, Elizabeth, who’s an absolute bluegrass prodigy, by the way. You, however, are enrolled in three classes”—Peacemaker shot a surprised glance at David—“two of which you’re failing.”

  David swallowed and sized up this formidable opponent. It felt so nice to have a human adversary for a change. Hating the weather and cosmic phenomena was so impersonal.

  “She plays old-time music,” David said. “Not bluegrass. There’s a big difference.”

  Colonel Blue now leaned in to whisper in David’s ear: “If you don’t want me to tell your little revolutionary cadre here that you’ve secretly landed a summer internship at a venture capital firm, I’d ask that you bring me to my son’s room very quickly.”

  David did as he was told.

  When the colonel and his two FBI types entered The Egg, they found about thirty superheroes sewing costumes, painting signs, cooking vats of penne. The heroes might not have noticed the officers had the tonggg not chimed right then.

  The USV ant farm went still, frozen. Including David.

  Though he was ushering a serious threat into the belly of the beast, the Seventh-Minute Stop was sacred. Disregarding it would break a covenant with those he sought to lead and protect.

  Colonel Blue and his two suited associates kept moving, of course. In a roomful of frozen offenders, they took the chance to slalom among the still bodies, the colonel eyeballing each USVer carefully as if he were inspecting uniforms and footlockers for punishable defects. He halted briefly beside two freshman initiates wearing sandwich boards that read WAR WASTES TIME!! and PREPARE TO KILL YOUR DARLINGS. David couldn’t help but notice the jacket bulge under the colonel’s armpit with what could only be a pistol.

  “Check upstairs,” Blue said to one of the suits. And to the other, “Check the basement.”

  David wanted to respond and ask about warrants, but piercing The Egg’s hallowed silence felt more invasive than the illegal search being conducted. From his peripherals, David saw one of the suits hop up the stairs toward the training rooms, while the other circled the kitchen, opening pantry doors until he found the locked basement door. USVers tilted their eyes toward him, the living room’s ranking officer. Owen subtly shook his head, but what was that supposed to mean?

  “You’ve got nice furniture,” the colonel said, running his hand over a teak table covered in red T-shirts screen-printed with Øs and the phrase WE CAN SAVE US ALL. “This one used to be in my dining room. It was Matt’s grandpa’s.”

  David stared straight, trying his best to stay calm and leaderly.

  “What’s your water capacity for this many kids?” Silence. “Whatever it is, it’s not enough.”

  Just then the intruders succeeded in opening the basement door with some kind of lockpick and Colonel Blue went for the stairs. And David awkwardly exploded with sound and motion.

  “Sir!” he yelled. “Colonel! I’ll escort you down if you’d like!” David tripped over an ottoman and chased them downstairs, his ears pelted by a collective tsk of disappointment from the USV.

  As they tromped the steps, David weaseled his way in front of Mathias’s father, wondering if the man might push him down the staircase. Once downstairs, he saw Fu, Britt, and Haley frozen near David’s bedroom as Business-Man accompanied the father of their leader to his son’s humble abode on the other side of the basement. Maps and other incriminating evidence had been hidden in Lee’s lab under the stairs, but the two suits poked around, examining Owen’s array of batteries on the tool bench. David glanced at the vise, the secret trigger. He imagined Mathias, Lee, and Nyla hiding inside the lab, staying the stiffest they’d ever been.

  “He’s really not here,” David admitted loudly. “My guess is he’ll be back in a week, but…”

  The colonel walked to Mathias’s door and said, “Open it, please.”

  Together, they entered. Everything looked sticky. David had never seen the inside of this room for more than a few seconds. It smelled like cinnamon and turpentine and Haley. David tried not to picture every sex dream/nightmare he’d had for the past two months. Meanwhile, Colonel Blue inspected the strewn bedsheets, picked some peanut butter off the wall with his fingernail. He scanned the floor and seemed to be searching for a clue, or maybe a trace of Mathias himself.

  “Your son is a great guy. A leader,” David offered. “Everyone thinks he’s a genius.”

  The colonel shut the door to Mathias’s room. “What do you think?”

  David was legitimately nervous now, being alone with this man.

  “I think he’s scared. Like all of us,” David said. “But somehow less so. Like this is simply the natural order of things, and what comes next will be perfect. He’s a man of vision. He sees things. The world needs a hero like him, with so little time left.”

  “It’s over,” Colonel Blue said. David assumed he was referring to the universe. “You seem smart enough, and if you’re really in charge then you can stop this USV before people get hurt.”

  “Sir, I don’t think it’s possible to stop it. Not without people getting hurt.”

  “Young people do stupid things when they gather in times of crisis.”

  “Or we’ll do transformative things that older people simply don’t understand or don’t have the… I guess you have too much to lose. We see what’s possible and we’re not tired or trapped yet.”

  Mathias’s father began to speak again but David cut him off.

  “With all due respect, do you know what we’re doing here, sir?” David asked. “We’re not mutant, alien superheroes pretending to save the day. We’re protecting each other, our communities. And we are willing to get our hands dirty and assist with whatever kind of relief effort you might—”

  “What’s in that refrigerator?” he asked.

  “I wish I knew. Nobody has the key.” David shook the padlock as if that proved his point.

  It happened quickly. Colonel Blue moving David aside, reaching into his jacket, pulling out his gun, and firing point-blank at the padlock. It exploded into brilliant metal shards. David found himself on the floor, wedged bes
ide Mathias’s bed. He’d never seen someone fire a gun outside a shooting range, with intent to actually destroy something. It was insanely loud and every cell in David’s body felt infuriated. The colonel cleared debris from the fridge door. He opened it.

  The gun went to his side and his body suddenly slumped out of its officious posture.

  Convinced the firing was over, David yelled assurances to the USVers outside and joined Colonel Blue by the fridge. It was colder inside than David imagined, no light. The upper shelves, as he’d suspected, were Mathias’s genetics: blood, semen, stool, a half-full mason jar of toenails. But the bottom shelves were his medicines. And these were news to David. Row after row of prescription bottles. Stuff that definitely didn’t come from Lee but from real doctors. They were alphabetized.

  Jesus, he thought.

  Colonel Blue examined them and picked out a handful of bottles, maybe six of them. These, he explained, were the most important ones. The ones that kept Mathias even. The rest he’d never heard of, which, to him, meant they were probably doing more harm than good.

  The bevy of pills suddenly made sense. David knew something was slipping inside Mathias. Maybe it was simply misdosages or unintended interactions? The new Zeronal?

  “Did my son tell you about his brother?”

  “Sure,” David said. “Everyone knows. Edison is part of Ultraviolet’s origin story.”

  “What has he told you all about Edison?”

  “Not a lot, quite honestly,” said David. “I know about the Derecho and the tree, how your other son survived but then fell into a kind of coma and passed away. But he doesn’t—”

  “My other son?”

  “Sure, Mathias’s twin.”

  Colonel Blue scowled. “People always say how twins have such distinct personalities. This one’s the quiet one. That one’s the life of the party. But Matty and Eddie were exactly the same. Perfect clones, do you understand? Their mom even dressed them alike for a while. I couldn’t stand it. I insisted they wear different colors. Matty was red, and Eddie always wore purple. Always.”

  “So Mathias took his brother’s color!” offered David. “A way of keeping his memory alive.”

  David loved this new detail. He considered how to work it into an upcoming comic book.

  The colonel’s voice descended to a whisper. “When we were all in the hospital, Mathias—they caught him doing it. There was no storm, no tree, that’s all just his fabrication, but Edison was in a coma. A nurse caught Mathias, right after. After he’d finished smothering Edison with a pillow.”

  David sat down on the bed next to Colonel Blue, taking this in. Was this real? Or just a ploy?

  “They tried to revive him, but… We buried it,” the man said. “Nobody had to know. They still don’t need to know, all the kids out there. But someone should know. You should probably know. He’s a… a lost person.”

  “Maybe,” David mumbled, “with all due respect, sir, maybe he felt his twin’s pain so strongly—they say that happens, right?—maybe he was helping him, y’know, die the right way?”

  “It wasn’t his twin,” said the colonel. “It was his exact replica.”

  “Right, spitting image.”

  “No, wrong. Edison was the first successful case in DARPA’s ST13B project, Advanced Mammalian Genome Engineering. I’m telling you Edison was his clone, David, a flesh-and-blood person made from his DNA. And he was perfect for… four years or so. When he started to fail, Matty saw it. And he decided that it was time for Edison to die. But we don’t get to decide when and how people live or die, do we?”

  “Not unless you work for the Department of Defense, I guess.” David shrugged. “Do you have any proof of this? Any of this? Video? Classified documents or something?”

  The man sniffed once at the air.

  David wasn’t sure if the colonel was messing with him. He was talking about human cloning, which was objectively insane, but David also knew they’d cloned a sheep back in the 1990s, so was it really so unbelievable that maybe they’d been doing humans for decades and just not talking about it? Everything in him wanted to ask the obvious questions, to respond as a little kid, screaming, “No, it can’t be!” Awestruck and incredulous. But David realized this was exactly what the man expected. So he tried to project the opposite response instead. Unimpressed. Credulous.

  He wanted the colonel to know whom he was dealing with.

  “He’s sick, David,” said the colonel, his face shifting. “I’m his father. You don’t know what that’s like, but it supersedes everything. You don’t have to want to help me, but if you want to help him, if you want to help yourself and all these kids out there, if you want to help Haley—your… the… she’s the captain girl, right?—then help us bring just him in quietly. Help us take care of him. The weather is only going to get worse for the foreseeable future and it’s safer if he’s—”

  “He’s right, isn’t he?” David said. “The gods are putting us out of our misery.”

  “There’s just too many of us,” said Mathias’s dad. “Overpopulation.”

  David remembered a tale from the Problem of Evil class. He told Colonel Blue the story of how there was once two levels of gods: the minor gods had to do all the work for the bigger, important gods, until one of the lesser ones got the idea to create humans to help with the grunt work.

  “They just didn’t realize how fast we’d procreate and how much noise we’d all make, and pretty soon the gods, especially Enlil, who was something of a whiner, couldn’t sleep for all the racket. So they figured out ways to lower the population. Mathias thinks that’s what’s happening again. Maybe the gods can’t hear themselves think. When earthquakes and disease and the war don’t do the trick, they’ll unleash the supercell, which catalyzes the flood, and we won’t know how to live together when the power goes out and the population will decline. Right?”

  “I’m hoping science will intervene before God,” Colonel Blue said. “Okay, listen. I won’t ask you to surrender this operation, and I don’t want to put my son in jail. But we’re out of time. He’s dangerous. He’s messing with things you don’t understand. So here’s my deal, my offer to you. First, I’ll need you to hit me in the face.”

  — Ø —

  She’d been standing beside Owen, ready, straining to make out the mumbles inside Mathias’s room. Haley jumped when she heard the crash. Colonel Blue spilled out of Mathias’s room. David was holding the man’s pistol firmly, keeping it trained on the colonel’s head. When the FBI lackeys reached for their pieces, Owen pulled an AR-15 from below the tool bench and locked on.

  The colonel halted his minions, swiped a trail of blood from his mouth.

  “For smart kids, you’re extremely stupid,” he said. “Now we know you have guns. Now you’re a violent threat. Now we have cause. Haven’t you heard? Guns are dangerous.” He looked at Owen. “And you’re now in the unenviable position of having to figure out whether you want to shoot three decorated military officers in this sweaty basement. I hope your aim is true.”

  Haley stepped in front of Owen, who kept the rifle aimed at Colonel Blue, never breaking his eyes from his target. Haley stepped closer.

  “You say ‘decorated military officers’ as if you’re good guys. You’ve directly threatened us, illegally searched our house, and your generation and government are responsible for the evils of the world that have put us in this situation. So, now, you need to understand that you’re in our basement, where we are the good guys.”

  Blue moved toward the stairs and smiled, the blood between his teeth. He turned to David.

  “You’ve made a massive mistake, son,” he said. “A stupid, stupid mistake. You shut this down or we come in and round up all of you savages ourselves, understand? One week!”

  “Time is irrelevant,” David said, pointing the pistol at Colonel Blue’s head. “It’s a new era.”

  Colonel Nathan Blue laughed a condescending laugh and stomped up the stairs.

  When th
ey were out of sight, Haley glanced over at David, still holding his stance. She’d never seen him like this, in full protector mode—not protecting her, but protecting all of them. As soon as the colonel was clear and his tiny motorcade gone from Woosamonsa, the call rang out and The Egg erupted. Haley strode over to David and gripped his neck and put her forehead against his.

  “You were so fucking good!” she said.

  “Will you go to the Silent Dance with me?” David asked, holding her, holding the moment.

  She said yes.

  — Ø —

  There was aripiprazole to decrease hallucinations. Codeine for pain. Depakote for migraines. Levoxyl for his thyroid. Detrol for his bladder. But then there was Propecia for hair loss caused by the Levoxyl and Depakote. Flexeril for the muscle spasms caused by the aripiprazole. Aricept for the memory loss caused by Detrol. Cialis for the stagnant libido caused by the Propecia.

  And even all of that didn’t worry David. What worried David were the amphetamines.

  After Mathias and the others had emerged from their hiding spots, David admitted quietly to him: the fridge had been breached. So Mathias offered David the tour. Just David, though.

  “I’ll give you the dosages and frequencies tomorrow,” Mathias said once they were alone, “but Dad’s right, I could use your help. If I stray too far I can become a real mess and a half.”

  David stared at the bottles. Almost nobody else—maybe Haley and probably Lee, he now realized—had seen inside this fridge. Mathias aimed to keep it that way.

  “Lee has kept me even, but I need to distance myself a little bit there. He’s been in love with me from the beginning, which is flattering. I kissed him a few weeks ago—I wanted to give him that much—but I can’t swing all the way. We’ve come to an understanding. Some distance until he gets his head straight. Which is to say I can’t totally trust him right now. This isn’t easy to admit, but I need you to protect me. Keep this a secret. Doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  David wasn’t sure which new piece of information to tackle first. He chose the obvious one:

 

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