by Adam Nemett
Ultraviolet approaches each hero individually, leans in, whispers. Then, each time, he says, “Do you know what you have to do?” And each one nods. And then each one leaves.
He’s moving down the line like this so, okay, Business-Man joins the row, playing along. But he honestly has no fucking clue what he has to do. Has he missed a meeting? When the rest have scattered and only Business-Man is left, last in line, Ultraviolet bellows to him, “Join us up on the roof, won’t you?” And suddenly USV security is headed his way. They don’t give him a choice.
ii.
David never assumed Mathias Blue was real—real meaning unenhanced, unadulterated—but he believed in him. From the roof of Spinoza Field House, they see the gray swell on the horizon. They see more grids going in the distance, browning out one by one, disappearing in the evening, bequeathing a gray and choppy sea. David looks to him, the Übermensch, Mathias Blue.
“That giant anvil thing is beautiful,” says Ultraviolet, staring at the massive cloud.
He’s right. It curls and gathers everything to itself. A cloud magnet. Growing denser and darker until nothing can escape. Standing beside his leader, Business-Man watches the supercell coming at them like a movie giant, stepping over towns. He can feel its pull. It has its own gravity. It spins howling wind and rain and hail at them, coming in sideways, pelting their purple skin like hundreds of paintballs. They stand there shoulder to shoulder and take it.
They’re strong enough to withstand this squall.
“That’s the supercell,” Business-Man says. “Insane thunderstorm with a cyclone inside, constantly spinning up and out.”
“Ascension,” says Ultraviolet. “Perfect. The gods will elevate us all.”
“That’s not the plan, dude. The plan is not to elevate. It is to hunker down and survive.”
Ultraviolet puts a finger in his ear and scratches. He turns away from the far-off storm, looping casually around the circular glass skylight in the stadium’s roof. Business-Man follows. He is second-in-command. He is nineteen years old. Blink.
It is the fifth of June, probably. The sun is rising and setting faster than ever. The adults have left. The Princeton campus belongs to the USV, and with the electricity gone the students will look for Ultraviolet to glow in the dark. They’re downstairs, the student body, just babies really. There are a handful of heroes here on the roof of Spinoza. They seem like good soldiers, but Ultraviolet can see it: man is weak and known to fall apart. He tells them to keep their masks on, no matter what, keep them on. “Like all leaders,” he says, “our mystery is our power.”
If the water inside the arena keeps rising and reaches this high, Business-Man’s plan is to break through this glass and pour out the top, but now that he sees the skylight glass from the outside, there’s a kind of chicken-wire mesh inside that’ll make it tough to fight through from below. Maybe he should gather a crew to cut through the mesh now. Where is Peacemaker?
“Where is Peacemaker?” Ultraviolet asks, reading his mind again.
“And Dr. Ugs?
Where are you, Business-Man?”
He is here. And now it’s his turn to ask questions.
“Where is Haley?” David retorts, breaking character. “What are you going to do to her?”
“Your darling is right here,” he says, tapping his breastplate. “This is where she lives.”
David wants to punch him, but instead he spits off the edge of the roof. His loogie plummets with the rain.
“We need them to be strong,” Mathias says. “I’m going to caution them about Nietzsche’s concept of the Last Man. Cut off, apathetic, weak. Lacking a certain imagination.”
David’s read some of what Mathias told him to read, and so he says, “Right: nihilism.”
“Listen,” Ultraviolet says, “here is your job.” He pulls from his pocket an orange bottle of pills. Mathias’s pills for energy, pills for strength, pills for connection: his charisma.
“They’re not going to last.” He’s right. “Some days, you’re going to administer a placebo.”
David hates to state the obvious, but: “I don’t actually know how to make placebo pills.”
“It’s in your hands now. It’s up to you,” Ultraviolet says. “Use your imagination.”
He hands the bottle to David. Then the grid goes down and the world is blind.
“Hold them quietly,” Ultraviolet says. “Our mystery is our power.”
Ultraviolet lights a candle. He turns from the flood and walks downstairs to orate, to lead, maybe to drown. David squeezes the pill bottle, opens the childproof cap, and pours two white capsules into his palm. He looks at them, these babies, these tiny, smooth secrets.
By the time they run out, maybe Mathias will be real.
— Ø —
Business-Man knows he has a choice: he can hold Mathias’s pills quietly, tightly, figure out a way to keep him at his best for as long as the drugs will allow. He can be the best number two on the planet. Or, instead, Business-Man can take the pills himself. See where they take him.
He swallows one.
Inside, Ultraviolet orates. A commencement address. All day and night. Endless streams of prophecy, poetry, mad genius. He sits at the controls of the announcer’s booth, a microphone at his mouth. It’s working, but there’s tremendous static, an ambient chorus of shushing behind Ultraviolet’s vocal solo. He lays out the path of the USV’s mass purification:
“Return to the Stop, my heroes, to the stillness… When there’s no time, do not pine for busyness… When food is scarce, do not pine for fullness. Appreciate the fast, the cleansing… Keep these waters clean. This lake is our salvation…”
Like this. He jumps from topic to topic. Nietzsche to chronostrictesis to education to moral determinism to his own disappearing hands.
“… Drink with moderation. Prepare yourselves… Only then will our silence carry the necessary weight to appease the gods and usher in a new Satya Yuga.…”
First, it’s annoying. But then it melts into the aural fabric of this place and becomes music.
“This lake is our salvation our sea some rye red yes but why is emblem emblem ‘Cask of Amontillado’ ice helado drowning in underground oil black to the reddest core of earth set to XplO it rumbles red the trees red the grass red the flood red beneath red above it all bursts into flames at once and becomes the sun exploding…”
The only sound is Ultraviolet’s incessant announcement. BusinessMan pops in Haley’s earbuds to enjoy Echo’s music.
Much of the Superdome is asleep, bodies passed out on bleachers like fallen knights. Some who cannot sleep venture to the concrete concourse, having their final alone moments. Their eyes are wide and dark. They rock back and forth on their heels. They are praying, perhaps. Or preparing. Reading aloud from Tales of the USV comics like it is scripture. “But that’s not the fucking moon,” they say. “That’s the fucking moon.” Others go to town on each other, bend each other over concourse trash cans, a tremendous amount of sucking and fucking. A silent line forms at the concession stand, USVers reverently receiving whatever canned goods are left.
Nobody notices Business-Man. He is invisible. A new superpower.
On the other side of the stadium, the concourse is more alive. A wedding in progress, although surely not legally binding, depending on whose laws matter anymore. Two superheroes in love—Zorro Astor and Cadmium Cobalt—speak their quiet vows and kiss as a small congregation showers them with white rice kernels. Or maybe those are pills. David wonders which is scarcest.
Before Mathias’s pilfered amphetamine pill kicks in, he lies down for some final moments of sleep. One last dream before reality hits. From the bleacher planks, he looks up at the rafters.
A central catwalk runs down the length of the ceiling, like a spine.
Why do they call it a “catwalk”? he wonders. Whose job was it to man that catwalk, to manage the building’s electricity from such a high place, staring down at athletes and crowds?
Welded sparks. Hot white light.
A statue is being cut down, iron toppling from a stone pedestal. The Mather Sundial, maybe.
When it’s gone, millions of purple beings climb up to the plinth, their faces amorphous. They keep climbing, scurrying over one another like noble roaches, building a tower of humans taller and taller. The tower rises up into the sky, beyond clouds, beyond sound, and when it reaches the silent ceiling of the world, the heavens burst forth, sun spreading outward like sideways lightning, and—XplO!—a beam shoots down, blasting this tower of heroes, bodies falling like firework ash.
David is watching from afar. From on high. From pure omnipotence.
And then he’s one of the bodies, falling.
He feels the pull of gravity.
The plummet.
The speed.
— Ø —
“Slowly,” a whisper says. “Pull it. Pull!”
“It’s too full,” says another voice. “I don’t want to touch it.”
“Do it for fuck’s sake. Hurry, he’s moving!”
Eyes closed, Business-Man feels hands fumbling around his crotch. He must’ve fallen asleep in Miss Givings’s section 110, inadvertently signed up for one last end-of-days orgy. But when he opens his eyes, ready to make a polite exit, he sees familiar faces arrayed over him kaleidoscopically. Dr. Ugs and Peacemaker and Sergeant Drill and even Esteban, staring down at him with wide eyes.
Zoom and he’s awake.
“Now! Do it!” Ugs screams.
Water pours down on Business-Man’s face, and he gasps at hands raking at his eyes and fumbling his mouth, prying open his jaw and pouring water in from the bottle that was in his pants. They’re force-feeding him, and though at first he’s convinced this is still his dream, when his arms flail against his quartet of attackers, he can immediately guess what substance is in that bottle.
Lunging forward, wet, Business-Man weasels out of Sergeant Drill’s grasp. “Don’t touch him!” they say, giving him a wide berth.
“What the fuck?!” he says.
“We know what we have to do, Business-Man.”
He can taste in the water that metallic trace of Liquid Zero.
He knows what’s going to happen but he has no idea why.
David spots a fire extinguisher fixed on the wall near the concourse opening, pulls the pin, and unleashes a flurry of white on these heroes, then turns and runs like mad. He bursts from the bleachered section, sprinting, sprinting through the concourse, thankful for his legs. He hears footsteps behind him.
The chase is on.
Blood pounds in David’s ears. He needs his arms to run, to sprint, to find a way out of this nightmare. Busting through a doorway he hits a cinder block stairwell and bounds down the steps three at a time and almost eats it on the concrete.
At the bottom, the floor is filled with water. Up to his knees. It’s dark, but he must be in a basement, somewhere underground. Shafts of moonlight pour through windows near the ceiling, and David hears fast footsteps coming for him. He’s in a locker room, part submerged. Slogging through water-filled aisles, he blinks and sees a supermarket, the frozen food section. Blink. He sees Haley emerging from a phone booth, naked. Blink. He spots another phone booth. This one is real, it’s here, not a superimposition. And it’s more a phone closet, the kind with a glass-pane door. An old cubby built for college athletes to phone home. Maybe it still works.
He heads for the booth, falling face forward into the water. He can almost feel the floor moving on this sinking Titanic. Behind him David hears the muffled pop of another door opening.
They are coming.
He dives forward and reaches the booth. It takes great strength to pull open the glass door against the water, which rushes around as David sloshes into the phone booth and pulls the door shut and thinks, Please, gods, please, ghosts, please, Grandpa László, dear Claire, give me a dial tone.
The receiver is cold against his ear and it sings the sweetest hum David’s ever known. Cold age of cell phones! The dial tone has been brought out of retirement to fight this one last battle.
Voices bark outside the booth. Metal lockers open and close. They’re here now, searching for him. David huddles into the water, only his head and hands above the surface.
C’mon, push those three square buttons.
His hand is going numb. He strains to hit the 9, the 1, once more, but his elbow can barely lift itself. No no no, god no, this is not happening, why, shit, how long does he have—
“911,” a voice says. “How is your emergency different than everyone else’s emergency?”
“This is Business-Man, uh, David Fuffman,” he hisses into the speaker. “At Princeton University. I’m under attack, I repeat, under attack. Send in SWAT now, goddamn it, now!”
Why can’t he stop speaking like this?
“Calm down, sir.”
“Send in reinforcements from the perimeter!”
“The what?”
“The perimeter. Don’t you guys have a goddamn perimeter set up?”
She sighs deeply. “You listen to me,” she says. “Last time a squad went to that campus some kid broke my husband’s collarbone. So tell me one good—”
But David doesn’t get to tell her one good anything.
Because suddenly a trash can smashes through the glass above him and shards of window pour down on his face. And David plops into the water, like an idiot, because now he can’t get up.
He looks up and there is Sergeant Drill. She’s got Peacemaker behind her plus a small army of his goons. David can’t sink any deeper into the water or his face will be submerged, drowning. He has nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. They open the door and yank him up by his armpits. He tries kicking their knees, but it’s no use. Something slams David’s forehead and then his neck and he’s in the water again, probably bleeding. He can’t see anything. And that’s the thing about getting the shit beat out of you—it’s impossible to find a still point. You’re constantly upside down.
Being dragged up a flight of stairs now. Once his eyes come back David sees a single blurry face bouncing up above him. It’s Cap’n Cunt. His Haley. At the top of the stairway. Thank the gods. But no, her eyes are wide and dark and everything good is washed away from them.
David is about to say something, some explanation, some warning, but she beats him to it.
“Any minute now,” she says catatonically. And then she’s gone from his vision.
He feels himself being raised up, and for a moment he believes it’s finally happening. The End. The Ascension. But no. This is weirder. His body feels tight and numb, like Novocain or a slept-on arm. When he tries to shake the sleep from his limbs and regain feeling, David knows he’s stuck inside himself again. The feeling that only comes with Liquid Zero.
David is paralyzed.
But Mathias’s speedier pill is kicking in hard, a million pinballs rattling around his rib cage.
And, also, he’s flying. A security team of USV heroes holds him aloft by his outstretched limbs—their standard-issue “airplane,” just like move-in day at The Egg—and they’re flying him up a set of stairs.
He can’t lock his core, find balance, find equilibrium.
He’s just a stupid rag of a man, a prisoner.
From below, David hears a familiar voice. It’s Dr. Ugs. He sounds a little drunk.
“Y’know, I tried to rat on Mathias one time, too,” he says. “Got as far as the precinct, but then I looked around at those fat asshole cops scurrying with paperwork, trash everywhere, drinking shit-colored coffee out of Styrofoam cups, some ha
ndcuffed crack head calling everyone faggots, and it’s like I was looking at dinosaurs. Like the T-rex, with those tiny arms. It was like, oh, of course that experiment was flawed and they didn’t survive, right? Just look at those stupid fucking arms!”
They fly David into the USV skybox, onto the conference table.
Ugs is over him now, staring down at David’s still body.
“Help. Me.” David can barely speak.
“You still think he’s Noah, like I once thought. The practical savior gathering and preparing us for survival and repopulation. But soon you’ll see.” Ugs leans in. “He’s Abraham. Father of all.”
Then they are gone. David is in the skybox, Ultraviolet’s lair. He hears his leader breathing.
Sometimes it takes a loud sound to wake one from slumber. Sometimes it takes a good slap in the face. Sometimes all it takes is a startling image. So when David’s head lolls to the side and his eyes focus in on a blurry figure, another himself, something shifts. Because here is what he sees: Ultraviolet in profile. His pants are off. There’s an axe in his hands.
He is leaning over himself, slicing a delicate cut into his penis with the razor-sharp axe blade.
Blood drips darkly down his hand. He flips his grandfather’s axe onto a desk in front of him, blood spattering like swirl art, and then grabs a mason jar to collect the blood from his member.
For David, this is what breaks the spell, the glitch that gives it all away.
David stays stiff, still, body frozen with fear and also drugs. Once Mathias has collected a centimeter of blood from his own cock, he patches himself up with gauze. He screws a lid on the mason jar of redness. Then he pulls up his pants and hits Record on his radio.
“Watch this,” he says to David.
He speaks softly, all in a steady monotone, different from his melodic oration: She must be sacrificed the only way to salvation kill the queen and her child please quench me the only way to salvation she must be sacrificed to swim in her waters the only way to salvation she must be sacrificed listen to the gods please quench me…