We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  He goes on like this. Who knows for how long? Minutes don’t exist.

  Once he is done chanting, he goes to his controls. Echo’s radio has many dials and buttons. The recording plays quietly—… Kill the queen and her child please quench me the only way to salvation…

  “If I twist this knob here, the bass drops out of the voice,” Mathias says.

  And it’s true, his vocal recording loses its low-end timbre, becomes tinny.

  “Then here goes the treble,” he says. And with a turn of some knob, more of Mathias’s voice gets swallowed up into nothing. But it’s still there, mostly muffled.

  “And then all we do is introduce the noise-masking signal at 1,500 Hz. And my instructions become inaudible! See, the slope control accommodates variation in the frequency response and—”

  David stops listening. White noise engulfs Mathias’s overdubbed words. Static. All shushing.

  But the voice! It continues in David’s brain, like a song lyric stuck in his head…

  Kill the queen and her child… please quench me… only way to salvation… please… His brain hears this earworm over and over. A loop of instructions. A call to madness. A voice in his head.

  “Please…” is what David mumbles. “Please, man. Please…” He doesn’t know why he says this. Maybe because it’s the noise in his head—please quench me. Or maybe he’s saying please because he’s experiencing the wrong kind of revelation. Witnessing the ultimate destruction of your hero.

  It’s suddenly so clear: the USV is being hypnotized, encoded, conditioned.

  Like Dr. Cranum, Mathias Blue has built himself a Brain Machine.

  “Plee…” David says. His jaw is tightening up.

  Mathias turns slowly and looks David in the eyes. Undaunted, he recites:

  “Quetzalcoatl gathered them all. He bathed them in a green bowl. Quetzalcoatl bled his penis on them. Then all the gods in that place gave him merit.”

  He says this like it’s so obvious.

  “You’re brainwashing them.”

  “What do you think we’ve created?” Mathias asks. “These heroes! The water below!”

  “Iz for drinking, azzhole.”

  “You still think that’s a well. For survival. But no, that’s a sinkhole, a cenote, a passage to the underworld. When we offer ourselves to Chaac, the water god, he will stop the floods and usher in the Golden Age. The Satya Yuga. But if we don’t quench his thirst, that’s the end, dude. So we’ll call our heroes up to the altar to receive their medicine. Cap’n Cunt will bleed the water. And the earth’s elite will pass through the dark neck of time and emerge luminous without end.”

  “That’s mass murder.” Now it’s David’s turn to quote. The ancient wisdom of the Super Friends. “‘No man has a right to enforce his will on others, no matter how good his intentions may be!’”

  Mathias laughs, “You’re a fucking Boy Scout!”

  “You’re fucking crazy!”

  “I’M RUNNING THIS MONKEY FARM NOW, FRANKENSTEIN! AND I WANNA KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE DOING WITH MY TIME!”

  David is truly frightened now, because it’s clear he’s gone. And it’s David’s fault. All of it. He instigated this. He planned the spectacles. David is Dr. Frankenstein and this is his monster.

  “Sorry, that’s a line from Day of the Dead,” Mathias explains, calm now. “It felt a propos. Truth is I am doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing right now.”

  “Whuriz she?” David’s losing his tongue fast.

  “Or,” says Mathias. “If you don’t believe the shaman stuff? Maybe chronostrictesis is fake. Maybe I made it up. You know business, right, so do you know what ‘condition branding’ is?”

  David knows what it is, from his Viral Marketing class. It’s when pharmaceutical companies coin phrases like “restless leg syndrome” and get people all worried. First, they sell the disease. Then they sell the cure. But David’s mouth is getting stuck. So he just nods.

  “Right! So maybe that’s what Business-Man can believe. Maybe I’ve been working with SCISM, with Pfizer, DARPA, NIST, and we’ve branded the idea of chronostrictesis in order to launch the most lucrative blockbuster drug in history. Is that plausible?”

  David doesn’t know anything anymore.

  “What about this? Maybe dear old Dad was telling you the truth. Maybe mononuclear reproduction has been available for decades, to those of us with access to the right government facilities. You know those advertisements in the back of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, where Ivy League women offer up their unfertilized eggs to couples who can’t have babies of their own? Elite genomes available for like $25K apiece? Well, you can also harvest those eggs for free—if the donors are willing, if they believe, David. I’ve paid for the lab time, but the eggs were all free, the most perfect time capsules money can’t buy. Because you can either use those genetics or you can destroy the egg nucleus, all of its genes and chromosomes, using ultraviolet light so that none of its genetic makeup is left over, and then you simply do a microinjection—”

  “Whur iz Haley?”

  “—adding my DNA to that nucleus, which can be taken from skin scrapings, blood, semen, whatever one might have lying around in a refrigerator, for instance, and, well, I guess what I’m saying, David, is that I’m smarter than you. I’m more zeroed in. I’ve seen things you haven’t seen, so I know you think I’m nuts, but I think you’re nuts, okay, you’re the crazy one, because you don’t have the first goddamn clue what’s going on, yet you pretend like you know what’s good and what’s evil.”

  “Whur iz Haley? The baby…”

  “Ha! Full savage truth, man: I tried to implant her the old-fashioned way, same as you did, and it’s anyone’s guess which of our seedlings took hold. But it’s not yours and not mine and not even hers. It belongs to the gods.” He seesaws his palms like balancing scales. “There are many possible narratives. Ascribe to the one you prefer. That’s belief. I believe what I believe because I see it. Like I saw that you’d take those pills I gave you.”

  “Why?” David mumbles.

  “Because you’re fucking selfish,” he says. “And because you told on me to my daddy, David.”

  The arena shakes. Wind so strong David can hear layers of roof being ripped off.

  “Golden Echo is dead because of you,” Mathias continues. “You’ll die a traitor.”

  “Whur iz Haley?”

  “Oy vey, she’s right here, buddy.” Mathias tilts David’s head. He can see her behind him. “I told you: this is where she lives.”

  Haley is naked, smiling down like a mother. She pets his bald head around his Mohawk.

  “We are not yet free, David,” she says. “But we are so close. Seven days, times seven weeks, equals forty-nine days. On the forty-ninth day, the baby’s pineal gland is fully formed. The gender becomes clear. The soul transmigrates. The power is pulled into the womb. For us, for this baby, that was April, do you remember? Your birthday, maybe, in the back of the van when we all came together? The forty-ninth day. I didn’t even know yet. You fell asleep, the drug’s sedative was too strong for most of you. But Ultraviolet drove us to the lab. And he showed me—I could see it, it was so beautiful, these pure magic eggs that could be carried in any of us! Birthed to the world! I was ready to give mine over to the gods, but then they tested me and I was already pregnant. Do you understand?”

  David didn’t understand a fucking thing.

  “But the other girls? They wanted to give themselves, and I explained to them what I’d seen at the center, how quick and painless the procedure, and they all gave their eggs so the USV will live on. We can save us all. Don’t worry, the women will carry on and take care of everything. The mothers. We can save us all. Do you understand what I’m telling you? We can—”

  “SuperVisor was the first successful egg,” Mathias says, “but then she got cold feet and terminated. She threatened our group, David, so she had to leave. Now, you have to leave, too. Tie him up, please, my Cap’n.”


  “I’m going to bind your hands now, David. I’m sorry, baby, I’m going to put you in this handcuff knot for when the Liquid wears off, do you understand, David?”

  “I’m not. The bad guy,” David says.

  “Oh, I heard the recording of you and Mathias’s dad. It was rawther gallant of you to try to protect me. It’s just… you want so bad to survive,” she says. “You think we’re too important to die. You think we’ll live and help people after the storm, deliver canned goods to kids in Trenton or something. But we won’t, David, and that won’t save anyone. Only sacrifice saves us. That’s our value. That’s our power.”

  David’s mind is aflame. And here she sounds calm and collected.

  “You can believe one of Mathias’s stories,” she says. “Or you can believe what you already know: that time is running out and the world is going to end. Unless we make a sacrifice.”

  “Haley,” David implored. “Nobody haz to scrifice anythng.”

  She smiles and begins to tear up. “That’s always been your motto, hasn’t it? The Anointed!”

  “Pluhz.” David’s eyelids can’t move. “I had. A plan.”

  “This has always been the plan,” Mathias says. “You’ve always known it, and you’ve helped make it so. This is how we pass through the Null Point. You’re frightened, is all. But push through that veil and find faith. Find peace. And by the time you can move again, it’ll be time.”

  “Any minute now.” Haley kisses David’s face and says, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  And it is not okay. It is not even a little bit okay. So David brings out the final piece of artillery. The nuke. The only trigger word that might possibly snap her out of it.

  David manages to say to her, “He’s. Raping. You.”

  “Come here, David,” Mathias says. “I want you to feel my palms.”

  One minute the world is there, but crumbling, and the next, there’s a pure purple planet hurtling through space, Mathias’s fist flying, exploding into David’s eye socket, turning his sight red, darkening his sight the way that apocalyptic asteroid darkened the dinosaurs’ sky, and in the blink before David loses consciousness, he considers not just the awesome weight of that astral body crashing to earth but also its aftermath; not one cataclysmic crash turning the planet to ash in the blink of an eye, but the massive dust cloud that followed, cutting off the sun, choking the plants, claiming the world’s inhabitants one by one as they trudged along the wasteland looking for water but finding none, finally collapsing with the slow and painful realization that this was fucking it.

  iii.

  First, he smells it—a mass of humanity, animalistic. Ash and body odor and semen and ass. It’s how ancient caves must have smelled, David thinks. Where cavemen hid from paralyzing ice.

  Fire turns ice to water.

  Man turns water to blood.

  Is this death he’s feeling? Or do the gentle rocking, the scent of his own sweat, the weightlessness, do they all mean he’s coming to?

  He chokes awake. Eyes swollen, dried shut. Skull heavy. David thinks he’s still dosed on Liquid, but no, he can move his arms again. His infrared goggles are on his eyes. He tries to lift his head. But something is wrapped tight round his throat, digging into his neck flesh.

  Frogs, insects, livestock. Fiery hail. Were these biblical plagues inexplicable God-magic, David wonders, or just some very reasonable bioscience? Red algae in the Nile? Bacteria from the algae killing all those fish and frogs? Then the insects—without frogs there to eat them—they swarm the land, feast on cows and pigs, spread their pestilence? Plus, just tons of shitty weather? An unhinged and misguided ruler. A perfect storm.

  “Awake, awake!” thunders a voice from above. “Stay stiff!” It is Ultraviolet’s, of course.

  David draws heavy hands up to his gullet and paws around. His wrists are lashed together with Haley’s rope, and his fingers find metal pulled tight against his Adam’s apple. It’s thick like a wire hanger, and it squeezes tighter when he swallows.

  Inside the silence, David still hears energy. He assumed that once the power grids failed, the familiar hum of electricity would fall dormant. But no. Power lines still buzz. It sounds like locusts, the ones that only show up every seventeen years. The eighth plague.

  He closes his eyes again.

  The ninth would be darkness, which is already here, right on schedule.

  But even in the dark everything is wobbly. He opens his eyes again. Tries to focus.

  Up above is the skylight, the dome gone dark, except when the lightning strikes illuminate its hub-and-spoke structure. It’s night outside, and in all ways terrible sounding. Inside, he can’t hear the rush of the water pipes filling the arena anymore. Aside from the lightning, the only color is an orange flicker tickling the ceiling—a fire most likely—so the power must be dead.

  But David’s still alive.

  He is in a rowboat. Drifting in their manmade lake. Above, hailstones have smashed the skylight, and a driving rain falls through this hole. David drifts into a column of rain. He looks up into the downpour, droplets coming fast like Star Wars hyperdrive. A fat one nails him in the eye.

  Blink.

  But what of the tenth plague? That last awful one that broke the Pharaoh. There’s no greater pain than the death of a child. He searches his cloudy mind for some indication of Mathias’s plan—he’s got some Passover sacrifice in mind, smearing blood over Earth’s doorframe in hopes the gods will pass them by.

  A new call goes out over the PA, loud and clear, bursting through the cracks of David’s fingers. But it’s David’s voice this time. And the voice of Mathias’s father:

  David: “… He’ll be in the exterior pulpit on the south wall, Friday night at eight o’clock is when it starts.”

  Oh fuck.

  David’s wearing a blazer, not László’s but something close, he can feel that much. He can’t stand. That wire is pulling at his jugular. Underneath his body he strokes a bed of velvet. At first he thinks this is just some royal vestment, but when he cranes his neck he finds orange and black and the tip of a number, 2. One of the massive arena banners from up in the rafters has been tied to David. Some athlete’s retired jersey number locked with twisted wire around his neck, draping off his shoulders.

  A cape. Ten feet long and heavy as fuck.

  Colonel Blue’s voice: “… If you decide not to take my job offers with DARPA, Booz Allen, or the agency, you’ve got a future in acting, Business-Man.”

  David eyes the stands. Holy shit, everyone’s here. Collected, lined up on the bleachers, lit by the dim dance of a fire. Their masks are on. Their heads are bowed forward. Totally silent. All of them. David opens his mouth to call out to them, but it’s sealed shut with layers of duct tape.

  David is a POW, the newest convicted felon of the USV. Which means he’s in trouble.

  David’s voice: “I’m a man of my word. But if I’m selling out Mathias just promise me—”

  On the far end of the stadium, under the scoreboard, a fire blazes, fueled by wooden chairs and library books. A makeshift pulpit has been erected from a bookcase and Mathias stands behind it, wearing a purple graduation robe, a mortarboard and tassel. He’s the valedictorian of this ceremony, and he holds court above the rising waterline. The basketball nets are nearly sunk by now.

  Behind Ultraviolet is a long table lined with cups, almost definitely filled with paralyzing Liquid Zero masquerading as DMT. The high priests of the USV—Dr. Ugs, It Girl, Sergeant Drill, Peacemaker with his army creating a perimeter(!)—are arrayed around Ultraviolet, ready to divvy out this incapacitating Kool-Aid.

  Lined in the bleachers beside Ultraviolet, each wearing a purple robe like a gospel choir, are seven masked women with hands folded on their stomachs—all the surrogate mothers carrying Mathias’s fertilized eggs, David’s betting.

  And seated below Ultraviolet, by herself on a bleacher bench, is Cap’n Cunt. She is naked, seated like some throned Anubis statue, wit
h one hand on her stomach and the other gripping Ultraviolet’s axe like a scepter.

  Her back straight and eyes wide. Weirdly so.

  Something is wrong, David can see it. She’s not really there.

  Colonel Blue: “We have a deal. You and your girlfriend will be protected.”

  As the call audio loops over again, David scans the arena. Angry masks everywhere.

  “There before you,” calls Mathias to his minions, “is the last vestige of the old order! The Kali Yuga. The corporate suit. The Business-Man. The busyness, man! Selfish and self-serving. A villain. The last shred of evil to be purged before evolution can happen.”

  David knows what’s coming, of course. It’s the Super Fucking Fire Zero.

  “The time of the Business-Man has come and gone. The corporate drone, the white-collared capitalist slave. We are done with his way of life. He is primed for extinction. He must be destroyed so that the new leap in evolution may begin. This, my heroes, is our Commencement Ceremony!”

  Howls spring forth from the stands, a volume so great it stirs the boat beneath David.

  “Hope and the future are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps!” A Thoreau quote, a final dickish wink from Mathias. Maybe it was that time on the roof, or wearing Haley’s earbuds during his nap, that saved David’s brain from total annihilation.

  Wait.

  He looks down at his wrists locked together in Haley’s handcuff knot, the one that hid an escape route like a Chinese finger trap. A secret message? Is that why she shared the knot’s trick? He looks at Haley and her eyes are wide and shiny but give him nothing else.

  “So what will we do with him, my heroes? Will we let him ruin our purity? Chance our salvation? Will we let this rat loose outdoors, exiling him to his rotting way of life?”

  “NO!”

  “Superheroes uphold justice, protect the universe. So I challenge you: save us all!”