We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  But lest he forget: he is not mild-mannered.

  He will count his blessings, not whine. Shit could be worse.

  Superstorm Phil lasted all summer and reportedly destroyed upward of 1.2 million lives—more than 120,000 in the United States alone—especially when factoring in not just the flood and heat waves, but also the resulting food shortages, the water contamination, the uptick in malaria and dengue fever caused by the massive increase in mosquitos. The NOAA called it the most extreme weather event in two centuries. David saw the peak storms at Spinoza, but the coma shielded him from the power drought and mini-disasters that followed. He woke during the rebuilding effort, $900 billion in damage. Maps altered. Populations dispersed. A global XplO.

  And when David killed Mathias, the League of Seven—no, Six—had their own frantic XplO, scattering from the Superdome like fragments of fireworks.

  It Girl/Britt Childress wound up in an in-patient psychiatric hospital in Tucson. They diagnosed her with anorexia and paranoid schizophrenia. They’re rebuilding her from scratch.

  Dr. Ugs/Lee Popkin quietly sought asylum at a few different pharmaceutical companies until AstraZeneca took the bait. With some shady plea-bargaining, Lee will serve six months house arrest for distributing counterfeit drugs before going to work full-time and forever for Big Pharma. It’ll be a kind of lifelong indentured servitude, but hey, better than prison.

  As for Peacemaker/Owen Surber, he was many kinds of men. Injured football star, would-be soldier, cheerleader, swing dancer, a gentle giant, a bodyguard, a good Christian, a badass motherfucker. He ended his life as a samurai. Noble protector of Mathias Blue, a.k.a. Ultraviolet, Supreme Leader of the USV. But he failed to save this leader from assassination, and when a retainer fails his master, there is only one thing a samurai can do. They found his body in the center of Woosamonsa Court. He’d knelt on the pavement near the fire pit and pulled off Golden Echo’s old helmet. He’d Bic-ed himself bald again on the top, leaving tufts of hair around the back and sides. Opening a slit in his costume, he exposed his chest and positioned against it his staff of police nightsticks, with a butcher knife fixed to the tip like a bayonet.

  Bowing forward, Owen impaled himself.

  Samurais call it seppuku. A good death.

  Beside Owen, they found a death poem, the kind all samurais compose at their end:

  The lights, the lights are out again,

  The power’s dead and done.

  The lights, the lights are out again

  But the dark is much more fun.

  He’d also been shot in the head with a rifle, so someone else must’ve been there to finish him off. Probably Sergeant Drill/Nyla White, who went on the run. David isn’t sure where she ended up. He keeps his mouth shut. He hopes she’ll build great things someday.

  And Cap’n Cunt/Haley Roth.

  She was alive. Naked, brainwashed, and prepped for ritual sacrifice. But alive. The world has once more cast her as the victim (which she hates) and David as the villain (which he hates). But he’s happy to take another fall. David will play the bad guy and go to jail. She will play the victim and go free. The media thinks he’s the evil mastermind of the USV, and she’s some sad chick who stumbled into a cult and got herself knocked up, along with the other surrogates who’ve mostly returned to the comfort of their biological families. David tells her sometimes gender stereotypes work out for the best. Babies need their mothers.

  The rest of the USV, all the students and converts at the Superdome who tried to throw away their bright futures in favor of a blinding present? Bereft of leadership and left to their own post-traumatic devices, they might have succumbed to some even more awful fate were it not for the saviors who arrived at Spinoza just outside the nick of time.

  It wasn’t police who came. The parents were the ones who saved the day.

  Maybe three hundred Princeton moms and dads descended on the Superdome, broke through the glass entrance just after David had taken his leap and the other USV leaders had run.

  Some superheroes were too far gone. When the cups of Liquid Zero didn’t work to paralyze them, they weighed themselves down, stuffing canned goods into coat pockets, and wandered into the flooded arena, their bodies drowning, dying a stupid, unnecessary death. In the end, there were only six of these ritual suicides. The rest of the mass of thousands was saved. Parents discovered confused and exhausted kids coming down from otherworldly moments. They talked their children back into some semblance of reality, boys and girls flopping into parents’ arms in tears. Most went willingly. Some got dragged away kicking and screaming. The parents did whatever had to be done.

  There was Time. Which returned.

  David’s parents were there. His mom knew enough medicine to immobilize her son, keep him stable until the worst of the storm passed, and then got him to Capital Health Regional Medical Center. David’s parents saved his life. They hunkered down in the Superdome and survived the worst of the storm and emerged evolved.

  Mathias Blue’s parents were not there. The colonel must have been busy with larger governmental and global concerns, so did not arrive in time to save his child from David, the way David saved his child from Mathias. Blue resigned from DARPA and landed at Google.

  Every officer who comes to David’s hospital room door he assumes is Colonel Blue arriving to exact revenge, or to ask the questions he should’ve asked when Mathias was alive, or to give David the answers to all that’s haunted him since. Maybe he’s digging up his son’s time capsules, to either eliminate them from the earth or finally take the time to understand his flesh and blood, poring over Mathias’s journals and to-do lists and hard drives as a kind of posthumous parenting. Maybe he’s busy tracking down the babies Mathias placed into those genetically pure surrogate eggs, to either raise that first army of Mathias clones or else destroy them all before they grow up to be too powerful. Maybe that’s the sequel, the next set of characters in the USV multiverse’s unfolding.

  But probably everyone will just move on. Grow up. With time.

  David was waiting, at first, for the world to really end. When it didn’t, he understood the reality of his situation: there was time. Plenty of time. Time to get better. Time to trudge and claw his way back to normalcy. He’d been given a second chance. And why?

  David wonders: What actually happened? What does he believe about himself and Mathias and the almost end of the world? In his quieter moments, David believes Mathias was right. The gods were angry and required a sacrifice. Maybe Mathias was Abraham in this scenario, the true believer, the father they all needed. Maybe David was. Or was he Isaac, just barely saved by the grace of God? Maybe Haley was Isaac, and David the lamb or the ram or whatever it was that took Isaac’s place. Either way, the gods were appeased, and they let the world live another cycle.

  A second chance.

  In the fall, most students returned to Princeton and began the tough transition back to normal lives of overachiever-hood. Even David was reinstated. Some dropped out, never to return. Some, like Bob Badalamenti ended up radicalized. He found refuge in dark corners of the internet, David had heard. Far-right men’s-rights groups camouflaging a deeper-seated hatred—come for the misogyny, stay for the fascism. David wonders if they’ll ever see him again, whether Haley will someday need to close that loop.

  Retention rate took a nosedive in most liberal arts colleges’ U.S. News & World Report rankings. Kids had learned enough. Trade school enrollment went up, though. For many, the USV was a blip, a quick foray into the world of radical college activism and cultish zealotry. For others, Mathias Blue was, and always will be, an honest-to-god savior. So David assumes there are many who would love to see Ultraviolet’s murderer dead. David Fuffman is the USV’s Benedict Arnold. Who wouldn’t try to sneak into David’s hospital room and smother him with pillows? But maybe the USV faithful will agree that the state of his being—the prison of walls and bars that he’ll likely enter, and this other prison of flesh and bone—perhaps that’s pl
enty punishment for evil old David Instead.

  Besides police protection, David’s sister is here to watch over him while he’s confined to hospital beds, wheelchairs, and operating tables. Beth has built a tent in the corner of the room. She stays there as much as the orderlies will allow. She says she’s keeping guard, making sure no one messes with her brother in his sleep. She is protecting him. And she knows everything about the USV. David answers whatever she asks about what he’s done. It’s his way of protecting her.

  He remembers what she said to him, the first day she saw him: “I heard you flew!”

  “I fell,” he clarified. “Grabbity sucks.”

  She hugged him lightly. She promised she’d protect him.

  “How do I look?” David asked, scared of the answer.

  She shrugged and said, “You’ll get there.”

  Even Thoreau was an outcast. Once, he accidentally burned down three hundred acres of forest while trying to make clam chowder. Neighbors called him a damned rascal. He did jail time, moved to the woods, and was the kind of guy who brought laundry home each week for Mom to wash. But every Tuesday he floated a rowboat out to the center of his watery backyard, carrying a compass and sounding line, to survey the bottom of Walden Pond. He needed to fathom how deep it went.

  If you can divine your own backyard, David thinks, you can rule a world. This is David’s new world. This family.

  The best part of being in the hospital is that Haley Roth is only three floors away. They have her downstairs in the maternity ward. She almost lost the baby. All those drugs and lack of proper nutrition. Doctors put her on strict bed rest at first, but now she can move around freely. As freely as any other exhausted nine months pregnant woman ready to pop.

  David still lies awake scared shitless that they’ll lose the baby before it has a chance to fight its way into the world. After all of this. After he’s finally learned the true nature of sacrifice.

  But he still has a lot to learn. He understands this once Haley finally tells him the truth.

  She wheeled into his room one day, or maybe it was night, with that giant fleshball exploding on her stomach. “Watch this, Business-Man,” she said, and popped a little wheelie.

  David responded with anger, masking his fatherly fear. He said something childish and self-righteous, something like “I didn’t throw myself off the roof and save you both only to watch you accidentally kill yourself in a wheelchair.”

  Haley grimaced, and David knew her enough to see she was hiding something.

  The truth: Haley had never been hypnotized or brainwashed, nor paralyzed. She’d never intended to slit her own throat with that axe—was he insane?

  What she’d intended was to kill Mathias Blue.

  And with his own weapon of choice. Once his countdown ended and he got close enough. She’d trained for the moment, knew exactly where to strike. She was fully prepared to save herself and her baby. To save them all.

  Blink. David sees Cap’n Cunt’s knuckles turning white, gripping that purple axe handle.

  “I’m sorry, David, that you’d fashioned me into a maiden that needed saving from some dragon.” She put a gentle hand on his legs, immobile in their hospital bed. “Because, buddy, I am the dragon.”

  He wanted to say “I’m sorry,” but instead he let tears fill his eyes.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re the fucking dragon, too.”

  “But you’d been dosed with Liquid,” David said.

  “I learned a little while ago not to drink just anything at parties.”

  Blink. Haley spits a stream of liquid through pursed lips. When Mathias turns to look at her, she pantomimes like she’s blowing him a kiss.

  She laughed at herself, or at life. There were other dragons, it turned out.

  Dr. Ugs had not dosed her, nor poured hundreds of Dixie cups’ worth of paralyzing Liquid Zero. His Kool-Aid was actual Kool-Aid, the placebo of the masses. He had, however, loaded up a syringe with a lethal dose of phenobarbital, telling Mathias he was administering the same intravenous cocktail Hitler once received: glucose and methamphetamines. The phenobarbital would’ve caused respiratory arrest if David had not beaten Lee and Haley to the punch.

  Maybe this is what actually killed him.

  Blink. A needle punctures skin, and that puff of blood clouds the syringe liquid, a tiny cenote.

  “Even the other pregnant girls were trying to off him,” Haley continued. “They had this whole witches’ coven thing going on, Blue Star Wicca, really leaned into it at the end there. They claim it was the Black Book revenge spell they cast. They think that’s what called you down from the sky.”

  Blink. David looks down from the Spinoza ceiling at surrogates arrayed in a seven-pointed star, a heptagram. The days of creation. A symbol to ward off evil. A sign of perfection.

  “But Nyla wasn’t in on it!” David insisted. “She was shooting at me, I remember!”

  “Nyla could’ve hit a damn raisin if she wanted. She was shooting near you. To stall or keep you cowering on that catwalk, out of everyone’s way.”

  Blink. An errant bullet pops a light fixture ten feet away.

  “What about Owen?!” David was screaming now.

  “I don’t know why he killed himself,” Haley said. “I’m fairly sure he ran up to that catwalk to stop you, to help you, but… he knew he’d failed both of you, failed everyone.”

  “And Britt?”

  “Oh, she was just off her rocker,” Haley said. “Totally gone.”

  “Haley, um, if you all were planning this… Why. Didn’t. Anyone. Tell. Me?”

  “Nobody knew about each other.” Haley shrugged. “We all thought we were the only one that saw through Mathias, that I’m the one who has to take matters into my own hands. Somehow we were all too scared to be the only one challenging his authority. Like, assumed we’d be outted and exiled. I mean, by that point there were thousands of kids that would’ve died for him. Blindly.”

  “I’m so stupid,” he said. “And here I thought we were all so zeroed in with each other.”

  “Maybe we were,” she said.

  Another sickening thought arrives.

  “You were all going to let me burn,” David said. “Exile by fire.”

  She went silent, and her stare stayed fixed. “I’m sorry, David,” she said. “I…I guess, first of all, everyone else believed you were the bad guy, or at least just as dangerous as Mathias.”

  “What did you believe?”

  “That you’re good,” she said, wiggling his toes. “Or you’ve got potential, at least.”

  “Then why didn’t you help me?”

  “I did help you, remember?” She wrapped her fingers around his wrists like a human handcuff. She thumbed his palms. “My job was to save this baby, and for that I had to be willing to sacrifice my own decency and be ready to murder someone. I saw it all playing out and I believed that if I could get rid of Mathias, we might all be okay. You and me and this baby and everyone else. But I also believed about you what you doubted about me,” she said. “I knew you were strong enough to save yourself. I had faith that you were. And you were. You are. You’ve never needed someone else to save you. So I need you to promise me something.”

  She had asked if he believed that he’d walk again. He said he did. She asked him to promise.

  And although, someday, a mixture of time and magic and science and drugs and love would eventually make it happen—this slow evolution from crawling on the shores of Spinoza to sitting to standing to actually walking upright again—David couldn’t actually see this future when he told her yes.

  “Yes, Haley, I promise I will walk again.”

  Sometimes we make promises only to force ourselves to keep them.

  It’s a promise for himself, and for Haley, and for the baby primed to arrive. David promises out of love and out of fear, because he fears what every expectant father fears: that it won’t make it. Or that it’ll just stop breathing one day. Maybe this fear ne
ver ends. Maybe it’ll be born perfect but eighteen years from now be co-opted by some dangerous college cult that forces his child to take psychotropic drugs while zip-lining across fucking bonfires.

  It never ends.

  After David recovers from his final surgeries, all he does is ask the nurses and cops if he can visit Haley. Sometimes they say yes. When David finally arrives at her room she’s usually sleeping. And he’s still on so many drugs. He sleeps all the time, too.

  Blink and it’s day.

  Blink and it’s night.

  Days pass like hours and they keep missing each other. Rowboats in the morning.

  But David is there and awake for the baby’s delivery.

  He lets Haley squeeze his hand as hard as she can, digging in her nails, drawing blood. Watches her writhe and sway on a birthing ball; waddle around the delivery room, veins straining beneath her skin; hanging from a squat bar, her legs splayed like some Yoruban goddess so gravity can do its job. Haley lets him scream along with her. They both refuse to time her contractions, but David can’t help but keep track of the dilation count from zero up to ten centimeters, praying for the numbers to keep climbing. When she gets stuck at eight, David worries that, after all they’ve been through, it’s still possible to get stuck in the dark neck of time.

  David says, “Remember when you once told me that you wished your superpower was to shrink really tiny so you could hide in small spaces and not take up too much space?”

  “What?” she pants, another rush coming on strong.

  “Well, now it’s time for you to get as big as possible. To grow bigger and bigger and bigger.”

  Whether or not she hears him, she reaches full dilation after two more contractions and now it’s time to push. When the baby starts to crown, they wheel David around to the other side to see. That white magic head coming out of nowhere, through a ring of fire, into the world. When the shoulders emerge, David hears the child’s cry mixing with Haley’s last push, and David realizes this thing Haley’s doing is the first truly superhuman feat he’s ever witnessed. She is divinity. Earth shifts on its axis and cycles back on itself at the sound of a primordial howl.