Vs Reality (7 page)

“Check this out, bro,” Brodie says, a bolt of excitement sparking his voice.
“This was
totally
a watershed moment.”

Cole gestures to the screen. “I thought those events were all exposed as hoaxes, like crop circles and UFOs? My sixteen-year-old cousin can make it look like that shit is happening with an app on her iPhone.”

Dia pivots in her seat. “Yeah, but none of
this
shit was Photoshopped or digitally altered. It all really happened.”

Paige swipes to the next slide, which shows a squat, heavy-set man standing at the base of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. A small group of people surround him, jaws hanging slack. “And what about this one: a suicide attempt in 2009 where some crazy dude jumped from the sky bridge: right out the glass window, and more than five-hundred and fifty feet
straight down
to the sidewalk below.”

Brodie leaps from his chair and blocks the projector, casting a pitch black shadow across the screen. “The guy hits the ground, bounces back to his feet and walks off in front of two dozen tourists. There were like
twenty
photos and videos of it. The next day the dude disappears, and no one knows where he went. It didn’t even make the nightly news.
Boom
– totally watershed.”

Paige shoos him out of the way with a brush of her hand and lets out a frustrated groan. “Brodie, sit your dumb ass down. And why do you always use the word ‘watershed’? I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

“Okay, Paige,” he scoffs. “Like you know what
every
word in the English language means. You’ve literally used the word ‘literally’ wrong, like, a billion times. If you ever got it right,
that
would totally be watershed.”

Dia rolls her eyes. “Alright kids, settle down. Don’t make me put you in a time-out.” She was used to refereeing these verbal sparring matches between her sister and her roommate, which ranged in importance from arguments over pizza toppings to disputes revolving around 1980s video game trivia. She pivots back towards Cole before continuing.  “
Anyway
, there were multiple reports coming in from all different sources, but every blog, news site and message board that reported them quickly disappeared. 
Nobody
was talking. Even the pictures and videos were scrubbed from the web like it had never happened.”

Cole knows what he saw in the alley. Unless he’s still experiencing one of his vivid dreams (no doubt brought on by multiple undiagnosed concussions) he’s pretty sure that
he’s
one of these anomalies they’re talking about. And so is everyone sitting in the room around him. “So the laws of the universe were being…bent?” he asks, glancing around him, now fairly confident they’re not planning to execute him.

Paige nods. “Gravity, thermodynamics, the physical properties of matter – everything we understood about the universe wasn’t just being bent. It was unraveling.”

“By people like us,” Cole says matter-of-factly.

Paige nods again, heavy lids blinking slowly.

“Okay, so if this is happening
everywhere
, all over the world, why wouldn’t the government warn us? Isn’t that what the New World Council is there for: to tell us if there is a virus or an outbreak or whatever?” The first lucid thought that drifted through Cole’s mind after he’d come to grips with this notion of ‘reality-bending’ was that this couldn’t have been an isolated incident. If one person had done it – if
he
had done it – so had others. Probably many, many times. How this had all been kept a secret seemed more far-fetched than the preternatural events themselves. A celebrity couldn’t take a crap without someone posting a high-definition video of it thirty seconds later, so how are real-life superheroes being kept under wraps?

“Nobody knows for sure,” Brodie says. “Maybe the government was just covering up because they accidentally
caused
whatever the hell it is that makes us trigger. Or maybe we’re all just part of some big crazy experiment they’re running.”

With a tap of her phone Paige re-illuminates the room, washing out the projected image on the screen. “Some people think it’s aliens,” she says flatly. “Others think the Earth is pissed off and it’s trying to get rid of us. Maybe a god got bored and decided to screw with us, if you believe in that sort of thing. Who the hell knows?”

Dia interjects with a pronounced sigh that lets everyone know she’s disinterested with their theories. “What we
do
know is that we’re being rounded up, one at a time, and brought somewhere that the Collectors refer to as ‘The Basement’. Almost every time someone triggers  for the first time these agents are right there, ready to snatch them. Everything else is just speculation right now, but we’re looking for more answers.”

“So can anyone manifest?” Cole asks, unconsciously running his fingertips along the back of his arm – the same arm where the coiling snake tattoo had taken form.

Paige shakes her head, looping a purple streak of bangs behind her ear before it falls across her face. “No, as far as we know only a small percentage of people have the capability. But they can’t just do it whenever they want. To manifest they need a catalyst of some kind. A trigger.”

With the room now illuminated, Dia flips open a small mirror and starts re-applying make-up to the bruise on her cheek using a small pad. “Like when you cleverly used your face to attack Heinreich’s fist,” she adds cheerfully.

Cole can’t help but laugh. “But I’ve been slammed in the face before. A
lot
of times, actually. Why would I manifest tonight…what was so special about
that
punch, in
that
alley?”

“All we know for sure,” Paige explains, “is that the first time we trigger it’s almost always caused by a traumatic or highly stressful incident: like an overdose, a painful injury, or watching someone die. These events cause a massive spike in adrenaline, cortical; our brain chemistry literally changes who we are in that moment.”

Cole raises his eyebrows. “Huh. So if I want to trigger I just need someone to try and kill me? That should be easy enough, especially if I keep hanging around with Dia.”

She continues to conceal her bruise, pretending to ignore the comment, but her lips curl at the edges.

“The first time it happens spontaneously, in a wild burst of energy. It’s the biochemical equivalent of a lightning strike.” Paige continues, “It’s unpredictable, and it’s an almost impossible experience to replicate. But if you want to manage it – to
control
it – you need something to adjust your brain chemistry accordingly.” She gestures to her right. “And that’s where our irritating sidekick Brodie comes in.”

Brodie leans forward in his recliner. “First of all, I’m nobody’s sidekick, lady.” He turns towards Cole. “Okay, so here’s the short version of the story: a couple years ago I get accepted into Princeton.”

“He just waits around all day for opportunities to tell people that,” Paige groans.

“
Anyway
,” Brodie says, firing Paige an icy glance, “as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, being a chemistry major in an Ivy League University turned out to be a little more expensive than I’d previously anticipated. Especially after my parents cut me off mid-semester. So I created a part time job to pay for my tuition fees.”

“So you were a drug dealer,” Cole said; a statement, not a question. The words sounded uglier coming out of his mouth than they did in his head.

Brodie shrugs. “Well, that’s one way to put it I suppose. I preferred to think of myself as a ‘freelance pharmaceutical designer and distributor’…but that’s not the point of this story, bro.”

“Sorry,” Cole says with a tiny wince. “Go on.”

“So, one day I’m sitting in my dorm, running quality assurance tests on some of the merchandise. I must have miscalculated the dosage because I passed out, cracking my head on the edge of my desk. I wake up and suddenly things start floating around my room: my desk gets stuck to the ceiling; my chair and lamp sailed out the window. Even
I
was floating, just hanging there, suspended in mid-air. It’s like I was screwing with the entire universe just by changing my brain chemistry, but the effects were localized to my room.”

“So you accidentally figured out how to make a pill that works as a trigger? And
that’s
how you can all keep manifesting whenever you want.”

Brodie cracks a wide grin and kicks out the footrest on his recliner, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Exactamundo. Good find, Dia. For a noob he catches on pretty quick.”

Paige pulls a transparent plastic bag from her pocket and tears it open, extracting a single blue pill. She holds it up between her thumb and forefinger, allowing Cole to take a closer look.

“This is my own personal creation,” Brodie says, his voice thick with pride. “I call it ‘Muse’: one-hundred percent guaranteed inspiration. It pulls the trigger and lets you hold your manifestation. The only side-effect I can find is that you get the munchies after a few hits…but that could have just been from a couple other tests I was running.”

Paige drops the pill into Cole’s palm. He squints at the tiny capsule, as if looking closer will reveal something special about its contents. But there is nothing unusual about it, as far as he can tell. It could be an aspirin if not for the distinctive, bright blue color. “Back in the alley,” he whispers, eyes laser focused on the pill, “when I grew, became more muscular…it scared the shit out of me. But it was
amazing
. And for the first time in forever, I actually felt…”

“Alive?” Dia cuts in. She angles her handheld mirror towards him, peeking at him in the reflection.

Cole glances back at her but didn’t say a word. He could see from the spark in her eye that he doesn’t need to – she feels the same way. “So you’re saying that I pop one of these Muse pills and I go back to the way I was: the muscles, the tattoos…?”

“That’s right,” Brodie says. “Pop a pill and you’re a superhero. It’s that easy.”

Cole turns back towards Dia. “So why didn’t you take one?”

“Sorry?” She snaps her compact close, sending a small plume of flesh-colored powder into the surrounding air.

“In the alley,” Cole asks. “You didn’t take one of those Muse pills. You pulled out and a knife and sliced—”

“Right, right…” She says quickly. She nervously adjusts her wrist straps – the leather bands that conceal the scarred flesh beneath. “I thought I had one in my purse, but I didn’t. Turns out I left my stash here in the penthouse so I had to improvise.”

Paige’s stoic, porcelain doll face creases into a small frown. She opens her mouth but whatever she’s about to say is cut off by a ringing phone.

Everyone pats themselves down, trying to detect the source of the ringtone. It’s Cole’s.

“Who is it?” Paige asks flatly, rudely.

Cole glances at his device. Jens’s ridiculous smiling face winks onto his camera’s display screen, a wave of blond hair flopping over one eye. “A friend.”

“That guy you were at the club with?” Dia asks. The phone continues to ring.

“Yeah, he’s probably wondering where I disappeared to.”

Paige bolts from her seat and clutches Cole’s wrist before he even notices she’s standing. “Put it on speaker,” she says, with a sharp inflection that lets him know that he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.

Another ring.

“All right…” Cole says nervously.

He pressed his thumb into the speaker icon.

“Hey buddy,” Cole says, his eyes still fixed on Paige’s. “So…how are things?”

“Good, good,” Jens replies after a small throat-clearing cough. “Look, um, the Buick has a flat and I need some help changing the spare. I’m useless with this type of thing, and if I don’t get her home before sunrise my dad is going to
lose
it
.”

“Sure. Where are you?”

“The warehouse behind Platinum. I rolled her in here to get her off the streets. Didn’t want to risk getting towed.”

Paige reaches out and pressed her thumb into Cole’s phone, tapping the mute button.

“Does he normally sound like this?” she asks, as if it’s a perfectly normal question.

“Does he sound like a human male in his early 20s?” Cole says, leaning back in his seat. “Yes…I suppose so?”

“His pitch, his cadence, his overall tone,” Paige fumes, leaning uncomfortably close. “Does he normally talk like that or not? Is it unusual?”

“I don’t know!” Cole says defensively, pitching as far back in his recliner as the chair will allow. “Sure. Maybe?”

“Come on,” Dia says, rising from her chair. “
Relax
, Paige. We don’t know that Jens is with them.”

“We don’t know that he’s
not,
” she fires back. “You’ve already done more than enough tonight so let
me
handle this, all right?”

Who would Jens possibly be with, Cole wonders. And why would it matter?