Cole still isn’t sure what a ‘trigger’ is, or how he’s supposed to explain one. “Well I ‘Hulked out’ right after I got punched in the face, and was about to fall unconscious. So…I guess that’s my trigger?”
Brodie barks out a laugh, holding his belly. “That sounds like a shitty trigger, bro. I’d definitely try to find a new one if I were you.”
Dia shoves Brodie’s shoulder, pressing him against the column. “Don’t be a dick,” she scolds him. “Cole here is a noob. He’s never manifested before tonight. Didn’t even know he could.”
“Well he’s come to the right place then.” Brodie pads down the hall and rounds a corner. Dia motions for Cole to follow.
In the expansive kitchen a young girl sits at a table, clacking away at a laptop.
“See that morose looking chick who’s glued to her computer?” Dia says. “That’s my little sister, Paige.”
Paige glances up from behind square-framed glasses and studies Cole, disapproving eyes trailing from his running shoes up to his black tank top. She bears a striking resemblance to Dia with high cheekbones and piercing dark eyes, but her hair is shorter, chopped on an angle at her jaw line, cut shorter towards the back. Her bangs are looped behind her ear, streaked with purple. “Dia, we’ve discussed this before. No more bringing strays back to the penthouse. You see this,” she motions around her with both arms outstretched, gesturing towards nothing in particular. “This is what the comic books refer to as a ‘secret hideout’. You know, like the Bat Cave? If you keep dragging randoms in here it ceases to be a secret.”
“He saved my life tonight – I think that earns him a pass.”
Paige rises, folding her arms tightly across her chest. “And why would your life have needed saving, might I ask?”
“It was just a little run-in with the Collectors,” Dia scoffs. “No big deal. We handled it.”
“Damn it,” Paige shouts, slamming a palm into the table, “what have we discussed? There is no—”
“Going out and having fun,” Dia interrupts, throwing her hands apart in frustration. “Socializing, drinking,being young and frivolous? I know, you’ve told me a zillion times. But just because you’re allergic to human interaction it doesn’t mean that I am, too.”
The two seem to have an oddly calibrated relationship. At first Cole takes them for mismatched roommates who periodically grate on each other's nerves; not uncommon for adult sisters living under the same roof, he supposes. But it’s more than that. Paige, the younger of the two by what looks like half a decade, seems to take on the tone of a perpetually exasperated mother when dealing with her older sibling. In retaliation Dia seems to relish in taunting her like a petulant teenager, mocking her concerns and pushing the boundaries of her patience. It’s bizarre and tense and more than a little awkward to be adjacent to.
Cole’s eye dart nervously between the siblings, wondering if he should quietly back-pedal, retreating into the hallway. He’s not great with confrontation. Brodie seems indifferent, rummaging through the refrigerator as they continue to bicker.
“I don’t like this,” Paige says, talking about Cole as if he’s not in the room. Donovan is suddenly eight years old again, listening to his mother discuss his lack of grammatical skills with his second-grade teacher. The urge to retreat tightens his chest.
“He’s one of the good guys,” Dia assures her sister, “I owe him.”
“Then pay him off and release him back into the wild.” Paige pats down her jeans, front and back. “I think I have a couple pills left.”
Brodie continues to search the fridge, bottles clanging. “He’s not here to score,” he says offhandedly. “He doesn’t even know what a trigger is. He’s a noobler.”
Paige casts her sister a skeptical glance, and Dia nods back reassuringly.
“Fine,” Paige says, half-convinced and half-defeated. “You can keep him. Just don’t let him touch anything.” She drops into her chair, readjusts her glasses and glues her fingers back to her keyboard.
Brodie chuckles, head still inside the fridge. “Paige is the brains of the operation. We all have our talents: Dia has the money, I have the looks, and she’s the computer nerd.”
Dia rolls her eyes. “What he meant to say is that Paige spends a lot of her time researching, trying to find others like us.”
“So how do you track these people down?” Cole asks.
Paige removes her glasses and lets out a heavy sigh. “I run a website from a re-routed IP address. I spend most of the day researching unusual news stories, and I scan forums trying to connect with people who claim to have manifested or witnessed an event.”
“So do you get a lot of replies?”
“Once in a while we get credible information,” Paige replies flatly, her fingernails clacking the plastic keys as she speaks. “ Sometimes it’s about Collectors, manifestations, or chemical compounds that can help us trigger and maintain our transformations. But most of the time it’s just guys sending me pictures of their dicks.”
Brodie chuckles. “Ah, the miracles of technology. But before we get into all that, you should probably see something first.” He pulls a silver beer can from the fridge and tosses it to Cole, and shoves several more into the deep pockets of his cargo shorts. “Let’s head to the screening room and we can get the new guy up to speed on current events.”
Cole follows Brodie down a long narrow corridor with Dia and Paige trailing a few steps behind. He hears them exchange heated words in a hushed tone. It’s inaudible, but Paige sounds significantly more agitated, with her whispers coming out like a hiss; a parent scolding their child in a crowded movie theater. His palms slicken once again and he wipes them off on his shorts. If they were going to kill me, Cole thinks, surely they’d do it on the rooftop. Toss me to the concrete fifty-stories below, or blow my brains out where the rain could wash away the evidence. Not inside their fancy apartment…especially given the snowflake white carpets and pristine matching walls. The cleaning bill would be horrendous. Though if Dia has an unlimited budget maybe they don’t care?
They reach a set of mahogany double doors with polished brass handles. Brodie flings them open to reveal a warmly lit room, lined with plush raspberry-colored recliners and matching velvet curtains draped across the entire far wall. Cole steps inside, eyes trailing along the floor. It’s carpeted with a gold and black pattern; swirling flourishes like the back of a playing card, and rope lighting that trails along the wainscoting. If he’s going to die at least it’ll be in one of the fancier rooms in the house.
With everyone inside, Brodie pulls the doors closed and flicks a light switch to the left of the frame, plunging the room into darkness. Cole swallows hard in a dry throat. A moment later Paige’s face illuminates with the faint lunar glow of her phone; three rapid taps of her finger later and the velvet curtains pull apart, the billboard-sized screen behind it bursting with color.
Cole blinks twice, adjusting his eyes. It’s a picture. A low resolution photograph of tourists running from a fire in the middle of a busy street. Inside the fire is the pale outline of a man, writhing and flailing. “Is t-that what I think it is,” he stammers, unable to avert his eyes. This is some sick joke, he thinks…they’re going to show me pictures of people being tortured to death, douse me in gasoline, toss a match and laugh about it.
“Some dude roasting like a marshmallow at a campfire?” Brodie says, popping the tab on a beer with a soft hiss. “Yup, pretty much.” He drops into a front row seat and throws one leg over the arm rest, taking a long swig.
Cole glances over to see Paige and Dia are seated as well. Paige flicks here eyes up towards him, and then down at the empty seat next to her, and then back to him. He takes the cue and sits down.
“Around seven years ago there were reports all over the world of some really strange stuff happening,” Paige explains flatly, as if under duress. She swipes the face of her phone and images shift by on the screen, like a bizarre (and somewhat gruesome) PowerPoint prese
ntation. “Spontaneous human combustions in Copenhagen, cars floating ten feet above the street in Mexico City, an iceberg forming in the Mojave desert. And it just got weirder as time went on.”
The images are mostly unconvincing, Cole thinks. Pixelated cell phone shots taken in poor lighting, badly out of focus. Then Paige pauses momentarily on one particularly persuasive shot: a clear photograph showing the now-infamous melting incident at the Great Wall of China; an alleged paranormal phenomenon that took place just inside the southern border of Mongolia back in 2007. A pair of European backpackers snapped several shots of the iconic wall sagging like a melted candle; an enormous swath of the twenty-five foot high structure appear to be partially liquefied, dripping down to the earth in Volvo-sized globs. This stunning image had been an internet sensation for several years, being discussed on forums and debated by conspiracy theorists ad nauseum. And of course, like everyone else with a functional internet connection, Cole had seen it before.
“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 par
t 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…”
Vs Reality Page 6
