Calibrations

California 2010

It was three o'clock in the morning: the devil's hour. Traffic had died down, and Death Valley was dead silent. There was no one on the road at this time of night, unless you counted the brightly painted Trans Am still stranded on the side of the 395.

Youngblood was fast asleep. He was curled up in the backseat of the car, softly snoring and occasionally whispering something that sounded like "Frank," "I'll never let them hurt you," or "Pepperiwillkillyouifyoudon'tgetoffmerightnow."

Pepper was trying to sleep too, but he had made the grave mistake of sitting next to Poison. "Pepper!" Poison shouted, nudging him awake again.

"What is it?" Pepper said drowsily.

"I just wanted to tell you that they made a movie out of Watchmen, and My Chemical Romance got to cover a Bob Dylan song for it."

"That sounds made up," Pepper said.

"It's not," Poison said.

"I'm pretty sure it is, just like whatever bullshit you told me about some newspaper in England thinking that we were a suicide cult."

"I swear it's all true," Poison said. He grabbed a comic book from under the seat and placed his left hand on it, while raising his right hand. "I swear it on the holy Bible that is Doom Patrol Volume 2, Number 19."

"Whatever," Pepper said.

"And after that, we were abducted by aliens," Poison said. "It was crazy. They took us in their spaceship and everything."

"Okay, now I know you're messing with me."

"I'm not!"

"Can you please just be quiet?" Pepper said, leaning his head against the seat rest. "I haven't gotten a good night's sleep in weeks."

"Oh yeah, I remember that," Poison said. "Those night terrors were awful. Did you get the one where everyone you love dies yet? I think that was the scariest one. It made for some great song material though."

"Will you shut the fuck up?!" Pepper shouted as he shut his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

Meanwhile, Figment and Revenge were wide awake. Figment was in the driver's seat, alternating between staring out the windshield, checking his phone, and wishing that he had coffee. Revenge, on the other hand, was hell-bent on figuring out exactly what was going on.

"So what is your plan anyways?" Revenge asked.

Figment sighed. This was the fourteenth time Revenge had asked the exact same question, and for the fourteenth time, Figment looked up from his phone and gave him the exact same answer. "You'll see," Figment said.

"What kind of an answer is that?" Revenge asked, but Figment didn't respond. Revenge turned to look out the window, watching a tumbleweed slowly roll by. "Some vodka would be really nice right about now."

"No, Revenge," Figment said. "That's not happening."

"Maybe you'd loosen up a little if you had something to drink," Revenge said.

"Still no," Figment said.

Figment looked out the windshield and searched for Ray, but he was nowhere to be found. He tried to hold onto a shred of hope, but Youngblood was right: Ray should have shown up hours ago. Something awful must have happened to him while he was time traveling. That was the only way to explain why he hadn't come yet. Figment took a deep breath and looked for Ray one more time, but he was starting to worry that they really were stuck here.

Figment wiped away his tears as he realized what this meant. Ray Toro, one of his closest friends, was gone forever. Sure, he had hidden the fact that he was an agent of the Watch from him, but that didn't cancel out all of the years that they'd been friends. Figment had written songs with him, he'd played shows with him, he'd left him behind at a countless number of truck stops, and now, Ray had lost his life trying to do him a favor. He wondered what he was going to do now, how he was going to go on without his best friend.