The Dark Restarter

by Sean McMahon

  Malcolm tried to scream in agony, but the pain was so unbearable he simply couldn’t vocalise it. Instead, he compartmentalised the agony, regaining control of what was left of his out-of-phase body, as he jumped across the room, landing with a thud against the door to his prison.

  The officer was speaking frantically into the radio attached to his chest, but it was all faint muffles and mumbles to Malcolm at this point. He had simply been here too long to hear the words of the living anymore, with the exception of that damn CD player of course.

  Doctors and nurses flocked to the door, and Malcolm pressed his temporally displaced body against it, the life that was ebbing away from his past-self still allowing him to retain enough of a charge to block their access. The mist grew denser, and shredded deep into his back, clawing at his tendons and bones, ripping through them effortlessly.

  He released a guttural scream, as those outside the door managed to open it just an inch.

  Malcolm glared at them, his eye sockets flashing violently with a familiar red energy, acting as an unseen warning to the doctors, to death, and to time itself.

  ‘Release me!’ he growled, in a voice that he didn’t recognise. A voice that seemed to shake the room, along with the door, as the mesh glass began to crack, and those trying to enter the room recoiled in confusion, the released pressure on their side of the door causing it to close with a violent slam.

  The police officer gingerly stepped closer to the door, shining a torch through the glass, and Malcolm growled again, this time causing the glass to shatter outwards. Malcolm thought he could see the flash of a blue garment behind the officer, being worn by a familiar face he couldn’t quite identify, but the agonising pain he was experiencing filed it into a section of his brain that was, at best, reserved for mere afterthoughts.

  And as his past-self left the land of the living, so too did his Restarter-self, time savagely ripping him to pieces, his mangled body collapsing on the floor, disintegrating like sand being sucked up by an invisible hoover until, finally, every single trace of Malcolm was gone.

  It was in that precise moment, that Malcolm had achieved what no Restarter had ever done before; he had committed trans-dimensional suicide. The act creating a singularity in space-time so gargantuan, that it was a paradox only a Restarter could fix.

  In fact, only two people in the entire universe stood any chance of undoing what he had just done.

  There was just one problem. Harold and Kara were living in a new timeline. Their unique skillset not so much forgotten as erased entirely.

  The “Restarters” didn’t exist.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Little Coffee Shop of Horrors

  Saturday, October 6th, 2018, 11:17am

  The room was devoid of the natural chatter and clinking cutlery. The only noise that cut through the eerie silence was from the speakers above them, the jaunty jazz that had been playing becoming garbled and disjointed until, following an ominous crackle, the music petered out altogether for a brief second, suddenly being replaced with the sound of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”.

  That alone was odd in itself, but not enough to cause such a sickening sense of foreboding between the two friends, nor the extremely disorientating wave of unexplainably mutual déjà vu.

  As multiple timelines collided – each one vying for dominance – they found themselves confused as to why they were even in a coffee shop. Their reason for meeting momentarily elusive, as their memories were partially altered, before being returned to them.

  ‘Kara,’ said Hal, pointing behind her.

  Kara turned around, resting an arm on her chair to balance herself, her jaw dropping as she drank in the sight before them; an elderly woman was pouring milk from a small jug into her giant coffee cup. Not in and of itself anything to be alarmed about. Hal and Kara’s cause for alarm was more due to the fact that the milk was suspended between the cup and jug, not quite hitting the caffeinated liquid within, but not fully leaving the jug either.

  They quickly realised that the effect they were witnessing wasn’t merely localised to that woman alone; everyone around them was suspended in a state of frozen motion, seemingly as utterly oblivious to what was happening to them as they were completely unmoving.

  ‘What’s happening,’ whispered Kara, as she stood up and walked to the woman with the milk jug and gingerly pushed her finger into the suspended dairy waterfall.

  Her finger passed through without any more resistance than a trickle of milk should have done under the force of her touch, but as she pulled her finger back, the hole it had generated in the wall of white remained.

  A river of fog began to spill from the front entrance of the coffee shop, under the legs of the patrons, and rose above the countertop, flowing up and over the baristas who were unknowingly indulging in an impromptu coffee break of their own from their daily duties.

  Hal and Kara both experienced a simultaneous ice-pick migraine, causing Hal to grip his head with his hands in agony, with Kara being less fortunate and falling hard to her knees. An intense ringing noise filled not so much their eardrums, as it did the actual synapses in their brains.

  Mercifully, the sensation dissipated as quickly as it arrived, and as the chorus of the song playing through the speakers began, the music seemed to rise in volume, signalling that the worst was yet to come.

  And so began the first recorded example of what they would later discover to be a Global Restart Event.

  *

  The table Hal was resting his arms on was the first object to explode. Shards of wood erupted beneath him, oddly travelling along a horizontal trajectory, causing his arms to fall partially through the table. Inconceivably, time then proceeded to move backwards, as the table repaired itself, encasing – and consequently trapping – Hal’s wrists in the most ridiculous form of handcuffs he’d personally ever seen.

  ‘Erm, Kara,’ said Hal, trying to pull his hands from the now solidified table. ‘I’ve just been Jumanji’d. Little help?’

  Kara moved closer, the insanity of the situation taking a temporary backseat as she felt around his wrists, and looked under the table. Hal’s fingers were balling into fists then relaxing again, as if he was trying to force his way free, as she caught sight of an odd object attached to the underside of the reformed stockade.

  ‘What the–’ she began, automatically reaching out for the onyx-coloured shape, a blue light swishing across it indicating it was a device of some kind.

  She was stopped in her tracks, as they both experienced another intense migraine.

  As the pain slowly receded, Kara suddenly recalled flashes of a past life she, thus far, had no coherent recollection of. It felt like remembering a forgotten dream; flashes of blue, a lodge exploding, her head colliding with a kitchen cabinet…

  She shook her head violently, in an attempt to cast out the distraction, the device no longer of interest.

  ‘You feel that?’ said Kara in a panicked voice.

  ‘Gah,’ groaned Hal, trying to fight the urge to vomit, knowing that doing so at this precise moment in time would add an unwanted grossness to his increasingly turbulent relationship with the universe. ‘Yeah, flashes,’ said Hal. ‘Memories maybe?’

  “More like dreams,” he thought.

  The elderly street magician behind Kara with the milk was the next to get the brunt of whatever on Earth was happening, as the jug she was holding exploded. Ceramic pieces flew outwards and upwards to the ceiling, which apparently had just been promoted to what now constituted as being the ground.

  ‘Woah, woah, woah!’ exclaimed Kara, as she too was pulled towards the ceiling above her. She clawed frantically at the table that was holding Hal hostage, but couldn’t secure her grip, and landed with a sickly thud on the ceiling next to the shards of ceramic. Rolling onto her back, she looked down at Hal with an expression that seemed to suggest she was asking for help.

  Hal shrugged his shoulders helpfully, as the woman in front of him suddenly became a magnet
for the fog, which coiled around her, then set about dissolving her body like a malignant acid. The woman’s body, becoming little more than ethereal sands of an hour glass, trickled upwards towards Kara’s face, causing Kara to splutter. She attempted to hold her breath, turning her head to the side, as the woman below her disintegrated entirely.

  Kara spat out what could be described as old-lady granules, which travelled a few centimetres away from her, then glided back up into her face. She fought the violent urge to throw up the contents of her stomach, knowing that doing so would result in an unfortunate gravitational boomerang effect.

  ‘I just inhaled old lady,’ said Kara grimly.

  ‘I think they prefer the term mortality-conscious,’ said Hal, in a display of misinformed political correctness.

  ‘Why would they prefer that?!’

  ‘I don’t know Kar’, older people can be funny like that. Did it taste like couscous?’ asked Hal with genuine interest. ‘It looked like couscous.’

  Kara was about to offload a scowl, but it was cut short as gravity released its grip and she fell to the floor. She pulled herself up, slamming her fists onto Hal’s table.

  ‘We need to get out of here!’

  Hal nodded in quick agreement, as the air electrified around them, and an arc of blue lightning shot across the room. They both ducked their heads down to avoid being struck by it, as the bolt of concentrated energy collided with the stationary body of a staff member, causing him to erupt into a billion shards of blue, glitter-like confetti.

  ‘Must go faster, must go faster!’ said Hal, in his best Jeff Goldblum voice, despite knowing his efforts would have been lost on his friend.

  Though static in density, the fog moved onwards, marking new victims, as the lightning strikes became more frequent, erasing everything from coffee machines, the photo frames lining the walls, and randomly selected chairs and tables from existence without discrimination. A young girl, still frozen in the action of taking money from a customer from behind the till erupted into pieces, her arms flying savagely across the shop, before slowing down, then returning back to her torso making her whole once again.

  ‘Kara, I’m parked down the road near my office. Take my keys, Grab what’s in the boot.’

  ‘What about you?’ said Kara, her unwillingness to leave him here conflicting with her desire to stay alive.

  ‘Just get out of here, I’ll be fine!’

  She nodded, realising that having the car running wasn’t such a terrible idea, then made her way to the entrance of the coffee shop.

  ‘The keys Kara!’ groaned Hal, jerking his head backwards towards the jacket resting over the back of his chair.

  ‘Right, keys,’ she said, jogging backwards and rummaging around in his pockets until she gained purchase on them.

  She ran down the narrow gangway back towards the door, but stopped in her tracks, as another ripple tore through reality, and yet another bolt of blue plasma appeared from nowhere. She dived over the counter to her right to avoid it, as it obliterated another customer.

  Hal, meanwhile, had an idea, and stood up, the table weighing him down tremendously. Not for the first time in his life, he cursed himself for never making time for the gym.

  ‘You okay Kar’?’

  The wanton destruction resulted in a vast amount of plates, cups and spoons to fall over her, which were now floating happily, caught between deaccelerated time and…somewhere in-between. She nudged a roaming plate that was floating past her face with her index finger, sending it spiralling off in a different direction.

  ‘Still alive,’ she shouted back.

  Hal pulled the table up like a shield, and gingerly backed up towards the exit.

  ‘By the power of Grayskull,’ he mumbled, his voice shaking with adrenaline with each step, as his eyes darted around waiting for the tell-tale shimmer in the air that preceded an energy burst.

  Finally, the air around him began to crackle. A small sound behind his left ear that was near impossible to hear, what with both the music and rustling wind attacking their senses, was all he needed. Using the weight of the table to aid him in spinning quickly, he faced towards the incoming barrage that was manifesting behind him.

  Hal grinned, as if directly challenging the universe itself to a duel.

  ‘Baa baa!’ he sang just a little too enthusiastically, perfectly in time with the music, as a bolt of vicious lightning materialised from nowhere and shot towards him like a homing missile.

  He brought the table up high above his head, digging his heels in, preparing to take the brunt of the force as it collided with the table. Shards of wood splintered outwards, slowly fizzling into nothingness, like blue-tinged newspaper on a burning fire.

  A small rectangular object no larger than a smart-phone landed with a clatter by his feet, looking notably scorched thanks to its run in with the bolt of lightning. Blue lights blinked half-heartedly around the curved edges of the device, until finally giving up altogether. Hal tapped the object with his foot, and it promptly disintegrated.

  He didn’t have time to wonder why it had been attached to the underside of the table, and instead focused on the immediate win; he was finally free. This seemed to anger the fog, which released another customer it was absorbing across the room, leaving only their torso and legs behind, as well as a hand suspended in the air holding the coffee cup they were drinking from, and made a beeline for him. It was an ugly site, the internal organs left exposed yet thankfully also cauterised.

  Hal jumped up onto a nearby table, creating some distance from the floor, or rather the fog that was slithering across it. Nothing about it looked like it would do him any good if it touched him. Treating the floor as if it were lava, he jumped onto an armchair, then slid across another set of tables which would have tipped under his weight were they not frozen in time, and made his way closer to the exit.

  “Dammit,” he thought, feeling utterly gutted Kara hadn’t seen him pull that off.

  Another bolt of lightning shot out from a shimmering anomaly in the air, and he fell down into a nearby sofa to avoid its wrath, as it collided with a child in a push-buggy. The energy had a different effect on the baby, bringing it back into the present.

  No longer frozen in time, the child began to cry, as another blast shot out and disintegrated the child, like granules of blue sugar dissolving into the coffee of infinity. With the child now gone forever, the pram exploded comically.

  ‘Holy shit, that baby just exploded!’ shouted Hal.

  Kara had made progress, and was now standing at the door.

  ‘If you’re done taking a break on that sofa, let’s go!’ she yelled.

  ‘Such a backseat…’ said Hal, sensing there was another word that should have wrapped up that sentence. One which felt both alien and familiar to him all at once.

  There was no time to dwell on that, and he pulled himself up, as tables, chairs, and a Bakewell tart exploded around him like proximity mines, crumbs and furniture debris suspended in the air around him.

  Finally at the door, they slammed it closed behind them and took a moment, pressing their backs against the large windows situated either side of it.

  The glass behind Hal exploded inwards, pulling him back into the coffee shop. A few seconds later he exited back out through the front door, dusting himself off and showing signs of more than a little embarrassment.

  Kara chuckled at him, and he shot her a look indicating they would never speak about that moment again.

  As they looked out across the street before them, it was clear the incident they were experiencing was not localised to just the coffee shop, as arcs of lightning spewed out, indiscriminately atomising everything and anything that got in its way. Time, it seemed, hadn’t just ground to a halt inside the shop; it had stopped everywhere.

  ‘How is this possible,’ whispered Kara in awe.

  ‘Well, global warming just got real,’ said Hal. ‘Either that or CERN fucked up in a big way.’

  ‘W
hy aren’t we affected?’ said Kara, her eyes wide with wonder.

  He knew she was referring to the other people in the Little Coffee shop of Horrors they had just barely escaped from.

  ‘I know just as much as you Kar’. I’m Jon Snow right now, I-’

  ‘Know nothin’…she said, finishing his sentence, unaware it was even a reference.

  ‘You watch Game of Thron–’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I need new material,’ said Hal.

  ‘You must recycle your jokes a lot if I’m starting to use them.’

  He nodded guiltily, despite not remembering dropping that reference to Kara before.

  ‘We need to get to my car,’ said Hal urgently.

  ‘Will it even work while all this is going on?’

  ‘Good point.’ He grimaced. There was no way of knowing if the engine would even start, what with reality caving in on itself. ‘But it’s what’s inside it that matters.’

  And off they ran. Past the countless mannequins that surrounded them, towards the only plan they currently had; reaching Hal’s car before they were engulfed by the thickening whiteness that was closing in on them from all sides like a sentient tsunami.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Raiders of the Lost Car Park

  Saturday, October 6th, 2018, 11:17am

  As Hal and Kara darted amongst the countless people still frozen in time, they made their way down a narrow alley and pressed their back against the walls of a cobbled archway, trying to catch their breath.

  ‘What the hell is happening?!’ panted Kara.

  ‘Aliens, maybe?’ offered Hal, equally short of breath. ‘I bet it’s aliens.’

  Kara was about to laugh, but saw more than a flicker of seriousness in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that! We don’t know it’s not aliens.’

  ‘It’s not aliens, Hal.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’