by Sean McMahon
For the first time in years, he felt frozen. This was not supposed to happen. It was bad enough keeping his entourage in line, without having to worry about his past-self going off-script.
‘I’m not sure we can,’ he said, a crack of actual fear in his voice.
‘Looks like past-you is planning a Time Heist of his own,’ said Hal, showing just a touch more excitement than the fear he should have been demonstrating. ‘Luckily for you–’
‘We know how to own that shit,’ said Kara, pulling a pose akin to that of an action hero that would have been best served by an editor. One who could cut to the next scene where the action was actually happening.
But this was real life, and the reality was that amidst Fearne’s sigh, she was standing there watching this nonsense unfold waiting for someone to explain what the hell was going on.
‘You do realise,’ said Fearne, ‘how ridiculous you two look when you set up some sort of cliff-hanger, and then just have to stand there, right? I mean, who are you even talking t–’
‘Shh!’ said Hal suddenly, staring behind her, causing her to turn around with fright. ‘You hear that?’ he whispered.
‘Hear what?’ said Fearne, wondering if their sanctuary was finally, after all this time, about to be invaded by a Dark Restarter after all.
‘That’s a scene break!’ said Hal.
‘Oh, sweet Lord,’ replied Fearne, turning back to face him and being greeted by the sight of Hal pulling a thousand-yard stare up into the sky for dramatic effect. ‘You are such a dic–’
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Rat-Catcher’s Gambit
179th Restart – Friday, August 24th, 2018, 2:57pm
'More of a new chapter entirely, actually,’ the Dark Restarter proclaimed, standing in the back of Kevin’s truck, finishing one of what was now an innumerable quantity of self-aggrandising monologues that he was accustomed to indulging in, via the medium of shouting to his alive-self.
Having mere moments ago instructed himself to drive the vehicle just like he had acquired it; that is to say, as if he had stolen it, he continued onwards with his two-man show, painfully aware he was both performer and audience.
‘Yes,’ he repeated for no one’s benefit but his own. ‘Not a fresh start. Nor a fresh restart. But a chance to start a new life entirely.’
He was feeling elated.
Trying to manipulate the past had been challenging enough, but the arrival of the time-travelling counterparts he was trying so earnestly to eradicate had exacerbated matters far beyond his ability to predict. The introduction of these personified wildcards led to him reaching an unpredictable, and therefore potentially game-changing decision; by driving his physical self over the boundary line – and by extension, away from this cursed place – he would finally be free. After all, how could he restart, if he wasn’t here in corporeal form to be restarted?
Malcolm grimaced, hating himself just a little bit for using the term of his enemies. But, secretly, he had to admit it was better than constantly having to sound intelligent by utilising so many synonyms. In the end he conceded it was better to stop wasting valuable thinking time on the matter.
*
Hal walked calmly onto the dusty road and squared up to the Restart Point, marvelling at how boring and unspectacular it looked, even from a mere several feet away. He found it odd how the road beyond it looked so…traversable.
For a brief moment, he allowed himself to imagine that his knowledge of the reality-bending properties that swirled malevolently within were nothing more than flights of fancy; a lie he had concocted, an urban-legend he had convinced himself to be true.
He made the sound of crackling lighting under his breath, as if that was the noise a gateway to a temporal nexus, and the self-contained trigger for a thirty-three-hour temporal anomaly such as this, should have been making.
Instead, it was more like a flawlessly-recreated, photo-realistic, animated snapshot of not only his own past, but an unattainable present and fluctuating future all in one. The road before him stretching out with all the hallmarks of terrain, with none of the follow through.
Sniffing belligerently, he forced a smile, followed by a half-hearted exhalation of amusement through his nostrils.
“It is what it is,” he thought.
A statement everyone inevitably resorted to when the cause of something couldn’t be defined or rationalised in a quantifiable way.
It was then that he heard the rumbling, and turned to face the real reason he was here.
*
The glint of the sun in front of The Dark Restarter was breached by the arrival of a strange sight; an outline of a man that wasn’t quite a silhouette.
The sun didn’t refract off the bodies of the restarted like it did with the living. One of the many curiosities he had uncovered on his journey.
Given that the now-lobotomised version of himself in the driving seat showed no signs of adjusting his speed or trajectory, Malcolm was certain this was exactly what it appeared to be; a last-ditch effort to thwart his departure.
‘Restarters,’ he growled, spitting the word out like the poison it was.
But he found himself smiling through his feral snarl, as the realisation of the futility surrounding the rat-catcher’s gambit sunk in.
What did the fool expect he was going to achieve? They may not feel pain when subjected to blunt-force trauma from an inorganic object such as the out-of-phase vehicle he had commandeered, but they could still be run over.
‘Speed up,’ Malcolm muttered to his psychologically-compromised alive duplicate, grinning with delight. ‘This is a very bad plan, Harold.’
*
Hal couldn’t get over how much of a great plan this was.
He looked back over his shoulder as he walked, beyond the Restart Point now situated one-hundred-yards-or-so behind him, and stared up at the blistering sun that held no power over his vampiric skin, then looked back out to the road ahead.
Kevin’s paint-chipped, midnight-blue truck was motoring towards him, and despite knowing what he knew, he licked his lips apprehensively, his imagination playing havoc with his sense of self-preservation.
He knew for a Stone-Cold Steve Austin fact that the car couldn’t hurt him physically, no matter how fast it was going. It existed in the past, and he was occupying his own present…but it was still a truck. And he was just a man…
He shook away his counter-productive fears.
This was going to work.
He could run away from this, allowing the car to pass him by. But that would give the Dark Restarter exactly what he wanted, potentially leaving himself, Fearne, whatever was left of Peter, and – most importantly of all – Kara stranded in time.
That last thought grounded him.
Standing sideways-on in the direction of the vehicle that was increasing in size at an alarming rate, he raised his right hand theatrically, and with a flourish of over the top showmanship pressed play on the phone in his palm, which he had slyly charged during his recent extended contact with the others.
‘Gotta have a soundtrack,’ he muttered, smiling as the music blared from the speakers.
Hal was unable to resist the urge to bop, as the baseline of the Foo’s “The Pretender” consumed every fibre of what was left of him.
Eyeing up the wagon of death that was speeding towards him, he casually unclipped the button on the holster that secured his gun, resting his hand on the grip like a true Brown Coat.
He knew the bullets couldn’t harm anyone. But the man standing on the back of the truck? Staring down at him like some kind of vehicular themed horseman of a patent-pending apocalypse? He couldn’t possibly know that.
As the Dark Restarter scowled at him like a top-tier extra from a Mad Max movie, Hal’s mind unhelpfully reminded him of another fact that knocked his bravado somewhat; the car might not be able to hurt him, but the road warrior could.
In fact, he could actually kill him.
Hal spun t
he gun in his hand impractically, like a cowboy dispensing a gratuitous demonstration of showboating that served no other purpose than to look like a damn boss, and it slipped from his grip, clattering soundlessly to the ground.
‘Shit,’ he muttered, seriously hoping Kara hadn’t seen that.
*
‘What is he doing?’ growled the surly spectator.
‘Being Hal,’ said Kara, who very much had just seen that.
But she didn’t roll her eyes, she merely smiled.
*
Retrieving the chromed weapon from the ground, he looked down the sight, aiming it towards the oncoming vehicle, unable to wipe the smirk from his face as he discarded the doubt from his mind.
“You got this, Callaghan. This is going to be legen–’
*
“–dare he?” thought Malcolm unable to get his head around what was clearly a demonstration of pure, unbridled stupidity. He replayed the thought again. “How dare he?!” having just witnessed the Restarter clumsily dropping a gun onto the ground like a delusional moron of unquantifiable idiocy.
But as the fool had composed himself and picked up the weapon, Malcolm wondered if there was more to all of this tomfoolery than met the temporally-displaced eye. The thought lasted for just a fraction of a second, but the seed of doubt was there; did the cavalier cretin before him know something he didn’t?
As Malcolm’s physical-self changed gear, taking his foot off the gas for a brief moment, the faintest sound of music met his ears over the ferociously revving engine of the truck. It was then that he knew he was truly being mocked.
He thought back to the niggling feeling that something was amiss. Was it impossible?...
*
‘This is possible,’ Hal said to himself, taking a deep breath and releasing a pep talk. ‘I mean, sure. On the one hand you’re jousting with a truck that’s moving eighty miles per-hour armed only with a pellet gun.’
He really hoped Kara was watching, as he arced the gun downwards in a quick motion, bringing his phone-wielding hand to the forefront.
Pointing it at the car, he turned his body and adopted a stance that seemed to indicate he was bracing himself for impact.
Kevin’s truck surged towards the Restarter, now less than twenty feet away, both Malcolm’s staring at him, one peering over the top of the vehicle’s cabin, the other inside it. Hal and the Dark Restarter shared a moment, staring into the whites of each other’s eyes; Malcolm’s face a savage sneer, and Hal’s adorned with a defiant smile.
‘Top left,’ muttered Hal, waving his phone-wielding arm like a Jedi, into the direction of the trees to his right.
Malcolm would have laughed, were it not for the version of himself that was driving the car suddenly pulling the steering wheel into a sharp full lock to the left, sending the Dark Restarter careening out of the vehicle and landing face down into the dirt, rolling for a comically extended length of time.
The truck, meanwhile, ploughed purposefully into a trio of burly looking fir trees that had, up until that point, been minding their own business, their disturbed branches now waving like Team Hal cheerleaders, as the bonnet and engine of Kevin’s truck crumpled like a soda can being struck by Mjolnir.
Hal brought the barrel of the gun to his lips, and blew away the non-existent pistol smoke, shooting a look instead of bullets to where Kara, Fearne, and Future Malcolm were hiding.
*
The Malcolm of their future held his outstretched arm in place, eyes closed in concentration, drawing on the Restarter energy of the others to bolster his equally innate ability to control his physical-self remotely.
Their plan was, first and foremost, to prevent his alive-self from stepping over the boundary line and into the world beyond.
But he’d never done it from this distance before, and didn’t know how long he could keep his alive-self from overcoming the whiplash he had surely sustained…
*
‘You okay their mate, you took quite a nasty tumble,’ said Hal, walking towards the recently-jettisoned Dark Restarter. ‘Can I get you anything? A cloth for the egg on your face, maybe?’
The darker Malcolm of the past pressed downwards towards the ground he was laying on, as if doing a very slow and deliberate press-up, all the while maintaining eye-contact with the person he was about to kill.
And then he faltered, as Kara and Fearne flew past him, each collecting one of his two large knives, and running off into the woods. Presumably to discard them.
‘Ouch,’ said Hal, tapping his foot to the beat of the music. ‘Yeah, no knifey-spoony for you today. This really is a bad news bears kind of day for you, isn’t it?’
The Dark Restarter didn’t speak. He was beyond such triviality. The boy before him had just carved the biggest bullseye into his own flesh. If Malcolm’s hatred was bad before, it was now spilling over the sides of the thimble-sized container that ensconced his sanity.
Hal felt it too; a prickling sense of danger that made him realise he’d just pushed a literal serial killer over the edge.
The Dark Restarter took a step towards him, and Hal pulled back the hammer on the Colt Python he had firmly trained on the man, absolutely counting on the fact that Malcolm’s past-self had no idea it was a fake.
‘Don’t move,’ ordered Hal, his instruction as effective as the type of command he issued to his dog Shelby when she’d caught a whiff of a particularly delicious cat-poop she wanted to investigate. And consequently devour. That is to say, entirely fruitless. ‘I mean it, I’ll shoo–’
Malcolm didn’t hesitate, he simply pulled the gun from Hal’s hand and grabbed the Restarter by the wrist, killing the music emanating from the phone instantly.
Hal suddenly felt weak, his retained charge of energy rapidly revoked.
Malcolm, however, clearly wasn’t suffering from the same problem, and was positively glowing. His eyes blazed with a terrifying red hue, which served as an unwanted invitation made solely to Hal. One inviting him to what was surely an imminent death.
Malcolm looked with disdain at the weapon he had stolen from the Restarter, back at Hal, then threw it with little effort, somehow managing to lob it all the way into the rear storage area of the vehicle his alive-self was currently still occupying.
‘Sick throw, to be fair,’ said Hal, genuinely impressed.
A compliment Malcolm rewarded by pulling Hal towards him and grabbing the Restarter by the throat, lifting him into the air.
‘Gak!’ gargled Hal, unable to produce any other response.
‘No more jokes?’ whispered Malcolm. ‘Not even a little smile? Or are you now realising that your luck truly has run its course?’ he added, throwing Hal to the ground away from both the Restart Point and the blue truck, which was now billowing smoke from its engine, as if trying to give everyone the heads up that it wasn’t feeling all that great, and would quite like any spectators to take a step back in case it lost control of the situation and, well, exploded.
‘Who needs luck,’ croaked Hal, his face an unwell-looking red, thanks to his recent foray into recently administered strangulation. ‘When you look as good as thi–’
Malcolm brought his boot down hard against Hal’s face.
‘Please,’ said Malcolm, reaching down and grabbing Hal by his brown, leather jacket and dragging him several more metres across the dirt-covered concrete, ‘stop,’ he added, releasing his grip and squatting down next to him like a garish gargoyle, ‘talking,’ he whispered, placing Hal’s head in his enormous hands, and beginning to squeeze.
Hal clawed desperately at Malcolm’s wrists, trying to somehow force him to release his grip, but was entirely unsuccessful. He was outmatched by the man’s strength, and it took all he had just to remain conscious, as the taste of copper trickled lazily across his taste buds and down the back of his throat.
Small, swirling black wisps began to fill his vision, tantalisingly proposing that perhaps a quick rest and a sleep would solve all his problems.
&n
bsp; ‘Bad wavy lines!’ he croaked, swatting them away with exaggerated eye movements, as if that would cast them out.
He could have really used his own Malcolm right about now to even the odds of what was evidently becoming an increasingly-unlikely survival scenario, but that was never on the cards.
They couldn’t risk tipping their hand so early on. Having a Malcolm from the future on their side, at least in theory, was the only ace they had. Though, admittedly, it wasn’t exactly doing Hal any favours in the immediate sense.