by Sean McMahon
But Hal knew their Malcolm had a far more important task to contend with.
Hal, as agreed, was just the bait.
*
Kara quickly stashed the knife in a suitably dense patch of tall grass, glimpsing a flurry of Fearne’s dress as she ran off to do the same.
As she made her way back to the wreckage of Kevin’s truck, she watched as their Malcolm froze, overcome with an unexpected hesitancy.
‘Malc’, what’s wrong?’ asked Kara.
His eyes were glazed over, as if he were stuck in place by an unexpected bout of emotional memory.
“Is that fear?” thought Kara, before feeling the urge to get back on track and placing her hand gently on the man’s shoulder.
‘Malcolm?’ she said softly.
Whether it was her words, or the jolt that flew through him thanks to the unexpected contact, he was back in the room, and reached in through the open passenger-side window. Ducking down low to make sure he remained unseen, he took advantage of his close proximity to his considerably more alive – yet utterly-stupefied – past-self, unlocking the door.
‘How long will it take?’ asked Kara, as he placed his hand through the body of his corporeal self and muttered a slew of words.
‘I’m not changing the battery in a smoke alarm, Kara,’ he replied, spitting the words in the irritated manner of someone much akin to that of a writer being asked a question whilst they were painstakingly trying to complete a particularly tricky sentence.
‘Jeez, just give me a ball park timeframe,’ she said with a frown, not wishing to draw this out any longer.
The Restart Point was closer to her than it was to Hal. It would have been so easy for her to just end this madness then and there without risking–
‘Oh shit!’ exclaimed Kara, as the Dark Restarter across the road from her shifted his position, revealing Hal’s bloodied and bruised face.
She watched helplessly, as Malcolm’s past-self grabbed her friend by the throat, causing her own out-of-phase hands to grip the lip of the trailer of the truck. Whilst she deliberated on what to do next, a familiar glimmer of chrome caught her eye, and she smiled mischievously.
‘Oh, hello you!’
*
‘What is it with you people,’ mused the Dark Restarter, as if he were engaging in a friendly catch-up over a cup of tea, rather than choking the life out of a young man.
‘You people? That’s–’ Hal spluttered, blood filling his throat, ‘–kinda narrow-minded, Malc’. Is it,’ he struggled to finish, ‘because I’m blue?’
Malcolm pressed harder against his wind pipe.
‘Why couldn’t you have just left things alone? You saved yourselves. Why did you have to come back here and risk it all just for the golfer?!’
‘He owed me…’ croaked the Restarter. ‘A tenner.’
‘I suppose you think of yourselves as time travelling superheroes don’t you. That the universe rewards goodness? Punishes the bad? But it’s all relative, Harold. You must understand this? After all, you yourselves are killers, in your own dull way of–’
‘Hey, Rambo!’
Malcolm turned his head towards the source of the other bane of his life. A female voice he recognised immediately. The second personified thorn in his side.
He couldn’t help but chuckle.
There she was; the orange secretary, no longer wearing orange, true, but still very much as he remembered her, standing in the back of the pickup truck, aiming a gun at him no less.
This was going to be interesting.
*
Kara teased the trigger, knowing that as soon as she fired the gun, the jig would be up.
Malcolm would know it was as harmless as a mouse deciding it wanted to become President of The United States.
But she didn’t need to pull the trigger, she just needed to stall him.
‘You look smaller than I remember,’ said Kara, goading him into focusing on her.
‘And you lack less courage in your convictions than I recall,’ retorted Malcolm’s past-self.
‘Blah, blah. Got it all figured out, don’t you,’ she said with a sneer. ‘Big man that likes to kill people half his size, and then calls it art. Tell me,’ she said, attempting to channel the spirit of her friend Robert and looking at him with as much sardonic pity as she could muster. ‘Was it because your mother didn’t love you enough?’
‘Careful, girl,’ said Malcolm, throwing Hal to the ground like yesterday’s Cornetto.
‘Ohhh,’ Kara continued, her eyes lighting up like an epiphany had revealed itself to her. ‘Or did she love you too much, maybe? If you catch my drift?’
He caught her drift. One handed. And crushed it to dust with a look of hatred so pure it would have killed her, if looks possessed the ability to kill. Luckily for Kara, that was little more than trite hyperbole.
‘I,’ said Malcolm, preparing to unleash a response so brutal, so perfectly crafted that it would have broken her in ways she would never have assumed possible.
But his intricately-designed wordplay was cut down before it had a chance to escape into the world, as Kara did something entirely unexpected; she turned around, jumped off the truck, and ran.
*
‘You done yet,’ snapped Kara.
‘A little more,’ replied Future Malcolm, hiding in the footwell with his hands firmly planted inside the brain of his living self.
‘You boys will be the death of me,’ said Kara under her breath, trying to locate Fearne with furtive glances, frustrated that she was nowhere to be seen, and continued onwards.
*
Fearne knew the plan. They had spent the last two hours piecing it together, erasing all trace of any unexpected loopholes. She knew she was meant to stow the blade she had swiped into the long grass, as far away from the dark Restarting monster that was Malcolm’s past-self.
And yet…
The weapon seemed to hum with the promise of vengeance, whispering to her the things she wanted to hear.
She allowed it to wash over her, as she approached Future Malcolm from behind, noting how vulnerable and pathetic he looked, pressing his body down in the compacted footwell of the drivers-side of the truck.
She had been told it belonged to the man named Kevin.
Jerry’s owner.
“Where was Jerry?”
Her thoughts were an erratic collage of swirling maybes, but one clear idea shone through, as she looked down at the business-end of the enormous blade in her hand, and she set her gaze back towards the man who had killed her boyfriend.
“Such a flimsy term,” she thought. “Boyfriend.”
It didn’t do Peter justice. Once you reached the age she was, such terms felt…juvenile, almost.
He was her lover.
Potentially would have been her future husband. The father to the children they would now never have.
He had taken that away from her.
“From them.”
That made her see red, quite literally, and her eyes filled with the red power Malcolm was now so well-known for.
“Yes,” she reasoned.
He had indirectly killed her children. Past, present, future, it didn’t matter. All this time travel bullshit was lost on her.
Would plunging the knife into the back of the man that was claiming to help them bring Peter back?
“Unlikely.”
Would killing him erase the murderer’s past-self that was unleashing sickly-sounding kicks and punches to Hal’s Restarter self?
“Who knew,” she thought. Or, more importantly, “Who cared?”
This would be her only moment. The window of opportunity she had been waiting for.
She stepped closer and raised the knife, her footsteps silent, until the pain inside her brought her more into phase with the timeline they were travelling through, solidifying her presence and causing a twig to snap beneath her foot.
Future Malcolm glanced over his shoulder at her, and grinned.
*
‘Well, enough chat,’ the Dark Restarter chirped, as he turned his attention back to Hal and placed his boot firmly into the small of the Restarter’s back, who, he noticed, had been trying to crawl away. ‘It appears that for all her brave words, even your orange friend has abandoned you. Running to the barrier, I expect. Off to trigger another one of your restarts.’
‘I’mjustthedistraction, douchebag,’ mumbled Hal, his words so faint Malcolm couldn’t catch them.
‘Speak up, Harold, you’re embarrassing yourself.’
Hal mumbled the same words, even quieter than before.
The Dark Restarter groaned, removed the pressure his leg was applying to the young man’s back and dragged him up by the collar, staring him square in the face.
‘I can’t hear you! Enunciate, or die quietly,’ barked the Malcolm of their past. ‘It matters not, even if your moronic friends trigger another loop, I’ll simply try again, then again, until I make it out of this cursed place.’
Hal laughed.
A cringe-inducing, fake-sounding work-laugh that he usually reserved for Susan who worked in Legal, whenever she lamented that the weather was rather cold out.
During the peak of an English winter.
Or summer, for that matter.
Man, Susan sucked…
It was an ugly laugh too, more like a death-throw gargle thanks to the blood in Hal’s mouth that continued to fill up like a self-replenishing goblet. Presumably due to the tooth Malcolm had dislodged that was bobbing against his cheeks, the nerve ending having only just given in and disconnecting from the enamel.
Malcolm was used to his art crying as the life ebbed away from them. He always felt closest to his work at this point. But never laughter. The boy was clearly insane.
‘Yeah,’ said Hal, his voice wheezy but nonetheless defiant, as he spat out his rogue tooth. ‘It’s almost as if we thought of that.’
The Dark Restarter was taken aback.
‘What did you say before, on the ground?’
‘I said,’ Hal cleared his throat and spat yet more of the red gooey contents from his mouth, though not at Malcolm. He wasn’t that brave. ‘I’m just the distraction,’ he added, taking a pause before whispering the last word, his eyes like fire. ‘Douchebag.’
Malcolm looked over his shoulder to the car, seeing Fearne through the smashed driver’s side window, then back to Kara who had just made it to the boundary line where the portal to a renewed past awaited her.
*
Future-Malcolm had done all he could, and grabbed Fearne by the wrist before she could introduce Malcolm’s back with the pointy end of his own death-bringer.
The knife still managed to find its way into the top of his leg, but only by about an inch.
‘I know you are hurting, and we will have this talk, but right now, you need to tell Kara we are ready.’
Fearne stared back him, nothing but red sparks spitting from her wrist thanks to their connection.
And zero blue.
‘Fearne,’ said Malcolm soothingly, trying to pull her back from wherever it was her head was at.
There was something incredibly disarming about the way he had said her name. If she didn’t know any better, she would have almost believed he was speaking to her as an equal, rather than someone he would slaughter should the whimsical mood have struck him.
‘Right,’ she said, releasing her grip on the blade. ‘Right,’ she said a second time, as if doing so would erase the fact she had just been caught in the act of trying to kill him.
Having revealed her true intentions, Fearne almost felt embarrassed, as she backed out of the truck’s cabin, then snorted in a sharp intake of air, before running to Kara.
*
Kara could see Fearne approaching, flapping her arms, and could just about make out her saying the deed was done as the truck exploded, a trickle of leaking petrol having seemingly kissed the smoke-cloaked flames from the engine.
None of them knew if their Malcolm had escaped, but they knew for a fact the living version of Malcolm hadn’t, which meant they would need to restart this party soon, before their actions took hold and became cemented in time.
“Or should they?” thought Kara, in hesitation.
They didn’t have enough information to know what killing their killer before he killed them would do to everything they had set in motion so far. There was no telling how that would affect the future.
She needed a moment, but saw Hal was in trouble, then smiled, as an idea so simple it was genius presented itself to here.
Kara thought of Hal’s black wellington boot, and the last time he had thrown it through the restart portal. How it had reappeared on his foot. How Hal’s brother Alex’s phone had reformed in his pocket following the first explosion they had caused by time-travelling.
For a fleeting moment, she looked at the gun in her hand, at Hal, then at her feet where the invisible barrier resided.
The Colt Python suddenly represented caution, and the Restart Point became the wind, as she threw the weapon into it.
*
Malcolm’s past-self was contentedly strangling the life out of Hal. ‘You just killed me, you idiot! The real me!’ he barked.
It was then he saw it; several wisps of blue light circling around Hal’s hand, which was currently clawing once again at Malcolm’s vice-like talons. Hal clearly saw it too, opening his hand and moving it away from them both.
They couldn’t help but both watch with fascination, as the strips of light quickly multiplied into billions of blue fragments, until finally solidifying to form a rather inconvenient object.
‘What are you people?!’ said Malcolm, beguiled by the constant surprises they kept throwing at him.
‘We’re The Restarters,’ said Hal, pulling back the hammer and shooting Malcolm in his mouth at point-blank range.
The pellet embedded itself into the back of Malcolm’s throat, which promptly filled his mouth with blood.
The pain was tremendous, and shocking enough to cause the killer to release his hold on Hal, who fired another round into the man’s cheek, then leg, causing the monster of a man to fall to one knee, comically looking like he was mid-proposal, his hands now wrapped around his own throat, still not knowing it wasn’t a real bullet.
Hal raised the gun and aimed it at the forehead of the man kneeling before him, and stood there for a moment.
A thought occurred to him, and he glanced to his right, as if expecting to see a glimmer of someone watching the show; a former version of his Restarting-self staring back at him with awe over the man in a brown jacket holding a bad-ass gun.
But there was nothing there.
Coming to his senses, Hal took advantage of the precious seconds that had been afforded to him and hobbled away towards Kara, before turning around, smiling mischievously, and shooting the man in the arse for no other reason but shits and giggles.
Kara and Hal raced towards each other, with Kara taking all of his weight before he keeled over, blue sparks erupting between them.
‘You look like shit,’ said Kara, her smile warm, yet anxious.
‘Next time, you’re the bait,’ joked Hal, strangely feeling a lot better thanks to the energy flowing between them. ‘Great shout on the gun, by the way. Total Bill and Ted moment.’
A menacing wave of white, static fog rolled through the trees, like a weary caretaker coming to investigate what the hell the two of them had instigated now, as if they were a couple of dogs fouling on the perfectly manicured lawn of linearity.
‘Time to bounce,’ said Hal.
‘Nobody says that!’ snorted Kara.
‘We say that,’ contested Hal.
‘Can you even walk?’
‘I actually feel pretty great, thanks for the boost.’
And they dragged themselves to the Restart Point, the sound of the Dark Restarter’s gurgling profanity drowned out by the sound of rushing air, as they wiped the slate clean and converted their current reality
into one of a more alternative variety…
One, for a change, operating by the rules they dictated.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Eternal Darkness of a Broken Mind
1,078th Restart – Friday, August 24th, 2018, 12:01pm
The Dark Restarter reappeared at the exact moment in time his own personal Restart-chain always began, stumbling outside of the small shack and falling to his knees. The residual memory of the burning in his throat, caused by the metal ball-bearing that had embedded itself into his soft flesh, caused him to gag reflexively. He tried to cough the bullet out, with zero success.