Extra Life

  It wasn’t suicide. It was murder.

  Just as the insight hit me, an electric shock jolted through my spine, far too painful to be another time warp. A brilliant blinding light flashed from every direction, but my body stayed solid. The recorded warning on my home computer from Video Russ blared in my memory:

  Someone else… can get through the holes… you understand?

  A deafening static screech, and something burst into Paige’s room.

  PAIGE DIDN’T hesitate. In one sleek motion, she rolled off her mattress and swiped an aluminum bat from where it stood in the corner of her room. She wasn’t going to die a passive death.

  But the intruder wasn’t a person. It had no real shape at all. More of an unfolding web of radiance, it seemed to be on the stairs and in the hall and bulging through the bedroom door, all at once. It was a digitized angelic glow—light dancing midair like slow-mo paint from a sprayer, full of crackling static electricity—except there was nothing heavenly about it.

  The whole room was charged with its power. The currents cramped the muscles in my throat. I couldn’t speak. Wisps of Paige’s hair lifted upward as she crouched to take a swipe at anything that might happen to turn solid inside all that ambient light.

  But the glow pooled in the doorway and darkened bluish. Another kind of doorway was opening.

  And whatever came though would be hell-bent on killing Paige.

  I knew, because it had succeeded once already in another world. Took her life and made it look like suicide. I couldn’t understand why, but it had to be my fault, clear enough. For starters, I tore the rifts in time-space that would help Paige’s killer step through, but it was even more than that. She was bait. Her “suicide” was a setup to lure me back here. Save her. Step right into the trap.

  With the doorway blocked, our one escape hatch was Paige’s bedroom window. I pointed to it, and she nodded. We were one floor up from the ground, but the risk of a sprained ankle and bruises seemed more pleasant than staying to see what would happen in her room once the radiance engulfed us.

  Paige sidestepped and took a line-drive swing, shattering the window glass. Efficient, but she might as well have popped an airplane hatch thirty thousand feet above ground. An instant suction wrenched almost everything toward the opening that wasn’t hammered to the floor.

  A spinning baseball clocked my shoulder. Notebooks and commemorative cards and pendants and stray socks all smacked the window frame and coughed through the broken glass. Paige’s bat snapped from her grip and was gone. Even the air in my lungs was expelled with one painful hiccup.

  Despite the airborne chaos, we weren’t affected. Our clothes rippled and our hair was tossed around, but our feet stuck as firmly on the ground as ever. It didn’t make any physical sense. Not the pressurized vacuum, and not our resistance to its suction.

  The pulsing electric light bled along the walls and surged toward us with an ambient roar. Paige’s room was disappearing in a solid wall of static, like jumbo-tron screens set to dead channels on full volume. We were being enveloped. Even the window was swallowed up in its reach, painted over by an electric film.

  Our only exit route was gone. And no more air to breathe. So much pressure, my head would implode if this lasted much longer.

  I had to look at this situation backwards by using some serious Alice in Wonderland upside-down logic, like no way out except through, like the spaceship in all those sci-fi movies that rushes deep into the black hole in order to escape its event horizon.

  I was fairly sure, at least, that this radiance was some kind of wormhole, or similar in principle, and I knew from two prior experiences that you could leap through the center of one and live to brag about it. That’s what we had to do: dive into the dark blue core of what used to be Paige’s bedroom doorway. I decided.

  I grabbed her by the wrist. Wherever we were headed, we’d go together.

  At least, that was the plan. But when I stepped toward the door, Paige fixed her sock feet to the floor and refused to move.

  The noise was so loud we couldn’t hear each other, but her wide eyes and frantically shaking head told me her opinion well enough. All I could think to do was put my hand against my chest, a silent vow—we’ll be all right.

  She studied me for a beat, snapped her eyes at the live electric meshing that closed in on us.

  Then she let me do it, take her into the eye of the storm. The closer we got, the more that blue nucleus seemed to repel us. When I reached into the static, I didn’t know if I’d be burned or electrified or sucked through a space-time vortex onto the bottom of the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Turned out to be none of the above. What happened was my arm went numb, but I felt the edge of the doorframe, just like you’d expect. I held fast and pulled us both through to the other side, into the hall.

  Instant silence, except for our gasping breath.

  Everything was perfectly ordinary, except behind us, where the doorway to Paige’s room was still the butt end of the electrical field we just escaped. It filled the space, flat as a television screen, but it emitted no light, no sound.

  Paige touched it, flinched back her finger after a bug-light zap.

  “What the f—” she started to ask.

  And something lunged out of the crackling blue gel and grabbed her wrist. It yanked her back toward the static wall from where it came. It was the shape of a human hand, but more like the gray fractal image of a hand, what you’d see if you stared at a Magic Eye picture for long enough. And its contact with Paige’s skin gave off a feedback screech.

  It was hell-bent to drag her back through, or kill her trying. All I could think to do was anchor both my arms around her waist. She leaned against me and planted her feet on either side of the door. When she grabbed for the virtual hand, her fingers passed straight through the illusion.

  Except it was still pulling at her, real enough. We growled and howled. Neither of us used real words. A second virtual hand emerged from the static, but this one wasn’t empty. It clutched a weapon, long and sharp. A knife.

  And it swiped the blade toward Paige’s captured and vulnerable wrist.

  All I have do to now is bleed, that thefacebook message said.

  I tossed my own hands into the pile of real and unreal fingers on Paige’s arm. Slapped my grip across her wrist, superimposed over the virtual hand, just in time for the knife to strike.

  The blade sliced just below my knuckles, sprouted instant blood.

  For a second it didn’t hurt. For a second.

  I pressed my face against the back of Paige’s neck and stifled a scream.

  The mindless hands seemed to think they accomplished their mission, so the grip relaxed, and we took our chance. Together, we heaved ourselves away from the static wall.

  Good news: the virtual hands disintegrated in a shower of pixels.

  Bad news: the sudden momentum sent us backward over the landing. We tumbled down the stairs, arms and legs smacking the wall and banister and each other as we took the fast route down.

  Without the plush stairwell carpeting, we probably would’ve broken our necks. Still, the grand finale was a tile floor—not quite so soft. I was splayed out snow angel-style, head ringing from the impact, but at least I served as a cushion for Paige when she landed stomach-first.

  For a second, we breathed into each other’s faces, astonished. To be slammed together like this. To be attacked out of nowhere by a virtual assassin or whatever. To still be alive, pressed together, both of us heaving and alive.

  Then she rolled away and dropped to the floor beside me.

  A few more minutes’ recovery time would’ve been nice, but nope. Relentless tendrils of sparking, sputtering electronic ooze leaked down the stairwell walls toward us. More a force than a physical thing, though whatever-it-was had a clear enough purpose—a program:

  Slice Paige’s wrist and make it look like suicide.

  And now it was coming at us for another shot. The
pulsing, mesmerizing light froze us into easy targets. We just stared at it, coming at us. Until, from the center of the vortex, something flung out, swished past my ear, and sank into the wall behind me. It shuddered into place.

  A chef’s knife. Real metal, a blade you’d find in any normal kitchen. It was thrust to the hilt into the wall, dead center between our two heads.

  After that, the ooze of light in the stairwell flashed, sputtered, and faded away. As if, with its knife-throwing sideshow act complete, it had finally exhausted itself. Nothing left but a burnt plastic smell.

  We both kept our attention fixed on the empty stairs, just to be sure. I couldn’t say how long it was before Paige sprang up and went toward the kitchen. She came back with a dishtowel and wrapped it a few times around my wounded hand. Blood all over the carpeted stairs and the tile, smeared across the front of my shirt. Just looking at it made me woozy.

  “All right, Russ, please explain what the hell just happened.”

  “Something tried to kill us,” I said.

  “Something?” She wrenched the chef’s knife out of the wall and brandished it at me. “This is mine, from my kitchen. I don’t know what that pyrotechnics show was all about, but a pair of pin-art hands just tried to cut me with my own knife, and now my mom’s apartment looks like it got hit by Katrina.”

  I had zilch for answers. Sure, I’d been warned. The Future Russ who sent me the video knew loads more than he ever wanted to know, but he was no help to me now. I wasn’t working with the information he had.

  Paige was still studying the knife, testing its sharpness with her fingertip. I could see my distorted reflection in the metal when she asked, “Could it—that wasn’t a ghost, was it? I know it’s crazy of me to even ask. I’m the most rational person I know, but after that stuff on thefacebook… I… wait.” She narrowed her eyes and grabbed my shirt collar, twisting it in her fist. “How’d you know?”

  “Know what?” I croaked.

  “About this. That I was in danger.”

  “I saw the online posts.”

  “Any idiot could’ve seen it was a fake profile.”

  “I wasn’t one hundred percent sure.”

  “You’re lying. How did you get here almost right on time?”

  Paige’s cat meowed questioningly at us from the top of the stairs. I could empathize.

  “Russ,” Paige insisted.

  “Listen to me, please. I have no clue what just happened or why it stopped happening or what to do if it happens again. All I know is we both need to get out of here. And you have to contact your mom and let her know not to come home.”

  I was kind of hoping she’d be spooked enough to just go with it.

  Nope. “Why?” she demanded.

  “Whatever just attacked us—you need to keep away from it,” I tried to explain. “Go someplace unexpected, and don’t even tell me where. I think it’s following me, or it knows what I’ll do next. We’ll have a better chance if we fool it with unexpected moves.”

  She clenched her jaw at me, glared down at that knife in her hand. My blood was on her tank top and her hair was an alluring mess. Right then probably wouldn’t have been a good time to ask her more about that surprise kiss. “Tell me why you know these things,” she said.

  “What if I said it was way too much for you to deal with?”

  “I’d say try me, or I’ll kick your ass.”

  Her cell phone jingled. She gave me a don’t move scowl and shimmied it out of her pocket. I was so focused on escape, I never even thought to wonder who might be calling.

  But then she answered, and listened to her caller, and the impact of this bizarro scenario corrugated her forehead. She said to the caller, “Shut up. Who is this really?”

  My own voice came faintly through the receiver: “…just make sure you were all right.” Russ 2.0 was calling, just like he did in the last reality I visited. Only this time, Paige wasn’t dead, so she answered.

  “What kind of sick prank is this?” she asked.

  In that moment of uncertainty, I took my chance, pulled open her screen door and made a break for it. No time for goodbyes. I leaped off her front stoop, tripped over my bike in a lame attempt to mount it. My shoes couldn’t find the pedals fast enough. The tires wobbled through the sandy lot before they reached the sidewalk.

  Paige grunted as she pounced on me. The bike flopped over, trapped my left leg against the ground. I rolled onto my back to scramble away, but she squatted onto my stomach and jammed an elbow under my chin to keep me docile. Her knee braced on my sternum thrust away my breath.

  Gritty pavement bit through the towel wrapped around my hand.

  “You just—called me,” she said. “That was you on the phone. I don’t know how—but it was.”

  “…wasn’t me… not exactly…” I choked out.

  “Talk, Russ.” She lifted her knee to let me breathe.

  There wasn’t much left to hide so I did talk. I told her everything in a rush, from the first leap and my solitary confinement at Conrad’s house and then the escape and the news of her supposed suicide, to the second half-leap that landed me in my bedroom at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  And I told her fast—because I was running out of time to stop Bobby Keene-Parker from crashing his car.

  PAIGE WAS a born myth-buster, so she wasn’t going to let me off after some rant that totally sounded like I’d taken a major dose of Molly. I was lucky she even released me from her death grip.

  “We should call the cops,” she said.

  “And tell them what?”

  “I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to hear their opinion.”

  I said, “They’ll think we’re both nuts, and they won’t be any help.”

  “You don’t seem to have much of a handle, either, coming at me with this story.”

  “I haven’t had tons of free time to Sherlock through everything.”

  At least the nightmare in her bedroom got her to vacate her apartment. One small victory. Another plus was getting her to agree not to let anyone else in there. She volleyed quick phone calls between her mom and grandma, convincing them they needed to have dinner at Grandma’s straight after her mom got out of work because the landlord just up and had their duplex fumigated for roaches without any notice.

  As for Paige herself, she refused to go into hiding like I asked. Instead, she bummed a standing ride on the back pegs of my bike. Gripped her fingers on my shoulders as I pumped us back uptown toward the Silver Bullet Diner. She wasn’t going to let me out of her sight.

  Bobby’s Rapide was still parked outside. I leaned my bike against the diner’s siding—nowhere to lock it and bigger things to worry about. When I pushed through the entrance, the bell hailed my arrival. No time to form a plan or consider how the other version of me would react.

  There he was, standing beside the far-end booth, the Russ Vale who’d taken a leap through the wormhole only once and was still under the impression he had his universe under control. I had to think of him as Russ 3.0, even if his existence in this universe technically started six hours before mine. Those were hours I already lived.

  He glanced up at me from his camera, put his attention back to the screen. Then he did a double take. Yes, it’s you, Russ Vale. And by you I mean me. I don’t know why, but I kind of expected 3.0 to raise his hands in surrender.

  In the booth, Savannah and Bobby were still acting the scene, unaware that the camera eye was tilting to the floor and their director had totally quit paying attention to their performance.

  But then Savannah spotted me—a mirror image of the guy standing beside her—and she bolted upright. At the soda machine, Sally the waitress also saw double and sprayed Coke all over her hand instead of into a cup.

  Behind me Paige muttered, “Y’all were really serious with this,” as if the phone call from another me, and the inexplicable techno-vortex that almost killed her, weren’t enough evidence already.

  Russ 3.0 rushed at me, bug-eye
d, waddling in Connie’s flip-flops and oversized jeans. Savannah followed close behind him. With Paige at my hip—and her kiss still fresh on my mind—this was the weirdest double date in history.

  “Aw, don’t look so surprised,” I told 3.0, even if I had to admit that when I was still him, I never would’ve anticipated this.

  “What’re you doing here—what is this?” he asked. His lips were stiff as a ventriloquist’s, so nobody else could read them, I guess.

  “I’m not who you think I am,” I said, voice dialed down to private mode.

  “Who do you think I think you are?” 3.0 asked.

  “You think I’m the blissfully unaware Russ who lives in this reality…”

  He jolted back as he realized. “You’re…”

  “From the future,” I said. “Already ahead of you.”

  “But… I’m supposed to be…”

  I mean, he’d already taken one leap, so he knew exactly what wacko physics we were dealing with. He should’ve been able to process the concept of another Russ showing up, further down the time line. Seriously, just a few hours ago, I was this guy. I remembered the triumph of standing behind that camera, the sense of invincibility. I remembered everything except this part, where another, future me shows up.

  “I’m here to stop you from making a huge mistake,” I said.

  “What mistake?” he asked. “And, Paige—how did you—”

  “Not the right place to explain,” I said, nodding at the bystanders.

  Sally leaned over the counter, drying her hands with a towel. “Care to introduce me to your look-alike, sugar?” she said to neither one of us in particular. Savannah was also pondering the existence of two of us like we were matching statues in a museum. See if you can spot the fake.

  “This is my—my twin brother, Seth,” 3.0 explained.

  “Nice save,” Paige snarked behind me.

  I tried not to wince at 3.0’s improv. Not that I could’ve done better, even considering my time-space advantage. And since we had the same brain, I caught on to his little inside joke: Seth (or Set, if you like) was the Egyptian god of chaos and destruction. The brother and polar opposite of the good god Horus, who, not so incidentally, was the deity of time, source of the word hour.