Extra Life

by Derek Nikitas

  “Are you kidding me?” she said. “Once in a lifetime.”

  And then Bobby had her door open, and she was getting out. When it was just the two of us in the car, 3.0 barked at me through his teeth, “Tell me what’s going to happen in there. This is all a rerun for you, but I’m winging it here, so clue me in quick.”

  Bobby rapped on my window. Show time.

  “We’ll be fine,” I told my clone.

  “You’re lying. You think I don’t know when I’m lying?”

  “I’m two steps ahead of Bobby, literally,” I said, which was not exactly the truth, either. I’d never been in this moment before. But I had insights, I understood motivations, and ninety percent of getting into trouble was the surprise factor.

  Bobby Parker wasn’t going to surprise me. I was on full alert.

  “I just don’t think—” 3.0 started.

  “Then stay in the car.”

  “Hell, no. Once in a lifetime, like Savannah said? Or twice, for you.”

  I looked at my double but didn’t see myself. He was a separate person with a different history. We were nothing more than twins after all, two different minds. I mean, what happens when a worm, chopped in half, becomes two fresh worms and they meet each other in the mulch, months later?

  Do they recognize themselves?

  BOBBY LED us into the sound stage. And there on the set was Cape Twilight star Morgana Avalon’s television bedroom with its four-poster bed wrapped in frilly lace, an impossible stack of childhood teddy bears on top of the dresser. And on the edge of the bed was Morgana herself, long bronzed legs stretching out from her silk pajama shorts, one pink slipper dangling from her upturned toes. She was chatting away on her cell phone.

  I couldn’t quite enjoy the spectacle. I was too on guard.

  Three cameras set up, but all of them were currently unmanned. The studio lights were dim, some of them fluttering, some dark. It looked like a break in the taping schedule. A few crew members muttered to each other through headphone mics, but nobody paid any attention to Morgana. Or us, for that matter.

  Bobby headed for a metal staircase along one sidewall and we followed. At the top was a narrow platform and a door marked Production Office. Russ 3.0 and I waited a few steps down while Bobby pressed a buzzer. Savannah was eager at his side, raising her heels up and down. A canned voice spoke through a speaker: “Yeah?”

  I’d heard the infamous Marv Parker enough times on DVD extras to recognize his voice. He sounded, as usual, like he’d just swallowed a cocktail of tacks and BB pellets. As soon as he spoke, Bobby morphed into his TV character. He was all stutters and stoop shouldered, timid as a lap dog.

  “Mr. Parker—Dad—it’s me, Bobby.”

  The door lock disengaged automatically and we all piled into a room that was hardly bigger than Mr. Yesterly’s office in the broadcasting room back at school. Same dented aluminum desk, too. I expected Movie Marv to have three levels of waiting rooms, secretaries, security guards, a mahogany desk, and one of those giant old-world globes that’s actually a secret liquor cabinet.

  The only nod to his empire was the array of movie posters on the wall, all Parker Productions, blockbusters and turkeys alike. Kind of like my room, except these posters were in nice gold frames, not tacked up with pushpins.

  When Marv stood up behind his desk, his head nearly broke through the drop-down ceiling panels. With his full beard, thick black arm hair, and tan vest, he looked exactly like a bear who had eaten a fisherman and then put on his clothes. “What’s the problem?” Marv asked.

  Bobby said, “Just wanted to introduce some folks.”

  “No time,” Marv said. “Full shooting schedule, and everything’s backed up because of all the glitches.”

  “Glitches?” I blurted. Couldn’t help it.

  “Power outages,” Marv explained. “Whole Eastern Seaboard’s on the fritz. Probably a covert terrorist attack or the government making us think there’s one. So who’re you, Mr. Glitches?” Marv’s question was aimed at me. He was staring me down, waiting. 3.0 and I had been in the room for at least a minute and Marv apparently hadn’t noticed, or cared, that we were the same person twice.

  Before I could answer, Bobby whipped something out of his jacket and aimed it at his father. Savannah gasped. Too fast for me to react, and all my plans about keeping a step ahead of Bobby were exposed as complete delusions.

  But what he drew wasn’t his gun. It was my script, and he tossed it across the room. It fluttered in the air and landed in a pile of other papers on Marv’s desk. Bobby said, “There’s Cape Twilight’s first Emmy Award, right there.” There was a quiver in his voice. Trying his damndest to act the part of the Bobby Keene-Parker we knew from the diner and Access Hollywood red carpet interviews.

  “Oh, yeah? Where’d you scrounge this up?” his dad asked.

  “These guys right here, the Vale Brothers. Russ and Sith.”

  Apparently, Bobby mistook me for Darth Vader.

  Marv Parker finally took a gander at us.

  “Twins?” he asked. “And what are you guys, twelve years old?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bobby said. “They’re gold, and you—” (his voice cracked on you) “—are gonna want to produce that script, early next season.”

  “Am I?” Marv said.

  “You are. I figure it’s time for me to be giving creative input,” Bobby said, rolling his shoulders back a bit for effect.

  “And who’s the broad?” Marv asked with a creepy smirk.

  “Savannah,” Bobby said. He put his arm around her waist and lashed her to his side so roughly that she cried out in surprise.

  This whole charade was getting way too personal—family stuff we didn’t need to witness. Even if I was in the middle of a pitch meeting for my script, I wanted so bad to tip my proverbial hat and exit stage left, let them work it out between themselves. But I wasn’t about to leave without Savannah. It appeared I’d have to un-knot her from Bobby’s arm if I was going to get her away from here.

  The look on Marv Parker’s face as he studied his son, it was the expression a kid gets when he fries ants with a magnifying glass.

  “Tell you what,” Marv said. “You obviously got a real package deal here, Bobby Boy. You take your twin scriptwriters and you prove your collective chops by racking up a coupla million bucks in foreign and domestic profits on some cheap thriller pictures, build your own studio, score three hit dramas on one network, and then we’ll talk about your creative input. Till then, read your lines like every other pretty face around here.”

  It was too small a room for this much pent-up aggression. If Bobby’s brain was a corn kernel, we would’ve heard it pop. But all he said was, “That’s not fair.”

  “Fair?” Marv said. One of the veins in his forehead got red and round and fat.

  I slipped my dad’s cell from my pocket. 3:56, more than three full minutes till four o’clock, which was the next half-life point, according to my dad’s theory. If something drastic happened here, if I dissed every warning Video Russ sent me, if I warped through space-time yet again, the leap might only take me back three hours. And if that was the case, anything that happened before four p.m., anything I hadn’t already fixed in this time line, would be out of my reach forever.

  Bobby inhaled a deep, defiant breath.

  His grizzly bear father sat back down, lifted my script off his desk, and tossed it in a nearby wastebasket. All I could think was Bobby, over and over, always crashing in the same car.

  “You’re right, Mr. Parker,” I jumped in. “That script is trash. It’s a first draft, really. We—my brother and me—we banged it out in like ten minutes. I’m deeply sorry for bringing it to your attention before it was really ready.”

  “What the hell?” Bobby asked me, clenching his jaw. Those smoldering eyes that girls so loved looked more like three-alarm fires from my perspective. He wasn’t even bothering to fuss with his lighter, which worried me more than anything.

  “We
could stand to do some more work on it,” I admitted.

  Marv snorted and said to his son, “Where’d you pick these twins up, anyway? Boyz R Us?”

  “What the hell?” Bobby said again, this time to his father.

  “It’s the girl!” 3.0 jumped in. He kept glancing at me for guidance. “She’s why. My friend Savannah here. She’s beautiful, don’t you think, Mr. Parker? See, she asked Bobby to talk up our script and he just couldn’t resist her. You know how it is. She’s got a lot of charm.”

  What a save. Wished I’d thought of it, though, in a way, I did. Savannah had both her arms wrapped around Bobby’s left bicep. He was her hero, her protector, and Bobby was the biggest Alpha Male in the room, if you didn’t count his pops. Never mind the useless Vale Brothers.

  “Her charm, huh?” Marv said. “Is that what they call it these days? Back when I scooped Bobby’s old lady straight off the bar top—”

  Two minutes to go. Might as well have been a decade.

  “Damn you, old man,” Bobby snarled. He jerked out of Savannah’s grasp, shoved his hand inside his jacket. If his life went a different way, he might’ve been the next Hollywood gunslinger—cop dramas, westerns, spy flicks, you name it. But instead, all that gun range practice led up to this moment, drawing his weapon and aiming straight for his father. In that instant, I was almost positive Bobby had also been lying about the gun being empty.

  “Oh, please,” Marv said. “Save the theatrics for the camera.”

  “Shut up,” Bobby whispered with his eyes squinted shut, like Marv’s voice wasn’t real, just an unending rumble in his head.

  “Put the gun away,” Marv said.

  “Shut up.”

  “I bought you that thing, and everything else.”

  “Shut up!” Bobby’s psyche had been shattered to bits. I knew, or at least I had anticipated, but in all my hurry to get past the gate, I couldn’t accept that we were walking into death’s chamber with the reaper himself.

  Marv stood again, curled his hands into thick fists, and pressed his knuckles into the desk. He was purple-faced and shallow-breathed, working desperately to keep from raging through the room. Between the gun and Marv Parker, I don’t know which scared me more. He started to say, “You little shit, you don’t have the—”

  But then he stopped, clutched one hand to his chest, and flopped back down in his seat so fast that the feathery hairs of his toupee lifted fully from his skull and settled back. He was grunting, ripping at the folds of his vest like he was shot, but the gun had not gone off. Something on the inside attacked him instead. And it was not yet four o’clock.

  Bobby turned his eyes to Savannah, wild black eyes that seemed to accuse her of causing this chaos. Her seductive charm, like 3.0 suggested. When his gun tilted in her direction, more from momentum than malice, she backed against the door and screamed. I wrapped her in my arms and turned her away from Bobby’s half-raised aim.

  3.0 had the same protective impulse, but the slight difference between us made this other Russ Vale choose a different tack. He dove straight for Bobby, shoulder to chest. The impact was point-guard perfect. The two of them hit the wall so hard they shattered the protective glass on a promo poster for Summer Camp Slaughter 2. The back of Bobby’s head dented the wood paneling.

  3.0 wrapped his hand over the gun and steered Bobby’s aim toward the wall. But Bobby took a cheap shot. Elbowed Three’s tender eye, sent him reeling into the aluminum desk. The desk scraped backward and heimliched Marv Parker’s gut, forcing an even deeper groan from his lungs.

  Back in control of the gun, Bobby leveled it at my stunt double. I must’ve yelled “no!” but it did no good. The gunshot put an angry hornet in each of my ears, and the question crossed my mind—what might happen if one of me…?—just as 3.0 took a bullet in his chest.

  I reached out, as if I could meld this other version into myself and rescue him, but we were several feet apart, and it was already too late. My double sat down on the floor and his startled eyes turned to me, pleading.

  To him, it didn’t make any sense that he should die, if I was standing here alive. It was a paradox. Because he had no clue about the parallel universes. Because I didn’t tell him.

  A chaos of fluttering papers, stench of smoke. Time wound down to a sluggish tick. Russ 3.0 slumped over and should’ve hit the floor, but he never reached it. Instead, he disintegrated. He blurred. He turned into coronas of color, then gray tone static, shrinking into nothingness. All in the span of a second or two. Connie’s empty jeans and Dr. Who t-shirt flopped to the ground. And 3.0 was gone, like he never existed.

  All the lights in the ceiling panels brightened in unison. Air conditioners and generators inside the building chugged back into action. I didn’t have to be a theoretical physicist to get it. Of course 3.0 disappeared—because he wasn’t from here. He was a projection from another dimension, a glitch, a virus.

  Savannah buried her face against my chest. Her fear was an awful thing to share with her, but we were both still alive, at least for now. Bobby staggered. He pressed his fingers into his eyes. If he spoke, I couldn’t hear through the wall of cotton the gunshot had put into my ears.

  I braced myself on the door and lifted Savannah upright. This moment, while Bobby was disoriented, was our window of escape. At least I thought it was, but I was wrong yet again. Bobby slipped his hand away from his face, like tearing off a mask. He would’ve won an Oscar for that lunatic look, if only he were acting.

  “You made me do this,” he said, and he lifted the gun at us.

  Now it was exactly four o’clock. I knew this not because I checked the time. I knew it because of the leap.

  BUT NOT my leap.

  Instead, a person materialized in the space between us and Bobby’s gun muzzle. It started as distorted air, heat waves off the grill, until it took a human shape outlined in a dark blue aura. It lingered for a second, there but not there.

  Then the shape emitted a single flash pulse that knocked Bobby back a step. My first thought was of the murderous techno-vortex that attacked me in Paige’s room—and not again. But then the gray shape turned real. A human male solidified directly in Bobby’s line of fire. Someone had just leaped in from some other space-time, and all I saw from my angle was his bare ass.

  The lights dimmed again, live machinery shut back down. Marv Parker was still too bowled over by the pain in his chest to notice. Bobby was too baffled by this crazy magic to shoot. So the naked dude took the opportunity to strike. A swift karate chop at Bobby’s gun hand and the pistol dropped into the pile of Connie’s clothes on the floor.

  The naked dude pivoted and howled “Run!” at us. I had a split-second to catch his face before Bobby’s fist smacked him sideways. Our rescuer reeled in such a way that all his flopping private-part glory was offered for Savannah’s scrutiny. And big whopping surprise: the naked dude from another dimension was another copy of me.

  Savannah turned away from the unexpected crotch shot just as I wrenched the office door open. The two of us hit the rickety landing so fast we almost went over the rail. I urged her down the stairs ahead of me, fast as we could, straight into a gauntlet of set-crew people clustered below.

  They’d heard the commotion, of course. The gunshot, the screaming.

  “He’s got a gun!” I yelled at them. It was a stock line, but it worked. The crowd recoiled, bumbling into each other, either because of my warning or because of whoever was behind us, rattling the stairs twice as hard with his stomping feet.

  I shouldn’t have looked back. Didn’t really need to get a good look at the other me coming down after us with the Dr. Who shirt balled up against his most vulnerable bits. The sight of him mucked up my stride so bad I slammed against the rail and lost my grip on Savannah. She went flying and was caught by some burly crewman at the base of the steps. Her purse took a wide swing on its strap and slapped some other dude in the face.

  I found my equilibrium, snatched her wrist again, and made for the
exit. With the door wide open, our escape was a blindingly clear rectangle of sunlight. One last glance at the Cape Twilight Blues set where Morgana Avalon was still propped on the edge of her TV bed, wearing her sexy TV pajamas, talking on her real-life cell phone, completely oblivious to what was going on.

  A voice from above: “Stop them!” Bobby’s voice.

  Out in the lot, hand in hand, Savannah and I froze, both of us panting. We were free and clear of the sound stage, but we were still inside an arena surrounded by high fences. If we took the wrong turn, we’d be trapped.

  Behind us, my naked twin slammed the sound stage door shut on his way out. Still with the shirt pressed to his crotch. Two security cars sped at us from the far end of the warehouse row, sirens blaring. Not prop vehicles this time. They’d be up our butts in seconds, and even if we were innocent of any crime (besides indecent exposure), they’d still detain us long enough for Bobby to get outside. Bobby was the heir to the throne of this gated little kingdom, and we were the invaders. If we got caught, he’d shoot first, and the studio security people would ask questions later.

  “Get in,” my new twin said, and aimed a black device at Bobby’s parked Rapide. Bobby’s car key. In the struggle upstairs, it seemed he’d managed to get a hold of it. The car chirped and the door locks disengaged. So this was our getaway.

  Go ahead and add grand theft auto to the list of crimes. Why not?

  I yanked open the back passenger door. Savannah dove in, rolled over the center console, knocked Red Bull all over the place, and flopped into the seat that 3.0 had formerly occupied. The video camera with the Silver Bullet footage of her and Bobby fell to the floor at her feet.

  I slid in behind her. Naked twin took the driver’s seat. He slid the key-thing into its port and pressed the R button. With his bare foot on the gas, we rocketed reverse in a roaring gush of engine noise.

  “You all right?” I asked Savannah, jostling her shoulder.