Extra Life

by Derek Nikitas

  She perked up her head, turned, and noted for the first time our naked double presence. We covered ourselves appropriately. She nibbled the edge of her lower lip. To a nurse, we were more a curiosity than a shock. “Um?” she said, sizing us up.

  A perfectly reasonable question for a time like this.

  The elevator dinged, the doors slid open onto the fourth floor, and the nurse flitted out of existence again. Vanished. No tablet, no scrubs, no nothing.

  “What the?” Twin said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  ON THE fourth floor, we hunched along the hall with our hands covering our privates. No telling when someone else would step out of a room, or appear out of thin air, and set off an alarm. Already, we were probably caught on security camera. We had to work fast.

  The plan was, once we were decent, we’d split up, look for a phone to call Dad with and warn him, if it wasn’t too late already. Inside a storage closet we found a stack of flimsy hospital gowns. We snatched two of them and draped them over bodies. They were decorated with a pleasant lilac motif, high fashion.

  “I think they’re on backwards,” I said.

  “Crap,” said Twin Russ.

  We both made the rookie mistake of slipping them on with the snaps in the front. You don’t get good coverage that way, especially if you plan to make a run for it, but we had no time for a fix.

  “I’ll ask for a phone at the nurse’s station,” Twin said, and hustled up the hall. Now that we could pose as patients, we didn’t have to sneak around anymore. I went for the nearest room, hoping there’d be someone inside whose cell phone I could borrow. But before I could leave the hall, somebody called my name.

  A few rooms down, my broadcasting teacher, George Yesterly, stood in a doorway wearing a pastel blue gown and clutching a mobile IV, drip tube plugged into his wrist. “Russ,” he said again. “Is that you?”

  “The one and only,” I said, nowhere to hide.

  Yes wheeled his IV toward me. Still haggard, but he didn’t look quite so ill as when we collided outside the school restroom all those hours ago in a world that used to be mine.

  “What brings you here?” he asked, nodding at my gown.

  “I, uh, my eye…” I said. “Headaches, after I got hit in gym, so my mom’s a little knee-jerk about injuries. We came down to the hospital to get a concussion check—you know—a couple MRIs.”

  “Your mother is here?” Yesterly asked. He made a little show of glancing around for her. Weirded me out big time.

  “Downstairs,” I lied. “Conrad Bower’s mom—she’s a nurse—she let it slip that you were here, so I thought I’d come up and say hi, you know... would you happen to have a phone I could…”

  Mr. Yes clasped one hand on my shoulder and gave me a fatherly grin.

  “I’m glad to see you, Russ,” he said. “You saved my life.”

  “Wait—what? I did?”

  “This afternoon when you mentioned I wasn’t looking too hot, well, it got me on alert. I tend to ignore these things, but because of what you said I cut out early, went to my doctor’s, and he sent me straight over here in an ambulance. Heart attack! Could’ve killed me if I waited much longer.”

  “Wow,” I told him. “That’s great. I mean, that you got here in time.”

  One good turn among all my time-space screw-ups. Sure, I caused a medical emergency for Marv Parker, but I saved George Yesterly from one—as if the universe was balancing itself out against my manipulations.

  I didn’t ask him about telling me he was a diabetic. No time. This Mr. Yes didn’t say it, and besides, it was just a white lie he told to stop me from worrying. Nothing worth mentioning, compared to what I’d done.

  “Of course, I’ve got some big life changes to make…”

  As he spoke to me under the flickering fluorescents, the intermittent seasickness rolled in. The hallway swayed on huge but invisible waves. Mr. Yesterly’s colors faded and his voice thinned, and then he turned transparent. The last I heard him say was, “…don’t have to know what you’re doing to do some good.”

  His see-through ghost stepped back from me, startled. Because I had just disappeared from his world, too.

  Twin Russ rushed back down the hall, swaying from his dizziness. But he had a cell phone upraised in his hand. “Got one,” he said, just as he stepped through Mr. Yes and disbursed the last of his lingering image.

  “The nurse,” he said, panting. “She asked where my ID bracelet was. Thought I was screwed. Then she just—”

  “Disappeared?” I guessed.

  “Yeah. And I snatched her phone off the desk.”

  “Something’s different. We’re sliding back and forth between realities.”

  “Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?” Twin asked.

  “Not uncontrollably, not like this,” I said. “It’s the same instant in time but it’s different—spaces. Or the same space, but different. It’s complicated. And we’re carrying things with us, like these gowns and that cell phone you’re holding. It’s not a full-fledged leap. It’s worse. I think we’re jammed between more than one dimension at once.”

  “Where did Mr. Yes go?”

  “Exactly. I don’t know. Call Dad, for God’s sake.”

  “I already did. Straight to voicemail.” He pushed the phone toward me so I could hear our father’s recorded voice droning on about being unavailable and if we needed to get a hold of him, please call…

  I cursed louder than I probably should have.

  “We might’ve screwed up the phone service,” I said.

  “Don’t I have our phone right now?” Twin asked. “I mean the other me, from a few minutes ago, the me I was before I pressed that button.”

  God, how many of us were there now?

  Virgin Russ, the one who always lived in this universe.

  One O’clock Russ, the guy who survived the Rapide crash.

  Then the two of us who just made the leap: me and Twin.

  If the time line was intact here, 3.0 would’ve been “erased” by Bobby at Sliver Screens and Future Russ would’ve disappeared in the car wreck. That brought the Russ count to four, if my math was right: Virgin, One O’clock, Twin and me.

  I snatched the phone out of Twin’s hand and dialed our home telephone number, two-thumbed. It rang seven times before I gave up. Even the answering machine wouldn’t connect, and now it was 5:45, way too late to save my father from that bullet.

  But then, just before total black-hole despair kicked in, I realized something about Dad’s cell phone voice mail message. It wasn’t the same one I was used to. I knew Dad’s recorded spiel by heart. Leave a name and callback number, blah blah blah. Hardly more inventive than the automated one they give you if you don’t record your own.

  But the message I just heard was not the same. So I called back.

  “You’ve reached Kasper Vale,” my Dad’s voice said. “I’m away from my phone right now. You can either leave your name and number or select three to be connected directly to Pastime Productions for further assistance.”

  “Dad is Pastime Productions,” I said aloud.

  “What’s Pastime Productions?” Twin asked.

  “Our travel agent.” I pressed three, waited for the connection.

  Until now, the changes between realities had been small, at least in my realm of influence. YouTube/YouView. The resurrection of the Pastime Playhouse. But we’d just fallen into a universe where my father’s route had taken a major detour. He wasn’t wasting away in his attic office this time around. This time, he owned his own company—the people who brought you the Pastime Project.

  Maybe this turn should’ve jolted me, but it all made sense, actually. If circumstances were just a tad different than in my home universe, Dad might’ve ditched Rush Fiberoptics and built his own start-up tech company before he invented the time-space program. As his own CEO, Dad wouldn’t have had to fret about the moral implications of his work. Nobody else would be able to touch it. He could pu
sh the project past research, straight into development, and pull the plug whenever he felt the implications were getting too scary.

  Too bad his son made a spectacular mess of his invention. Maybe the biggest fail since the Big Bang. Crap, maybe this was the sort of screw up that caused big bangs.

  I was mulling over this minor implication while the phone rang and rang.

  “Nobody’s picking up,” I told Twin.

  “We’ll have to find wherever Pastime Productions is and get there ourselves before—” He didn’t have to say—before Bobby Parker. “What’s the message say?”

  “It just keeps ringing.”

  “Give me the phone.”

  There wasn’t anything to gain, so I surrendered the cell.

  “Wait, call Mom and tell her not to go home,” I told him.

  The reality wobble struck again. I braced myself against the wall and groaned. My heart pounded with the worry that if this didn’t stop soon we’d be pulled to pieces or stuck in an empty zone between dimensions forever.

  The trace amounts of food in my gut were surfacing this time. I dove into Mr. Yes’s hospital room, angling for the toilet. He was solidly there again and seated on the edge of his bed, staring at a framed print of a pier at sunset.

  “There you are,” he called out. “I thought you disappeared.”

  “Sorry,” I answered, between wretches. My voice echoed in the toilet bowl.

  “You must’ve hit your head pretty bad,” said Mr. Yes.

  “I’ll be okay,” I groaned.

  “Better get back downstairs, though. You know, it really seemed like you disappeared. I started thinking I was hallucinating from the medication they gave me, but it wasn’t really anything that powerful...”

  I came out of the bathroom, wiping my mouth on a handful of paper towels I got from the dispenser. “Mr. Yes, you wouldn’t happen to have any idea where my father’s company is located, would you? Pastime Productions, it’s called?”

  “Strange question,” he said.

  “Strange day,” I countered.

  “Drove by there the other day. Nice repurposing of the old lot.” Yesterly didn’t have to say more. If Dad was nostalgic enough to name his company after the Pastime Theater, it was no stretch to imagine he’d buy the empty lot and build his offices there. Should’ve guessed it myself.

  On my way out, I asked Mr. Yes if I could borrow some money for the vending machine downstairs, promising I’d pay him back. All he had was a fifty, but he gave it over anyhow, thanking me again for the inadvertent life-saving warning. I wished I could tell him that he just saved my ass, too, but it would’ve taken too long to explain, and he never would’ve believed me. So I said goodbye and stepped back out to an empty hallway.

  Twin Russ was nowhere to be found. I’d been ditched.

  TWIN MUST’VE overheard Yesterly tell me where Dad’s business was based, or he got a hold of Mom on the phone and asked her, or he guessed the answer. Whatever the case, off he went by himself.

  Because—you had to figure—if Dad named his own company after his groundbreaking science experiment, this might finally be one of those universes where our father achieved some actual results, maybe even an answer to our predicament. An antidote, of sorts. Twin Russ was angling to get there first, and cut me out. Bastard.

  Part of me hoped Twin was stupid enough to take the elevator again. That way, if he slipped between dimensions mid-ride, he might find himself appearing where the elevator car wasn’t. Going down fast. That’d handle the traitor—no witnesses, no cleanup.

  No such luck, though. As soon as I entered the emergency stairwell, his barefoot steps echoed up from a few stories below. I shouted after him, but the response was a resounding door slam. So I followed.

  Took the last few steps to the ground floor with my arms thrust ahead of me, pushed nonstop through the exit and into the lobby. I must’ve looked deranged with my backward gown and my wheezing, but nobody paid attention. A much more interesting show was already in progress.

  There were five times as many people as when we showed up with Dad—dozens crowded around the admissions desk and the standing-room-only waiting area. A few shouted for attention, but most were subdued, scared. It looked like some crisis evacuation meeting zone.

  Outside the plate glass window, ambulances and civilian cars clogged the emergency lane. Spinning lights swirled their colors across my range of sight. In the center of it all, just shy of the automatic sliding doors, three crouching security guards had wrestled a patient to the ground and pinned his arms behind his back. “Let me go!” the captive screamed. His voice cracked, not quite a man.

  It was Twin Russ, dropped by the guards on his way to freedom.

  “I didn’t do anything!” Twin screamed at them.

  A familiar nurse watched from the admissions desk, covering her mouth with one hand. She was the nurse from the elevator, the one we flashed indecently. It must’ve been her that alerted security.

  Since I was still unnoticed on the sidelines of this circus, I slipped into an adjacent wing through a pair of swinging doors, huffing it fast toward a side exit.

  I chanced a pit stop at the hospital gift shop to commemorate my visit. Shopping fast, I made a quick show of considering a tote bag and water bottle, then grabbed a Wright Beach t-shirt with jogging shorts and a pair of cheap knockoff Crocs, the only footwear they had in stock besides flip-flops. I blew the bulk of Mr. Yes’s fifty bucks in one swoop.

  The bored clerk didn’t breathe a word about my patient gown or my fugitive attitude. Thirty seconds in a nearby men’s room, I emerged in my getaway suit. The incriminating gown I kicked under one of the toilet stalls—good riddance.

  I hurried out the side exit, and froze beneath the startling cloudless blue sky. Not atmospheric blue, but the solid electric blue of a crashed operating system. The Blue Screen of Death. It domed above the earth, or as much of it as I could see.

  And the city was full of noise—hundreds of horns and alarms, sirens, angry shouts from the far side of the parking lot. I did this. I crashed the world. Error might as well have been written across the naked sky, followed by my name. Who could have guessed that some teenage twerp from a nowhere coastal North Carolina town could wreak this much havoc?

  All that immense unstoppable power did nothing to make me feel mighty. I was an insect under the dead blue dome. It could fall and crush me the same as anybody else. I was nobody. All I did was wake a force I couldn’t handle.

  Azalea Taxi cabs circled the hospital, sharks around a sinking boat, so one of them caught me fast enough, right at the sidewalk. The driver was a scrawny man with deep facial lines, impervious to what was happening around him.

  “Front Street, downtown,” I told him.

  “We waitin’ on y’alls brother?” he asked.

  “Huh?” I asked back.

  The cabbie nodded at his rear-view mirror. A second later, the back passenger door swung open. There was Twin, still in his gown, panting and glistening with sweat. I had no choice but to scoot over so he could get in.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “Security nabbed me,” he said.

  “Yeah, I noticed.”

  “Then thanks for helping.”

  “You ditched me first,” I reminded him.

  “They had me on the ground, then another of those dimensional shifts happened, and all of a sudden they didn’t have me. I just got up and ran out here, and saw you getting into this cab.”

  If the driver could hear us, he didn’t say so. He pulled around to the Oleander Street exit, facing a solid line of stopped traffic. People were out of their cars, hoods lifted open. Far down the road, black smoke billowed from somewhere unseen. I didn’t want to think what it might be.

  All these malfunctions… I imagined airplanes dropping from the sky by the thousands. Nuclear plants losing power, drifting into meltdown. The end of everything.

  OUR TAXI driver plowed halfway downtown by weaving past stalled
cars, skirting shoulders and jumping curbs. For him, this whole Reality Meltdown was the final challenge round. Then we hit an intersection where the cab stalled out and wouldn’t turn back over, no matter how hard our driver cranked the key.

  Twin was overwhelmed. He gawked out the window and said, “Is this even real?” to the Blue Sky of Death. Just then, five military Chinooks thump thump thumped their double rotors overhead. I hoped to hell their guidance systems stayed operational while they were up in the sky.

  I got woozy again, braced myself for another shift. The taxi went ghostly. Our backseat lost its solidity, dropped out from underneath us. There was nothing but asphalt to break our fall. I turned sideways and landed on my ribs. Twin sprawled flat with such a crack I could almost feel the pain zap through my own spine.

  A split-second to go and our shift would be complete—in the middle of snarling rabid traffic. I scrambled off the street, lost one Croc, grabbed Twin by the arm as I went. We both rolled under a bus stop shelter, just as the last hazy glimpse of our cab faded out. In that other world, our cabbie was about to get mighty peeved that we ditched him without paying.

  “What the hell!” Twin said.

  “Dude, you should be used to this by now.”

  “Let’s not get in any more disappearing cars,” he said.

  Lucky for us, traffic was at a standstill in this reality too. A truck eased into the space where the cab had been and ran over my Croc, but the footwear bounced against the curb, unharmed.

  Had to focus now. Had to think—life or death. If we’d been sailing along at thirty miles per hour when the shift went down, we’d have ended up spread across the street like strawberry jam on toast.

  I grabbed my Croc, slipped it back on. No worse for the wear. We took off running, Twin dangerously barefoot. We had to be skirting the next leap point, 6:15. Time was folding up and closing down.

  6:15, 6:37, 6:56—even if we were reckless enough to make more leaps, the half-points were fast collapsing in to a meaningless blurt of minutes, then a handful of seconds, then no time at all. 7 p.m. was the monster climbing the staircase, closer and closer.