Extra Life

by Derek Nikitas

  One shot, he promised, but that was his first lie, because from the start he meant to shove me through the wormhole over and over again, enough times to bust a leak between dimensions and flush himself into this world.

  He was the gremlin who tampered with Connie’s video game and computer and telephone, who pushed me to go out and screw up my life so I’d have to make the leap again. And again.

  I couldn’t image what mindset would make him commit his betrayals—his murders and manipulations, driving Bobby crazy. People did horrible things all the time, but not people with my exact personality, my empathy, my memories and longings, my perfectly sane arrangement of brain and nervous system.

  To him, every new universe was just a game. He could draw a blade across Paige’s wrist and it was nothing more than a trick blade, a movie prop, and the blood was chocolate syrup, and Paige was just a scream-queen actress. Because how else could you—could I—do it? Press down and slice and watch the life fade out of her eyes? And do it for no other reason than to lure me into leaping again?

  Alternate selves discarded, with no more thought than when you toss out a dulled disposable razor. Russ Vales picked off at random when the sheer number of them threatened reality itself. And Bobby Keene-Parker of all people had been sent to take them out, except the original of course. That’s why Bobby asked who I was at the point of a gun. He didn’t want to shoot the wrong Russ.

  This was me. This was who I was.

  Loser and winner, cheated and cheater, victim and monster.

  Virgin Russ stepped forward, held out his hand to Wrong Russ.

  “You’re not going to hurt us,” Virgin said. “Give me the gun.”

  Wrong cowered back, twitchy-eyed, panting. He tucked the gun into the back of his waistband. Something else was in his hand now—Bobby’s lighter.

  Next came a deafening blast. I thought it was an explosion, but it was the emergency exit door, slammed wide open. A dark figure dove in, hunkered low. Police, more and more of them spilling in. A battering ram. Helmets, face shields, Kevlar vests. Demands growled out.

  Wrong Russ did not obey them. He flicked his thumb on the igniter, and the lighter flame came alive again. As Virgin reached out to snuff it, the flame seemed to leap for the gas-drenched seats, eager to spread. An instant inferno enveloped the rows and crawled up the curtains. A wall of heat and light rushed against our bodies. I reeled, coughed, couldn’t see, and someone wrenched the Flux Stabilizer from my hands.

  Wrong Russ, of course.

  The air was too hot to breathe. I choked and coughed and tumbled down the landing toward the theater entrance ramp. Somehow, I had Paige’s wrist in my grasp and we rushed away from the heat, Virgin and Dad close behind.

  But Conrad? I couldn’t find him through the fire and confusion.

  Uniformed police crowded the lobby exit doors in full raid mode. Dust kicked up so thick it lingered. In the midst of it, Wrong Russ was a gray shadow, gun in one hand and the bulky stabilizer in the other, like a homemade bomb.

  Lobby doors swung back, a mad rush for the box office. Police swarm: “Drop it! Drop the gun!” The weaponless among us halted in our tracks, ducked low, kept our distance from Wrong Russ and the onrush that was about to take him down.

  Then gunfire. I don’t know whose. Uncountable reports. The glass concession case shattered. I shoved Paige behind a Ms. Pac Man machine and dove for cover beside her. She grunted from the impact and swore at me, but she was safe for another instant at least.

  Then quiet. A few guttural shouts. Official commands. The syncopated stomp of a dozen boots, heavy breathing. The castle overrun with marauders.

  Rough hands lifted me off the floor and twisted my arms behind my back. Handcuffs cranked into place. I was given a hurried escort through the choking dust and smoke, toward sunlight.

  My steps kicked metallic debris—remnants of the Flux Stabilizer, now scattered scrap parts. A tossed-aside pile of Wrong Russ’s clothes. He had been taken out by police. Deleted. Time winding down to zero hour. My only escape hatch, slammed shut and locked.

  MY HANDCUFFING seemed to be a case of mistaken identity. I tried to plead with my arresting officers, but the patrol cops weren’t listening. They told me to zip it. I was not under arrest, just detained until the details were clarified.

  I was alone and still cuffed in the backseat of a parked cruiser two blocks from the burning theater. Windows opened a crack for fresh air. Forced to watch the smoke filling the sky. Flashes of orange fire.

  My temporary holding tank was parked in front of a vintage clothing store. The mannequin in the window, wearing a 1960s dress that looked more like a curtain, glared at me accusingly.

  Most of Front Street was cordoned off, with emergency vehicles of every stripe hoarding road space. I’d managed to make a disaster zone of downtown Cape Fear twice in less than ten minutes, but at least this time the pandemonium didn’t run so deep that it screwed with the laws of nature. There weren’t enough Russes left for that.

  A pulsing red light cut through the smoke. It was the beacon at the top of the radio tower reminding me of the chance I lost.

  In the front seat, an open laptop mounted on the console told me it was 6:58. Two minutes left to go, but I fretted over the immediate past instead. I’d seen Paige and Virgin and my father leave the theater, but Connie—I didn’t know. He was trapped in the center of all those seats when they went up in flames. Maybe the cops had time to grab him, but that fire, it came on so furiously. And the flames would’ve struck him with such a paralyzing fear…

  So much carnage and all for nothing. Because Wrong Russ was dead and gone, just minutes away from his salvation. After however many hundreds of leaps and reboots? It was almost a shame for him to have failed, and almost a blessing that my defeat came much more quickly.

  Wrong Russ was proof that time and temptation would twist my mind in ways I couldn’t at that moment anticipate. He was the end result.

  I didn’t see Paige coming until she was outside my window. Her cheeks were smeared with soot. She wrapped her fingers into the inch of window space. Then I saw: she was pressing something against the window. Our Curt Schilling baseball card.

  “How’d you get out here?” I asked her.

  “There’s a lot going on. I probably won’t be missed.”

  “Conrad…” I said.

  Paige dropped her eyes. She didn’t have to say it out loud. What she said instead was, “Take a look at this card, Russ. You remember it?”

  “Yeah. My lucky card. You fished it out of the garbage to remind yourself what a failure I am.”

  She hitched her lip at me. “Who said that?”

  “You did. In another life.”

  “I admit, it sounds like something I’d say. But it’s a lie.”

  “I should’ve gone back for him,” I said.

  “The real reason I took this card,” she went on, ignoring me, “is to remind myself about sticking with it, about missed chances and redemption and all that corny stuff.”

  “Please,” I said. I imagined them pulling the burned husk of a body from the theater wreckage, backpack still strapped to his bones, smoke still rising from the char.

  “Okay, so it’s sort of ironic,” Paige explained. “Y’all sucked at baseball, but I’ve seen your heart, Russ Vale. You need to quit tossing out your cards.”

  “I don’t have any more cards,” I said.

  The clock on the police laptop blipped to 7 p.m.

  And I heard it, the chime of my cell phone.

  Paige reached into the belly pouch of her sweatshirt and took out the phone to verify what I’d heard was true. She had my cell phone, kind of battered and scratched, but otherwise intact. She said, “I grabbed it off the floor, just before they got us out. Figured you might want to have it back.”

  “You do it,” I told her.

  “Uh-uh, James Cameron. No way I’m jumping into y’alls weird sci-fi fantasy. This is yours to fix. That’s why I showed you the
baseball card. A reminder.”

  “Nothing will change here. Connie will still be dead.”

  “It’s something me and the other Russ have to live with. This is our world. But you, you don’t belong here.” She eyed me for a second, then lowered her voice to recite: “I ain’t going to let you toss your whole life to save mine, girl.”

  A line of dialog from my movie, used against me. The sting of it threw me off guard, like Paige knew it would. Handcuffed, I could only watch as she slipped the cell phone through the window crack and aimed its screen at me.

  “Take care of Virgin,” I said.

  “Virgin? What virgin? What does that mean: take care?”

  “I didn’t mean…” I started, but she pressed the blue icon.

  I POPPED back into awareness, hands still behind my back, though nothing bound them together anymore. I wasn’t in the cruiser, either. I was in some tricked-out muscle car, my bare butt propped on some massive speaker that took over the whole back seat. It cranked out rap so hard my bones rattled.

  The dash clock said 6:40. Set a few minutes fast, I figured. The burly driver’s bald head, red-flame tattoos and all, bopped to the beat of the music. I hunched low, but his lazy eyes caught me in the rear view and burst open wide.

  “What the—” he said, swiveling around to face me.

  “I’ll explain later!” I yelled. Why not?

  Burly Dude grabbed for me. I dodged his meaty grip, shoved the door, and rolled onto the sidewalk. The grit of concrete bit my skin, but it was better than chancing Burly’s wrath.

  Nearby pedestrians gasped at my public indecency. The sky was natural blue with scattered clouds, and reality seemed generally stable. Good news. Not enough Russes here to screw with the coding. Four of us, by my count—Wrong Russ, Virgin, me, and the me from five minutes back. One O’clock and Twin would already be dead, murdered by Wrong and Bobby. Five alien intruders seemed to be the magic number for total interdimensional meltdown. The fifth must’ve been that surprise Bobby clone, or the extra Russ I hadn’t known to count.

  Burly Dude laid on his horn. I found my feet and lunged hands-first into the consignment shop. That damn window dummy watched me with that same judging glare she would give me again, twenty minutes from now.

  Inside, somebody called out, “Hi, there—let me know if y’all need any help.” Obviously, the shop owner couldn’t see me past the overstuffed racks and linen piles, clothes hanging literally from the rafters.

  I snagged the nearest pair of jeans and shimmied them over my hips. Great: pink hearts stitched down the thighs, flared bell-bottoms. Even greater: waistline too tight to button.

  I might’ve looked for a better fit, but the time bomb was ticking down, and just outside the display window, Burly Dude was finally rising from his car, snarling at me. I found a bland gray sweatshirt and went on my way. Zig-zagged through the bulging clothes racks to the back of the store like navigating a mosh pit to reach the stage. Behind me, Burly stepped in with a welcoming overhead jingle.

  The checkout counter came into view. A woman with rat’s-nest hair lowered her knitting to get a look at me.

  “I’ll pay you back, I swear,” I told her, and swiped a pair of scuffed black electrician’s boots from a shoe rack. I dropped them into my path and stepped inside as I went.

  Burly was over six feet, so I saw his glistening bald head coming at me through the clothes. I took an alternate route, ducking low so he couldn’t catch sight of me. The clothes were almost suffocating, but then I saw the light, and dashed through the exit.

  Down the street, the Pastime Playhouse was intact. No fire, no smoke curling into the sky. For the moment.

  My oversized boots clomped off beat as I ran toward the theater. Every muscle in my body was jelly from hours on the run, but I still had to push.

  I was almost there when Savannah shot through the narrow alley between the buildings and headed straight at me. She ran with both hands in front of her face, thumbing manically at her phone. This was when she fled from the showdown inside, another angle on the moment.

  “Savannah!” I said.

  She jolted, fumbled the phone, and it skittered across the concrete ahead of her, jettisoning the battery as it went. A newspaper box broke her stride. She slumped into it, red-faced, purse dangling from the crook of her elbow.

  I had to squeeze her shoulder to get her to truly see me.

  “Listen—I’m going in there. Don’t call the police,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Don’t call the—why?”

  “They’ll ruin everything. Just trust me. I’ll stop what’s happening.”

  “They—they kidnapped me—Bobby and the other—you—and I had to sit there and watch—inside the theater—I don’t—you—who?”

  “I’m a good one,” I assured her.

  Her head kept shaking but her eyes seemed to believe. That was the best I could do. The dismantled phone would buy me a few seconds of time, at least, if Savannah decided to ignore my pleas and call the cops anyway.

  I rushed in through the lobby, alone. Kicked off my boots for the sake of stealth. No real plan in my head. I didn’t have the time for strategy like Wrong Russ did. All I could do was bumble in and hope to cause enough chaos to offset his careful calculations.

  Inside the theater, Wrong recited his justifications once again, the second daily staging of a local play: “These worlds are dreams, you understand? No more real than dreams, except you keep waking up from one into the next. But I want to wake up for good, and so do you…”

  Former me was supposed to say, Don’t tell me what I want, but this time I leaped from around the corner instead. No way Wrong Russ could’ve forecast my appearance. This was all new territory. None of his hundreds of leaps had ever brought him to this new string of events.

  But… the bastard got the best of me anyhow. Dodged my grappling arms and whacked my skull so hard I saw white flashes and reeled into the gas-soaked theater seats.

  His gun went off. More screams and scrambling. I wasn’t dead. The throb in my skull assured me of that. When my eyes refocused, Wrong Russ had control of the Flux Stabilizer, just like last time. He stepped backwards, warning everybody off with his firearm. Near his feet, Former Me was nothing but a wicked-witch pile of hospital gift shop clothes on the floor. Five seconds flat, and a miserable failure.

  All I did was get another version of myself killed again, and now we were spiraling toward another crash. Wrong turned the gun back on me. One last bit of tidying up before he scrammed. I was wedged on the floor between two rows of seats. Easy target, defenseless and dazed.

  “No!” somebody screamed. It was Connie, ten feet behind me.

  The shadow of a fat wingless bird arced overhead. It looked like a turkey taking awkward flight. Wrong Russ did a double take at the incoming projectile, raised his eyes and his aim to meet what was hurtling his way. Connie’s backpack, stuffed almost to bursting.

  Wrong decided not to fire. Instead, he sidestepped, and the pack flopped onto the landing, gushing all its contents. Books and action figures and Magic cards, everywhere.

  Wrong Russ coughed out a laugh, swiped Connie’s emptied pack off the floor, and shoved the Flux Stabilizer inside. He turned to make his escape, no longer interested in picking me off, it seemed. This time, there’d be no police raid to stop him.

  After he fled, I tried to stand, but my latest head wound took its toll. Everything popped black, a fuse blown in my brain, and I was out cold.

  I WOKE up with pain sizzling through my forehead. Someone tipped bottled water into my mouth and got me coughing even more. No clue where or when I was, but the information trickled in as I recovered from my stupor.

  A moving car, Dad’s to be exact, the backseat, me in the middle with Virgin almost on my lap. I would’ve told this other me to give me me some space, but Paige and Savannah flanked us on either side. We were packed pretty tight.

  And my best friend Conrad Bower was manning the wheel. Connie
, driving. I blinked, suspecting a brain injury (mine or his), but there he was, hunched forward, hands at ten and two on the wheel. Yeah, he looked frightened, but not petrified. Not helpless, not anymore.

  We were cruising Front Street at a reasonable clip.

  Dad in the shotgun seat, navigating.

  “Stop sign,” Dad told Connie.

  We all lurched when Connie stomped the brake, but nobody complained. Forget about driving: last time I even saw Connie inside a car was never, in this world or any other.

  “Connie,” I said. “You’re killing it!”

  He gave a quick nod—concentrating too hard to chit-chat.

  Virgin said, “He wouldn’t get in otherwise, so we had to let him take the wheel.”

  “He saved my life,” I said, mostly to myself, remembering that fat-bird backpack soaring overhead, what it must’ve taken Connie to make such a bold move at gunpoint.

  “You might have a concussion,” Paige announced.

  She was the nurse with the water, getting more on the front of my shirt than in my mouth. I grumbled and nudged the bottle away, even if I would’ve preferred to wrap my arms around her and forget everything else.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said. Because, hey, in a handful of minutes I’d be pain free. Gone to oblivion, just as soon as Wrong Russ activated the Flux Stabilizer. I’d be nothing but a memory, and maybe not even that.

  “How long was I out?” I asked.

  Dad turned in his seat, slapped a reassuring hand over my knee. “Just a couple minutes. It’s seven minutes to seven now. We had to carry you out of the theater. People are going to have some questions when all this is done.”

  “All what?” I asked.

  I got my answer when Connie turned a sharp left into the WCPF station parking lot. The backseat occupants grunted as we crushed each other. Straight ahead, the radio tower spiked the sky like vast scaffolding for something better in the future.

  They’d brought me here for the final showdown. Me, the worthier Russ, if only because I didn’t kill anyone.