Extra Life

  But Wrong Russ wasn’t where we expected him to be, stationed at the tower base waiting out the clock. At first, I thought we must’ve beat him rushing over here, but then I saw the gate swung open, half the padlock dangling busted from the latch. He must’ve shot the lock to gain access.

  And then I looked up. He was scaling the center ladder, just like I did twelve hours before. Halfway to the top already, with Connie’s backpack strapped on his shoulders. The Flux Stabilizer’s antenna sprouted from its open pouch, ticking back and forth with each new upward lurch.

  I didn’t have a clue what Wrong’s deal was. Maybe he wanted to get closer to the satellite dishes and receivers at the tower top, thinking they’d give a stronger signal. More likely, he was fortifying his position—out of range of anyone who came to stop him, like us.

  “Does he still have the gun?” Paige asked.

  “If he’s smart. And he is,” I said.

  If any of us tried to climb after him, Wrong Russ could take pot shots with his pistol all he wanted. I pictured the gruesome fall. He’d pick us off, one by one, and nobody would get close to him.

  “I’ll go,” Virgin volunteered. “He won’t hurt me.”

  True: killing Virgin would be suicide for any clone, but—

  “He’s desperate,” I said. “He’ll shoot you out of spite if you stop him from taking the leap. He’s run out of chances.”

  “Or you might just slip and fall, even if he doesn’t shoot you,” Connie added, eternal optimist. He’d brought the car alongside the gated base. Wrong was too high up for us to see him at this angle, and we were closer than was safe. I worried he’d start firing at the car to scare us off.

  “It has to be me that goes, even if I don’t make it,” I said.

  Nobody protested, especially not Virgin. I was the stranger in these parts, the one who wouldn’t be missed no matter the outcome.

  Savannah was hunched in a fetal ball against the door. She hadn’t offered an opinion or even a word since I regained consciousness. I wondered how they lured her into the car in the first place. Maybe they told her Bobby was still on the loose and looking for her to be his co-star for eternity. Or maybe she felt a smidge of obligation to see this through. Who knew? She just sat there, clutching her purse. Her purse.

  “Savannah, I need some of your makeup,” I said.

  I lifted my butt off the seat and struggled the jeans down to my knees. No time for modesty. Paige covered her eyes with her forearm and said, “Woah, wait a second—not cool.”

  To Virgin, I said, “Dude, take off your clothes.”

  “What?”

  “I got a way to beat Wrong Russ.”

  “Wrong what?”

  “Never mind. Y’all have nicknames.”

  “What’s mine,” he asked.

  “Classic Russ,” I lied. “Like Classic Coke. Give me your pants.”

  IN VIRGIN’S borrowed clothes and shoes I climbed the tower. My arms and thighs were so weak, I worried they’d just give out. The roof of Dad’s car down below looked like a kiddie pool for a daredevil high jumper. Down there, Kasper Vale stood beside his car, hands in his pockets, my only spectator. Our final words for each other weren’t much, but then I wasn’t exactly his son.

  There he was anyhow, absorbing all the mystery of my existence, the way you’d contemplate a snapshot of yourself you don’t remember being taken.

  Further above, Wrong Russ clung to the ladder. He was an even stranger enigma—one that none of us wanted to ponder. The backpack was repositioned on his chest for easier access. He gripped the pistol firmly, hanging one-handed. I could practically see down the gun barrel.

  He wasn’t moving anymore. He was waiting. For me. All he had to do was wait and he’d win, simple. And if my ploy didn’t work, if I couldn’t fool him, then I was a dead man, hopefully before I hit the ground.

  My arms would barely cooperate with the climb. All the thrill I might’ve felt before was gone. My hands were sweaty on the rungs. Each footstep reverberated through the tower structure like an amped-up laser gun blast.

  Wrong shouted something down, but the wind disbursed it. Either he was stalling for a better shot, or my impersonation of Virgin Russ was working so far. The trick wasn’t so much the clothing swap as the hasty patch job to conceal my black eye. Foundation and powder and a bunch of other beauty product from the stockpile in Savannah’s purse.

  Just before I left the car, Paige passed me the Curt Schilling baseball card, and this time she didn’t have to tell me what she meant by it. I wanted to bestow some final wisdom on Virgin, but all I could think was “take care of these people,” knowing now they could mostly take care of themselves.

  I got another ten feet higher and Wrong said, “Don’t come any closer.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me.”

  “What are you coming up here for, anyway?”

  “To convince you.”

  “Convince me of what?”

  “To climb down and share the leap with the other Russ.”

  “Lost his chance.”

  My climbing dragged to a crawl. I had some dumb notion if I moved slowly enough, he wouldn’t notice.

  “Nobody’s stopping me this time,” Wrong said. He stirred from his perch, turned away from me and went for further heights. The satellite dishes were clustered just a few yards over his head.

  Cape Fear sprawled out below and spun of its own accord. Wrong had to be feeling the vertigo too—or maybe not. Maybe all he felt was the rush. We were leaps apart, different to the cores of characters. I was still desperate to keep myself wrapped in the humanity he already shed.

  “I have to know,” I called up to him.

  “Yeah?”

  “How’d you get Bobby Parker to do all your dirty work?”

  “Bobby was a certifiable nutso. You could steer him off a cliff with the right argument. All it takes is a good director.”

  “He shot Dad.”

  “The only real Dad is the one waiting for me on my home turf.”

  “This sure as shit is real.”

  “From your point of view, I guess,” he said.

  “Tell that to the people down in that car.”

  “Collateral damage. What can I say?”

  “Why’d you show them those movies in the theater?” I asked.

  Wrong stopped and glanced up toward the red beacon light. I could sense it—his nerves wouldn’t let him go higher. We were maybe ten rungs apart and I wished we could keep climbing, just a few more seconds to put off the confrontation.

  He looked down at me through the V of his armpit. “I didn’t want any of this,” he said. “When I get back—to my real life—everything I did and saw will be erased. I’ll be Regular Russ again. But I wanted someone—I wanted them—to see what I could achieve, what was possible. I wanted to see their faces. That’s why I showed them. All I ever wanted was to make them happy, so I gave them what they lost, even if it was just in a movie.”

  Then Wrong Russ did what I never would’ve dared. He reached out one leg and planted it against a horizontal steel brace, grabbed a diagonal lattice and pulled himself from the safety of the ladder. Out on a limb, betting I wouldn’t follow. Luke at the end of Empire, with no Falcon to save him. Except not, because that would make me Vader again. Seth, not Sith, damn it.

  “All you did was make them grieve all over again,” I said.

  The mention of the ones we left below made us both chance a look back down. Sure enough, they were all out of the car now. They were craning their necks to watch us, two boys lost out of time and space, settling this major mess we made.

  “I showed them better lives,” Wrong said.

  “All this extra time and you couldn’t figure it out?” I asked.

  “Figure what out?”

  “They never needed your help. You needed theirs.”

  We were level with each other now. Three of me, arm to arm, could’ve reached him, but not me alone. The steel brace where he w
as balanced groaned when I tested my own foot on it. This structure wasn’t built for the jungle gym antics of two hundred-and-fifty-pound teenagers.

  Wrong anchored himself to a lattice and kept his gun on me. He held the backpack by its coat rack loop, unzipped too far so the Flux Stabilizer jutted precariously out the side. “I’ll shoot you,” he reminded me.

  “And erase yourself,” I said, playing my Virgin Russ role.

  “One way or another, I’m off this ride.” The stubborn set in his jaw was just as mine would’ve been if our situations were reversed.

  I was right beside him, ready to leap. When I grabbed a lattice beam, the strain on my wound made me hiss. The cut across my hand was torn open again. Blood dribbled down my forearm, bright enough to catch Wrong’s eye.

  He’d made that slice himself, the mark that betrayed me.

  His eyes widened, and I knew I was caught. “You—” he growled.

  INSIDE THE backpack, our cell phone chirped cheerily. The Pastime Project, coming to a close.

  I lunged at Wrong before he could shoot me. A lunatic suicidal move, but I didn’t have a choice. He reared back and almost lost his footing. I caught empty air and learned how badly gravity wanted me. But I kept clinging with a finger hold.

  The gun smacked steel, triggered a shot that spark-pinged a bullet off metal just beside my head. The recoil jerked the gun from his grip, and down it went—to be dashed on the ground or swallowed by the Cape Fear River.

  While Wrong considered his loss, I took another fast grab and caught hold of one backpack strap. But my fingers lost the lattice and I was swinging midair over a long span of space. To his credit, Wrong held fast, even when my full weight snapped his arm straight down, hard enough to dislocate a shoulder. Credit Connie, too, for choosing an accessory that could withstand a human clip-on ornament.

  I dangled. Nothing but sturdy vinyl and Wrong’s determination keeping me alive. He was all teeth, holding fast to his strap, and the backpack was a high-stakes wishbone stretched taut between us. I knew our strength. He’d last another few seconds, tops.

  Then I heard it, the rip of a zipper slowly prying itself apart. The long antenna on the Flux Stabilizer bent its aim straight down, toward me, as the bulky equipment slid free from its protective pouch and readied for a sky dive.

  “No!” Wrong screamed.

  I made a blind grab as the device geronimoed. At this instant, in a million other realities, my reach was not quite right. In those worlds, the device tipped off my fingertips and fell away forever, but this was not those worlds. Here, I managed to catch the thing. It smacked firmly into my hand.

  The arc of my full-body swing brought my sneaker toes against a lower beam. But the back swing sent me out over open space again. Because I had the device and there was still a chance to recover it, Wrong Russ kept his job as my anchor and my pivot.

  Momentum brought me forward again. I locked a crossbeam in the crook of my arm. The backpack fluttered away, empty and exhausted.

  A five pound chunk of tech like the Flux Stabilizer weighs at least a hundred when your muscles are frayed. But I wasn’t going to give it up now. Our cell phone was safely housed in its heart, just where Wrong Russ inserted it.

  It flashed the final minute: 7 p.m.

  Poised on the next beam above me, Wrong said, “Aim it up at both of us. We’ll both go through.”

  No harm done, I supposed. But I vetoed the plan. Because this final wormhole would send Wrong Russ back to a world where the Pastime Project was a constant reality, where every day he’d be tempted to use it again—one last shot to get everything right—and how seriously long would a guy like him hold out before the urge took over, until he threatened all of existence again?

  Because I was him and he was me. I’d zap myself back to my bed, safe and sound, no harm done, but in twelve hour’s time the call would come to me again. Another invitation to make the leap.

  I didn’t have to take this trip anymore. This world was as solid as any other, and it was the end of the line. I reeled back, assumed the best possible stance I could manage, and pitched the device out over the Cape Fear River.

  Who knows if an ump would’ve called it a ball or a strike? Accuracy didn’t matter, as long as I was tossing it for good.

  Above me, a scream and a clatter, and then a blank space where my double had been a second before. Wrong Russ’s body rushed past. A quick eclipse over the falling sun. He jumped and was falling, falling, reaching out for that spiraling chunk of metal and wires already far beyond his grasp.

  His final failed leap.

  There is no victory in watching your own death, though you can’t turn your eyes away. My stomach thought it was me in free fall, and I cried out with despair that wasn’t mine to feel.

  A disturbance on the surface of the water far below. A brief blue flash, an almost imperceptible split in the current, swallowed again instantly. Wrong Russ was gone, but I clutched for dear life to someone else’s existence. And held on tight.

  SEVEN P.M. passed me by, and I still was. Still I am. Maybe not in the solid, anchored way that Virgin Russ is, but we’re both still flesh and bone and blood, both the captains of our own thoughts and personalities.

  He’s more impulsive than me, go figure—still that full-throttle energy. After what I went through, I’m more of a stop-at-all-the-stop-signs-and-look-both-ways sort of guy.

  I’m not convinced my friends and family were relieved when I climbed down from that tower alive. I was like the loser who gets too drunk at the party and crashes on the couch, and the next morning I’m still there, snoring away, and it’s awkward for everybody.

  They put on smiles, gave hearty hugs, but maybe they would’ve preferred my disappearance, one way or another. It would’ve been tidier, easier to explain, and easier to live with.

  The cover story we first concocted in the Silver Bullet was still our official statement to the public. So as far as you know, Russ Vale had a reclusive, home-schooled twin named Seth, and I got cast in the part, go figure.

  You’ve probably seen it on Evening Entertainment or read about in People. How the Vale Brothers were running an elaborate ruse, pretending to be each other, in preparation for a documentary that never really got off the ground.

  After the business with Bobby Parker, we were forced to “admit” our mistaken-identity game and apologize. Turns out, when you’re mired in an explosive international scandal, people ask questions. And there were repercussions: like both of us had to take last year’s final exams all over again, just to prove we didn’t tag-team the first time.

  Never mind that reporter who found no birth records for Seth Vale. I mean, you could stand us side by side and see we were twins, you could do genetic testing to prove it scientifically, so what difference does some missing paperwork make?

  Yeah, you’ve heard our story, but not everything you read on BuzzFeed is true, except maybe a few of the nutty trolls speculating in the comments section: “prolly got a Dyad Institute cloning lab in their basement, yo” or “this some syfy shiznit gowin on here.” That dude with the Caillou avatar wasn’t too far off the mark, after all.

  You can fool your public, but you can’t pull one over on the woman who vividly recalls giving birth to just one kid. Madeline Belmont-Vale had to learn our secret after the fact, and it was a delicate procedure, much like snipping the right colored wires in the right order to avoid detonation.

  Mom’s Big Surprise went down sooner than we hoped. She got tipped off to the Pastime Theater crisis and actually showed up amid all the cop cars and cordoning tape. Seated in the back of an ambulance, I heard the clack clack of her high heels a few seconds before she rounded the corner and grabbed both sides of my face, demanding to know if I was okay, and what happened to my hand, and why was I wearing stage makeup over a black eye?

  “Madeline?” Dad said, Virgin standing next to him. Oops.

  Congratulations, Maddy, it’s twins!

  Mom looked back at me, t
hen yanked her hands away. She got a little non-verbal for a few seconds—mostly wha noises. Then she pressed her fingers to her forehead, found her cool, and said to my Dad, “Kasper, what did you do?”

  Because this kind of M.C. Escher upside-down logic? The only man who could make a working beta test of something like this was my father. Later, he sat her down and laid out the equations that got us into this mess. Or what he could figure, at least, because this universe’s Kasper Vale had not yet actually cracked the time-travel code. Took about a dozen hours of talking to make her believe.

  I don’t want to pretend Mom was easily convinced, but she’s a woman who needs to compartmentalize things in her life. Something like an extra, identical son? She can’t let that kind of puzzle go unsolved for too long.

  Ultimately, after she thought she understood enough of what happened, Mom gave Dad an ultimatum: erase every file and burn every notebook with the slightest scribble about the Pastime Project. It was either that or divorce. Dad had already dealt with the nasty repercussions of time-space tinkering, and he knew it wasn’t nearly as bad as Mom could make his life. He moped and stalled for a while, and I knew his agony, having to ditch your dream for the reality of other people.

  But it’s like giving up sugary soda or social media. You feel alive and full of promise again soon enough. You feel cut loose from your own tight knots. Within a week he was plotting other, equally secretive projects. Some people you can nudge in the right direction, but you can’t change them.

  We had a nice backyard campfire, all four of us Vales, tossing notebooks to the flames. Burning every bridge that might’ve one day led me astray, into another universe again.

  SKIP AHEAD to six months after that day, the longest day.

  The hoopla eased off long enough that our town could appreciate something else besides the salacious details of the Bobby Parker tragedy for five minutes.

  So the local state university branch did a screening of an award-winning film called Shelter, directed by a homegrown ingénue who spent close to a year documenting the trials and triumphs of a few women living at a local halfway house. Raw and moving, the film won spots at more than a dozen festivals around the country and earned its director a statewide grant.