by Sean McMahon
‘Restart,’ said Kara, helping him along.
‘Yeah, about that…’ said Alex, wincing playfully. ‘Restarters? You couldn’t think of anything a little cooler?’
‘I didn’t want to upset any time riders,’ said Hal, returning the volley.
‘Fair point,’ said Alex, recalling the myth his brother had told him about a long time ago.
‘Besides,’ said Kara, ‘I actually came up with it.’
‘Really?’ said Hal.
Kara winked, and offered up a shrug as if to say “why not?”
Pushing his barely-concealed incredulity to one side to focus on the matter at hand, Hal took the time to explain their strict schedule. How their current timeline was already wildly out of control. With the lodge destroyed, it was reasonable to assume that their past-selves could, potentially, all decide to leave at a moment’s notice.
‘And if they…we leave,’ Hal said finally, ‘Kara and I won’t be murdered, meaning we’ll potentially disappear. You might even inherit the restarts. That’s why we’re near the boundary line. If the cars start approaching, Kara and I can jump through, restart the chain of events and–’
‘Not obliterate the lodge with you inside it,’ added Kara helpfully.
‘Risky. But solid. Okay…’ said Alex, as he took another drag of his quantumly-disentangled smoke. ‘So, you’ve tried following this Kevin guy, but it turned out he wasn’t the killer…’
Rachel stirred from her stupor. ‘That was actually a really great idea on Robert’s part, getting you to stake out the House of Doom.’
Alex nodded in agreement, as he attempted to absorb what he was being told.
‘So, what it all boils down to,’ said Alex, ‘is that you need to stop the guy, but you can’t do it any earlier than this evening, because you can’t interact with his surrounding environment in any way?’
‘Yeah,’ said Hal. ‘We can only interact on a very basic level, unless we’re virtually right next to our past-selves.’
‘Pushing a cup here, steering a few events there,’ said Kara, in an attempt to elaborate.
‘I mean, I did move a fridge once,’ said Hal, rather proudly.
‘A fridge?! Maybe you’re underselling your capabilities here?’ exclaimed Alex.
‘I lifted a speaker!’ Kara added. ‘Frightened the life out of poor Jasmine.’
‘Like, off the ground?’ said Alex. ‘And Jasmine actually saw you do it?!’
Alex thought about that for a moment.
‘What about another fire?’ he suggested. ‘Is that an option? I mean, you annihilated an entire building…’
‘We can’t go that route,’ said Hal, shooting his brother’s idea down. ‘Besides, the lodge was…we were desperate. It took us so many restarts to get the details just right. And we can’t risk Jerry getting caught in the blast. Add to that, Jerry’s actual owner is in the basement.’
It was one thing killing an actual murderer, but killing an innocent was out of the question.
‘And that’s assuming there’s something in the basement we could use to recreate a disruption of that magnitude,’ added Hal.
‘Which there isn’t,’ noted Kara.
‘What about with the four of us?’ said Alex, trying a new angle. ‘We could work together to bring The Big Bad down?’
Rachel was the one to point out the obvious flaw with this idea.
‘Ooh! Wait, no, that wouldn’t fly either,’ said Rachel. ‘If we work together, Hal and Kara would potentially survive, but that would be after we died, meaning that we’d be dead. Like, dead dead.’
‘Rach’ is right’ said Kara, ‘and now that Fir Lodge is gone, our past-selves may not even cross paths with the killer at all. Whatever we do from this point on has to be restarted. The douchebag has beat us again.’
‘Major Douchebag,’ added Rachel.
Hal and Rachel saluted each other, something they always did when a noun was prefaced with a word that was synonymous with a ranking officer, or title.
‘Wow,’ said Alex, ‘you guys have got yourself into a real pickle here. I can see why you felt the need to break space-time to call a meeting.’ A thought flashed into Alex’s mind. ‘Wait, can you possess people?! I mean, we’re basically ghosts, right?’
Hal smiled. This was why he needed his brother. He needed a mind with ideas that didn’t have a filter, someone who wouldn’t be too embarrassed to ask the good questions.
‘Ha, no, it doesn’t work like that,’ said Hal. ‘That’s not what this is. As far as we’ve been able to tell, we’re more like…residual echoes, displaced in time. We’re not really dead, or ghosts.’
Kara didn’t necessarily share that belief, but thought she would add some vital information.
‘There appears to be a rule here that prevents us from interacting physically with anything living,’ said Kara. ‘Anything biological, even. And on the flip side, we can’t walk through walls or stuff either. Doors are our arch-nemesis…’
‘Yeah,’ said Hal, ‘unless we’re close enough to our past-selves to interact with them, that is. We have to time it perfectly when pulling and turning door handles, or risk waiting god knows how long before we get another chance.’
Hal and Kara plonked themselves down on the grass verge, and Rachel and Alex followed suit. After a short silence, Rachel raised her hand, and Hal gave her a look that seemed to ask if she was serious, gesturing for her to proceed.
‘What’s the deal with the not-so-mild electrocution when you grabbed us?’ asked Rachel.
‘Honestly? We don’t know,’ said Kara, intercepting the question. ‘It only seems to happen when we physically connect with each other in this place.’
Alex sat up, crossing his legs, his mind clearly whirring again.
‘It was pretty powerful,’ said Alex. ‘Is it always like that? When you touch?’
‘We don’t make a habit of it,’ said Hal. ‘We were kinda worried it would either trigger a restart, mess with the whole deal and send us back further, or that crossing the streams would just erase us entirely. And it’s never generated as much feedback as that before. Apart from once with Kara, she–’
‘No, it’s never been that powerful,’ interjected Kara, not wanting her friends to know how close she came to losing her mind when she had first discovered the truth about how she had ended up in this netherworld.
Hal took the hint.
Slightly unconvinced, Alex geared up to question Kara further, but saw Hal shaking his head in a barely-perceptible manner, and sensed he should let it slide.
‘Do you think it’s because there were so many of us connecting at the same time?’ asked Rachel.
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Hal. ‘I’ve got to say, grabbing Alex’s shoulders earlier was the longest we’ve been able to sustain a connection so close to our…other selves.’
Alex nodded, more questions clearly brewing.
‘Does the potency of the feedback increase when you’re closer to your past selves, then?’ he asked.
Hal and Kara shrugged in unison, then Kara decided to field the question.
‘We’ll have to test it out more to be certain, but it seems that way. It’s only a fizzle when we’re far away from them.’
They could hear the sound of a fire engine in the distance.
‘We don’t have long,’ said Hal, as the siren set off a burst of anxiety within him.
Kara stood up. She didn’t want to run through the barrier just yet, but she wanted to be ready if she needed to, in case things went sideways.
‘Guys, there’s something that’s been bothering me,’ said Hal, noticing that Alex was looking for a bin for his cigarette. ‘Bro, seriously. It’ll disappear instantly after the restart. Just drop it.’
Realising Hal was right, he flicked it into a patch of tall grass to the left of him.
‘Sorry… it’s a lot to take in,’ mumbled Alex.
Hal continued detailing his concern. ‘Say, by some miracle, we change the past, future, or whatev
er, and we actually manage to prevent our deaths, but we don’t kill the guy, Jerry’s owner Kevin is going to be next on a very long list of future murders.’
Hal shuddered, as he thought about the covered walls that seemed to function as some sort of creepy shrine to all of the people the killer had ended. ‘But say we actually succeed, and manage to kill this weirdo, Kevin will still be locked away in that basement.’
‘You know,’ said Rachel, clearly wanting to address something that was on her mind as well, ‘I’m not pretending to be an expert on all this time-travel shiz, but regarding your problem with Kevin…I have an idea that might help.’
‘Rach’, none of us are time-travel experts’ said Hal. ‘We’re all just making this up as we go along. What are you thinking?’
‘Well...say you stop this guy, saving Kevin after that point is going to be hard,’ said Rachel. ‘I mean, time itself will presumably be all over the place, what with how much you’ve screwed around with the natural order of things, no offense.’
‘None taken,’ said Hal with a chuckle, as Rachel pressed onwards, validating his decision to bring her here in the first place.
‘Your past-selves will presumably leave Kevin’s lodge safe and sound,’ continued Rachel. ‘And each step further they take away from you will reduce your ability to interact with this place, right?’
Hal and Kara confirmed this with a simultaneous nod.
Rachel closed her eyes, her idea not quite fully-formed, and opened them again, as it solidified.
‘I think…you need to find a way to save Kevin before he needs saving…put something in place well in advance. Does that make sense?’
Hal and Kara mulled that over, letting her words wash over them.
‘Yeah…’ said Hal, ‘I get where you’re coming from. That’s…that’s actually genius Rach’!’
Rachel blushed, and shrugged it off as if it was nothing, but secretly felt pretty bad-ass over finally getting her head around the rules of time travel.
‘Can’t you call the Poli…’ began Alex, then stopped mid-sentence and slapped his forehead for emphasis. ‘Nope, even if you could dial out, there’s no way you could give the police the heads-up, unless they were running your call through a dedicated EVP filter. Which may or may not be a real actual thing.’
Hal laughed, then said ‘yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not a real thing mate. Although, if we make it out of this, we should definitely try and patent it!’
Rachel pretended she knew what an EVP was, and let it slide, trying not to get distracted by the combined nerdiness of the two brothers.
‘Will we all retain our memories?’ asked Rachel. ‘Once you, erm, restart us? Or if you beat the guy, will you both remember?’ she added, pointing to Hal and Kara.
Hal sifted through his foggy memories. There had been so many restarts since Robert’s untimely demise. Eventually, he begrudgingly reached his conclusion.
‘Unlikely. If Robert remembers anything, he hasn’t let on since he restarted.’
‘He did seem to debate whether he wanted to get into the hot tub after the restart though,’ said Kara, ‘it was only for a second, and you’d have to have watched three or so restarts in a row to really have noticed it, but now he does it every time,’ she added.
‘You do realise what that means don’t you?!’ said Alex excitedly.
Rachel was right there with him. ‘You changed time!’
Kara and Hal looked at her disbelievingly, but she wasn’t to be dissuaded.
‘Your actions in this world directly led to a…help me out Alex,’ said Rachel.
‘Temporal constant,’ Alex chipped in effortlessly.
‘Oh Lordy, where do you come up with this stuff?’ said Rachel. ‘But yeah, that! You changed one of those! It’s a tiny change, sure, but–’
‘Now you know that the future is pliable,’ said Alex, finishing Rachel’s sentence for her, ‘this could actually work!’
Alex and Rachel were now hopping around on the spot, just a little bit too enthusiastically, and went in for a high five, then remembered they were self-contained lightning dispensers, and seemed to think better of it.
Whilst the elation they were projecting regarding this revelation was admittedly infectious, Hal and Kara knew better than to read too much into small victories. And yet, Hal couldn’t help himself.
‘Eesh, maybe, I guess,’ said Hal, warming to the idea. ‘Yeah. Yeah, okay. I mean he does hesitate every single time now…but that’s a huge leap to assume we’d remember enough to call the police if we manage to beat this thing and realign with present-time.’
Alex pulled out his phone, out of habit more than anything else.
“Dead like me,” he thought.
But as he looked at his phone, he suddenly got the feeling he was onto something.
‘Hal, give me your hand for a second.’
Reluctantly, Hal obliged, noting that the current was mild, undoubtedly due to their alive-selves being well-over a mile or so away, as Alex continued to stare at his phone.
‘Come on come on…’ Alex said impatiently, eventually conceding. ‘Worth a shot I guess,’ he said, as he pulled away from Hal and shook his own arm, which was more than a little numb. ‘Maybe with more power…if we were closer…’
‘What?’ said Hal, ‘I mean, sure, maybe we could listen to our music, but I’m fairly certain we couldn’t make a call even if these things had some juice. I doubt the circuitry is even in there.’
Alex walked over to the boundary line and squatted.
‘Alex, be careful, don’t get too close!’ warned Kara nervously.
‘Jeeze, obviously,’ said Alex. ‘Relax Kara, I’m just thinking. What happens if I throw my phone through here?’ he said inquisitively.
‘Try it,’ said Hal, with a smile. Alex obliged, watching as his out-of-phase phone disintegrated into a thousand tiny blue shards.
‘Coooool,’ said Alex.
‘Where’d it go?’ asked Rachel, the sight of seeing an object dematerialising before her very eyes creating a very real sense of wonder.
Hal had forgotten what that must have been like. He and Kara had been here for so long now that remarkable occurrences were relatively commonplace to them. He suddenly felt like a very jaded time-traveller.
‘Now check your pocket,’ said Hal.
Following Hal’s instruction, Alex pulled his restored phone from his boiler suit pocket, his mind suitably blown, and turned back towards the mysterious vortex.
‘This blue electricity stuff has to be important,’ said Alex. ‘There’s no way something that holds this much power over the reality of this…time-bubble you’re both trapped in is just for show.’ Alex couldn’t see the point in that. ‘Surely, if it’s generated by the contact between Restarters, it must serve a purpose, and I’d bet real money that it’s the key to interacting with people in the past.’
Hal grinned at his brother for finally embracing the term “Restarters.” Hal had almost been on the fence up until now about sticking with it. Their discussion was cut short by the ear-splitting sound of a fire engine, as it sped past them.
‘Crap. Guys you’ve been amazing. But we’ve got to go,’ said Kara.
Alex acknowledged Kara’s instruction with a look of determination, and extended his hand, to Hal.
Realising it was time to say goodbye, Hal felt his spirit break a little. He always felt like he had to be strong around his little brother, even though Alex had never expected that of him. Hal cleared his throat, frustrated by all of the things he didn’t have time to say. What if he couldn’t make it back? Who would look after their sister? Their dad? Could Alex get a message to Jess?
‘Boys…’ whispered Kara, not with impatience, but merely a mild undertone of urgency. ‘We have to go now…before it’s too late.’
The brothers ditched the handshake for a hug.
‘If you need to talk again, feel free to…erm, kill me again?’ said Alex.
Hal laughe
d. ‘We took a huge risk bringing you here, we won’t risk your futures by pushing our luck. But thanks.’
Rachel pushed between them, and flung her arms around Hal. Hal hugged her harder, preventing her from recoiling from the now-shimmering blue energy that radiated between them.
‘Make sure you come back to us okay?’ said Rachel. ‘I don’t want to lose my best friend.’
Hal smirked. ‘Erm, you do have Jon, Rachel…you know…your boyfriend?’
‘You know what I mean, you douche!’
Hal laughed, knowing perfectly well what she meant.
Alex offered Kara a casual salute, but she scoffed and jumped towards him, hugging him tightly, muttering something into his ear.
‘Tell Greg I love him,’ said Kara, ‘I don’t think I ever actually said the words…’
Alex frowned at the foreboding tone in her voice.
‘You can tell him yourself, when you make it back,’ replied Alex.
Kara’s eyes welled up, and she clenched her jaw, nodding firmly.
Rachel and Kara ran at each other and hugged, ignoring the mild impact of displaced energy as they did so, and said the word “babe” a few thousand times.
Now it was Hal’s turn to act as timekeeper. He coughed softly, and they broke it up.
Hal and Kara made their way to the invisible nexus ahead of them, as Hal looked back over his shoulder and shouted to Alex.
‘Bro, I’m so Sam Beckett right now!’
‘I guess that makes me Al’?’ said Alex. ‘Let’s hope this next leap gets you guys home,’ he added with a smirk.
‘Oh boy. Here’s hoping,’ said Hal.
Rachel and Kara shot each other a look, rolling their eyes, as Hal turned back to face Kara.
‘You want to hold hands or anything when we go through?’ he asked.
Kara pulled a face that seemed to be assessing if he was drunk.
‘Man-up and pull yourself together, Hal.’
‘Anyone ever tell you that you’re so grumpy just before a restart? On three then?’ suggested Hal.
‘Who would possibly be able to tell me that?! Yeah, on three,’ confirmed Kara.
They counted down in unison. ‘Three…two…’
Alex’s phone pinged to life in his hand. The glowing, white, fruit-shaped logo emblazoning the screen like a perverse product-placement that had just decided this purgatorial afterlife was its new core demographic. Alex raised the handset, his brain trying to formulate words to shout at Hal, who was facing away from him, facing towards the invisible time barrier, but all Alex could produce was an unintelligible, barely-formed sound.