by Sean McMahon
Kara staggered backwards, her arms in a protective pose around her body, the shock of what she had witnessed clearly hitting her just as hard.
‘I don’t…they didn’t have a face. It was just…pure nothingness!’ she said, shaking a little.
Facing Kara, Hal was still standing relatively close to Peter, who casually spoke faintly into Hal’s ear. ‘Still…s-sorry.’
‘Argh!’ shouted Hal, jumping backwards. ‘If that’s time travel humour, I am NOT loving it! Can we get the hell out of here please? That’s about as much weird-ass shit as I can handle right now.’
On cue, Peter came back to life, seemingly unaffected by any form of temporal dysplasia, and grabbed a charger, plugged in his phone, then happily left the room. Hal and Kara slipped out behind him, their past-selves now well on their way to taking Jerry home.
‘You know, in hindsight,’ said Kara, ‘our plan to not follow this up, so as to prevent the possibility we were involved, seems like the right call.’
‘Well, too late now Kar’,’ said Hal, ‘we’re through the bloody looking-glass on this one. I think we should steer clear of him from now on. That was messed up.’
‘Yuh-huh,’ agreed Kara, not wishing to visit that otherworldly version of Fir Lodge ever again. ‘And I thought restarts were weird, that place was a full-on hell-scape!’ she added.
Eventually, they had to accept that there was no explanation for what they had seen. They waited for the restart to claim them, in the hope that it would wash away the heebie-jeebies they were currently saturated with, both in agreement that Robert’s room was officially out of bounds from here on out.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
A Fistful of Restarts
100th Restart – Friday Afternoon, 12:17pm
Kara and Hal had spent their ninety-ninth restart preparing for the tasks ahead. It was finally time to transition from talking about what needed to be done, to actually implementing their decision. They had been putting it off for a reason, not least because they had no idea on how they were going to stop their murderer; a living entity, that was out-of-phase with the time and space they were occupying. The second reason was more a question of existential morality. Even if they could kill him, should they? They reasoned that, in the end, it came down to one simple fact; it was self-defence. Though they both felt the justification was still a little tenuous. The defining factor was that it wasn’t just themselves they were trying to save anymore, it was Kevin as well. That fact alone made it a mathematical question, rather than an ethical one. How many more would fall to the whim of their killer, if they allowed him to continue on his current course?
Once they made the conscious, mutual decision of what needed to be done, next came the how. It was time to see just how much power they truly wielded. It was time to stop holding back.
*
Hal found it difficult to physically accost his friends, despite Kara’s argument that the act would restart anyway, and that it would literally be erased from time. In her eyes, this meant it didn’t count. Hal, however, wasn’t so convinced.
‘Bloody hell Hal, you literally killed Robert, Rachel and Alex! Why are you being such a baby about this?’ said Kara, laughing at his plight, whilst curled up in a ball beside the hot-tub directly behind Jon, who turned suddenly, and tripped over her in spectacular fashion.
‘It just feels wrong man, I can’t explain why,’ said Hal. ‘I think I’ll focus on my past-self instead.’
‘Are you sure that’s such a great idea, I mean the last time we did that, we nearly erased ourselves entirely,’ said Kara, a look of concern on her face, as she remembered her friends fleeing to the edge of town, where the barrier resided. She shuddered, as she remembered the time-echoes.
‘It’ll be different this time, you and I won’t be connected,’ said Hal unconvincingly.
With the retained charge that they had spent the early hours of the morning building upon, he ran at his past-self, who was minding his own business, sitting on their favourite picnic bench, finishing his second cup of coffee. Hal threw a punch, aiming for his own face. As it connected, a blue shockwave rippled across the garden, and all the way through the lodge. Hal’s past-self recoiled in agony from the broken jaw he had just sustained, as his Restarter self was thrown fifty-yards into the air, and into a nearby hedge.
‘Jeeze Hal, way to start small,’ said Kara.
‘Oh god, they’re going to take me to a hospital, aren’t they?’ said Hal, referring to his friends, as Jon rushed over to see what was wrong with Hal’s past-self. Kara winced at the sight of past-Hal’s jaw, which was drooping lazily.
‘Restart point?’ suggested Kara.
‘Restart point,’ agreed Hal.
*
Will lined up his shot, resolute in his prediction that he would be able to sink the yellow, despite his distance from the pocket. He pulled back the cue and aimed true, but as he moved to strike the ball he felt a sharp push in the small of his back, causing him to collapse onto the pool table. His cue falling to the floor, Will turned and looked behind him, as Jon stared, and then erupted with laughter at him.
‘Damn Jon, that hurt mate!’ said Will.
‘I didn’t touch you,’ said Jon, ‘that was all you.’
As Will clambered up off the table, he slipped on his pool cue, smashing his head into the table, and falling to the ground with a sickly thud.
‘Eesh, that doesn’t look good. Restart point?’ suggested Hal.
*
As Robert ran frantically around the garden, the flames billowing across his apparently highly-flammable Santa costume, it occurred to Kara that landing an uppercut infused with interdimensional energy, whilst Robert was standing in front of a barbecue, was clearly one of her more reckless moves. Eventually, Robert collapsed in a burning heap, as their friends tried to extinguish the flames.
Hal and Kara stood there covering their mouths, feeling terrible that they’d now killed Robert twice since they got here. A curmudgeonly Santa Clause startled them from behind, catching them completely off-guard. This time, Robert was wearing his full Santa outfit, not just swim-shorts and a hat.
‘Worst. Magic trick. Ever,’ said Robert.
‘Robert?! You’re here? Wait, what magic trick?’ said Hal, unnerved by the trauma of seeing Kara having just killed him.
‘The fog routine?’ said Robert. ‘You both disappeared. Clearly a smoke machine. Hey what’s that over there? Why is everyone screaming? And why is it daytime now?’
Hal pursed his lips as he tried to find the words. ‘Erm…Okay don’t get mad…but Kara just killed you.’
‘That was totally not my fault,’ interjected Kara. ‘If anything, you need to sue the costume company for…wait, you remember the last time we spoke?’
‘You killed me?! That’s like…a euphemism, right? And yeah, of course I remember, it was literally a few seconds ago.’
‘If anything, you mean “metaphor”,’ said Hal, ‘and no, you are, quite literally, dead. Again. First one was on me, sorry bud. But on the bright side, at least Kara and I are even now,’ he added.
‘What are you talking about?!’ said Robert, unable to wrap his head around what was happening, and becoming even more irritable than usual. ‘And why is there a fire in the middle of the garden?’
‘Tell you what mate, better if I show you. Fancy a walk to the edge of town?’ said Hal, as they dragged him away from getting too close to his own burning corpse.
*
‘Interesting don’t you think?’ said Hal, giving no indication as to what he was referencing.
‘That we haven’t killed anyone today? I’d agree, but the day is young…’ noted Kara forebodingly.
‘Yeah, I mean, that too obviously, but I was thinking more about how Robert seemed to remember his first restart with us?’
Kara shrugged. ‘Nothing surprises me about this place anymore. If anything, it just highlights how little we really know about how time works here.’
&nb
sp; ‘Plus, his clothes? He was in costume,’ said Hal. ‘Not just wearing those fetching shorts of his. Someone really needs to run a course on the…’ Hal paused, as he concentrated hard to put the sentence together, then continued. ‘Chronological implications of interdimensional phase-shifting,’ he said proudly.
Kara found it worrying that sentences like that were effortlessly deciphered when they reached her ears nowadays. Their adventuring through time had seen to that.
‘Oh yeah, bet that would sell like hot cakes,’ said Kara, implying a course of that nature would not indeed garner as much interest as freshly-baked treats.
‘Well, I think we’re ready, don’t you?’ said Hal, standing up from his seat at the picnic table, and stretching. ‘Enough practise. We need to put everything we’ve learnt into the correct order and see what we have.’
Kara gave him two thumbs up, knowing that his optimism was misplaced. Now they knew exactly what they were going to do, setting things in motion to get there in the right order was going to take far more restarts than even Kara could have predicted.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Tequila Killer
165th Restart – Friday Afternoon, 12:01pm
With a rush of air, and a brief trip through the white oblivion that lay between the edges of time, separating presumably countless timelines from each other, ensuring the stability of reality as humans perceived it remained immaculately-intact, they landed without the faintest sense of queasiness. Hal set off on his customary brisk walk to nowhere in particular, stopping after a few metres, and turned to face Kara.
‘Wow, tensing your stomach really helps with re-entry!’ noted Hal, remembering the early days, when it made him want to throw up the non-existent contents of his temporally-displaced stomach.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Kara, thinking that it would almost be a shame if they managed to pull off their plans on this restart, never getting to take advantage of that little gem a second time.
‘You’ve finally nailed the Time-Traveller-Landing by the way,’ she added.
‘Really?!’ said Hal, his smile positively beaming. ‘You wouldn’t just say that would you?’
It was then that the unexpected eeriness of their most-visited holiday destination, albeit by default, hit him like a truck. ‘Holy shit, the fog…it’s–’
‘Erasing everything!’ said Kara, finishing his sentence for him, as she stared out into the bleached-white yonder.
They took in their surroundings with expressions that were equal part wonder, and barely concealed fear, as Will’s car pulled up onto the driveway of Fir Lodge. Only this time, the car appeared to be a dark grey, instead of the vibrant-red they knew it should have been.
As Will exited his car, his words were a barely-audible muffle, though Fleetwood could still be heard, booming through the gloom from the car speakers, as clear as their vision was obscured. Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t just the fog that was hindering their vision, everything in their vicinity seemed to lack detail. It was as if someone had smudged the edges of the lodge, the cars, trees, and even the shingle beneath their feet. The voices of their friends had also been affected, as if they were covering their mouths and making strange noises, rather than using fully formed words. For a horrifying moment, Kara wondered if their friends were actually talking in a dialect she didn’t understand, or if that dialect was actually English, she’d just forgotten how to speak it…
As their past-selves arrived, Hal and Kara were shocked to see they could hear them just fine. Still blurry visually, and their clothing devoid of any notable colour, they took comfort in the fact they were clearly in-sync just enough to their past so as not to be completely disconnected from it. For all their planning, they now had to contend with the obstacle of the removed audio-cues they had been utilising to keep track of precisely when, and where, they needed to be, for their carefully mapped-out plan to work, as well as decreased visibility. Not for the first time, they wondered what exactly they had done to piss off the universe so much.
*
As they prepared, for what they feared would be their last chance at attempting a flawless run of their mission, they took the opportunity to voice any last-minute concerns or curveballs they thought they might encounter. If their plan worked, there was no telling what would happen to this version of themselves, or if they would retain their memories.
‘Do you think we’ll just disappear?’ asked Hal, as he lit his first cigarette of what he hoped would be his final three. ‘I mean, if we prevent the events that brought us here in the first place, we should just cease to exist right? Our past-selves should continue on, none the wiser.’
Kara shrugged.
‘Or worse, maybe we’ll stay here forever,’ said Kara. ‘I can’t imagine time just allowing us to return to the present, not with the all the knowledge we’ve gained. There’s probably a reason no one has ever spoken of an experience like we’ve had before. Maybe the reason we’ve never heard of it is because–’
‘No one’s ever made it back,’ said Hal.
Not wishing to allow that sentence to hang in the air any longer, he promptly put an end to it.
‘I don’t think that’ll happen Kar’, It’s more likely that once our past-selves step over the boundary line, the loop should end. On top of that, we wouldn’t be harbouring time-secrets if we were never here to experience them in the first place.’
They sat there quietly for a while, mulling over the countless possibilities. The truth was, it didn’t matter what the future held for them, it didn’t change the fact that their plan was the only thing they had left to keep them going. Without a goal to work towards, they were little more than time-echoes themselves, and they refused to accept that they were nothing but forgotten residual memories, floating through a timeline that not only didn’t want them, but had put a full-stop on their respective destinies altogether.
*
It was their one hundred and sixth fifth restart, which meant that they had been jumping through time for almost a year, give or take. With their intention being never to return after the events they were planning to instigate the following evening, they spent their Friday charging themselves, and listening to music, which helped them greatly with maintaining their focus. Whilst charged, the fog retreated for short bursts, which allowed them to concentrate more succinctly on the precise order of events they would need to set in motion.
As their friends turned in for the evening, in the early hours of Saturday morning, they had waited for Jasmine to get her evening glass of water and return to bed, not wanting to frighten her again. With Hal’s past-self and Jasmine finally out of the picture, they were free to occupy the kitchen in peace. The kitchen of the lodge being directly above the sweet-spot between the rooms that Kara and Hal were occupying in the past made it an equally ideal location to continue charging the powerful blue-energy for the day ahead of them.
It was then, that an unusual idea occurred to Kara, as she spotted the various bottles of spirits lining the kitchen counter. She smirked mischievously, and made her way to the alcohol.
Sticking her tongue out slightly to concentrate, she reached for the bottle of Tequila she’d bought over three hundred days ago, and pulled it towards herself on the counter. Hal was curious to see where her thought process was leading her, and leaned against the island in the centre of the kitchen, a raised eyebrow of perplexity on his face.
Kara marched onwards, using her finger to rest on the edge of a shot-glass, moving it closer to the bottle. She repeated the process with a second shot-glass, then tilted her head to the side, as if to indicate she needed some more charge. Checking over his shoulder to ensure Peter, Fearne, Will, and Stacey were still sleeping soundly on their sofa beds at the other end of the lodge, Hal kicked off from the island he was leaning on, and placed his hand on her shoulder.
A respectable surge of energy coursed through them, and Kara seized the opportunity it afforded her, by quickly unscrewing the cap of the liquor bottle, c
ausing it to fall towards the counter, which Hal caught in his free hand to prevent it falling onto the stainless-steel sink.
They couldn’t risk anything waking their friends, it could lead to them having to restart, and they honestly didn’t know how many more restarts they had left at their disposal.
‘Nice catch,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ he replied softly.
Holding the neck of the bottle, she attempted to lift it off of the counter. With his free Hand, Hal supported the bottle from underneath, and in one swift motion they tilted the bottle, filling one glass, then the other. In unison, they returned the bottle to its upright position, and then pushed the bottle back into the corner, not bothering to mess around with putting the cap back on.
‘I’m not even sure if we’ll be able to retain the liquid,’ said Kara, ‘but I think it’s pretty clear that, one way or another, this could end up being one of, if not the last restarts,’ said Kara, ‘and I’m sure as hell not leaving before I have at least one more shot of tequila.’
‘Uh huh,’ said Hal, ‘figures.’
Kara punched him in the arm playfully, and they positioned their hands closer to the shot-glasses.
‘We should toast to something,’ said Kara.
Hal nodded, as a troubled look crept across his face.
‘What’s up?’ asked Kara, sensing something was wrong. If Hal had any doubts or concerns, she’d rather know about them now, rather than out in the field.
‘We joked before, when we brought Alex and Rachel to us, you called it a “Time Heist”, remember?’
‘Umm, yeah,’ said Kara, ‘I remember, because it was an awesome name that I came up with. What about it?’
‘Very awesome,’ said Hal, smiling weakly. ‘But a few hours from now? That’s going to be the real deal. We’re essentially trying to trick time, before it has a chance to catch up with us. We’re stealing our lives back Kara. Do you…do you think it will really work?’