Infinite

by Brian Freeman

  Dylan raised his arms with the fingers of his hands spread wide. He knew that I was a threat, but for now, I was just another Chicago mugger shaking him down. “I’m not armed,” he called. “I’m not going to fight back. What do you want? Money? I don’t have much, but you can have whatever’s in my wallet.”

  I spoke to him from the tunnel. “I don’t want money.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  I tried to speak, but my throat choked up with guilt and indecision. We were alone, no one around but the two of us. It was the perfect moment. Everything I wanted was right in front of me, standing on the trail. All I had to do was take it.

  “Talk to me,” Dylan went on. “Are you in trouble? Do you need help? Tell me what you want.”

  I couldn’t hold it in. What I said made no sense, not when he couldn’t see my face and see who I was. But I told him anyway.

  “I want your life. That’s what I want.”

  Fear widened his eyes. He flinched and took a step backward, ready to bolt. I wondered if he was thinking about that earlier moment, looking through the window, seeing his mirror image on the other side of the glass. Did he realize that was me? Could he hear himself in my voice?

  “Don’t run,” I warned him sharply, grabbing the knife from my pocket and holding it up in silhouette. “Don’t try it. You won’t get far.”

  “Listen to me. I have a little girl. A baby.”

  “I know.”

  “You know? You know who I am?”

  “I know everything about you . . . Dylan Moran.”

  “Then what do you want with me?”

  “I told you. You’re leading the life I’m supposed to have. And I want it back.”

  “What does that even mean?” He narrowed his eyes, trying to see me in the darkness. “Who are you?”

  I almost stepped into the light and gave him the answer. I’m you. If I came at him, he’d know who was taking away his world. Before he died, he’d look into my eyes and see the truth. I tightened my grip around the knife handle, feeling it slip in my sweaty fingers. My mouth was dry with desire for what this man had. My legs tensed, ready to move.

  But I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t me.

  I was trying to take things that belonged to someone else. I’d lost my Karly; he’d kept his. I’d waited to have a child with her; he’d said yes. I could take those things for myself, but in the end, they still wouldn’t be mine. I hadn’t earned them, and this man had. He deserved to keep them, not to have them ripped away by a stranger. I couldn’t steal his life.

  I stayed in the tunnel, where I was invisible. The silence between us dragged out.

  “It doesn’t matter who I am,” I told him finally. “Go home. Get out of here. Go home to Karly. Go home to your little girl.”

  He backed away, unsure whether this was a trick. I stayed in the darkness without moving, watching my one chance at happiness leave me behind. When Dylan got to the top of the slope, he turned his back on me. I knew he would run now, disappearing into the park.

  “Dylan,” I called after him sharply.

  He stopped, although he was far enough away that I wasn’t a threat anymore. “What is it?”

  “Not that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t go through the park. Stay on the street. If you never want to see me again, stay out of the park at night.”

  There was something in the sound of my voice that convinced him. He went the other way. He clambered up the grass away from the trail, and when he was out of sight, he ran. I heard his footsteps pounding above me, as he joined the lights and traffic and people on the street.

  He was safe. He’d make it home now.

  My grief tasted bitter in my mouth. I felt hollowed out inside. I’d come a long way and ended up back where I started, with nothing to show for the journey. The guilt, the loss, the shame, all distracted me. I wasn’t thinking about where I was, or the darkness of the tunnel that had been lit up when I came this way before. I’d missed the clues I should have seen immediately. I’d forgotten why I was in this world.

  I turned around and saw my own shadow.

  He buried a knife in my stomach.

  CHAPTER 32

  The blade sliced through tissue and muscle and severed my intestines. I felt an electric shock of pain and then a strange flowing warmth. My doppelgänger was right in front of me, his breath on my face. He cut through my abdomen with the practiced hand of a butcher. The damage was done in seconds, and then he put his other hand flat on my chest and pushed me away. I stumbled backward. The knife slid out of my body. I clutched at my stomach and felt blood oozing between my fingers. I staggered out of the tunnel into the light, with a wet red stain growing on my shirt. The river slurped along the bank beside me, sounding loud inside my head.

  Shock overwhelmed me. With my fingers numb, my own knife clattered uselessly to the sidewalk. I tried to hold the blood in, but I couldn’t. It pulsed out of my body.

  Dylan followed me out of the tunnel, wiping the bloody knife on his leather jacket.

  “I thought you were different,” he sneered. “When I saw you take out that knife, I really thought you might have the balls to kill him. But no. You had your chance, and you let it slip away.”

  I fought down the dizziness in my head and charged at him. He saw me coming. Smoothly, he eased his weight onto his left foot, turned sideways, and lashed out with a jab of his right leg. His foot kicked like a piston into the wound in my stomach, and my brain turned upside down with agony. I stumbled, moaned, then collapsed to my hands and knees. My mouth spat up vomit. Blood dripped from my belly onto the trail, a constellation of cherry-red spatter.

  I tried to forget about my panic. My fear. My pain. I needed to function, at least for a while longer. The blood on the ground became a kind of Rorschach test, centering me. I stared at the blood, and then my gaze shifted to the weeds and cracks in the bridge’s retaining wall, and then to the shadows thrown by the light post overhead, and then finally to the long steel blade of my knife. It still lay on the trail where I’d dropped it. The black handle was inches away. My body blocked it from the view of the Dylan standing over me. I could feel him there, like a boxer crowing over the adversary he’d knocked to the ground.

  My fingers inched closer to the knife like the legs of a spider. In one jerky motion, I grabbed it and pushed off my knees. I slashed at him with the blade, and my knife landed in flesh, driving four inches deep into his thigh.

  He howled with pain and twisted away, ripping the knife handle from my hand. Grimacing, he yanked the knife out of his leg and threw it like a boomerang into the river. I could hear the splash. He lifted his own knife high over his head, and his eyes boiled with fury. I expected him to bury the blade in my neck, cutting through arteries that would erupt in fountains of blood.

  Instead, slowly, he brought his arm back down. I was on my knees on the sidewalk, and he limped toward me and slid the sharp edge of the blade under my chin. He pressed hard enough that I could feel the sting. Then he lowered the knife and jabbed it into the fabric of my shirt and tore away one of the sleeves. He backed up and tied the sleeve tightly around his leg. The cloth was crimson in seconds.

  With his wound bandaged, he jerked me to my feet. Another shock wave of pain radiated through my body. I had trouble standing. He threw me against the railing at the riverbank and pushed the point of the knife against my rib cage, where my heart was beating wildly. Below me, I could smell the brown sludge of the river.

  “Do you want me to end it?” he asked.

  “Do whatever you want.”

  “Sorry, I won’t make it quick for you. You get to sit here and die slowly, knowing what I’m doing on the other side of the park. Listen carefully. Maybe you’ll be able to hear Karly scream.”

  My lip curled into a snarl of rage. I dug my fingernails like claws into his wounded thigh. It felt good to see him suffer, but my victory was short lived. He scored the knife in a bright-re
d line across my chest and hurled me to the ground. I landed hard on my side as he delivered a vicious kick into my stomach with the toe of his shoe. Fireworks blew up in my head, white hot and blinding. I was barely conscious.

  He knelt beside me, and his voice made a sadistic whisper in my ear.

  “I’m going to kill all of them, Dylan. Do you want to watch? Sorry, but I don’t think you’ll make it that far. You’ll see it through my eyes, though. We’re connected, you and me. You’ll know what I’m doing. You’ll watch each one of them go. Dylan. Karly. And the little girl, too. I won’t forget her.”

  “Don’t.”

  It was the only word I could drag from my throat. He just laughed at me.

  “It’s too late. You had your chance. Once I’m done, I’ll go back to the Art Institute and start over. I have more worlds to conquer, and you won’t be around to chase me. You failed again, Dylan. I’m stronger than you are. Face it, I always have been.”

  He pushed himself to his feet and limped away.

  I tried to focus, but my eyes spun in circles and then blinked shut. I lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes again, I didn’t see him anymore. Inside the spinning kaleidoscope of my mind, I saw my father instead. I was a boy huddled in the corner of the bedroom, and my mother’s gun was on top of the dresser, and my father was reaching for it, cocking it, aiming it, pulling the trigger.

  I should have been able to stop it.

  All my life I’d looked back on that moment and wondered why I’d let it happen. I should have been able to stop it!

  If only I’d reacted faster. If only I’d seen him going for the gun, if I’d screamed, if I’d warned my mother, if I’d leaped off the floor and run to him, if I’d put myself between him and her. I could have done something. Instead, I sat there and watched my father pick up the gun and shoot my mother in the head. I did nothing.

  I let her die.

  I let Roscoe die.

  I let Karly die.

  Losing them was all on me, one failure after another.

  Never again. I heard myself shouting somewhere in my head, trying to jolt myself awake. Never again! I wasn’t going to let it happen to anyone else. I’d come here to set myself free, and that was what I had to do.

  The blur of my memories faded away. Somehow, I came back to life. I was still in the park. I’d passed out, but I had no idea for how long. The other Dylan was gone. I was alone on the sidewalk in a river of blood, but I was still alive, and that meant I had one more chance. I grabbed the railing on the riverbank and pulled myself up. When I was standing, I tried to swallow down the pain. I pushed a hand against my abdomen to stanch the bleeding, and I staggered up the trail.

  Where was he?

  I didn’t see him.

  The trail crested a hill beside the trees. With each step, I dragged stale air in and out of my chest. Bugs swarmed around me, as if smelling that I was close to collapse. No, it was my blood they wanted. I felt them landing on my fingers, beating their sticky wings, drinking their fill from my wounds. I didn’t have the stamina to swat them away. Let them feed.

  Faster, I thought to myself. You have to go faster.

  My legs carried me down the dark trail at a pace that was almost a run. I was in a race now, not just between me and my doppelgänger, but between my mind and my body, to see which one would give up first.

  Where was he?

  There. I could see him ahead of me now. He limped in and out of the glow of the light posts. He’d slowed; he was losing blood, like me. I dug into my reserves and pushed aside pain, and breath, and blood, and memory, and I stumbled ahead like a marathon runner with the finish line looming at the end of one more long block.

  I was nearly there. I had him within reach.

  Then, from the middle of the park, I heard something that sent a shudder of terror through my soul.

  “Dylan?”

  It was a voice from the darkness, calling my name. A voice I knew so well.

  Karly.

  No, no, no, no, it couldn’t be her, not here, not now. But the Dylan I was chasing heard her, too, and he stopped on the trail. The unmistakable silhouette of my beautiful wife broke from the trees and joined him. She wrapped him up in an embrace and kissed him. It was dark, and she could barely see him, but she showed no fear.

  Why should she? He was her husband.

  Relief filled her voice. “Dylan, where were you? I was so worried when you didn’t come home. I left Ellie with the neighbors and came out to find you. Sweetheart, I told you not to go through the park.”

  I saw him smile. There was nothing but evil in that smile. I heard him say, “I’m sorry, my love.”

  Then I saw his hand disappear into his leather jacket for the knife.

  He was just like my father, reaching for the gun.

  I should have been able to stop it!

  I summoned everything I had left in my body. I threw myself across the last few steps and launched into the air, colliding hard with his back and knocking him to the ground. Pain exploded in my gut, tearing open my wound, unleashing a sea of blood. I took Dylan’s head into both of my hands and slammed his skull against the concrete. Then I did it again, and again, hearing the bone crack. When his eyes finally closed, I wrapped my hands tightly around his throat and pushed my thumbs into his windpipe. I cut off every atom of air that would keep him alive.

  Above me, Karly screamed.

  Of course she did. She couldn’t see my face. I was a stranger attacking her husband. She grabbed my shoulders to pull me off, and when I hung on, she kicked and scratched and got on the ground and clamped her teeth around my forearm. I couldn’t take it. Finally, I let go, and she dragged me backward into the grass.

  We were still in the dark. She couldn’t see my face.

  “Karly, stop!” I screamed.

  But all her primal instincts had taken over. She hammered my body with her fists. Her knee sank into the bloody mess of my abdomen, causing waves of agony that left me struggling to breathe. I put up my arms to fend her off and shouted again.

  “Karly, it’s me!”

  My familiar voice, my words, slowly seeped into her mind. She began to perceive that something impossible was happening here, but it was already too late.

  Rising above her like a ghost under the park light, I saw my doppelgänger. He was on his feet again, the knife in his hand. Blood from his fractured skull ran in ribbons down his face. He jumped toward my wife. With a surge of adrenaline, I shoved Karly away, but Dylan kept coming. He landed on top of me, and we rolled together, battling for control of the knife. My strength was waning, but so was his. Both of us were dizzy, drained, desperate. The park became a whirling gyroscope inside our heads, and I could feel our minds coming together. I saw his face and my face through my own eyes. As we rolled, as our bodies intertwined, we were becoming one person. We’d always been one person, trapped inside endless worlds.

  There was only one way to stop him. I had to sacrifice myself. I let go of the knife and took hold of his throat again, choking him. With his hands free, he thrust the knife into my back, and pulled it out, and thrust it in again. I held on through every lightning bolt of agony. I ignored the pain and weakness and blood and kept my fingers wrapped around his windpipe. Below me, his face turned purple. His eyes bulged. His tongue swelled from his mouth. He stabbed me over and over, but the shock waves rippling through my back belonged to someone else, not me. My mind shunted them aside. I had no wounds, no feeling, no body at all. I was nothing but two hands locked around a killer’s neck.

  He reared back to stab me one more time.

  This time, the blow never came. His arm stiffened in midair. The knife slid away from his fingers and dropped to the grass. His stare grew fixed, the whites of his eyes ruby red with exploded blood vessels. His body went limp.

  It was done.

  Dylan Moran was dead.

  It took time for me to unclench my knuckles and peel my fingers away from his neck. When I was finally able t
o let go, I rolled off him. We lay in the park next to each other, two twins. One dead, one dying. I turned my head, watching him, still not able to believe I’d killed him. Exhausted, I let my eyes blink shut—not for long, only for a few seconds. When I opened them again, he was gone. The ground was empty, as if his body had never been there at all. He was an intruder who didn’t belong in this world.

  Neither did I.

  I had to go, too.

  Every breath had become torture. I dragged in air and tasted blood as I exhaled. It wouldn’t be long. And yet I felt free.

  Karly knelt by my side. Her blue eyes were full of confusion and fear. “Dylan. Oh, my God, Dylan, what’s going on? That other man, he was you. He had your face. Where is he? Where did he go?”

  I whispered to her as my brain floated. “Go home, Karly.”

  “No, you need help. An ambulance.”

  She took her phone in her hand, but I found enough strength to hold her wrist down. “Don’t.”

  She put her hand softly on my cheek. “I can’t lose you. Ellie can’t lose you.”

  “You won’t lose me. Go home. I’m there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not your Dylan. I’m not him. Your Dylan is safe. I promise you.”

  “I don’t understand!”

  I felt black clouds encroaching. I didn’t want her to see the end. “Please, Karly. Go.”

  “How can I leave? How can you say that?”

  She bent down, and her hair swished across my face. Her lips found mine. I could barely feel them, but the barest sensation of softness was enough to take away some of the pain. She held on to me, our faces pressed together. I smelled her perfume, but my five senses had begun to shut down, and only the sixth was left.

  “Do you love me?” I asked her.

  “You know I do.”

  “Then trust me. Go home.”

  She pushed herself up on her hands, her face over mine, only inches away. “Are you really there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can I possibly believe that?”