Die Again To Save Tomorrow (Die Again to Save the World Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  “I’m Korean, you racist bastard! And no, I don’t think I can beat you—I know I can!”

  Aki kicked him again, and he laughed.

  He laughed so nastily that it turned Rueben’s stomach. “All the better. You Korean girls—”

  Before he could finish what was sure to be an explicit comment, she surprised him with a right kick under the knee. He folded a little but regained his composure and threw another punch at her. She blocked it and maneuvered away from him.

  Suddenly, Aki darted close and leaned into her assailant while she tried to grab the man’s pistol tucked back under his hoodie.

  “Stop that,” the gunman muttered, but it was too late. Aki got control of the gun. Her assailant twisted, and they both fell to the bar’s floor. The spitting cough of the silenced weapon sounded, and Aki groaned. The man in the hoodie rolled her off him, and she lay on the floor with unseeing eyes and blood pooling out from a gunshot wound over her heart.

  Rueben’s mouth dropped. “You bastard!” With his heart about to burst, he charged toward Aki’s murderer, full of adrenaline.

  The gunman tucked the pistol back under his hoodie and met Rueben’s attack, deflecting him and shoving Rueben to the side. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” the man said.

  But it had. Aki lay dead and bleeding a few yards away, and there was only one way to fix it.

  Rueben had to die.

  God, he hated dying. It wasn’t like in a video game. It was a long process where overwhelming pain took over, and he had to fight back his instincts to stay alive—struggling to breathe and whatnot. They—the lack of oxygen, severe blood loss, bones piercing his lungs, etc.—eventually won, and he died. What fun it always was.

  It had to happen. With enough calm and focused concentration, he could time warp back to before Hoodie Man ever stepped foot in the bar and call the cops to apprehend him before all this madness ever happened. Before his friends got hurt. Before Aki was…murdered.

  Rueben drew a deep breath. In order to die, he needed a weapon—or at least someone else to kill him. The gunman was the perfect person. It was time to poke the bear. “Here goes.”

  In one quick, forceful motion, he grabbed a wooden chair, lifted it high, and smashed it over the guy’s raised arms. Splintered wood rained down over the fight scene. Rueben expected—wanted—a fatal assault. Yet instead of fighting him, the man paused and turned to him with an odd smile.

  His toothy grin and laugh sent shivers down Rueben’s spine. Although the hood and sunglasses covered most of Badass Hoodie Man’s face, Rueben thought the guy was about forty years old. He cracked his knuckles as he stared down Rueben. “You looking to die, kid?”

  “I could ask the same of you.”

  The man laughed. “I’m not going to make dying easy for you, you know.”

  “It never is.”

  The man sneered. Then police sirens rang in the background, coming ever closer. Blue-and-white lights shone through the windows. Rueben was running out of time.

  He had to get this guy to kill him.

  Rueben held up his fists. “You think you’re big, tough guy? Going around hitting women. Come on, show me what you got.”

  Rueben was a lanky, computer-nerd type, and this dude, well, he was well-muscled, had a curious gauntlet and metal body armor, and a devil-may-care attitude.

  This challenge was exactly what it seemed to any onlooker: a suicide mission.

  Rueben gulped in anticipation of the intense amount of pain this guy was going to dole out. There was no way out of it. He danced around, waiting for a punch.

  Instead of attacking him, the man used his remaining moments of freedom to pull out a syringe. He held it needle-point up, pushed out a droplet, then tapped the cylinder of clear liquid with his finger.

  Rueben raised an eyebrow. “A little heroin?”

  The man laughed. “It’s not for me. It’s for you. With what I have in here, you’ll wish it was heroin.”

  Rueben slowly backed away. Before he could wonder what was in the syringe, the man chased him. Rueben instinctively scrambled up on top of the Jaguar booth. He ripped off a gleaming metal wheel hub and held it before him like a shield. He didn’t know what this guy was up to, but it didn’t sound like this injection would kill him slowly.

  At that moment, the door burst open and two cops rushed in, brandishing guns. “Freeze. Everybody freeze.”

  Rueben and the gunman held their hands up, and the cops quickly noticed Aki’s body on the floor.

  One of the cops stared wide-eyed at the unconscious body lying against the wall. “Shit, Martha?”

  Hoodie Man ran toward the back entrance, and the two cops chased. When their line of sight was clear, they fired concentrated shots that found their mark but deflected harmlessly off the gunman’s back.

  Damn. What kind of hi-tech body armor deflected bullets?

  It didn’t matter. What did matter was warping back in time and preventing all this from happening. To do that, Rueben had to die.

  Taking a deep breath, he sprinted into the firing range of the police officers’ guns.

  One of the cops waved his gun at him. “What the hell? You’re obstructing justice, and that murderer is going down whether you stand in the way or not. Now, you got one warning. Move it.”

  Rueben backed off, mainly because it was pointless. The cop wouldn’t murder him. Man, had that plan backfired, no pun intended. Maybe he could try again.

  With Rueben out of the way, the two cops chased the gunman out the back door. Rueben followed them, hoping for another chance at a stray bullet. Luckily, the bar’s staff had escorted all the patrons well away from the building so it was only the gunman, the two police officers, and Rueben. He saw a dumpster in an alley though, and huffing with a palm steadying himself against it was Marshall.

  The cops chased the gunman down an alley, yelling and shooting. Rueben joined the chase, attempting to throw himself in the path of the bullets again.

  “Damn idiot!” Marshall yelled from his spot against the dumpster. “You want to be civilian collateral damage? Get out of the way, son!”

  The hooded gunman made it about half a block away from the bar when he came to a chain-link fence and stopped. Stowing the syringe under his hoodie, his hand went for his gun again.

  “Drop the gun,” the cop yelled.

  The man drew a deep breath. Slowly he set the gun on the ground but hesitated with his palm still caressing the gun’s grip.

  The other cop squinted down the sights of his pistol, his finger poised over the trigger. “Let go of the gun and put your hands behind your—”

  Then it all went down. The hooded gunman raised his weapon and nearly got his shot off, but the second cop had already pulled the trigger. Fire spat from the gun’s muzzle, and Hoodie Man crashed backward to the pavement, striking the back of his head on a dumpster. Blood leaked from the man’s shoulder under his hoodie, and he didn’t move.

  The first officer radioed in the situation while the second officer bent and checked for a pulse. Finding one, he kicked the gun a few feet away from the body, holstered his gun, turned Hoodie Man onto his chest, and cuffed his wrists behind his back.

  Applying pressure to the wound, he tilted his head up from the unconscious man and toward the first officer who was speaking to someone on his radio with his back to him. Then he glanced back down at the shoulder wound. It wasn’t bleeding too badly now, but he’d probably need medical supplies from the police car until the ambulance arrived.

  When the officer rose from the apprehended man’s body, Rueben had his chance. Neither cop was facing Hoodie Man, and Rueben snuck over and grabbed the gunman’s weapon, noting a knife concealed inside the man’s boot.

  The cops turned, drawing their guns again. “Hey!”

  One of them sighted down his gun, while the other warned, “Set it down, son. I don’t know what’s going on in your head, but you don’t want to do it.”

  Instead, Rueben turned the g
un on himself. This changed the whole scene. The two cops faced each other, and a sympathetic look crossed the first one’s face.

  He whispered to the other one. “Do you remember what to say from that counseling module?”

  “Counseling module? Man, we got a dead cop killer in the street and another with a gun. Don’t talk to me about no ‘counseling module!’”

  The first cop pursed his lips and appeared to be reciting from a script. “It’s not worth it. You’ve got a lot to live for. We’re gonna get you some help. Okay? Get you to see a counselor. Just drop the gun, okay?”

  The other cop scoffed. “Ah Jesus, man. This is not the way we do this shit.”

  Before Rueben knew what was happening, the second cop had his hand pinned behind his back.

  Rueben cried out as the officer’s grip squeezed his wrist. “Owww.”

  Then the cop grabbed the other one and held it behind his back. It cut off his circulation, and Rueben felt that disconcerting dull ache that reminded him of the one time he got a really awful acupressure massage. “Look, you got the wrong idea, here. I’m not—”

  The cop kicked his legs apart, and Rueben heard him reaching for his cuffs. “We’re going to need you to drop the gun, son.”

  Rueben tried to talk fast. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  They didn’t listen. With both hands pinned behind his back, Rueben knew he had no choice but to release the gun. The cop already had his hand on it. He just had to let go. He wriggled his fingers free of the weapon, which the officer promptly confiscated. The grip on his wrists only lessened and didn’t release. The cop sounded like he was having a hard time with the cuffs.

  The cop replied soothingly, “There you go.”

  These guys were an obvious and literal interpretation of the good-cop-bad-cop routine, and if Rueben wasn’t so worried about going to jail, he would have found it funny. Now he was just scared out of his mind.

  Once, when he was a teenager, he had been behind the school with a couple of kids who were getting drunk and high. He wasn’t doing either but trying to interview them for the school newspaper about their rock band.

  The interview wasn’t going so well. His voice recorder kept screwing up, and he was trying to take notes but having a difficult time transcribing the frontman’s speech about, “Don’t be into labels and just let the music happen, man. Music comes from our primal souls, the part of us that we share with nature. We can’t label that instinct to make sound and art through our cultural biases of what we understand sound to be.”

  “I’m sorry, can you repeat that whole ‘primal souls’ part? I didn’t get the rest of that.”

  It had been at that moment the cop sirens had sounded. Before Rueben had even known what was happening, the band had all dropped their spoils and ran like hell.

  This had left Rueben with all their evidence of vices. The truth eventually won out in the eyes of the school and the law, but Marshall never believed it. He made Rueben spend an hour in jail to scare him straight. The highlights of that hour included a drunk named Paco who defended his honor against a meth head named Speedy, who had allegedly just bitten off a guy’s ear.

  Marshall’s plan had worked.

  Rueben never did a bad thing again after that. Or at least he was paranoid as hell about it. Now, the prospect of going to jail made him break out in hives, and he was suddenly fourteen again, trying to explain the instinct to create sound or something. He never did understand what that frontman meant.

  But then the cops started talking about a fate worse than jail.

  The first cop continued, “Come with us. We’re going to take you to the hospital, where you can talk about what’s going on, all right?”

  Shit. There would be no place to die in the psych ward.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not suicidal. I just—”

  The cop led him away from the scene toward the waiting car. “It’s okay. We all have things going on in our lives. Situations we feel like we can’t control. Right?”

  “Sure, but—”

  The cop searched for his script before cutting Rueben off. “But hurting yourself is never the answer. You’ve got so much to live for. So much potential. It might seem hopeless right now, but it’s always darkest before the dawn. Things can turn around in an instant. We just have to remember to make the right choices.”

  “I’m really not suicidal, I—”

  The cop spoke over him in a patronizing tone. “Of course not. Sometimes we all need to take a step back and reevaluate our choices and our responses.”

  God, he was going to have to play to this guy. If he told him the real reason he’d just tried to off himself—that he had a superpower and when he died, he went back in time—yeah, he’d be going to the nuthouse for real.

  And they made sure there was no way for those guys to die. He could be in there for years and stay alive.

  Rueben sighed and studied the ground. “You’re right. I don’t know what came over me. That man attacked my friends. Shot one of them…oh Jesus, and I…lost it all a little. I freaked out. I made a bad choice.”

  The soft cop patted him on the shoulder, and his face beamed that his pep talk had worked. “Yeah, yeah, that’s right, let it out.”

  The other cop muttered almost unintelligible swears as he led Rueben to the squad car.

  Rueben had visions of Speedy licking his lips. “Look, really, I’m not suicidal. I’ll see a counselor on my terms. Really. Look, you’ve uh, got a lot of paperwork here. Come on, do you need any more on this case?”

  The two cops stopped and glanced at each other. Paperwork. The universal kryptonite of cops, Rueben knew from Marshall. Marshall even hated signing his permission slips when he was a kid.

  The hard one turned to the soft one. “He does have a point.”

  “All right, we’re going to let you go. But please, see someone.”

  “I will.”

  The cop let him go, and Rueben twisted away and darted toward Hoodie Man’s body.

  “Agh, that sonofabitch was lying!”

  With the police’s footsteps falling heavily behind him, Rueben felt at the gunman’s boot. Bingo. The knife.

  He grabbed the knife and grimacing with sweaty palms, squeezed his eyes shut and plunged it hard into his chest.

  Rueben writhed in the excruciating pain, and the cops rushed toward him. As the light faded, the last thing he saw was Marshall. And the anguish on his face as he stared at him.

  Then he died.

  Chapter Four

  Friday, May 19, 10:46 p.m.

  Rueben reinhabited his body and found himself in the Exit Bar. It always took a moment for him to reorient himself after he’d died. He arrived as the assailant pinned Martha against the wall.

  Okay, so this was where they were. Not necessarily where he’d wanted: before Hoodie Man even showed up, but this would do. When training for the Pout mission, Rueben had learned to focus and control how far back in time he traveled whenever he died. He hadn’t exactly done that when he’d killed himself this last time.

  He glanced at his smartwatch, knowing that it would have recorded his death and time warp for later analysis at Buzz’s mansion. Before the Pout mission, Buzz had automated a process that sent himself and Martha an email alerting them that Rueben had just warped as well as notes from before the warp.

  However, they’d all agreed to turn that feature off for the foreseeable future to give Rueben some privacy if he wanted to warp back for personal reasons—not that he ever had. Which meant that Buzz and Martha had no clue he’d just died and warped. He could catch them up later, but right now, he had to act and try to save his friends before someone got killed.

  Aki.

  Rueben’s eyes shot to Aki standing amid the crowded bar. Oh, thank God. She was alive. He could kill himself again and go back farther to before this happened, but for now, he wanted to kick Hoodie Man’s ass. To do that, he needed a weapon. His eyes locked onto the bar. Perfect. He jumped behind the c
ounter.

  The bartender yelled at him, “What the hell? You can’t be back here. We have insurance, man.”

  When Rueben didn’t listen and kept throwing stuff around, the bartender kept yelling. “Hey, hey, stop.”

  Rueben nodded toward the fight, still unseen by the staff. “Yeah? Your insurance cover that?”

  The bartender peered in that direction. “What the hell? I’m not dying for this job!” He yelled at the other employees. “We’ve got a fight. Call the cops! Get Joe!”

  Joe, Rueben surmised, must be the manager and wouldn’t be much help. While the waitstaff scurried around trying to handle the situation, Rueben rummaged under the counter.

  It was a food service establishment. There had to be something. He noticed the lemons chopped in a container and threw them on the ground. Bingo. Right behind the container glistened a serrated steak knife. Had the bartender been eating steak back here while on duty? Eh, better than nothing. He grabbed it, ran back out from behind the counter, and rushed toward the fight scene.

  By now, several bar employees were trying to break up the fight, but no one was getting anywhere. There was mainly a lot of yelling and tussling. The whole bar had noticed, and a couple of vigilante customers had joined the fray. Someone was trying unsuccessfully to pound the assailant with the rim of a Goodyear tire. It wasn’t working.

  Joe was on-site now, a skinny man with glasses, an untucked dress shirt, and jeans. The only thing that seemed to qualify him to manage a bar in the city was a nose ring. Otherwise, the guy looked like he belonged in an accounting office. “Sir, the cops have been called. Drop the gun.”

  Oh, Rueben scoffed in his mind. You didn’t add the ‘Drop the gun’ part before. Way to change things up. He’ll drop it now.

  Things were going a bit differently this time, as he’d learned could happen during the Pout mission. Two bouncers from the next bar over had stepped inside at the sound of the noise. They wore security windbreakers, and each had pistols raised, their eyes trained on the guy.

  Holy shit. If they had carry permits, at least one of them might have served in the military or on the police force at one time. That was good. The customers slowly backed away, and a tense hush fell over the scene.