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

by Ramy Vance

  “Yeah.”

  The two soldiers got closer, and Rueben crouched as low as he could. Aki scrunched down beside him.

  The conversation continued. “I don’t know, man. That’s a hard choice. They both got that booty, but they’re both a little high maintenance, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  They were inches away from Rueben now. If they looked over the top of the bushes, they'd see them.

  “I mean, you know, a man’s gotta get paid to get with that.”

  “I hear you, man. I hear you.”

  The two soldiers swung the metal door wide open and entered as they talked. “Plus, like I said, they’re old as fuck. I’d go with the younger ones, like that Kylie…”

  They disappeared into the building, and the door floated shut behind them. Rueben’s heart raced, and he scrambled to catch it without being detected. He wasn't going to make it, though.

  Rueben reached into his pocket and fished out Martha's red toucan keychain as he dove toward the closing door. Falling on his chest, he extended his hand and barely managed to wedge the keychain into the doorway as the door closed on it. He looked up from the ground and found that Petunia had caught in the crack and successfully prevented it from closing.

  The soldiers’ conversation was distant, but he could still hear it.

  “Yeah, now Kylie…she’s hot. I wouldn't mind, you know…with her.”

  The other soldier laughed. Then Rueben couldn’t hear them anymore as he lay on his chest. Aki was still hiding in the bush behind him, and she shot him a questioning look. He winked in response, and she visibly relaxed.

  Still prostrate in the dirt, he held up a finger. He waited for a few more minutes for the soldiers to get far enough away, then he glanced around outside the bushes. He couldn’t see anyone.

  He rose and dusted off his clothes, and Aki did the same. He opened the door and pocketed Petunia the plastic toucan. They both entered the building.

  The back of the building had a short hallway with offices on either side. Clearly, the two soldiers worked back here, so they were somewhere. Rueben and Aki leaned against the wall and crept slowly along the hallway. They didn’t see anyone. Where had the two guys gone?

  They crept deeper inside. One of the two guys suddenly stepped out of an office. Luckily he turned back to address his buddy and didn't see Reuben and Aki out in the open. “But Khloe, she looks too fake.”

  Rueben held his breath, and every muscle in his body tensed. They had credentials to be on the base but not breaking in back here. If anyone caught them, they would likely go to jail. Well, Sven could get them out of it, but it would be an ugly process. That was if the guards didn't shoot them on sight.

  Rueben carefully felt his way back along the wall. He saw a door nearby. He felt around until he found a doorknob and eased it open.

  The conversation between the two guys continued. “They all look fake, though.”

  “That’s true. That’s the point of that whole family. Especially that dad.”

  They doubled over in laughter, and Rueben darted behind the door and grabbed Aki with him. They shut the door behind them, and in the darkness, it appeared they were in a closet of some kind.

  Rueben smelled cleaners, and it was small enough that Aki pressed against the same wall he was, and he was stepping on her foot. There wasn’t room for the both of them in here, and there sure wasn’t time right now for them to adjust.

  From outside the door, one of the soldiers commented, “Did that closet door just open?”

  Rueben froze. He still had his hand on the inside doorknob, and he felt a lock against his palm.

  “I definitely heard something. Is someone back here?”

  With a subtle palm movement, Rueben twisted the lock and felt it click.

  “I didn’t see anyone come in.”

  Rueben squeezed his eyes shut, held his breath, and lifted his hand off the doorknob.

  The soldier tried the door. “It’s locked.”

  Only a door separated them from the soldiers.

  “Whatever. Let’s go. It’s chow time now.”

  “If there’s someone in here and we don’t check it out, it’s our asses. Go get the keys.”

  Rueben’s stomach froze. Busted. They would have to fight these guys who were clearly in much better shape than he was. Then they’d radio for backup, and the whole horde of United States troops guarding this base would be on their asses like white on rice.

  “Dude, I don’t even know where the keys are. We’ll have to call someone, and it will take forever.”

  “We have to do it right and file a report of suspicion.”

  “A report of suspicion? Come on, really? You think some crazy homeless dude is hiding in the cleaning closet? How would a homeless guy even get in here? There are, like, twenty armed guards outside and a security fence. I can barely get in here half the time.”

  “You said you saw it open too.”

  “I don’t know what I saw. I heard something. It could have been a mouse. Come on, dude. I’m hungry. Let’s go.”

  “Fine. Let’s go.”

  The metal door slammed shut, and Rueben counted to ten before he exhaled. Then he felt along the wall and found a light switch. He flipped it on. They were in a janitorial closet no bigger than a bathroom stall.

  He repositioned himself to get off Aki’s foot. “That was close.”

  “Yeah. We don’t have much time. The one guy’s onto us. All he has to do is compare notes with Jeebs, and they’ll figure it out. We have to find Martha and Zach and those drones fast.”

  “Yeah.”

  Rueben opened the door, and they all but fell out of the closet and into the hall. Rueben made sure to lock the closet in case the soldiers came back later to check. They hurried down the short hall, up a flight of steps, and found another door with a keypad at the end of the hall. They tried it. It was locked.

  Aki motioned to him. “Do you have your wallet on you by chance?”

  “Yeah.”

  She peered at the door locking mechanism. “This one will work. Give me a plastic card.”

  He pulled out his wallet and handed her the first rewards card he could find.

  She smirked when she saw it. “You shop at IKEA?”

  He shrugged. “I like the style, okay?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, and they have good lamps.”

  “Lamps? You buy lamps?”

  “Yes, I buy lamps. Mainly because Buzz said… Never mind. Are we going to break into this room or not?”

  She grabbed the card and shoved it between the door and the frame. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Maybe you need one of my lamps.”

  She silently chuckled. After a bit of finagling, the door popped open. She held her finger over her mouth, and they crept in. It was a tiny office with a concrete floor, and they had to be careful with even their footsteps.

  The office reminded him of going into the office area of a mechanic’s shop. There was a messy wooden desk and a computer whose manufacture date looked like it was before Rueben was born. A couple of crinkled papers lay on the desk, and some tools and screws.

  Rueben took out his phone and snapped photos of everything. Then they noticed the office had a door on the far wall next to a window overlooking a large warehouse area.

  That was when they saw Martha.

  "Oh, thank God. She's still alive." Rueben wiped a hand across his forehead. That was the only relief they got. Martha was in the middle of the room, tied to a folding metal chair. She appeared to be talking to someone, although they couldn’t see who. He was standing between rows of shelves containing drones.

  Aki ducked beneath the view of the window, and Reuben did the same. They needed weapons. Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and he felt in his pocket. He triumphantly retrieved Buzz's spinning top, careful not to activate the blades. He turned to Aki. “Hey, do you have any weapons on you?”r />
  Aki looked at him. "No. Why would I? We wouldn't have been able to get past the checkpoint."

  "Yeah," Rueben said. "But women have places to hide things." He flinched when Aki crooked an eyebrow at him.

  "What exactly are you saying?"

  "Um, it's just that on TV, whenever a woman is undercover in, like, a tight dress or something, she always has a weapon and her badge concealed somewhere…um, uh never mind."

  Aki smirked and then said, “Who do you think Martha's talking to?"

  Rueben stared through the window down at the shelf of drones concealing Martha's kidnapper. Suddenly a swatch of white hoodie came into view. “It's Pete.”

  Martha wiggled against the restraints around her wrists, and she thought she noticed a shadow of guilt pass over Pete’s face. “You think you could let me go, here, Pete? I mean…Rueben. This hurts like hell.”

  "You don't know true pain."

  "Just let me go."

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No. I don’t trust you in this world.”

  Fair enough. If he let her go, she’d probably kick his ass. Or at least try to, anyway. She didn't know if she could with his metal body armor or whatever he had on under his hoodie.

  Pete continued with his drones. He looked so alone.

  “Why are you doing this, Rueben? Why are you really doing this? I don’t buy your fake Guy Fawkes historical bullshit for one minute. It was a smokescreen for something else. Tell me why you’re doing this.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  He raised an eyebrow and continued to load the bombs inside the drones. “This world is the hardest.”

  “Why?”

  “Everyone dies.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re trying to do?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean…everyone I care about dies over and over again. There’s no way out. No matter how many times I try to save them, they keep dying. Believe me, I’ve tried everything. In over seven thousand tries, I still can’t save them.”

  “Seven thousand?”

  “Yeah. I just want to be free from all of this.”

  “Look, there has to be some other way. You don’t want to do this.”

  “But I do.”

  “Reuben, this isn’t you.”

  “This isn’t me when I was in my twenties, no. That’s the Rueben you know.”

  “No, I know the real Rueben. We grew up together.”

  “Oh, hell. Like I remember any of that.”

  She wondered if Pete, being from another universe, had an alternate version of herself as his childhood friend. If so, had things happened as they had in this universe?

  Evil Rueben continued to inspect each drone, sometimes placing a decal of a country’s flag onto the side, and sometimes he’d record a voice message in a foreign message. But why? Martha watched him closely. “It reminds me of that time you built a rocket.”

  “What?”

  “In seventh grade, you wanted to build a rocket that went into space. You spent all summer working on it and mowed lawns for the parts. You’d read all these books and convinced yourself that you could get it to launch. All you needed was this one little part, and it would be complete. You saved up all your money, and…this kid, you remember Perla Jaxson?”

  He didn’t say anything. He just kept working.

  “She was this girl down the street, and someone stole her bike. She was devastated, and her mom said it would be a while before she could get her a new one. They didn’t have much money. So, you started a crowdsourced campaign for her bike. Do you remember that?”

  A slight smile played about his lips, but he didn’t say anything. That was good. It meant his universe was like her universe.

  “Only no one donated, so you put in all your rocket money and gave it to her. She never knew it was you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “She never bought a bike. She took the money and bought a curling iron and new makeup. Incidentally, she suddenly became hot and popular and completely uninterested in me.”

  “That’s how that ended up?”

  “As I recall. But you were there considerably more recently than I was. So I trust your memory over mine on that.”

  Martha suddenly did seem to remember Perla turning into something of a snot after the bike incident. Had that had to do with buying beauty products with Rueben’s bike money?

  “That’s not the point. The point is, you’re a nice guy. You’re not like this. Killing a bunch of human beings, regardless of your reasons, is wrong.”

  “Wrong? There is no right and wrong, Martha. There are only rules and rule-followers.”

  There was a clear difference between Rueben and Pete. For a moment, she’d been talking to Rueben, and now he was switching back to Pete.

  “Think about what the fallout is going to be in this timeline after you do this. Is that what you want for all of us? For the people you care about?”

  He slammed the screwdriver down. “That’s just it. You’re all going to die. Especially you. You’re going to die soon, and it will be a horrible death.”

  Martha’s stomach froze, and she felt the color drain from her face. “How?”

  “Never mind. Just leave me in peace.”

  He worked on his drones for a few more moments. She tried to get to his soft side again. “Remember when we were kids, and we built that bike ramp? God, that thing had to have been at least six feet high. How did we not die?”

  He didn’t respond, but she could tell he was holding back a chuckle. “Remember that one time a bunch of us went to that party at Bret Williams’s house? It was great until the cops busted it up. Everyone got arrested but you.

  “We were all running like hell, and you grabbed a throw blanket and hid under the couch. I don’t know how you fit under there. We all went to jail, and our parents had to bail us out. You were sound asleep in your bed at Marshall’s curfew. We all got grounded, and you didn’t have anyone to hang out with, so you kind of grounded yourself.”

  He raised an eyebrow as his lips rose in slight amusement, but he still didn’t say anything. He grabbed a screwdriver from his backpack and started to loosen a screw on one of the drones.

  “Damn. How you put up with Marshall all those years, I will never know. He was all right before the whole…thing. Once Carolyn left, he flipped a switch.”

  Pete’s movements were tense now, but she kept going.

  “The thing I most remember about Carolyn was that she always had cookie dough in her freezer. She would bring it out sometimes, and we’d all have cookies and milk.”

  He turned to face her, his eyes wild. “Don’t. You. Dare.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “If you don’t shut that hole in your face, I will shove this screwdriver down your throat until you do.”

  For the first time, she was really scared. This alternate universe Rueben was not the Rueben she had grown up with. This was someone else. And she feared he was capable of anything.

  Rueben and Aki crouched down low under the window in the office and watched the exchange between Martha and Pete.

  They watched the exchange until Pete stepped out from between the shelves and gestured at Martha with what appeared to be a weapon.

  Rueben’s eyes widened, and he turned to face the door leading down into the warehouse. “We have to rescue her.”

  “Wait. Wait. I’ve called for backup.”

  “But it may be too late. We’ve got to go in.”

  “We don’t have any weapons, and this guy’s a psychopathic killer.”

  “What do you suggest, that we sit here and watch her get killed?”

  “No. I think we need to come up with a better plan than an ambush. It hasn’t worked for us in the past, has it?”

  Rueben had to admit she was right. “What if we alert the base staff?”

  “Right. The first thing they’ll want to know is why we’re sne
aking around, and by the time we get around to explaining ourselves, it will be too late. Besides, they have Pete in there in the first place. For some reason, they trust him.”

  "Well, I'd feel a lot better with more than this razor blade top." Rueben rifled through the desk drawer and found a sharp metal letter opener. Man, he didn't want to have to use it, but if Pete threatened Martha, he'd have no choice. “I’m going in with this.”

  Aki winced. “That might do.” She snooped through the office for another makeshift weapon and found only a heavy paperweight in the shape of a small sea bass. She shrugged. "Better than nothing, I guess."

  Rueben and Aki slowly opened the door next to the window and descended sturdy metal stairs, sneaking silently against the wall. The shadows helped conceal them. They heard muffled voices but couldn’t make out what Martha and Pete said. Slowly, keeping a watch out for any extra guards, they snuck up to the middle of the room.

  Pete was speaking. “It’s a useless existence. I keep living, and everyone around me dies. So this time, everyone will die with me.”

  Martha’s eyes widened as she spotted them behind Pete. She kept going, maintaining eye contact with Pete, keeping him distracted. “What if you stayed in one timeline, and you were like the rest of us, trying like hell not to die?”

  “Don’t try to tell me how to live my life.”

  “Why not? You want to tell the rest of us how to end ours.”

  Pete smirked, and Rueben and Aki snuck up behind him.

  Martha fidgeted her knees together awkwardly. “I have to use the bathroom.”

  Pete sighed and set the screwdriver on a shelf. “You’re not going to try anything funny, are you?”

  “No. I really need to pee. Can you please untie me?”

  He rolled his eyes and approached her.

  As soon as his attention focused on the ropes, Pete's eyes narrowed on Martha, and he drew his silenced pistol and leveled it at her head. "I see what you’re trying to do. So you thought you could escape when I untied you? I'll show you—"

  Rueben snuck forward, closing in on Pete from behind, the razor blade top in one hand, the metal letter opener clutched in the other like a knife. No, like a shiv. He suddenly felt unclean, like a criminal. Like Pete…but Rueben heard the click of Pete's gun cocking and he let fly the top, twisting it in a vicious corkscrew manner.