Extra Life (17 page)

There was still a chance, if I timed it exactly, that Dad might sprint out of the gate with that flash drive raised triumphantly in his hand, leap over the hood of a parked cruiser, and dive into the car just as I pulled up to grab him.

So it was on me now.

I had maybe a few seconds to recall everything I knew about driving a car from the three or four training sessions I had with Mom. I held my breath and eased the car out backwards, shifted into drive. At the main road, I flicked the left turn signal and waited, counting the seconds.

Behind the gate, blue uniforms converged in the courtyard like a whole football team in a pile-on tackle. A glimpse of my father’s gray sweatpants in the center of it all. The crowd broke and there was Kasper Vale with his hands cuffed behind his back.

That’s when I knew for sure that Dad’s plan was no plan at all. He’d totally winged it, and he failed. The guy could invent a time travel device, but he couldn’t figure out how to break into a building without instantly attracting the attention of the entire Cape Fear Police Department.

As much as I wanted to, I didn’t cry out. I didn’t ram the gate with the car or throw myself at the mercy of the lawmen. Nothing but my own arrest would come of it. So I played a random passer-by rubbernecking for a glimpse of the ruckus at the Rush building.
Don’t mind me, just taking a shortcut home
.

What else could I have done? I left my father to his fate. Took that turn and drove.

I
CLIPPED
an SUV at an intersection and scraped a long thread of paint off its passenger door. I wouldn’t have realized if not for the chorus of horns. Without a backward glance I left the scene of the accident, because why did it matter now? Dad was arrested and Paige was dead.

Nearing twenty-four hours with no sleep. So exhausted, I could hardly climb the main staircase in my house. Up ahead in my room the lights were on, the doorway open. Russ 2.0 lay sprawled on my mattress, hands behind his head, thinking, while Connie manned the keyboard and monitor at my desk.

I stood there for a few seconds before anyone noticed.

“
You
,” 2.0 said, bolting upright. “What are you doing here?”

When Connie turned, his glazed eyes cleared fast. He glanced back and forth between the twin Russ replicas as if he forgot which was which.

The computer monitor displayed a familiar video: Bobby Parker and Savannah Lark seated in a booth at the Silver Bullet, playing characters who weren’t themselves. The footage I recorded just a few hours earlier.

I didn’t have to ask where Connie got the video. He must’ve salvaged the memory stick from the camera I smashed against that brick wall across the street from Paige’s.

2.0 rolled off his bed and came at me with an open hand. I flinched, but all he did was press his palm against the side of my face, probed my skin with his fingers, staring. Nothing happened to correct the paradox. No sick mutant melding together of our flesh, no body molecules suddenly unsure which Russ to cling to.

His own face was so slack with idiotic wonder, I was embarrassed for us.

“I still can’t believe it,” he said.

“Believe it,” I said. This had to be exactly how schizophrenics experienced their lives. Like me, Russ 2.0 was also wearing a hoodie. I noted the sliver glint of our cell phone, peeking out from the belly pouch.

“Time warp? I’d never do anything so stupid,” he claimed.

“Hindsight, Monday Morning Quarterback, and all that, brother.”

I swung a fist at his stomach. His abs clenched and my sudden sneak attack put him off balance. He stumbled backward into the dresser, toppled a pile of clean laundry we had both forgot to put away.

I had the cell phone in my hand, neatly pickpocketed.

“Guess I should’ve expected that,” 2.0 complained.

“You of all people,” I said.

Connie stayed out of it. He returned to the keyboard, minimized the video display to uncover the WCPF local news station site, and dialed up the volume so we could all hear. It was aerial shots from a helicopter. Cruisers on a roadside somewhere.

For a second, I thought he was showing late breaking news of Dad’s arrest.

He wouldn’t look at me, but I saw his tortured expression reflected in the screen clear enough.

“You’re the outsider here,” 2.0 told me. “And you’re a disaster. Look.”

The news clip wasn’t about my father after all. Chopper footage showed a single-vehicle accident, a car crushed against a telephone pole. The front end was a squeezed accordion, but the back was all I needed to guess the make and model. Only one guy in town had an Aston Martin Rapide.

The voice-over reporter solemnly intoned Bobby Keene-Parker’s name. A high-speed wreck, emergency airlift to New Hanover Hospital, critical condition. Then, they cut to a live shot of movie mogul Marv Parker outside one of the Silver Screen sound stages. He was a thick man with a trimmed beard and sunglasses to keep his dead eyes from view. Couldn’t be bothered to rush to his son’s hospital bedside, apparently.

Marv Parker told the press, deadpan, “Kid’s been on a self-destruction streak for a long time now, so frankly I’m not surprised. Ruined a beautiful car. Eventually a parent’s got to let go. The boy’s responsible for his own screw-ups, you know? He’s got to realize there’s a lot of people in this business depending on him.”

The minions crowded behind Marv Parker tried their best not to grimace.

I’d thought those hours at the Silver Bullet were the only stretch of perfection I managed during this disastrous second pass. But I was drunk on my own glory. Didn’t pay enough attention to the way Bobby got up and sped off as soon as the torture of recording his scenes was over.

He left distracted, his emotions scraped hollow from the inside out. All that daddy subtext must’ve wormed into his thoughts, took his mind off the road…

“This happened after you finished shooting your video,” 2.0 said. “This, and Paige. I don’t know what you did. What I know is you’re
not me
—because I’d never go around hurting people like this, knowing what would happen.”

“But I
didn’t
… I wouldn’t…” I tried to say. He didn’t even know about Dad’s arrest yet.

The movie posters on my walls, the close-up faces of Batman and Tyler Durden and Walter White and Imperator Furiosa and Dr. Manhattan all glared at me. My jury, just waiting to have their unanimous guilty verdict read aloud by the court.

My alarm clock read 6:58. Less than two minutes to go.

“Look,” I pleaded. “The message told me I had one shot and I had to take it. The message was from
me
, from the future, so why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know… common sense?” 2.0 said.

“We suck at common sense and you know it,” I said.

The phone buzzed in my hand just as the clock flipped to 6:59. Right on schedule, the text from the future coming through.
Take the leap
, it would offer, just like last time.

2.0 leaped for the phone, caught me off guard, and a tangled mess of Horace Vales bounced onto the bed. Lookalike pairs of hands grabbing for the phone. I clutched his arm. We put me in a headlock. He elbowed his face.

The phone spun out of our hands and dropped to the floor at Connie’s feet. He leaned forward in his chair, hands squeezing both armrests. The phone was Connie’s for the taking.

We froze and looked at him, but he hesitated.

“
Connie
,” 2.0 said.

Connie picked up the phone. “You’re my best friend,” he said. “You’re
both
my best friend. I didn’t know which one of you to trust, except that you…
you’re
the one causing all of this.”

The phone buzzed a second time. Seven p.m. The Pastime Project had arrived.

“Connie,” I said. “Please be careful. You could mess up everything.”

2.0 squirmed out from underneath me, shoved me into the headboard, and slid off the bed. I thought he’d take the phone from his accomplice, but instead he backed away from both of us, toward the open closet. He crouched in there, enveloped by the hanging clothes.

Then he shut himself inside.

“Do it, Connie,” he called out from behind the door. “Like we decided.”

My attention snapped back to the guy with the phone, my best friend, just as he pressed the icon. An arm’s length out of reach, I couldn’t stop him in time.

Too late I realized: 2.0 had ducked into the closet so he wouldn’t get caught in the wormhole.

I screamed, “
Stop
!”

But it wasn’t what I expected, as usual. Connie didn’t take the leap for himself. Instead, he turned the display against me, and I was bathed once again in a blast of bright white light.

W
HAM
, I was awake. Just like that.

But I didn’t know where I was or how long I was gone, not until total recall smacked me across the skull. Then I realized I’d lost barely a second of time. A nanosecond. My hands were still clutching at nothing. If I was screaming before, I was screaming still.

Naked on my bed. Pins and needles head to toe.

This time I knew exactly what happened to me: a program created by my father sent a localized black hole cycloning out from my phone, and it spun me in its vortex at such an absurd speed that my molecules stretched like sugar in a cotton candy machine.

Like, instant death. Except now I was reconstituted and deposited on a precise point in the space-time continuum. Born again, the new Horace Vale, same as the old Horace Vale.

My alarm clock
bleep bleep bleeped.
I whacked snooze but the racket kept going. No actual time was displayed—just random digital dashes. Glitches. I found the cord, pulled the plug. The clock went blank.

Over on my desk, my computer clicked away at a frantic round of internal processing and spit the results onto the monitor in a running trail of alpha-numeric
Matrix-
style nonsense. The toy lightsaber in my closet was firing off the electronic sizzle it was only supposed to do when it hit something. And when it sported batteries that hadn’t been dead for at least four years.

I knew 2.0 was not inside that closet. Connie was gone, too. Empty desk chair. Or it was me who left
them
behind. Or maybe their time line was completely deleted. Or the fabric of the universe was so twisted now, I didn’t know when or where the hell I was.