Extra Life (20 page)

Plus, the profile pic was different—used to be Rob’s kindergarten graduation pic but now it was just a .gif of a prescription pill bottle, a heartless joke about his suicide method. Whoever created Paige’s profile had also hacked into Rob’s dormant account.

“Paige, the person who did this is a serious asshole,” I said, not knowing whether I should touch her, if she’d want that kind of comfort. “They all are. You really don’t have to be ashamed about who you are. Your love life is your own business and there’s nothing wrong with—”

She nodded half-heartedly and leaned her head against my chest. I wished our first hug could’ve been for better reasons than this.

“I don’t understand,” she muttered.

“We’ll find out who did this. They should be arrested at least…”

Her breath warmed the hollow of my neck. “Thank you for coming over here,” she said. Her voice was raw, completely stripped of its usual tough protective shell. It made me want to tell her the entire ridiculous truth.

But before I could, she sat upright and steadied my head between her hands and pressed a forceful kiss on my lips. A long, deep inhale through her nose, like she was breathing me in. My eyes went wide and my mouth wouldn’t quite shut from the surprise.

This
was how Paige Davis dealt with her pain? Even when she broke away, I didn’t have time to say a thing, because one last post had just blurted onto Paige’s fake wall. It said:

That’s it. It’s done. All I have to do now is bleed.

Her supposed final post.

The culprit had to be the same sicko who’d been taunting me with mysterious phone calls and garbled email messages, who had the power to make the whole local grid go haywire with malfunctions. The
same person
, period. Someone targeting both of us, maybe even luring us together into one room. Here, now.

Paige put her fingers to her open mouth. Suddenly, that kiss was probably the last thing on her mind. And suddenly the fake profile wasn’t a lame prank anymore. Because now I understood how it could possibly be that a brave heart like Paige Davis would wind up dead.

It wasn’t suicide. It was murder.

Just as the insight hit me, an electric shock jolted through my spine, far too painful to be another time warp. A brilliant blinding light flashed from every direction, but my body stayed solid. The recorded warning on my home computer from Video Russ blared in my memory:

Someone else… can get through the holes… you understand?

A deafening static screech, and something burst into Paige’s room.

P
AIGE DIDN’T
hesitate. In one sleek motion, she rolled off her mattress and swiped an aluminum bat from where it stood in the corner of her room. She wasn’t going to die a passive death.

But the intruder wasn’t a person. It had no real shape at all. More of an unfolding web of radiance, it seemed to be on the stairs and in the hall and bulging through the bedroom door, all at once. It was a digitized angelic glow—light dancing midair like slow-mo paint from a sprayer, full of crackling static electricity—except there was nothing heavenly about it.

The whole room was charged with its power. The currents cramped the muscles in my throat. I couldn’t speak. Wisps of Paige’s hair lifted upward as she crouched to take a swipe at anything that might happen to turn solid inside all that ambient light.

But the glow pooled in the doorway and darkened bluish. Another kind of doorway was opening.

And whatever came though would be hell-bent on killing Paige.

I knew, because it had succeeded once already in another world. Took her life and made it look like suicide. I couldn’t understand why, but it had to be my fault, clear enough. For starters, I tore the rifts in time-space that would help Paige’s killer step through, but it was even more than that. She was bait. Her “suicide” was a setup to lure me back here.
Save her
. Step right into the trap.

With the doorway blocked, our one escape hatch was Paige’s bedroom window. I pointed to it, and she nodded. We were one floor up from the ground, but the risk of a sprained ankle and bruises seemed more pleasant than staying to see what would happen in her room once the radiance engulfed us.

Paige sidestepped and took a line-drive swing, shattering the window glass. Efficient, but she might as well have popped an airplane hatch thirty thousand feet above ground. An instant suction wrenched almost everything toward the opening that wasn’t hammered to the floor.

A spinning baseball clocked my shoulder. Notebooks and commemorative cards and pendants and stray socks all smacked the window frame and coughed through the broken glass. Paige’s bat snapped from her grip and was gone. Even the air in my lungs was expelled with one painful hiccup.

Despite the airborne chaos, we weren’t affected. Our clothes rippled and our hair was tossed around, but our feet stuck as firmly on the ground as ever. It didn’t make any physical sense. Not the pressurized vacuum, and not our resistance to its suction.

The pulsing electric light bled along the walls and surged toward us with an ambient roar. Paige’s room was disappearing in a solid wall of static, like jumbo-tron screens set to dead channels on full volume. We were being enveloped. Even the window was swallowed up in its reach, painted over by an electric film.

Our only exit route was gone. And no more air to breathe. So much pressure, my head would implode if this lasted much longer.

I had to look at this situation backwards by using some serious Alice in Wonderland upside-down logic, like
no way out except through
, like the spaceship in all those sci-fi movies that rushes deep into the black hole in order to escape its event horizon.

I was fairly sure, at least, that this radiance was some kind of wormhole, or similar in principle, and I knew from two prior experiences that you could leap through the center of one and live to brag about it. That’s what we had to do: dive into the dark blue core of what used to be Paige’s bedroom doorway. I decided.

I grabbed her by the wrist. Wherever we were headed, we’d go together.

At least, that was the plan. But when I stepped toward the door, Paige fixed her sock feet to the floor and refused to move.

The noise was so loud we couldn’t hear each other, but her wide eyes and frantically shaking head told me her opinion well enough. All I could think to do was put my hand against my chest, a silent vow—
we’ll be all right.

She studied me for a beat, snapped her eyes at the live electric meshing that closed in on us.

Then she let me do it, take her into the eye of the storm. The closer we got, the more that blue nucleus seemed to repel us. When I reached into the static, I didn’t know if I’d be burned or electrified or sucked through a space-time vortex onto the bottom of the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean.

Turned out to be none of the above. What happened was my arm went numb, but I felt the edge of the doorframe, just like you’d expect. I held fast and pulled us both through to the other side, into the hall.

Instant silence, except for our gasping breath.

Everything was perfectly ordinary, except behind us, where the doorway to Paige’s room was still the butt end of the electrical field we just escaped. It filled the space, flat as a television screen, but it emitted no light, no sound.

Paige touched it, flinched back her finger after a bug-light
zap
.

“What the f—” she started to ask.

And something lunged out of the crackling blue gel and grabbed her wrist. It yanked her back toward the static wall from where it came. It was the shape of a human hand, but more like the
gray fractal
image
of a hand, what you’d see if you stared at a Magic Eye picture for long enough. And its contact with Paige’s skin gave off a feedback screech.

It was hell-bent to drag her back through, or kill her trying. All I could think to do was anchor both my arms around her waist. She leaned against me and planted her feet on either side of the door. When she grabbed for the virtual hand, her fingers passed straight through the illusion.

Except it was still pulling at her, real enough. We growled and howled. Neither of us used real words. A second virtual hand emerged from the static, but this one wasn’t empty. It clutched a weapon, long and sharp. A knife.

And it swiped the blade toward Paige’s captured and vulnerable wrist.

All I have do to now is bleed,
that thefacebook message said.

I tossed my own hands into the pile of real and unreal fingers on Paige’s arm. Slapped my grip across her wrist, superimposed over the virtual hand, just in time for the knife to strike.

The blade sliced just below my knuckles, sprouted instant blood.

For a second it didn’t hurt. For a second.

I pressed my face against the back of Paige’s neck and stifled a scream.

The mindless hands seemed to think they accomplished their mission, so the grip relaxed, and we took our chance. Together, we heaved ourselves away from the static wall.

Good news: the virtual hands disintegrated in a shower of pixels.

Bad news: the sudden momentum sent us backward over the landing. We tumbled down the stairs, arms and legs smacking the wall and banister and each other as we took the fast route down.

Without the plush stairwell carpeting, we probably would’ve broken our necks. Still, the grand finale was a tile floor—not quite so soft. I was splayed out snow angel-style, head ringing from the impact, but at least I served as a cushion for Paige when she landed stomach-first.

For a second, we breathed into each other’s faces, astonished. To be slammed together like this. To be attacked out of nowhere by a virtual assassin or whatever. To still be alive, pressed together, both of us heaving and alive.

Then she rolled away and dropped to the floor beside me.

A few more minutes’ recovery time would’ve been nice, but nope. Relentless tendrils of sparking, sputtering electronic ooze leaked down the stairwell walls toward us. More a force than a physical thing, though whatever-it-was had a clear enough purpose—a
program
:

Slice Paige’s wrist and make it look like suicide.

And now it was coming at us for another shot. The pulsing, mesmerizing light froze us into easy targets. We just stared at it, coming at us. Until, from the center of the vortex, something flung out, swished past my ear, and sank into the wall behind me. It shuddered into place.

A chef’s knife. Real metal, a blade you’d find in any normal kitchen. It was thrust to the hilt into the wall, dead center between our two heads.

After that, the ooze of light in the stairwell flashed, sputtered, and faded away. As if, with its knife-throwing sideshow act complete, it had finally exhausted itself. Nothing left but a burnt plastic smell.

We both kept our attention fixed on the empty stairs, just to be sure. I couldn’t say how long it was before Paige sprang up and went toward the kitchen. She came back with a dishtowel and wrapped it a few times around my wounded hand. Blood all over the carpeted stairs and the tile, smeared across the front of my shirt. Just looking at it made me woozy.

“All right, Russ, please explain what the hell just happened.”

“Something tried to kill us,” I said.

“
Something
?” She wrenched the chef’s knife out of the wall and brandished it at me. “This is
mine
, from my kitchen. I don’t know what that pyrotechnics show was all about, but a pair of pin-art hands just tried to cut me with my own knife, and now my mom’s apartment looks like it got hit by Katrina.”

I had zilch for answers. Sure, I’d been warned. The Future Russ who sent me the video knew loads more than he ever wanted to know, but he was no help to me now. I wasn’t working with the information he had.

Paige was still studying the knife, testing its sharpness with her fingertip. I could see my distorted reflection in the metal when she asked, “Could it—that wasn’t a ghost, was it? I know it’s crazy of me to even ask. I’m the most rational person I know, but after that stuff on thefacebook… I… wait.” She narrowed her eyes and grabbed my shirt collar, twisting it in her fist. “How’d you know?”