Extra Life (27 page)

“But not this reality,” I said.

“Exactly. And somewhere there is a reality where the physics are skewed
just enough
that some other Kasper Vale could make a time travel program actually work. The tech would be rare indeed—but once it was discovered, it could cut across universes and paradoxically appear in realities where it was a long way from ever being invented, like here.”

“I’m surprised this doesn’t happen all the time,” I said.

“In 99.999999 percent of all possible realities, it doesn’t. But keep adding nines until you lose your voice or die of old age. The chances are thinner than anything you could imagine happening to you in this or any other life. Except quantum physics tells us there is a chance, no matter how slight, so it
has
to happen somewhere.”

“Lucky us,” Virgin Russ quipped.

“Right,” Dad said, and he meant it. “The chances of this happening are infinitesimally small, and yet even that tiny number is infinite. So in a sense, this is happening so often, we can’t even imagine, yet it is more rare than we could imagine.”

We were the discoverers of the most shattering find in galactic history, right here, but also in endless elsewheres, too. Because .0000001 percent of infinity is still infinity. Endless Russes making endless leaps between dimensions, threading an imaginary needle, tying realities together, making a knotted mess of things. That kind of realization can wring out your mind with a good, hard twist.

Maybe there were infinite Russes, but my consciousness only lived in this one. And this one, the one I called
me
, he was adrift from his home port, lost from his reality. I was on the verge of a panic attack. I turned and hustled down the retractable ladder, hyperventilating and hoping I wouldn’t pass out before my feet touched the landing.

Down the main staircase. The view through the decorative front door glass showed me that a car was parked out front where there was no car five minutes before. Typical make and colors of a police cruiser.

My gut clutched so hard I almost somersaulted down the steps. They found me, tracked me down at home, though nobody had yet rung the bell. Probably they were positioned around the yard, waiting on backup before they stormed the place and collared me for nabbing Bobby’s car. If Marv Parker was dead from a heart attack, I was probably somehow wanted for that supposed crime as well.

I slipped into the den where the windows were wide and clear, planted my knees on the couch to get a look. No doubt it was a cruiser, but just one, parked, lights off, nobody in the driver’s seat. The decal along the body didn’t quite make sense—not at first.

It didn’t say
Cape Fear Police Department
. No, it said
Cape
Twilight
Police Department
. Either fictional police were here to arrest me or—

I turned around. My speculative script for
Cape Twilight Blues
was right there on the coffee table with my home address typed on the cover page. It had been left in Marv’s office, but here it was, returned to me, special delivery.

Clear across the room in Dad’s recliner, with a drop-dead scowl, was the delivery boy himself, teen TV sensation Bobby Keene-Parker. He stood, wiped sweat off his glistening red brow. “
Where’s my car
?” he asked.

The question struck me as weirdly off topic but, regardless, you can’t tell a guy you crashed his quarter-million-dollar wheels. Even if it wasn’t
you
, per se. I showed him both my palms. “Your car isn’t here, but it’s safe.”

Bobby let loose an ugly, throaty groan. Bloodshot eyes and wet streaks across his cheeks meant he’d recently had a fierce crying jag. He said, “They’re all over, hunting for me, because I pulled my gun, but it was you, wasn’t it? You ruined my life.”

“No,” I said.

Bobby couldn’t see from my vantage, so he didn’t know Virgin Russ was taking tentative steps down the main stairs. Any second there’d be a creak and Bobby’d hear him, and the surprise would probably be just the kind of freak-out shock that would trigger Bobby’s full-on crazy.

I shot a warning glance at Virgin on the stairs. Virgin Russ, who I had to keep safe at all cost.
What happens to him, happens to us
, Future Russ told me.
We’re just his shadows in this world.

Bobby stepped toward me. “You said everything would be fixed.”

“I’m sure I didn’t tell you to give your father a heart attack.”

He cracked a hairline fracture of a smile as he swiped an iron poker from the fireplace stand. The poker, with its curved black claw, was only a decoration, but it could still puncture a hole in my head if he swung it hard enough. He said, “Been telling me a lot of things, all right. But I got notions of my own. Like, if I get rid of y’all, everything will go back to before. No more crazy shit slipping through.”

He took another step closer and turned, glaring straight at Virgin. “You, too,” Bobby said. So much for Virgin sneaking up and saving the day.

If I get rid of y’all, everything will go back to before.
It was another way of saying
you are the virus
.

Bobby had seen enough to break a feeble mind—multiple Russ Vales, dead ones pixelating into nothing and fresh reserves teleporting into place. But he seemed immune to surprise, like he expected all this craziness, like he
knew
.

“Which of y’all is fake?” Bobby asked. He toggled the poker between Virgin and me.

Without warning, our mounted flat screen television flipped on, though nobody pressed the power button. Stereo surround burst out with a cheesy synth score at max volume.
Cape Twilight Blues
soundtrack music again.

And there was Bobby-Keene Parker on screen and in character, embracing his boyfriend inside the local park bandstand, both of them sobbing about some emotional catastrophe.

The real Bobby screeched and hurled the fire poker like a javelin. I ducked, but he wasn’t aiming for me. The poker smacked the TV screen and dropped to the floor, leaving a gouge of distorted color in the image. But
Cape Twilight
played on, amping up the drama with a slow zoom into close-up.

Outside, an actual Cape Fear cruiser veered into our driveway. Another slammed its brakes just behind Bobby’s dummy car. The sight of them flooded me with relief. They had to be here to nab Bobby, not me.

On the stairs, Dad brushed past Virgin Russ, arms loaded with notebooks. The hem of his bathrobe billowing behind him. I don’t know what Dad was thinking. He must’ve heard the sirens and thought they were coming for him. Maybe it was some inter-dimensional trace memory of his arrest in another life. Or maybe he was just paranoid. Either way, Dad was oblivious to the real and present threat right there in his living room.

Bobby reached around to the back of his waistband. Brought out his gun one-handed, cupped it into his opposite palm, and shot a hole straight through his own televised face. The screen died for real this time, and so did my ears, again.

The gunshot got Dad’s attention. He stumbled into the foyer, dropped all his notebooks on the floor and stood defenseless in his house slippers.

Blue uniforms rushed across our yard, sidearms drawn.

Bobby winked at me and said, “Down with tyrant fathers, right?” I couldn’t quite hear him, but I read his lips loud and clear. Then he shot my dad square in the chest.

T
HE TWO
of us occupied a second floor waiting room at New Hanover County Hospital. Virgin Russ and me, seated directly across from each other on the benches. We were twin brothers named Russ and Seth, so far as the police and the hospital staff knew. That was what we told them. Soon enough our lies would get riddled with holes, but neither of us was in the frame of mind to construct a more solid cover story.

I squeezed my cell phone in my hand. Fifteen minutes till seven. After the shooting, Virgin had given it over to me willingly, no questions asked, because he had to believe he could trust me, trust himself.

The back of my right hand was cleaned and stitched, courtesy of a triage nurse. I refused pain meds, so the hurt was wafting up my arm, stiffening all the muscles along the way. Virgin Russ glanced at it, every time my fingers moved, as if he could feel the pain.

Behind him, a glass wall overlooked the parking lot and a baseball diamond on the back edge of the city park. Little league game in progress. A kid pitcher wound up and tossed a wild ball that hit the fence three feet to the left of the catcher. Way off target.

Sneakers squeaks in the hallway, doctors paged on the intercom, the hum of the vending machine in the corner. The muted TV mounted in the corner showed WCPF’s coverage of the evening’s top story: a “bizarre incident” at Silver Screen Studios, no casualties reported, Marv Parker in intensive care right here at NHCH, a crashed Aston Martin, suspects fled the scene, Bobby Keene-Parker arrested at a local residence, shooting victim also rushed to the hospital... a wild convergence of events that the station had not yet pieced together.

I couldn’t read Virgin Russ’s thoughts, but I could guess the filmstrip playing on repeat in his head. Same as mine, captured from a different angle. Dad catching the bullet, collapsing backward into the banister as police swarmed through the front door. Bobby dropping the gun like it was all a misunderstanding, just a prop weapon, a misfired blank, no harm intended.

Last we saw Dad, he was strapped to a stretcher gliding through the hospital entrance, and then we were ushered into this room, buffeted with an hour of questions from two police detectives while awaiting contact with Mom, who could not be reached by phone. Police were supposed to be on their way to alert and collect her. All I wanted was Mom with us, even if it meant she had to see her son cloned and hear the crazy story. I tried my best not to be pissed that she couldn’t even be reached in an emergency.

Dad was in surgery now. Our last update from the nurse was more than a half hour earlier: the bullet missed our father’s heart, but nicked an artery and punctured a lung. Surgeons hard at work, no guarantees, the usual. It all seemed so tentative. A new shape could still be molded in the clay.

Virgin said, “So you’re going to do it, then?”

“What?”

“You got the phone, your eject button. That’s how it works, right? You just teleport away and leave this mess for the rest of us?”

“The mess you jump into is worse, believe me,” I said.

“It’s my choice as much as yours,” Virgin said. “I could leave instead.”

“Listen, I’ve been through it. I know what happens. Dad told you about the warning video, but you haven’t seen the crazy holes that rip open between reality and virtual reality, or what seems virtual to us. It’s like we’re putting the universe through a shredder every time we do this.”

“If Dad dies…”

“He’s not going to die.”

“How do you know? Did you see the future?”

“No,” I admitted. But our dad could recover, and then the extra leap wouldn’t be worth the risk. Even if the worst happened, even if Bobby Parker won his eye-for-an-eye out of some twisted idea that I tried to make him kill
his
father, the program couldn’t save Dad in this world. If one of us pressed the button, the other would be left behind to grieve. The worlds I ruined still limped on without me, real as ever.

I couldn’t stop thinking of all those other realities where tragedies struck people I loved over and over again... some of those worlds I visited, breathed the air, and the awfulness that happened there still weighed on me. It was all too much for one person.

“There can’t be two of us,” Virgin said. “One has to leave.”

“Wherever you go, there will be at least one more of you.”

“But not here. Here, if you leave, I get my own identity back.”

I couldn’t take his accusing glare anymore. It was confronting the mirror when your self-esteem is in the toilet. When I stood, he asked me where I was going, and I told the truth: to get a drink from the fountain. And I took the phone with me.

This wing of the hospital was mainly empty. Just the uniformed police officer assigned to guard us until such time as the detectives were satisfied with our account of the
incidents
.