Extra Life (32 page)

Suddenly this was a craptastic plan, getting jumbled up with myself and trapped in a dead-end closet. All Bobby had to do was pivot and he had his own shooting gallery made of one regretful inventor and three identical reckless teens—bonus points for the triple play.

A sputtering blue light flashed. Calm voices were talking somewhere. Twin hugged the Flux Stabilizer and shrank in fear from the gun. Bobby smirked at him and said, “What you got there?”

My throat clutched shut. Bobby’s question was rhetorical. It was clear that somehow he knew what the stabilizer was for, just like he knew where to find us. He was ten minutes ahead of me, at least, on everything. Bobby knew the rules of the game. Bobby knew what we were and what needed to be done. Bobby was the antivirus.

“Now wait a minute,” Dad said, stepping forward.

Bobby elbowed Dad’s jaw and knocked him aside. He turned and put the gun to Twin’s forehead. I pressed my hands to my ears an instant before the blast. The noise pushed through anyhow, skull-rattling. Then, pure quiet, except for those strange and oblivious voices in another room, the voices I’d heard a moment before, calmly discussing whatever it was they were discussing, now magnified and echoing.

Here
was no longer my father’s office. I was in the projection room at the Pastime Playhouse. A pulsing blue light shined off a small glass window. It was the light from a digital projector casting a movie onto the screen down in the theater. The voices I’d heard were the actors in the movie being shown.

I sat up and took stock of what had just happened. Bobby killed Twin, clearly enough, and Twin’s death had stabilized realities again. Fewer Russes meant no more inter-dimensional flip-flop. By the luck of a coin toss, I touched down in the movie theater instead of my Dad’s office.

The Flux Stabilizer sat safely in my lap, just where Twin dropped it the instant he died. My salvation—I lifted it in my hands, heavier than I expected. Parts of it were hastily soldered together with steel elbow joints, an alien thing of interchangeable parts. But it was still missing its cell phone heart.

And those voices, still sounding out from the theater speakers. I recognized those voices. Savannah and Bobby, speaking lines from my movie, “Take the Leap
.
”

I peered through the glass at the theater screen below. It was in fact the movie I taped in the Silver Bullet diner—a short-reverse-shot sequence, miraculously edited together by someone else. My actors sat in their diner booth, playing the parts of the doomed motorcycle daredevil and the love of his life.

This was final page in the script, where the girl volunteers to reject her college scholarship and stay behind, marry the daredevil, if only he’ll promise not to risk the jump that killed his father. This is where Bobby nails his climactic line:

“I ain’t gonna let you toss your whole life to save mine, girl. You’ve got a million more leaps of faith, and maybe I got less, but we’re just going to have to let go and see where it is we fall.”

I
HEADED
back down to the theater lobby, where magic hour sunlight bathed the glass entrance doors and lit the dancing dust motes. Real sunlight from a natural sky. The street outside was thick with traffic, but it moved at a steady pace, like any normal Friday evening. With fewer Russ Vales, the world was right again.

The empty concession and posterless frames told me the place was still defunct, but that fact hadn’t stopped
somebody
from screening a movie in the theater. I carried the Flux Stabilizer against my shoulder so the longest antenna wouldn’t scrape the swinging door. Then I pushed through into the dark. The sound of cheering and clapping hailed from the speakers, but it was not meant for me.

And the smell of gasoline was so noxious in here I could taste it. The white vinyl surface of the screen was marred with blooms of mold, but still the scene in progress was clear:

A tween girl on a pitcher’s mound, red hair sprouting from under her cap. She winds up her pitch and throws, and the amateur video swish-pans to where the batter takes a foolish swing at a curve ball. This wasn’t the footage I’d shot in the diner. It was amateur home video from several years ago, our little league championships.

Strike three for the win, and the team swarms the diamond to pile the star pitcher with their love. The last to mope out onto the field is a scrawny little Horace Vale. By then, the others have already got Paige Davis hoisted onto the tallest teammate’s shoulders. A triumphant moment captured forever, a moment that
never happened.

I understood that what we were watching was actual found footage from another universe. Digital video shot years ago, probably by some kid’s parent, then archived in their home movie collection, only to be salvaged in the present, smuggled into some other reality, and spliced into this film. And here was the final showcase screening.

“What the hell is this?” a girl from the audience said aloud.

I hadn’t expected a test audience, not with the theater’s shutdown status and the gas fumes. But a handful of viewers sat clustered together in two rows, dead center. Silhouettes in the dark, except the one who stood to ask her question. Her freckled, skeptical face and baseball cap were lit by the reflection from the screen.

My chest heaved at the sight of her. The guy I used to be, just hours ago, in another world, would’ve never believed I could have such a visceral reaction to the sight of Paige Davis.

On screen, the video cut to another scene: more amateur video footage of a line of soldiers ushering duffel bags through the security checkpoint bypass, into a crowd of waiting friends and relatives in an airport lobby. Kids hurtling forward to jump their uniformed parents.

There’s young Conrad Bower, mugging for the camera, doing a spastic interpretive dance to show his excitement. Must’ve been his mother recording. For no apparent reason other than pent-up glee, Connie strikes a mock bodybuilder pose—nothing you’d ever catch him doing in this life.

And then somebody calls to him, and he turns, and a man in civilian clothes drops to one knee and widens his arms. Connie and his father hug like they just won the game show grand prize. His father, alive and well. Another miracle that never happened.

One last shot showed Paige again, older now. The video might well have been recorded a few days before. The camera tracks her as she runs across a stretch of Wright Beach, leaps in the air and catches a Frisbee. She turns on her heels and whips the disk back, laughing maniacally, and the camera follows to where Paige’s older brother catches it
smack
between his hands.

“Turn it off,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”

My
voice
said it, but I didn’t, actually. Because another Russ Vale was in the theater audience. As my eyes adjusted I recognized my father, Conrad, Savannah, Paige, and two more variations of me. I counted six figures until the screen went black and they fell into darkness.

A few seconds later that bright blank wall of blue overtook the screen and the house lights slowly brought me a clearer view of my friends, family, and facsimiles. One Russ was wearing the cargo shorts I still had on when this all began. I could assume he was our innocent Virgin, the one to be protected at all costs. Process of elimination meant the other was One O’clock Russ. Which one of them had the cell phone I needed—I had no idea.

“Oh, crap,
another one
,” Paige said, flicking a hand gesture at me, her proof of an infestation.

“How can y’all stand this gas smell?” I asked them.

“That’s what I’m saying,” said Virgin, with a cough.

“What are you doing here?” Paige asked me.

“I should ask you the same question.”

“We were invited,” One O’clock proclaimed.

“By who?”

Savannah directed my attention to the highest seats, just below the projection booth. Someone was there, crouched so low in his seat I hadn’t noticed him at first. Bobby Parker, grinning, hands laced together behind his head.

At the sight of him I screamed, “Everybody get out!”

But none of them moved. Not even Bobby himself. Well, Connie, who was hunkered in the crash position against the seatback ahead of him, briefly lifted his hands from his face and flashed a tortured expression at me. That was it.

They had to sense the risk. The gasoline stench alone, making my eyes water fierce—

“Where did you get that?” Dad asked me, sidestepping along his row. When he reached the end, he came down the landing, drawn to the Flux Stabilizer. “Is that—I mean, the design—”

My dad recognized his own handiwork, I guess, even though he hadn’t actually invented the device in this reality. With the theater still intact, Kasper Vale’s mad scientist laboratory was still just an item on his Christmas wish list.

No time for show and tell here. Bobby was surely armed and could start blasting any second. Dad flinched when I screamed again: “You have to get out! Bobby Parker is a maniac. He trapped you here, and
he’s got a gun
!”

They all blinked at me, turned to Bobby for a second opinion. Bobby stood up. His hair took on a blue glow from the projection beam behind him, and the shadow of his pompadour was writ large on the movie screen. He shrugged and showed both his hands.
Who me?

“I got nothing, folks,” he said. Lifted his shirt to expose his bare waistline, did a three-sixty, modeling his total lack of a firearm. “Alls I did was bring y’all down here for a show like I was supposed to.”

“It’s a trap,” I said. “Savannah, you saw him aim a gun at his father.”

Savannah hugged her purse to her chest and moved farther down her row, away from me, the crazy guy with the weird contraption in his hands, even though we were already on opposite sides of the theater. She was closest to the emergency exit—two seconds away if she turned and sprinted.

“At Silver Screen Studios,” I told her. “You went there—”

Savannah shook her head, refusing my story.

One O’clock tried to calm me with his upraised hands. “You’re confused, bro,” he said. “I don’t know what happened where you came from, but whatever you’re talking about, it didn’t happen here.”

I couldn’t keep my eyes off Bobby. He was headed down the landing now, just behind my father, and I refused to accept that he was anything less than a maniac, in this world or any other.

“Where’d you get this movie?” I asked Bobby.

Bobby shrugged. “Why don’t y’all tell me?
You
made
it.”

“You know what’s going to happen before I do,” I said. “You’ve known all along, maybe even before you came into the diner. You’re in on this, whatever it is.”

“Alls I know,” Bobby said, flapping his fingers on either side of his head, “is there’s like a dozen of you dudes swimming around in my head, all telling me a different story. Can’t keep it straight anymore. I’m through with this gig, is all I’m saying.”

“You had a gun,” I said. “From the shooting range.”

“Yeah, I left it in my—” Bobby’s words caught in his throat. His eyes bulged like he needed the Heimlich. Just behind me, another surprise visitor had arrived. This one was the cause of Bobby’s shock.

I turned, fully expecting to find another factory-line model of myself. Instead, there stood a second Bobby Keene-Parker, Clone Trooper, pistol aimed on his target, who, naturally, was me.