Extra Life (34 page)

Time—all this time, repeated time—and not a second to think, to consider how Wrong Russ played me like an X-Box hero using every available cheat code. He recorded the invitation and mailed it through space and time. He duped me into thinking he was me from some glorious future.

One shot
, he promised, but that was his first lie, because from the start he meant to shove me through the wormhole over and over again, enough times to bust a leak between dimensions and flush himself into this world.

He
was the gremlin who tampered with Connie’s video game and computer and telephone, who pushed me to go out and screw up my life so I’d have to make the leap again. And again.

I couldn’t image what mindset would make him commit his betrayals—his murders and manipulations, driving Bobby crazy. People did horrible things all the time, but not people with my exact personality, my empathy, my memories and longings, my perfectly sane arrangement of brain and nervous system.

To him, every new universe was just a game. He could draw a blade across Paige’s wrist and it was nothing more than a trick blade, a movie prop, and the blood was chocolate syrup, and Paige was just a scream-queen actress. Because how else could you—could
I
—do it? Press down and slice and watch the life fade out of her eyes? And do it for no other reason than to lure me into leaping again?

Alternate selves discarded, with no more thought than when you toss out a dulled disposable razor. Russ Vales picked off at random when the sheer number of them threatened reality itself. And Bobby Keene-Parker of all people had been sent to take them out, except the original of course. That’s why Bobby asked who I was at the point of a gun. He didn’t want to shoot the wrong Russ.

This was me. This was who I was.

Loser and winner, cheated and cheater, victim and monster.

Virgin Russ stepped forward, held out his hand to Wrong Russ.

“You’re not going to hurt us,” Virgin said. “Give me the gun.”

Wrong cowered back, twitchy-eyed, panting. He tucked the gun into the back of his waistband. Something else was in his hand now—Bobby’s lighter.

Next came a deafening blast. I thought it was an explosion, but it was the emergency exit door, slammed wide open. A dark figure dove in, hunkered low. Police, more and more of them spilling in. A battering ram. Helmets, face shields, Kevlar vests. Demands growled out.

Wrong Russ did not obey them. He flicked his thumb on the igniter, and the lighter flame came alive again. As Virgin reached out to snuff it, the flame seemed to leap for the gas-drenched seats, eager to spread. An instant inferno enveloped the rows and crawled up the curtains. A wall of heat and light rushed against our bodies. I reeled, coughed, couldn’t see, and someone wrenched the Flux Stabilizer from my hands.

Wrong Russ, of course.

The air was too hot to breathe. I choked and coughed and tumbled down the landing toward the theater entrance ramp. Somehow, I had Paige’s wrist in my grasp and we rushed away from the heat, Virgin and Dad close behind.

But Conrad? I couldn’t find him through the fire and confusion.

Uniformed police crowded the lobby exit doors in full raid mode. Dust kicked up so thick it lingered. In the midst of it, Wrong Russ was a gray shadow, gun in one hand and the bulky stabilizer in the other, like a homemade bomb.

Lobby doors swung back, a mad rush for the box office. Police swarm: “Drop it! Drop the gun!” The weaponless among us halted in our tracks, ducked low, kept our distance from Wrong Russ and the onrush that was about to take him down.

Then gunfire. I don’t know whose. Uncountable reports. The glass concession case shattered. I shoved Paige behind a Ms. Pac Man machine and dove for cover beside her. She grunted from the impact and swore at me, but she was safe for another instant at least.

Then quiet. A few guttural shouts. Official commands. The syncopated stomp of a dozen boots, heavy breathing. The castle overrun with marauders.

Rough hands lifted me off the floor and twisted my arms behind my back. Handcuffs cranked into place. I was given a hurried escort through the choking dust and smoke, toward sunlight.

My steps kicked metallic debris—remnants of the Flux Stabilizer, now scattered scrap parts. A tossed-aside pile of Wrong Russ’s clothes. He had been taken out by police. Deleted. Time winding down to zero hour. My only escape hatch, slammed shut and locked.

M
Y HANDCUFFING
seemed to be a case of mistaken identity. I tried to plead with my arresting officers, but the patrol cops weren’t listening. They told me to zip it. I was not under arrest, just detained until the details were clarified.

I was alone and still cuffed in the backseat of a parked cruiser two blocks from the burning theater. Windows opened a crack for fresh air. Forced to watch the smoke filling the sky. Flashes of orange fire.

My temporary holding tank was parked in front of a vintage clothing store. The mannequin in the window, wearing a 1960s dress that looked more like a curtain, glared at me accusingly.

Most of Front Street was cordoned off, with emergency vehicles of every stripe hoarding road space. I’d managed to make a disaster zone of downtown Cape Fear twice in less than ten minutes, but at least this time the pandemonium didn’t run so deep that it screwed with the laws of nature. There weren’t enough Russes left for that.

A pulsing red light cut through the smoke. It was the beacon at the top of the radio tower reminding me of the chance I lost.

In the front seat, an open laptop mounted on the console told me it was 6:58. Two minutes left to go, but I fretted over the immediate past instead. I’d seen Paige and Virgin and my father leave the theater, but Connie—I didn’t know. He was trapped in the center of all those seats when they went up in flames. Maybe the cops had time to grab him, but that fire, it came on so furiously. And the flames would’ve struck him with such a paralyzing fear…

So much carnage and all for nothing. Because Wrong Russ was dead and gone, just minutes away from his salvation. After however many hundreds of leaps and reboots? It was almost a shame for him to have failed, and almost a blessing that my defeat came much more quickly.

Wrong Russ was proof that time and temptation would twist my mind in ways I couldn’t at that moment anticipate. He was the end result.

I didn’t see Paige coming until she was outside my window. Her cheeks were smeared with soot. She wrapped her fingers into the inch of window space. Then I saw: she was pressing something against the window. Our Curt Schilling baseball card.

“How’d you get out here?” I asked her.

“There’s a lot going on. I probably won’t be missed.”

“Conrad…” I said.

Paige dropped her eyes. She didn’t have to say it out loud. What she said instead was, “Take a look at this card, Russ. You remember it?”

“Yeah. My
lucky card
. You fished it out of the garbage to remind yourself what a failure I am.”

She hitched her lip at me. “Who said that?”

“You did. In another life.”

“I admit, it sounds like something I’d say. But it’s a lie.”

“I should’ve gone back for him,” I said.

“The real reason I took this card,” she went on, ignoring me, “is to remind myself about sticking with it, about missed chances and redemption and all that corny stuff.”

“
Please,
” I said. I imagined them pulling the burned husk of a body from the theater wreckage, backpack still strapped to his bones, smoke still rising from the char.

“Okay, so it’s sort of ironic,” Paige explained. “Y’all sucked at baseball, but I’ve seen your heart, Russ Vale. You need to quit tossing out your cards.”

“I don’t have any more cards,” I said.

The clock on the police laptop blipped to 7 p.m.

And I heard it, the chime of my cell phone.

Paige reached into the belly pouch of her sweatshirt and took out the phone to verify what I’d heard was true. She had my cell phone, kind of battered and scratched, but otherwise intact. She said, “I grabbed it off the floor, just before they got us out. Figured you might want to have it back.”

“You do it,” I told her.

“Uh-uh, James Cameron. No way I’m jumping into y’alls weird sci-fi fantasy. This is yours to fix. That’s why I showed you the baseball card. A reminder.”

“Nothing will change here. Connie will still be dead.”

“It’s something me and the other Russ have to live with. This is our world. But you, you don’t belong here.” She eyed me for a second, then lowered her voice to recite: “
I ain’t going to let you toss your whole life to save mine, girl
.”

A line of dialog from my movie, used against me. The sting of it threw me off guard, like Paige knew it would. Handcuffed, I could only watch as she slipped the cell phone through the window crack and aimed its screen at me.

“Take care of Virgin,” I said.

“Virgin? What virgin? What does that mean:
take care?
”

“I didn’t mean…” I started, but she pressed the blue icon.

I
POPPED
back into awareness, hands still behind my back, though nothing bound them together anymore. I wasn’t in the cruiser, either. I was in some tricked-out muscle car, my bare butt propped on some massive speaker that took over the whole back seat. It cranked out rap so hard my bones rattled.