Extra Life (25 page)

He could’ve picked a better title for the guy, but I knew what he meant.
Virgin
as in never-took-the-leap, still native to this reality. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter which of us was first because each of us was as real as the next. I could feel my own heartbeat. Hear my own thoughts. You think, therefore you are, and all that philosophy crap.

But in this car was a Russ who’d gone deeper into the labyrinth than me. A Russ who somehow escaped the shooting in Marv Parker’s office, a shooting in which Savannah apparently
died
, and then somehow managed to sneak his way
back
into that office by 7 p.m. in order to leap back to four o’clock and save us.

“Listen,” Naked Russ said. “Virgin Russ has to be protected. What happens to him, happens to us because we’re just his shadows in this world, you understand?”

“How do you know this?”

“Trust me, I’ve seen more than you.”

Where did I hear that before? Me, telling the same thing to 3.0, is where.

Nothing seemed solid. The outskirts of Cape Fear rushed past, but it might as well have been a simulation. A cop car sped at us from a side road, then, with a cough of smoky grit from its spinning tires, took chase at the head of the pursuing posse.

Video games antics. Just hit the power button and it all goes away, including your extra lives. I was 4.0. A copy, a projection, a ghost. But my lizard survival brain kicked in anyhow, reminded me we were topping one hundred mph and plowing back into a downtown sprawl full of stop signs and side roads. This death-defying chase was real enough.

“You gotta slow down!” I screamed at the driver.

I wrenched the seatbelt over my chest and latched it into place. Savannah had hers on already. She sat clutching her purse like it was a life preserver. “Let me out of here,” she insisted. “Stop the car. This is
not
cool.”

I touched her arm and said, “We’re going to be all right. Just stick with us.”

“I don’t have anything to do with this!” she screamed. “Let me out!”

Naked Russ wasn’t listening. We blew through a stop sign and barely missed getting jack-knifed in the crossroad. Cars from both directions came to a rubber-burning stop.

The cruiser on our tail got nailed into a sudden half spin by an SUV. The sickening pitch of that crunch wormed deep into my spine. Even further back, the Silver Screen security cars were blocked by the sudden chaos of traffic surrounding the SUV/cruiser wreck.

We were in a residential neighborhood, speed limit thirty. Thick live oaks made a natural tunnel arch over the road. Sirens from every direction. Maybe even the rhythmic thump of a helicopter overhead? We zipped under a green light, but there were three more stoplights until—

“Market Street!” I said. Our road would end there at a T-intersection.

“
I know
!” Naked Russ said. He stomped the brake and made a hard left aimed at a cluster of trees. My seatbelt locked me in place. I cried out and ducked, but we missed the trees by at least half an inch.

Instead, we skidded onto a blind side-road. On the broken-up asphalt, the car leaped and lunged wherever it pleased. We might as well have been off-roading. Naked Russ worked to keep the wheel straight.

“
Let me out
!” Savannah screamed, clutching the chair-back in front of her.

“Where are we
going
?” I asked Naked Russ.

“Listen to me very carefully,” he said. “Are you listening?”

“Yes!”

“Keep her safe…”

In the rear view mirror, I saw his eyes (one of them swollen and bruised) flit over to Savannah. I didn’t need to hear him say that
Bobby would’ve shot her if Future Russ didn’t materialize and stop him.

But what happened there did not happen here. This was a different universe. Savannah
didn’t
die. She escaped because he came back to rescue us. It
already happened
, and because it happened, my time line was forever separated from the one that brought our driver back to us.

We were different Russes. Different, but almost identical. Naked Russ had no bloody towel on his right hand. His hand wasn’t even bleeding, though the knife cut was there, gaping open, tender and ugly. A trace of stitch marks, but no actual stitches.

He yelled to me, “You have to be careful not to trust—”

Just ahead, a rusty pickup truck backed out of a dirt driveway. Out of nowhere, from behind a fence. Future Russ was watching me in the rear view, so he didn’t see, not until it was too late.

He cried out, jerked the wheel. The pickup’s back bumper scraped along the side of the Rapide with a metallic scream. Then, my skull was shaken like a Magic Eight Ball. A few seconds of hazy dreaming, and—

We were still in the car, but it wasn’t moving. A hissing noise, leaking liquids. Smoke or dust stung my eyes. The sun seemed a hundred times brighter than it did a few seconds before. Air bags went limp in each of the front seats. Savannah sobbed beside me.

The contents of her purse were all over the back seat: mascara brushes and lipsticks and little snap cases of I don’t even know. She was scooping it all back into her lap as if everything would be better if she could just retrieve her makeup.

There was my camera, next to her foot, and I couldn’t care less.

“Are you all right?” I asked her again.

She didn’t answer, but she was upright, breathing, alive.

Sirens. It wouldn’t be long before the police got to us. Only when I unlatched my belt did I feel the impact pain lashed across my chest. My door was already wrenched out of whack. It groaned when I pushed it up and away. I got it open just far enough for me to tumble out, and I pressed my hands and knees into the crumbled asphalt.

Time out, please. Just need a couple seconds.
I tried to chart which Russ I was, which world I was in. What just happened and what was bound to happen any second.

The car, once a feat of modern engineering, was now abstract art. The front end was crunched into black metal waves against a sturdy telephone pole. The hood was littered with glass.

The driver whose truck we hit eased his boots onto the road. Overalls, straw hat, a hundred years old. He yelled, “Hey, you folks all right?” but neither of us answered.

Through the Rapide’s missing windshield I saw two empty front seats. Our driver, the future incarnation of me, was completely gone. No sign of him in the road ahead. No blood. No remnants at all.

Future Horace Vale must have died on impact. He’d come on like an explosion and just like 3.0, he vanished from existence. Deleted, because he wasn’t of this world.
Be careful not to trust…
he warned. But he never got a chance to tell me who.

“O
H MY
god oh my god oh my god,” Savannah chanted.

She skittered across a grassy lot away from the accident, away from me. Hands on her head, like she was under arrest, though no cops were actually on scene just yet.

“Savannah, wait,” I called out.

“No.
Nope.
Leave me alone. None of this happened.”

I tried to catch up, but she jacked her pace up to a jog almost. She was aiming for a row of houses on the next street over. A backyard pathway toward downtown and away from me.

“Savannah, please.”

She stopped and spun on me with a full-toothed wince, “Please don’t say my name again. I don’t know you, and I don’t know what’s happening, so please leave me alone.”

“I’m Russ—your friend. Did you hit your head?”

“Which Russ? You’re here and then not and then back again and people get shot and a car wreck and I didn’t ask for this. All I wanted was to hang out with Bobby Parker, and then he—you—I’m just going to go home and sleep it off and when I wake up, it’ll be a dream, okay?”

The old man kept guard over his busted taillight and dented bumper. He watched us flatly, a reality TV show aimed for some demographic totally not him.

“I’m sorry, but it’s not a dream,” I told Savannah.

She stiffened her arms at her sides, took a breath, and stormed off without me. For a second, I thought maybe she was the person Future Russ warned me not to trust. But that theory didn’t fly. He was talking way worse than Savannah ditching me at the scene of an accident.

He couldn’t have meant Bobby Parker, either, because Bobby was a no-shit-Sherlock on the threat level scale. I didn’t have to be told not to trust him. No, my worst enemy had to be the one who sent the techno-vortex that attacked Paige in her room, the one who psyched out my moves like he knew them all ahead of time, like my every choice was furthering somebody else’s plot against me. Even when I thought I was winning.

If only I could play the game over from the start. If only I could stop thinking like this was some elaborate upgrade of
Grand Theft Auto: Cape Fear
, where all I had to do was start back at the last save point.

The
whomp whomp whomp
of helicopter blades kicked me back into gear. No time to ponder existence. The authorities had taken to the sky to track me down, so I had to hustle on out. I cut across a yard and strolled down a few sidewalks, easy pickings, right out in the open. But that was my strategy. Cruisers zipped by, sirens blaring, while my chill stride must’ve fooled them into thinking I wasn’t the fugitive they were looking for. Just out on a stroll, even if underneath I was massively overdosed on panic hormones.

I fished Dad’s phone from my pocket and found the touchscreen black and shattered. Ruined in the crash. The case broke open in my hand, battery and microchip clattering to the sidewalk. I didn’t even bother to pick up the pieces.

I had probably two and a half hours until seven. My only options were the hope of a breakthrough solution from Dad, or another leap from the Pastime Project. The second choice was a risk I didn’t want to take, but if there was no other way, I’d have to get my phone back again.

Here again on Market Street, I was only a block away from Connie’s house, ten minutes away from my own. If the universes aligned the way I thought, then this world’s Connie would not be over at Paige’s house getting the news of her death. Instead, he’d be at his house with so-called Virgin Russ, still trying to keep Virgin from finding out about me, for fear that our meeting would cause a meltdown in existence.

If
the cause-and-effect stayed steady, and
if
I could trust Conrad Bower.

Because I knew from experience that my best friend could be convinced to turn against me.

I crept around the back of Connie’s house and quietly let myself in through the kitchen. The downstairs was abandoned as expected. They’d be in Connie’s room, his safety zone, so I slipped off my shoes and took the stairs in my sock feet, trying not to make the old wood creak. Upstairs was the low mutter of a television or radio or both. If Connie or Virgin Russ opened the bedroom door, I’d be spotted instantly, but there was no other way to get closer.

I had no plan other than to eavesdrop on their conversation and see if Connie had spilled the big secret, especially after Virgin’s weird phone call with Paige. I had to gather some info I could use, convince them to let me have the cell phone. Tackle Virgin Russ and take it from him, if necessary. As long as I caught them before they cooked up a plan to zap me out of their lives again. Whatever way I needed to play it would be justified.

Connie’s bedroom door was open a crack. Three steps from the landing, I finally heard a hushed voice that was neither Virgin Russ nor Connie. A girl’s voice was saying “…should force him to explain what’s happening here because…” It was Paige Davis.

I took the rest of the stairs in one stride, shoved through the door, and there was Connie hunched over his keyboard as always, and Paige seated at the foot of the bed, watching him type.

Paige flinched at the sound of my entrance and cut off her sales pitch.

“Russ,” she said, squinting at me, like it’d help her figure
which
Russ.

“It’s me—the one who saved your life. Why are you here?”