Extra Life (24 page)

“Oh, please,” Marv said. “Save the theatrics for the camera.”

“Shut up,” Bobby whispered with his eyes squinted shut, like Marv’s voice wasn’t real, just an unending rumble in his head.

“Put the gun away,” Marv said.

“Shut up.”

“I bought you that thing, and everything else.”

“
Shut up!
” Bobby’s psyche had been shattered to bits. I knew, or at least I had anticipated, but in all my hurry to get past the gate, I couldn’t accept that we were walking into death’s chamber with the reaper himself.

Marv stood again, curled his hands into thick fists, and pressed his knuckles into the desk. He was purple-faced and shallow-breathed, working desperately to keep from raging through the room. Between the gun and Marv Parker, I don’t know which scared me more. He started to say, “You little shit, you don’t have the—”

But then he stopped, clutched one hand to his chest, and flopped back down in his seat so fast that the feathery hairs of his toupee lifted fully from his skull and settled back. He was grunting, ripping at the folds of his vest like he was shot, but the gun had not gone off. Something on the inside attacked him instead. And it was not yet four o’clock.

Bobby turned his eyes to Savannah, wild black eyes that seemed to accuse her of causing this chaos. Her seductive charm, like 3.0 suggested. When his gun tilted in her direction, more from momentum than malice, she backed against the door and screamed. I wrapped her in my arms and turned her away from Bobby’s half-raised aim.

3.0 had the same protective impulse, but the slight difference between us made this other Russ Vale choose a different tack. He dove straight for Bobby, shoulder to chest. The impact was point-guard perfect. The two of them hit the wall so hard they shattered the protective glass on a promo poster for
Summer Camp Slaughter 2
. The back of Bobby’s head dented the wood paneling.

3.0 wrapped his hand over the gun and steered Bobby’s aim toward the wall. But Bobby took a cheap shot. Elbowed Three’s tender eye, sent him reeling into the aluminum desk. The desk scraped backward and heimliched Marv Parker’s gut, forcing an even deeper groan from his lungs.

Back in control of the gun, Bobby leveled it at my stunt double. I must’ve yelled “
no!
” but it did no good. The gunshot put an angry hornet in each of my ears, and the question crossed my mind—what might happen if one of me…?—just as 3.0 took a bullet in his chest.

I reached out, as if I could meld this other version into myself and rescue him, but we were several feet apart, and it was already too late. My double sat down on the floor and his startled eyes turned to me, pleading.

To him, it didn’t make any sense that he should die, if I was standing here alive. It was a paradox. Because he had no clue about the parallel universes. Because I didn’t tell him.

A chaos of fluttering papers, stench of smoke. Time wound down to a sluggish tick. Russ 3.0 slumped over and should’ve hit the floor, but he never reached it. Instead, he disintegrated. He
blurred
. He turned into coronas of color, then gray tone static, shrinking into nothingness. All in the span of a second or two. Connie’s empty jeans and Dr. Who t-shirt flopped to the ground. And 3.0 was gone, like he never existed.

All the lights in the ceiling panels brightened in unison. Air conditioners and generators inside the building chugged back into action. I didn’t have to be a theoretical physicist to get it.
Of course
3.0 disappeared—because he wasn’t
from here
. He was a projection from another dimension, a glitch, a virus.

Savannah buried her face against my chest. Her fear was an awful thing to share with her, but we were both still alive, at least for now. Bobby staggered. He pressed his fingers into his eyes. If he spoke, I couldn’t hear through the wall of cotton the gunshot had put into my ears.

I braced myself on the door and lifted Savannah upright. This moment, while Bobby was disoriented, was our window of escape. At least I thought it was, but I was wrong yet again. Bobby slipped his hand away from his face, like tearing off a mask. He would’ve won an Oscar for that lunatic look, if only he were acting.

“You made me do this,” he said, and he lifted the gun at us.

Now
it was exactly four o’clock. I knew this not because I checked the time. I knew it because of the leap.

B
UT NOT
my
leap.

Instead, a person materialized in the space between us and Bobby’s gun muzzle. It started as distorted air, heat waves off the grill, until it took a human shape outlined in a dark blue aura. It lingered for a second, there but not there.

Then the shape emitted a single flash pulse that knocked Bobby back a step. My first thought was of the murderous techno-vortex that attacked me in Paige’s room—and
not again
. But then the gray shape turned real. A human male solidified directly in Bobby’s line of fire. Someone had just leaped in from some other space-time, and all I saw from my angle was his bare ass.

The lights dimmed again, live machinery shut back down. Marv Parker was still too bowled over by the pain in his chest to notice. Bobby was too baffled by this crazy magic to shoot. So the naked dude took the opportunity to strike. A swift karate chop at Bobby’s gun hand and the pistol dropped into the pile of Connie’s clothes on the floor.

The naked dude pivoted and howled
“Run!”
at us. I had a split-second to catch his face before Bobby’s fist smacked him sideways. Our rescuer reeled in such a way that all his flopping private-part glory was offered for Savannah’s scrutiny. And big
whopping
surprise: the naked dude from another dimension was
another copy of
me
.

Savannah turned away from the unexpected crotch shot just as I wrenched the office door open. The two of us hit the rickety landing so fast we almost went over the rail. I urged her down the stairs ahead of me, fast as we could, straight into a gauntlet of set-crew people clustered below.

They’d heard the commotion, of course. The gunshot, the screaming.

“He’s got a gun!” I yelled at them. It was a stock line, but it worked. The crowd recoiled, bumbling into each other, either because of my warning or because of whoever was behind us, rattling the stairs twice as hard with his stomping feet.

I shouldn’t have looked back. Didn’t really need to get a good look at the other me coming down after us with the Dr. Who shirt balled up against his most vulnerable bits. The sight of him mucked up my stride so bad I slammed against the rail and lost my grip on Savannah. She went flying and was caught by some burly crewman at the base of the steps. Her purse took a wide swing on its strap and slapped some other dude in the face.

I found my equilibrium, snatched her wrist again, and made for the exit. With the door wide open, our escape was a blindingly clear rectangle of sunlight. One last glance at the
Cape Twilight Blues
set where Morgana Avalon was still propped on the edge of her TV bed, wearing her sexy TV pajamas, talking on her real-life cell phone, completely oblivious to what was going on.

A voice from above: “Stop them!” Bobby’s voice.

Out in the lot, hand in hand, Savannah and I froze, both of us panting. We were free and clear of the sound stage, but we were still inside an arena surrounded by high fences. If we took the wrong turn, we’d be trapped.

Behind us, my naked twin slammed the sound stage door shut on his way out. Still with the shirt pressed to his crotch. Two security cars sped at us from the far end of the warehouse row, sirens blaring. Not prop vehicles this time. They’d be up our butts in seconds, and even if we were innocent of any crime (besides indecent exposure), they’d still detain us long enough for Bobby to get outside. Bobby was the heir to the throne of this gated little kingdom, and we were the invaders. If we got caught, he’d shoot first, and the studio security people would ask questions later.

“Get in,” my new twin said, and aimed a black device at Bobby’s parked Rapide. Bobby’s car key. In the struggle upstairs, it seemed he’d managed to get a hold of it. The car chirped and the door locks disengaged. So this was our getaway.

Go ahead and add grand theft auto to the list of crimes. Why not?

I yanked open the back passenger door. Savannah dove in, rolled over the center console, knocked Red Bull all over the place, and flopped into the seat that 3.0 had formerly occupied. The video camera with the Silver Bullet footage of her and Bobby fell to the floor at her feet.

I slid in behind her. Naked twin took the driver’s seat. He slid the key-thing into its port and pressed the R button. With his bare foot on the gas, we rocketed reverse in a roaring gush of engine noise.

“You all right?” I asked Savannah, jostling her shoulder.

“I’m—no—what—who—”

Naked Russ looked back at us and repeated my question:

“Savannah, tell me you’re all right? Are you hurt?”

“No…” she whimpered.

The relief buoyed him, and I realized circumstances must’ve gone another way in whatever reality he just leaped here from. That had to be why he leaped into our universe—because Savannah hadn’t made it out safely in his.

“Hold on,” Naked Russ said. He put the car into a spin while Bobby’s Beethoven blared a rousing crescendo to urge him on. When the tire squealing stopped, the oncoming security cars were suddenly behind us, and the front gate with its closed traffic bar was straight ahead.

He slammed the Rapide through the toll bar at thirty miles per hour. At that speed, the bar snapped and tumbled over the car roof. Savannah screamed, planted her shoes on the seat in front of her. Naked Me jerked the wheel, fishtailed southward onto 23rd Street.

We ripped through roadside gravel and decorative bushes, but the car righted back onto the road fast enough. I’d like to say I had faith in our rescuer’s stunt driving, but I knew better. He was totally improvising movie stunts. Unless he was from a
very
different universe, the guy could barely drive. I would know.

We gained speed with a straight shot back to the city through an industrial park. The security cars peeled onto the road behind us with less enthusiasm than the Aston Martin. I kind of hoped they’d screech to a stop at the edge of their jurisdiction, but nope.

“They’re after us!” I yelled. Every muscle in my body was locked in place.

The needle passed ninety. The limit on this road was forty-five.

Naked Russ smacked buttons to turn off the orchestra. The stereo went silent, but the screens in front of us turned on, playing the opening credits of
Cape Twilight Blues,
feel-good theme song and all. And there was Bobby Keene-Parker, arching his eyebrows at us from TV land.

Savannah kept her hands clasped over her ears. I could only imagine. All the mind-blowing I had gone through came in increments, but for her it all happened in one big blast.

“We need to stop!” I yelled to Naked Russ.

“Fat chance! You want to get arrested for killing Marv Parker?”

“But we didn’t… he wasn’t…”

“His kid’s a psycho—and who are they going to believe? Us?”

I grasped him by the shoulder, just to be sure. He was real, and he was
me
, though not the
me
in the back seat having these thoughts. He wasn’t 3.0 either—because that version of us died and disappeared in Marv Parker’s office. I watched it happen. I was the Real Russ, the
oldest
by several hours, the original. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Until this guy.

“Where did you come from?” I asked him, just as we lurched across some railroad tracks. The car hit air and my teeth cracked together.

“From the future,” he said. Blunt, because there was no better way to deliver the news. I had to assume he was a variation of me who’d just leaped a third time into the alternate past, the leap that took him to four o’clock exactly. I wasn’t the first or the last—just one in a long line stretching off in two directions to who knows when.

“You’re the original Russ,” I said aloud.

“You got it backwards,” he yelled over the engine noise. “It’s the one who’s from here. Wherever you are in time and space, there’s always one Russ who never took the leap. The Virgin Russ. He’s the one.”