Extra Life (30 page)

Maybe this turn should’ve jolted me, but it all made sense, actually. If circumstances were just a tad different than in my home universe, Dad might’ve ditched Rush Fiberoptics and built his own start-up tech company
before
he invented the time-space program. As his own CEO, Dad wouldn’t have had to fret about the moral implications of his work. Nobody else would be able to touch it. He could push the project past research, straight into development, and pull the plug whenever he felt the implications were getting too scary.

Too bad his son made a spectacular mess of his invention. Maybe the biggest fail since the Big Bang. Crap, maybe this was the sort of screw up that
caused
big bangs.

I was mulling over this minor implication while the phone rang and rang.

“Nobody’s picking up,” I told Twin.

“We’ll have to find wherever Pastime Productions is and get there ourselves before—” He didn’t have to say—
before Bobby Parker
. “What’s the message say?”

“It just keeps ringing.”

“Give me the phone.”

There wasn’t anything to gain, so I surrendered the cell.

“Wait, call Mom and tell her not to go home,” I told him.

The reality wobble struck again. I braced myself against the wall and groaned. My heart pounded with the worry that if this didn’t stop soon we’d be pulled to pieces or stuck in an empty zone between dimensions forever.

The trace amounts of food in my gut were surfacing this time. I dove into Mr. Yes’s hospital room, angling for the toilet. He was solidly
there
again and seated on the edge of his bed, staring at a framed print of a pier at sunset.

“There you are,” he called out. “I thought you disappeared.”

“Sorry,” I answered, between wretches. My voice echoed in the toilet bowl.

“You must’ve hit your head pretty bad,” said Mr. Yes.

“I’ll be okay,” I groaned.

“Better get back downstairs, though. You know, it really seemed like you
disappeared
. I started thinking I was hallucinating from the medication they gave me, but it wasn’t really anything that powerful...”

I came out of the bathroom, wiping my mouth on a handful of paper towels I got from the dispenser. “Mr. Yes, you wouldn’t happen to have any idea where my father’s company is located, would you? Pastime Productions, it’s called?”

“Strange question,” he said.

“Strange day,” I countered.

“Drove by there the other day. Nice repurposing of the old lot.” Yesterly didn’t have to say more. If Dad was nostalgic enough to name his company after the Pastime Theater, it was no stretch to imagine he’d buy the empty lot and build his offices there. Should’ve guessed it myself.

On my way out, I asked Mr. Yes if I could borrow some money for the vending machine downstairs, promising I’d pay him back. All he had was a fifty, but he gave it over anyhow, thanking me again for the inadvertent life-saving warning. I wished I could tell him that he just saved my ass, too, but it would’ve taken too long to explain, and he never would’ve believed me. So I said goodbye and stepped back out to an empty hallway.

Twin Russ was nowhere to be found. I’d been ditched.

T
WIN MUST’VE
overheard Yesterly tell me where Dad’s business was based, or he got a hold of Mom on the phone and asked her, or he guessed the answer. Whatever the case, off he went by himself.

Because—you had to figure—if Dad named his own company after his groundbreaking science experiment,
this
might finally be one of those universes where our father achieved some actual results, maybe even an answer to our predicament. An antidote, of sorts. Twin Russ was angling to get there first, and cut me out.
Bastard.

Part of me hoped Twin was stupid enough to take the elevator again. That way, if he slipped between dimensions mid-ride, he might find himself appearing where the elevator car
wasn’t
. Going down fast. That’d handle the traitor—no witnesses, no cleanup.

No such luck, though. As soon as I entered the emergency stairwell, his barefoot steps echoed up from a few stories below. I shouted after him, but the response was a resounding door slam. So I followed.

Took the last few steps to the ground floor with my arms thrust ahead of me, pushed nonstop through the exit and into the lobby. I must’ve looked deranged with my backward gown and my wheezing, but nobody paid attention. A much more interesting show was already in progress.

There were five times as many people as when we showed up with Dad—dozens crowded around the admissions desk and the standing-room-only waiting area. A few shouted for attention, but most were subdued, scared. It looked like some crisis evacuation meeting zone.

Outside the plate glass window, ambulances and civilian cars clogged the emergency lane. Spinning lights swirled their colors across my range of sight. In the center of it all, just shy of the automatic sliding doors, three crouching security guards had wrestled a patient to the ground and pinned his arms behind his back. “
Let me
go
!” the captive screamed. His voice cracked, not quite a man.

It was Twin Russ, dropped by the guards on his way to freedom.

“I didn’t do anything!” Twin screamed at them.

A familiar nurse watched from the admissions desk, covering her mouth with one hand. She was the nurse from the elevator, the one we flashed indecently. It must’ve been her that alerted security.

Since I was still unnoticed on the sidelines of this circus, I slipped into an adjacent wing through a pair of swinging doors, huffing it fast toward a side exit.

I chanced a pit stop at the hospital gift shop to commemorate my visit. Shopping fast, I made a quick show of considering a tote bag and water bottle, then grabbed a Wright Beach t-shirt with jogging shorts and a pair of cheap knockoff Crocs, the only footwear they had in stock besides flip-flops. I blew the bulk of Mr. Yes’s fifty bucks in one swoop.

The bored clerk didn’t breathe a word about my patient gown or my fugitive attitude. Thirty seconds in a nearby men’s room, I emerged in my getaway suit. The incriminating gown I kicked under one of the toilet stalls—good riddance.

I hurried out the side exit, and froze beneath the startling cloudless blue sky. Not atmospheric blue, but the solid electric blue of a crashed operating system. The Blue Screen of Death. It domed above the earth, or as much of it as I could see.

And the city was full of noise—hundreds of horns and alarms, sirens, angry shouts from the far side of the parking lot.
I did this
. I crashed the world.
Error
might as well have been written across the naked sky, followed by my name. Who could have guessed that some teenage twerp from a nowhere coastal North Carolina town could wreak this much havoc?

All that immense unstoppable power did nothing to make me feel mighty. I was an insect under the dead blue dome. It could fall and crush me the same as anybody else. I was nobody. All I did was wake a force I couldn’t handle.

Azalea Taxi cabs circled the hospital, sharks around a sinking boat, so one of them caught me fast enough, right at the sidewalk. The driver was a scrawny man with deep facial lines, impervious to what was happening around him.

“Front Street, downtown,” I told him.

“We waitin’ on y’alls brother?” he asked.

“Huh?” I asked back.

The cabbie nodded at his rear-view mirror. A second later, the back passenger door swung open. There was Twin, still in his gown, panting and glistening with sweat. I had no choice but to scoot over so he could get in.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Security nabbed me,” he said.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“Then thanks for helping.”

“
You
ditched me
first
,” I reminded him.

“They had me on the ground, then another of those dimensional shifts happened, and all of a sudden they didn’t have me. I just got up and ran out here, and saw you getting into this cab.”

If the driver could hear us, he didn’t say so. He pulled around to the Oleander Street exit, facing a solid line of stopped traffic. People were out of their cars, hoods lifted open. Far down the road, black smoke billowed from somewhere unseen. I didn’t want to think what it might be.

All these malfunctions… I imagined airplanes dropping from the sky by the thousands. Nuclear plants losing power, drifting into meltdown. The end of everything.

O
UR TAXI
driver plowed halfway downtown by weaving past stalled cars, skirting shoulders and jumping curbs. For him, this whole Reality Meltdown was the final challenge round. Then we hit an intersection where the cab stalled out and wouldn’t turn back over, no matter how hard our driver cranked the key.

Twin was overwhelmed. He gawked out the window and said, “Is this even real?” to the Blue Sky of Death. Just then, five military Chinooks
thump thump thumped
their double rotors overhead. I hoped to hell their guidance systems stayed operational while they were up in the sky.

I got woozy again, braced myself for another shift. The taxi went ghostly. Our backseat lost its solidity, dropped out from underneath us. There was nothing but asphalt to break our fall. I turned sideways and landed on my ribs. Twin sprawled flat with such a crack I could almost feel the pain zap through my own spine.

A split-second to go and our shift would be complete—in the middle of snarling rabid traffic. I scrambled off the street, lost one Croc, grabbed Twin by the arm as I went. We both rolled under a bus stop shelter, just as the last hazy glimpse of our cab faded out. In that other world, our cabbie was about to get mighty peeved that we ditched him without paying.

“What the hell!” Twin said.

“Dude, you should be used to this by now.”

“Let’s not get in any more disappearing cars,” he said.

Lucky for us, traffic was at a standstill in this reality too. A truck eased into the space where the cab had been and ran over my Croc, but the footwear bounced against the curb, unharmed.

Had to focus now. Had to think—life or death. If we’d been sailing along at thirty miles per hour when the shift went down, we’d have ended up spread across the street like strawberry jam on toast.

I grabbed my Croc, slipped it back on. No worse for the wear. We took off running, Twin dangerously barefoot. We had to be skirting the next leap point, 6:15. Time was folding up and closing down.

6:15, 6:37, 6:56—even if we were reckless enough to make more leaps, the half-points were fast collapsing in to a meaningless blurt of minutes, then a handful of seconds, then no time at all. 7 p.m. was the monster climbing the staircase, closer and closer.

We turned onto Front Street, both of us out of breath after a four-block sprint. Twin bounced on one foot, clutching the bare heel of the other in his hand. Across the street, past a gridlock of cars, was our end zone—the former site of the Pastime Playhouse.

But there was nothing former about it. The theater was
there
. A brick-faced 1930s Public Works project, the tube shaped ticket booth under the marquee awning with its dead and dusty light bulbs, and the readerboard letters explaining that the place was TEM OR RILY CLO ED.