Extra Life (31 page)

No sign of my father’s headquarters.

“I thought you said it would be here,” Twin said.

I stepped off the curb into the choked standstill of vehicles. I tuned out the crisis and kept my eyes glued on the building, staring it down, willing it to change. I didn’t blink. My eyes watered from the cloud of exhaust fumes around me.

But there it was: the ghostly mirage of another building, superimposed on the theater. A newer, sleeker sign transformed the words Pastime Playhouse into Pastime Productions. Above it, a clock the size of a monster truck tire had hands that turned counterclockwise. My father’s headquarters was there, just past the veil of this dimension.

“This is the place,” I said.

Twin and I reached the three sets of entrance doors. We yanked on two handles simultaneously, and both of them clapped against their deadbolt locks. I didn’t hold out much hope for the third, but Twin dutifully gave it a yank. No dice.

I shielded my eyes with my hand and peered through the glass door. The lack of sunlight dimmed the lobby, but I could make out the same old marble floor, the extravagant gilded faux-gold frames that used to contain the “coming soon” posters. Hand painted murals behind the concession stand showed iconic scenes from
Casablanca
and
The Wizard of Oz
and
Gone With the Wind
. A lost memory reclaimed. I could almost smell the popcorn.

Out of that shadowed fantasy past, somebody was coming toward us. A lanky teenager with a screwy look on his face. I had to step back, thinking it was a reflection. But no, it was him, Virgin Russ. He stopped at the door and glared at us through the glass. The kid was a mess—mussed hair and a clammy cast to his skin.

“Let us in!” I said.

After inhaling another few seconds of doubt, he twisted the bolt lock and pushed open the door. “I guess I should’ve expected you… both,” he said.

Inside, our voices resounded in the dusty front lobby. The glass displays at the concession stand were empty of candy, the popcorn machine purged. The cold was sharper than it should’ve been, and it made Twin in his flimsy gown hug his own shoulders. There was a pervasive whiff of gas, like when you overfill a lawn mower tank.

“Can you tell me what I’m doing here?” Virgin asked us.

“What do you mean? Don’t you know how you got here?” Twin asked back.

Virgin glanced cockeyed at Twin’s hospital gown but didn’t ask for details. He said, “I was in my dad’s office upstairs, and then suddenly—”

“You shifted,” I butted in. “You’re stuck on this ride with us.”

“This place—this theater—it burned down years ago—but…”

I wasn’t all that surprised to learn that Virgin Russ was bound to us with our inter-dimensional field trips. He rode the same shifts because his nature was identically coded. Whatever programming malfunction was capturing us in its loops was capturing him too. He
was
us.

“We’re in another dimension. Dad’s office is still here—just—not—accessible, at the moment,” I explained, or tried to.

“Don’t call him
Dad
like we’re brothers,” Virgin said. “He’s
my
dad. You left yours behind in some other… whatever. Don’t you dare forget that.” Evidently,
this
Virgin Russ had been given plenty of opportunity to get bitter about our existence before we even arrived on scene.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Set all that aside right now. You need to understand that everybody here is in danger.”

“From what?” Virgin asked.

“Bobby Keene-Parker,” Twin and I said.

That bomb was a total dud. Virgin said, “You’re kidding, right?”

“The guy’s a maniac and he’s got a gun. If he finds you…”

“How would he find us here?”

Even as Virgin asked the question, the past began to slip from us again. The murals of Bogart and Bergman and Garland turned to shimmering afterimages, then they were gone. In their place was a metal staircase with Plexiglas steps lit by a pale blue glow. Small mood lights dotted sheet metal walls between rivets. Every decorative touch in the place reflected Dad’s
Brave New World
futuristic utopia kitsch. We had arrived at Pastime Productions.

Twin doubled over and gagged from the vertigo, nothing left to vomit.

The receptionist’s desk was unstaffed, the waiting area with its Swedish weird-posture chairs was empty. And at the far end, where the theater itself used to be, an elevator waited, door shut.

I made for the stairs, wasting no time.

“What are you doing?” Virgin said, and grabbed my arm. His eyes widened when he realized his rash move had caused us to make physical contact, but there was no cataclysm. I knew it, but Virgin was making all these discoveries anew.

Virgin, the
real boy
, wanted to shut out all the troublemaking wooden Russ puppets dancing around him on their strings. He wanted to avert his eyes and pretend we didn’t exist.

“You want us out of here, right?” I asked him.

“Hell, yeah.”

“Then let me go talk to Dad. He’ll have the solution.”

Upstairs, the Death Star decor gave way to unfinished drywall, floors dusted with sanded compound powder. It was a simple hallway, two doors on either side and the elevator gleaming at the far end. Dad must’ve heard us because he popped out of a doorway on the left and said, “There you—are.” He lowered his chin to get a clear view of three Russ Vales over his reading glasses.

“My God,” he added, with a wistful smirk on his face that was almost embarrassing, like he was admiring his own handiwork. What he’d only been able to produce once with his biology, he’d now replicated with his technology. Nothing to be proud of, Pops. It was a holy mess, like multiplying Gremlins by getting them wet.

More than that, I wanted to rush down the hall and hug him, breathe him in, celebrate the fact that he was alive and well and un-shot. Heck, he was even dressed in khaki pants and a pressed button-down shirt. Clean-shaved and self-employed.

“What the heck is that?” I asked him, nodding at the strange piece of equipment he was cradling in his hands. It looked like a Vietnam-era walkie-talkie, the size of a shoe box and outfitted with a nest of antennas, one of them as long as a fishing pole and bobbing, even as Dad tried to hold it still.

“This,” Dad said. “Is a Flux Stabilizer. It’ll fix everything. I think.”

D
AD’S NEW
office was a junkyard of gadgetry, wires and gutted computers—the contents of his office back home crammed into a room a fraction of the size. He and Virgin fit snugly inside, but we two replicas had to watch from the hall.

The Flux Stabilizer’s long antenna prodded and scraped the wall no matter how Dad adjusted the angle. It was a monstrosity of chips and hinges that seemed bound together only by the winding of its own wires. Dad explained, “If the stabilizer is used in conjunction with the program, then in theory it will recalibrate any variables that have been thrown off track. It would send you back where you came from.”

“In theory?” I asked.

Dad slumped into his office chair with a sigh. He nodded at the bank of computer screens, all of them stone dead. The lights overhead flickered, threatened to die completely. These widespread technical malfunctions had screwed with his progress, and maybe even his calculations, I realized.

“I haven’t been able to replicate the program exactly,” Dad admitted. “Obviously, I succeeded in some other universe, but not here, not yet. But it may not matter because I can bypass the problem. This stabilizer will interact with the program after it’s been downloaded onto the cell phone.”

He pointed to an empty slot in the center of the Flux Stabilizer. It had the basic dimensions of my cell phone and a connection jack.

“Plug and play?” Twin and I said together. Our echo was getting annoying.

“Sure,” Dad answered. “And these circuits will reroute the program through patch software. Sorry for the bulkiness. I didn’t have time for sleek product design—or for a trial run, for that matter.”

“But you’re sure it’ll work?” Twin asked.

Dad looked down at his wacko device, then back at us. “Sure as I’ll ever be. Call it a full reboot. It’ll send the user back to his own universe, to his own body, probably at the exact point he left it. At the same time, any other—versions—who are still separated from their home dimensions will be…”

“Deleted,” Virgin Russ said, staring us down.

“What about you?” I asked Virgin.

“Nothing. I’m where I belong, so I get to stay.”

Dad nodded and said, “It’s just how the math works out. The firm boundaries will have to be reestablished. I wouldn’t have predicted it, but this propagation of identical code is likely what’s causing all these anomalies, and a full reboot is the only thing that will stop…” Dad looked to the ceiling, the flickering lights, the implicit Blue Screen of Death sky just over our heads.

“You mean too many Russes spoils the world,” I said.

“I’m afraid so. Nature is a delicate equation. The universe is a complex program.”

And you are a virus,
were the words left unsaid.

Twin got morose, staring at the Flux Stabilizer. I understood his hesitation. For me, a reboot was a no-brainer: back to a life with the same crappy letdowns any kid my age had to deal with. Ask forgiveness of a few people, and things went back to normal. But
Twin’s
home life was a tragic mess, with Dad possibly dead. Even in this reality, there would be serious fallout from the incident at Silver Screens, the crashed Aston Martin, all of it. It was a rigged lottery where I would be the only winner, and I felt like crap about that.

“Can more than one of us use it?” I asked.

“I didn’t expect there to be two of you…” Dad admitted.

“Actually…” I said, because a key player was missing from the scene. One O’clock Russ—the guy who walked away from the car crash and went home to find Bobby in his living room. If Bobby ambushed him this time around, there might be no One O’clock left at all.

Except I hated to think of the other Russes like they were dispensable CD-Rs with
The Worst of Russ Vale
copied on them. We thought, therefore we
were
. My fear for my existence meant I was real, not a glitch, and the same was true for each other Russ.

Besides, the chance of One O’clock already having been “erased” by Bobby Parker would be no stroke of good luck. No way. Because One O’clock Russ had the key ingredient here: the cell phone where the Pastime Project would be downloaded. Without that phone, Dad’s reset device was nothing more than the most ridiculous skin ever designed.

“One last thing,” said Dad. “Very important. You’re going to need some serious bandwidth to get enough power for the transference. You’re going to need the best receiver in town.”

In other words, we were going to need the WCPF radio tower. Back to the scene of the crime.

Dad offered the stabilizer to Twin and I, though he must’ve realized that only one of us could take it. He didn’t want to have to make a choice like that himself. We hesitated, and from down the hall came a pleasant
ding
.

It was the chime that announced the arrival of an elevator car. I let myself get distracted by the noise and the sliding aluminum door, long enough to give Twin the edge. He took the device into his arms.

Then the elevator door smacked into place and Bobby Parker stepped out, his gun already aimed. He shouldn’t have found us, but here he was, relentless.

Twin dove for cover inside Dad’s office, while I fell off guard and stumbled backward against the drywall and collapsed to the floor.

Bobby approached me stiff and determined. He steadied the gun with two hands as he reached point blank range, and then he didn’t shoot.

“Which one are you?” he asked. “Tell me,
now
.”

“Killing me won’t make you a star,” I said.

Bobby dipped his aim and asked, “What?”

I took my opening, propelled off the wall in a cloud of white dust, straight through my father’s office door. I body-slammed Virgin Russ by mistake so we
oomph
ed in stereo and crashed into a house of cards made of spare circuit boards.