Extra Life (35 page)

The dash clock said 6:40. Set a few minutes fast, I figured. The burly driver’s bald head, red-flame tattoos and all, bopped to the beat of the music. I hunched low, but his lazy eyes caught me in the rear view and burst open wide.

“What the—” he said, swiveling around to face me.

“I’ll explain later!” I yelled. Why not?

Burly Dude grabbed for me. I dodged his meaty grip, shoved the door, and rolled onto the sidewalk. The grit of concrete bit my skin, but it was better than chancing Burly’s wrath.

Nearby pedestrians gasped at my public indecency. The sky was natural blue with scattered clouds, and reality seemed generally stable. Good news. Not enough Russes here to screw with the coding. Four of us, by my count—Wrong Russ, Virgin, me, and the
me
from five minutes back. One O’clock and Twin would already be dead, murdered by Wrong and Bobby.
Five
alien intruders seemed to be the magic number for total interdimensional meltdown. The fifth must’ve been that surprise Bobby clone, or the extra Russ I hadn’t known to count.

Burly Dude laid on his horn. I found my feet and lunged hands-first into the consignment shop. That damn window dummy watched me with that same judging glare she would give me again, twenty minutes from now.

Inside, somebody called out, “Hi, there—let me know if y’all need any help.” Obviously, the shop owner couldn’t see me past the overstuffed racks and linen piles, clothes hanging literally from the rafters.

I snagged the nearest pair of jeans and shimmied them over my hips. Great: pink hearts stitched down the thighs, flared bell-bottoms. Even greater: waistline too tight to button.

I might’ve looked for a better fit, but the time bomb was ticking down, and just outside the display window, Burly Dude was finally rising from his car, snarling at me. I found a bland gray sweatshirt and went on my way. Zig-zagged through the bulging clothes racks to the back of the store like navigating a mosh pit to reach the stage. Behind me, Burly stepped in with a welcoming overhead jingle.

The checkout counter came into view. A woman with rat’s-nest hair lowered her knitting to get a look at me.

“I’ll pay you back, I swear,” I told her, and swiped a pair of scuffed black electrician’s boots from a shoe rack. I dropped them into my path and stepped inside as I went.

Burly was over six feet, so I saw his glistening bald head coming at me through the clothes. I took an alternate route, ducking low so he couldn’t catch sight of me. The clothes were almost suffocating, but then I saw the light, and dashed through the exit.

Down the street, the Pastime Playhouse was intact. No fire, no smoke curling into the sky. For the moment.

My oversized boots clomped off beat as I ran toward the theater. Every muscle in my body was jelly from hours on the run, but I still had to push.

I was almost there when Savannah shot through the narrow alley between the buildings and headed straight at me. She ran with both hands in front of her face, thumbing manically at her phone. This was when she fled from the showdown inside, another angle on the moment.

“Savannah!” I said.

She jolted, fumbled the phone, and it skittered across the concrete ahead of her, jettisoning the battery as it went. A newspaper box broke her stride. She slumped into it, red-faced, purse dangling from the crook of her elbow.

I had to squeeze her shoulder to get her to truly see me.

“Listen—I’m going in there. Don’t call the police,” I said.

She shook her head. “Don’t call the—why?”

“They’ll ruin everything. Just trust me. I’ll stop what’s happening.”

“They—they kidnapped me—Bobby and the other—you—and I had to sit there and watch—inside the theater—I don’t—you—who?”

“I’m a good one,” I assured her.

Her head kept shaking but her eyes seemed to believe. That was the best I could do. The dismantled phone would buy me a few seconds of time, at least, if Savannah decided to ignore my pleas and call the cops anyway.

I rushed in through the lobby, alone. Kicked off my boots for the sake of stealth. No real plan in my head. I didn’t have the time for strategy like Wrong Russ did. All I could do was bumble in and hope to cause enough chaos to offset his careful calculations.

Inside the theater, Wrong recited his justifications once again, the second daily staging of a local play: “These worlds are dreams, you understand? No more real than dreams, except you keep waking up from one into the next. But I want to wake up for good, and so do you…”

Former me was supposed to say,
Don’t tell me what I want,
but this time I leaped from around the corner instead. No way Wrong Russ could’ve forecast my appearance. This was all new territory. None of his hundreds of leaps had ever brought him to this new string of events.

But… the bastard got the best of me anyhow. Dodged my grappling arms and whacked my skull so hard I saw white flashes and reeled into the gas-soaked theater seats.

His gun went off. More screams and scrambling. I wasn’t dead. The throb in my skull assured me of that. When my eyes refocused, Wrong Russ had control of the Flux Stabilizer, just like last time. He stepped backwards, warning everybody off with his firearm. Near his feet, Former Me was nothing but a wicked-witch pile of hospital gift shop clothes on the floor. Five seconds flat, and a miserable failure.

All I did was get another version of myself killed again, and now we were spiraling toward another crash. Wrong turned the gun back on me. One last bit of tidying up before he scrammed. I was wedged on the floor between two rows of seats. Easy target, defenseless and dazed.

“No!” somebody screamed. It was Connie, ten feet behind me.

The shadow of a fat wingless bird arced overhead. It looked like a turkey taking awkward flight. Wrong Russ did a double take at the incoming projectile, raised his eyes and his aim to meet what was hurtling his way. Connie’s backpack, stuffed almost to bursting.

Wrong decided not to fire. Instead, he sidestepped, and the pack flopped onto the landing, gushing all its contents. Books and action figures and Magic cards, everywhere.

Wrong Russ coughed out a laugh, swiped Connie’s emptied pack off the floor, and shoved the Flux Stabilizer inside. He turned to make his escape, no longer interested in picking me off, it seemed. This time, there’d be no police raid to stop him.

After he fled, I tried to stand, but my latest head wound took its toll. Everything popped black, a fuse blown in my brain, and I was out cold.

I
WOKE
up with pain sizzling through my forehead. Someone tipped bottled water into my mouth and got me coughing even more. No clue where or when I was, but the information trickled in as I recovered from my stupor.

A moving car, Dad’s to be exact, the backseat, me in the middle with Virgin almost on my lap. I would’ve told this other me to give
me
me some space, but Paige and Savannah flanked us on either side. We were packed pretty tight.

And my best friend Conrad Bower was manning the wheel.
Connie,
driving.
I blinked, suspecting a brain injury (mine or his), but there he was, hunched forward, hands at ten and two on the wheel. Yeah, he looked frightened, but not
petrified
. Not helpless, not anymore.

We were cruising Front Street at a reasonable clip.

Dad in the shotgun seat, navigating.

“Stop sign,” Dad told Connie.

We all lurched when Connie stomped the brake, but nobody complained. Forget about
driving
: last time I even saw Connie inside a car was never, in this world or any other.

“Connie,” I said. “You’re
killing it
!”

He gave a quick nod—concentrating too hard to chit-chat.

Virgin said, “He wouldn’t get in otherwise, so we had to let him take the wheel.”

“He saved my life,” I said, mostly to myself, remembering that fat-bird backpack soaring overhead, what it must’ve taken Connie to make such a bold move at gunpoint.

“You might have a concussion,” Paige announced.

She was the nurse with the water, getting more on the front of my shirt than in my mouth. I grumbled and nudged the bottle away, even if I would’ve preferred to wrap my arms around her and forget everything else.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. Because, hey, in a handful of minutes I’d be pain free. Gone to oblivion, just as soon as Wrong Russ activated the Flux Stabilizer. I’d be nothing but a memory, and maybe not even that.

“How long was I out?” I asked.

Dad turned in his seat, slapped a reassuring hand over my knee. “Just a couple minutes. It’s seven minutes to seven now. We had to carry you out of the theater. People are going to have some questions when all this is done.”

“All what?” I asked.

I got my answer when Connie turned a sharp left into the WCPF station parking lot. The backseat occupants grunted as we crushed each other. Straight ahead, the radio tower spiked the sky like vast scaffolding for something better in the future.

They’d brought me here for the final showdown. Me, the worthier Russ, if only because I didn’t kill anyone.

But Wrong Russ wasn’t where we expected him to be, stationed at the tower base waiting out the clock. At first, I thought we must’ve beat him rushing over here, but then I saw the gate swung open, half the padlock dangling busted from the latch. He must’ve shot the lock to gain access.

And then I looked up. He was scaling the center ladder, just like I did twelve hours before. Halfway to the top already, with Connie’s backpack strapped on his shoulders. The Flux Stabilizer’s antenna sprouted from its open pouch, ticking back and forth with each new upward lurch.

I didn’t have a clue what Wrong’s deal was. Maybe he wanted to get closer to the satellite dishes and receivers at the tower top, thinking they’d give a stronger signal. More likely, he was fortifying his position—out of range of anyone who came to stop him, like us.

“Does he still have the gun?” Paige asked.

“If he’s smart. And he is,” I said.

If any of us tried to climb after him, Wrong Russ could take pot shots with his pistol all he wanted. I pictured the gruesome fall. He’d pick us off, one by one, and nobody would get close to him.

“I’ll go,” Virgin volunteered. “He won’t hurt me.”

True: killing Virgin would be suicide for any clone, but—

“He’s desperate,” I said. “He’ll shoot you out of spite if you stop him from taking the leap. He’s run out of chances.”

“Or you might just slip and fall, even if he doesn’t shoot you,” Connie added, eternal optimist. He’d brought the car alongside the gated base. Wrong was too high up for us to see him at this angle, and we were closer than was safe. I worried he’d start firing at the car to scare us off.

“It has to be me that goes, even if I don’t make it,” I said.

Nobody protested, especially not Virgin. I was the stranger in these parts, the one who wouldn’t be missed no matter the outcome.

Savannah was hunched in a fetal ball against the door. She hadn’t offered an opinion or even a word since I regained consciousness. I wondered how they lured her into the car in the first place. Maybe they told her Bobby was still on the loose and looking for her to be his co-star for eternity. Or maybe she felt a
smidge
of obligation to see this through. Who knew? She just sat there, clutching her purse.
Her purse.

“Savannah, I need some of your makeup,” I said.

I lifted my butt off the seat and struggled the jeans down to my knees. No time for modesty. Paige covered her eyes with her forearm and said, “Woah, wait a second—not cool.”

To Virgin, I said, “Dude, take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“I got a way to beat Wrong Russ.”

“Wrong
what
?”

“Never mind. Y’all have nicknames.”

“What’s mine,” he asked.

“Classic Russ,” I lied. “Like Classic Coke. Give me your pants.”