Extra Life (29 page)

A surge of nausea gut-punched me so hard I gagged. The whole world seemed to jostle on its axis. Twin Russ groaned like it struck him too, and his face whitened almost to ivory. Aftereffects of the leap, I guessed, though this didn’t happen the last two times. “What the hell?” Twin Russ asked.

Five-thirty p.m. Future Russ must’ve used the four o’clock leap into Marv Parker’s office without any do-overs. He must’ve forced us onward to the next drop-off point.
No exit here.
Or else two Russes taking the same leap burned twice the fuel—I had no clue which was the right explanation.

Five-thirty p.m. My father might already be shot, again. If not, it would happen soon—any minute, any
second—
and we were too far away to stop it.

First, we had to find some covering. Impossible to think straight when you’re naked. Then a phone. Then, don’t get arrested.

I popped my head out of the waiting room. Nobody in the hall, closed elevator to the right, and an empty nurse’s station down on the left. While I watched, a nurse rushed from one room to another, but she was way far off and didn’t see me.

Another bout of nausea whacked me good. My head spun. Twin Russ pulled off the trash bin cap and puked inside. Something was badly off. Our fit inside this universe was wonky, unsettled, a toy train that kept wobbling because one wheel wasn’t quite on the track.

My plan now was to ransack a nearby room for bed sheets we could use as makeshift togas. With two cots in each room, I had two chances to find an empty bed, or two possible patients to catch me in the act and scream for help. What’s behind door number… 205?

“Wait here,” I told Twin Russ.

My bare feet slapped rudely on the hall floor, but I slipped into the opposite room without trouble. The closest cot was empty, but in the dim light I could make out the shape of a patient in the next bed over. I froze—and heard the steady drone of snoring. I grabbed a handful of neatly tucked blankets and sheets.

Vigorous tugging got the blanket loose, but then came footsteps in the hall, approaching. When I turned to have a look, just that slight movement left me merry-go-round dizzy. I steadied myself on the cot’s aluminum side rail, then the blanket I was grasping pulled back against me.

“
Mine
,” squawked a voice from two feet away.

Five seconds ago,
there was nobody in this bed
. I would’ve bet my life on that fact, which meant even my perceptions were falling apart. Because
now
the cot was definitely occupied by a toothless old man with the grip of a professional arm wrestler. I cried out and lost my hold on the blanket.

The neighboring patient flipped on her light, and my tug-of-war opponent screamed through his pink gums at the sight of me standing naked by his side. He pulled his hard-won blanket over his head.

“Pervert!” The other patient screamed. You could say grannies look alike, but this one was the spitting image of the one who doused me with a hose, way back when this whole leap business started.

“Sorry!” I said, and backed out of the room just as empty-handed and naked as when I got there. Twin Russ shrugged questioningly at me from the waiting room doorway, but I zipped right past him.

Two nurses and a security guard jogged toward us, shouting the usual pointless requests that we stop and perhaps answer a few questions. Elevator straight ahead, door invitingly open. It was a fluke I couldn’t pass up.

I dove inside the elevator car and body-checked the back wall. Twin Russ, right behind me, swiveled and smacked the “close doors” button as our pursuers gained on us.

“
Woah, woah, woah
,” the security guard said to the doors as they slid shut. His outstretched hand couldn’t stop them in time, and Twin pressed the fourth floor button to get us moving.

“We’re going up?” I asked through my heaving breathing.

“You want to show up in the lobby like this?” Twin asked.

“I think we’re stuck between spaces,” I said.

“No we’re not. We’re moving.”

“No—not the elevator—I mean—”

Twin didn’t have to ask why I stopped talking. He could see the ghost as well as me. It took shape in the center of the elevator car, forcing us against the back wall. It was the see-through outline of a woman, facing away from us. I reached out for her shoulder, but she was no more solid than a hologram.

“Holy crap,” Twin said.

“This is what I mean,” I said. “Stuck between spaces.”

The ghost woman’s image thickened enough that we could see clothing, a pair of scrubs. The vague outline of a rectangle in both her hands—which materialized into an electronic tablet. She was a random nurse, just going about her day at work.

She perked up her head, turned, and noted for the first time our naked double presence. We covered ourselves appropriately. She nibbled the edge of her lower lip. To a nurse, we were more a curiosity than a shock. “Um?” she said, sizing us up.

A perfectly reasonable question for a time like this.

The elevator dinged, the doors slid open onto the fourth floor, and the nurse flitted out of existence again. Vanished. No tablet, no scrubs, no nothing.

“What the?” Twin said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

O
N THE
fourth floor, we hunched along the hall with our hands covering our privates. No telling when someone else would step out of a room, or appear out of thin air, and set off an alarm. Already, we were probably caught on security camera. We had to work fast.

The plan was, once we were decent, we’d split up, look for a phone to call Dad with and warn him, if it wasn’t too late already. Inside a storage closet we found a stack of flimsy hospital gowns. We snatched two of them and draped them over bodies. They were decorated with a pleasant lilac motif, high fashion.

“I think they’re on backwards,” I said.

“Crap,” said Twin Russ.

We both made the rookie mistake of slipping them on with the snaps in the front. You don’t get good coverage that way, especially if you plan to make a run for it, but we had no time for a fix.

“I’ll ask for a phone at the nurse’s station,” Twin said, and hustled up the hall. Now that we could pose as patients, we didn’t have to sneak around anymore. I went for the nearest room, hoping there’d be someone inside whose cell phone I could borrow. But before I could leave the hall, somebody called my name.

A few rooms down, my broadcasting teacher, George Yesterly, stood in a doorway wearing a pastel blue gown and clutching a mobile IV, drip tube plugged into his wrist. “Russ,” he said again. “Is that you?”

“The one and only,” I said, nowhere to hide.

Yes wheeled his IV toward me. Still haggard, but he didn’t look quite so ill as when we collided outside the school restroom all those hours ago in a world that used to be mine.

“What brings you here?” he asked, nodding at my gown.

“I, uh, my eye…” I said. “Headaches, after I got hit in gym, so my mom’s a little knee-jerk about injuries. We came down to the hospital to get a concussion check—you know—a couple MRIs.”

“Your mother is here?” Yesterly asked. He made a little show of glancing around for her. Weirded me out big time.

“Downstairs,” I lied. “Conrad Bower’s mom—she’s a nurse—she let it slip that you were here, so I thought I’d come up and say hi, you know... would you happen to have a phone I could…”

Mr. Yes clasped one hand on my shoulder and gave me a fatherly grin.

“I’m glad to see you, Russ,” he said. “You saved my life.”

“Wait—what? I did?”

“This afternoon when you mentioned I wasn’t looking too hot, well, it got me on alert. I tend to ignore these things, but because of what you said I cut out early, went to my doctor’s, and he sent me straight over here in an ambulance. Heart attack! Could’ve killed me if I waited much longer.”

“Wow,” I told him. “That’s great. I mean, that you got here in time.”

One good turn among all my time-space screw-ups. Sure, I caused a medical emergency for Marv Parker, but I
saved
George Yesterly from one—as if the universe was balancing itself out against my manipulations.

I didn’t ask him about telling me he was a diabetic. No time.
This
Mr. Yes didn’t say it, and besides, it was just a white lie he told to stop me from worrying. Nothing worth mentioning, compared to what I’d done.

“Of course, I’ve got some big life changes to make…”

As he spoke to me under the flickering fluorescents, the intermittent seasickness rolled in. The hallway swayed on huge but invisible waves. Mr. Yesterly’s colors faded and his voice thinned, and then he turned transparent. The last I heard him say was, “…don’t have to know what you’re doing to do some good.”

His see-through ghost stepped back from me, startled. Because I had just disappeared from his world, too.

Twin Russ rushed back down the hall, swaying from his dizziness. But he had a cell phone upraised in his hand. “Got one,” he said, just as he stepped
through
Mr. Yes and disbursed the last of his lingering image.

“The nurse,” he said, panting. “She asked where my ID bracelet was. Thought I was screwed. Then she just—”

“Disappeared?” I guessed.

“Yeah. And I snatched her phone off the desk.”

“Something’s different. We’re sliding back and forth between realities.”

“Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?” Twin asked.

“Not uncontrollably, not like this,” I said. “It’s the same instant in time but it’s different—spaces. Or the same space, but different. It’s complicated. And we’re carrying things with us, like these gowns and that cell phone you’re holding. It’s not a full-fledged leap. It’s
worse.
I think we’re jammed between more than one dimension at once.”

“Where did Mr. Yes go?”

“Exactly. I don’t know. Call Dad, for God’s sake.”

“I already did. Straight to voicemail.” He pushed the phone toward me so I could hear our father’s recorded voice droning on about being unavailable and if we needed to get a hold of him, please call…

I cursed louder than I probably should have.

“We might’ve screwed up the phone service,” I said.

“Don’t I have our phone right now?” Twin asked. “I mean the other me, from a few minutes ago, the me I was before I pressed that button.”

God, how many of us were there now?

Virgin Russ, the one who always lived in this universe.

One O’clock Russ, the guy who survived the Rapide crash.

Then the two of us who just made the leap: me and Twin.

If the time line was intact here, 3.0 would’ve been “erased” by Bobby at Sliver Screens and Future Russ would’ve disappeared in the car wreck. That brought the Russ count to four, if my math was right: Virgin, One O’clock, Twin and me.

I snatched the phone out of Twin’s hand and dialed our home telephone number, two-thumbed. It rang seven times before I gave up. Even the answering machine wouldn’t connect, and now it was 5:45, way too late to save my father from that bullet.

But then, just before total black-hole despair kicked in, I realized something about Dad’s cell phone voice mail message. It wasn’t the same one I was used to. I knew Dad’s recorded spiel by heart. Leave a name and callback number, blah blah blah. Hardly more inventive than the automated one they give you if you don’t record your own.

But the message I just heard was not the same. So I called back.

“You’ve reached Kasper Vale,” my Dad’s voice said. “I’m away from my phone right now. You can either leave your name and number or select three to be connected directly to Pastime Productions for further assistance.”

“
Dad
is Pastime Productions,” I said aloud.

“What’s Pastime Productions?” Twin asked.

“Our travel agent.” I pressed three, waited for the connection.

Until now, the changes between realities had been small, at least in my realm of influence. YouTube/YouView. The resurrection of the Pastime Playhouse. But we’d just fallen into a universe where my father’s route had taken a major detour. He wasn’t wasting away in his attic office this time around.
This time
, he owned his own company—the people who brought you the Pastime Project.