Extra Life

  Pyres

  The Long Division

  From acclaimed and award-winning author Derek Nikitas comes a riveting and timely thriller: Extra Life — a mind-bending speculative thriller about Russ, a control-freak teen who receives an app on his cell phone that allows him to ‘leap’ twelve hours into the past to fix a disastrous day. But tampering with time-space introduces dangerous glitches he can’t control, especially as he confronts a psychologically unhinged teen TV star, and willful alternate versions of himself.

  For Gavin

  EVERY YEAR, tourists swarm my town. Sure, our Atlantic beaches are sweet, but people should know, just under the surface lurk sharks. If you’re not careful, you’ll get a jellyfish sting, you’ll get caught in a riptide. Years ago, hurricane waters drowned a thousand homes and raised buried caskets to the surface. True story. We’ve got miles of beachfront boardwalk just aching for Instagram, but the flip side is flood and blood and fear.

  Cape Fear, that is.

  For the last thirty years, almost twice as long as I’ve been around, Cape Fear, North Carolina has been the backdrop for a hundred creep-show TV series and movies. Believe it or not, it’s the biggest US production hot spot after LA and Manhattan, probably because we’re a post-apocalyptic ghost town after the tourists abandon us for winter.

  Nowheresville, just east of the Twilight Zone.

  The whole Cape Fear movie scene started in the early Eighties when they came here to make The Kindling. You know, the one where Drew Barrymore is still E.T.-era cute, and she starts people on fire with her brain? A few cheap special effects struck box office gold. Because of that success, a movie mogul and uber-producer named Marv Parker got delivered his first truckload of cash and built his local empire, Silver Screen Studios, right here in town.

  You’ve seen some of our homegrown horror shows. There was that messed up flick with the kid who finds a human ear in his yard and the villain with the oxygen mask. Or the one actually called Cape Fear, with Robert De Niro as a tattooed psycho who’s in love with his cigarette lighter. Also, A Walk to Remember.

  In the Nineties, Silver Screen did a slew of teen slashers. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Prank Call, Step Into the Light 1 through 4, you name it. My real-life high school pops up in the backdrop of a whole lot of shots, but always with a new makeover, a new fictional name.

  My dad and I used to catch showings at the old-school Pastime Playhouse before it burned down. We’d point at the screen and whisper, “look, look,” whenever a familiar Cape Fear location did a cameo. Even the Pastime Playhouse itself showed up on screen a couple times with its giant clock facade, tingling everyone in the audience with that squirmy sense of being in and out of time and body, real and not real. There is where we are, but we are not there. More fun than whatever the actual movie was, honestly.

  I can spot my city in just about any Halloween horror marathon. A string of films all out of their proper release-year order, so my sense of time gets twisted inside out and backward, like that chimp they put through the faulty teleporter in Revenge of the Replicons (another Cape Fear classic).

  But around here there’s a whole other level of darkness that doesn’t quite show up on celluloid or digital. I mean, you probably already heard about the Pastime Playhouse tragedy. It was an international scandal. Everybody knows the premise, but there are always facts below the surface and between the lines, things you couldn’t know.

  Like, just for example, that movie The Crow, from twenty years ago. Remember? Yeah, way before my time, too, but it’s the one where Brandon Lee, son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, plays the goth dude who comes back from the dead to avenge his own murder, jump-starting the whole dark superhero/comic book adaptation craze?

  What if I told you Brandon Lee was killed on set at Silver Screen Studios, right here in Cape Fear? What if I said he was shot in the stomach by a malfunctioning blank cartridge that was supposed to be harmless? What if I told you he took his mortal wound right at the exact moment when his character was supposed to die?

  You’d call me crazy or at least a liar. Because, duh, obviously Brandon Lee is alive and well. Obviously he went on to star in two smash-hit Crow sequels, not to mention Speed and The Matrix I-III.

  But just try to imagine for a second if Brandon Lee really was killed on the set of that movie. Imagine all those future leading-man roles of his went instead to, I don’t know, some doof like Keanu Reeves. Imagine Brandon Lee’s been dead for two decades.

  Ridiculous?

  Maybe here in this life, maybe as far as you know. But in another universe, something like that could’ve happened. In theory, anything could’ve happened, and probably did. That’s the kind of deep down, spun-around, terrifying truth that trumps all the monster movies getting filmed here in Cape Fear.

  Sometimes I forget what’s real around this place and what isn’t. I admit it. There’s a certain slipperiness of memory. I get confused a lot, which makes me sound like a nursing home geezer with dementia, when actually I’m a sixteen-year-old high school junior. The thing is, I’ve lived a lot of lives over my short time in this world, and it all traces back to that morning I was ten minutes late for school.

  (See, I was just about to toss y’all a Back to the Future reference, how I was running late that morning and sorry I couldn’t hitch a skateboard ride off the back of a truck like Michael J. Fox. Except that zinger would’ve went woosh, right over your head, even if you did catch the movie. Because where you come from, it’s not called Back to the Future. It’s called Spaceman from Pluto, starring Eric Stoltz, and it was stinker nobody bothered to go see.)

  So, yeah. That morning, late for school but not in any hurry. I wasn’t going to sweat it, even on a muggy coastal morning dusted all over with pollen. I’d been in way worse trouble than a tardy slip. Like especially that trespassing and vandalism arrest that got me tossed out of public school in the first place. What a punishment, right? Kinda-sorta expelled, forced to enroll in an exclusive private school that’s as ritzy as Cape Fear gets.

  But that was two years back, my freshman year, and I was now fully rehabilitated, partly because of the positive influence of my best friend, Conrad Bower. And Conrad’s house was where I was headed that morning.

  I found him pacing the creaky wood floors of his plantation porch, adjusting his shouldered backpack because the thing was ballooning with junk. His house was in the antebellum district off Market Street. An imposing house with peeling white paint, it was shadowed by trees strewn with Spanish moss like a creepy text font. Way too much house for just my man Connie and his mom, but it wasn’t supposed to be just the two of them.

  “Crap, Russ, crap—we’re late,” he said to me, all White Rabbit. My full name is Horace Vale, Horace after my maternal great-grandfather, a dusty history hand-me-down. Russ was better, a sleazy Seventies exploitation filmmaker name. The kind of name even dogs could pronounce.

  “You could’ve taken off without me, you know,” I told him.

  “No, not hardly. How many times did you press snooze?”

  “I don’t know—two or three?” I said.

  “And what time did you get up?”

  “I don’t know—seven-fifty?”

  “That doesn’t add up,” he decided. “Your alarm is set for seven and each delay is nine minutes, so two or three delays—”

  “I get it. My math sucks, and we’re late for school, so let’s move.”

  Connie made it all the way down two porch steps before he stopped and said, “I mean, what if it was something serious that held you up, an accident or something, and you needed my help? I’d want to know. Or you’d get here and I wouldn’t be around. What would you think? ”

  On the sidewalk, I did my best let’s-go lean.

  But then
Connie did it anyway, his usual deal. He scurried back up the steps, jiggled the doorknob to check that it was locked. This time of day, his mom was still gone on her nursing shift at New Hanover Regional, so it was Connie’s job to make sure the house was secure.

  He hesitated, as usual, unlocked the door, and told me he’d be right back. He would now comb through his house testing window locks, oven dials, the freezer door—check, check, check—making sure he hadn’t forgotten any book, pen, or touchscreen device he could’ve conceivably shoved into his backpack.

  Every morning, I was supposed to budget time for this. It used to irritate the crap out of me, but we all have our morning rituals. Mine was fixing a hot mug of coffee for my dad and marching it up the steep attic steps to his office, where he’d be slumped asleep over his desk in front of a triptych of computer monitors, debugging software.

  This chore started two months earlier after Dad was laid off from his techie software job at Rush Fiberoptics, where he applied Game Theory and Quantum Mechanics to software applications. What was still sci-fi in reality my Dad could make doable in cyberspace—prototype trial runs for the eventual real deal, when the tech finally caught up to his imagination. He was freelance now—and by freelance I mean just farting around for free.

  I’d wake Dad with the java delivery, then head back down to the kitchen for a kale smoothie debriefing with Mom, fresh from her dawn jog. We’d consult the giant white board where our weekly schedules were laid out in marker, moment by moment. Dry-erase marker, but if I dared to actually erase anything, I risked being sentenced to a five-mile jog-along with Mom.

  Every morning the same, like Groundhog’s Day.

  So now, while I waited for Connie to finish indulging his OCD, I fished my cell from my cargo shorts and scanned the recent texts. All seven were from Connie, minutes before I arrived. Russ, dude, where r u? and so forth.

  It always gave me a chill, reading an old text after you’ve already talked to the sender, you know? A strange blip in time—the past flashing back on you. Like how my grandma still had Grandpa talking on her answering machine message, even though he died five years ago.

  Brooding too much on the shadowy side of things could make you downright mental, like my friend Conrad here. His house-check compulsion was a thing I didn’t bitch about or chide him for because it had to do with his dad. Connie’s father wasn’t holed away in an attic like mine. He was dead—Afghanistan, helicopter—and these safety checks were how Conrad fit that terrible fact into place, every morning of his life.

  I couldn’t imagine what it was like, even if Connie and I were close. He and I might not have even been friends if I hadn’t at first been paying penance for a shitty prank I played on him once, and also if we weren’t both such ridiculous movie buffs, especially the classic ones before CGI spoiled all the fun of questionable practical effects. We weren’t Luddites—I mean, we caught all the latest stuff, but we’d also seen Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness so many times we could play dialog karaoke with the mute on. “Klaatu Barada Necktie” and etcetera.

  (Connie would mention that gibberish Evil Dead line is actually a reference to a major plot point in a Fifties space-robot movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still. We could do this all day, really, but you can just add these movies to your queue for later.)

  We barely ever watched a movie apart, and we hardly ever skipped our three-hour post-credits debate, even after the crappiest flicks. Sometimes we even recorded our own commentary tracks. Yep, we were that in love with our own opinions—especially Connie with his plot logic nit-picks, his “how could the mother possibly not remember giving birth to twins, especially if one was a werewolf?”

  The difference between us was, I was a wannabe filmmaker. I loved the indie/hand-held/slice-of-life/stark reality stuff, the grassroots, DIY, guerrilla-shoot tactics. Connie was a fanboy who binged on sci-fi and fantasy, bursting with special effects and wonky philosophy—his current obsession being that SyFy show about the teens from all different time periods mysteriously awakening from cryogenic sleep inside the same boldly-going spacecraft. He had elaborate theories about how the show would turn out.

  Honestly, I wasn’t exactly eager to earn my geek badge, not in a public ceremony, anyway, but at least Connie’s viewing taste was a step up from Cape Fear’s most popular current television output—the CW’s Cape Twilight Blues. It wasn’t even a horror show, just a teen soap opera, pretty much the first wholesome series they’ve made around here in years, if you think a bunch of snarky, back-stabbing, bed-hopping, twenty-something supermodels pretending to be teenagers is wholesome.

  Over the last two seasons, just about every glossy magazine in the world had a cover spread of one of the six dreamy stars of Cape Twilight. Every dude I knew had a secret crush on the show’s lead actresses—Morgana Avalon or Clarice Louise-Best, or both, or neither, depending on the most recent episode.

  I wish I was above all the hype. But in a town like Cape Fear, living that close to shimmering star power, when I saw Morgana or Clarice or even Bobby Keene-Parker in the flesh, squeezing oranges at the Harris Teeter or seated at a movie two rows behind me? It seemed like more than this town deserved, a permanent backstage pass. I always felt on the verge of breakout fame myself, and that’s exactly the type of hunger that can turn you into a cannibal.

  And I had the taste for it, bad. Like, when I think about the first home video I ever shot: eight years old, in the backyard with a setup on a tripod, and my dad’s supposed to be watching me. I got it all worked out. I’m fixing to jump off the roof onto a trampoline, then bounce into our pool, get it all on tape, send it to America’s Funniest Videos, and win ten thousand bucks.

  Well, I hit the aluminum pool rim and broke my arm in two places. I edited out the part when I’m rolling around in agony, just so it would still be funny. AFV actually did run it, as part of one of those musical montages where they show twenty-nine other trampoline mishaps in thirty second. My one second of fame.

  And no cash prize. Those only go to genius pets and slapstick babies.

  Sorry, I took a few detours there. Let me wind us back to the starting point.

  So, time’s ticking, and finally Connie stumbled back out of his house looking dazed. The humidity was already making his glasses slip down his nose. “Ready?” he said, like I was the hold-up. For an answer, I slapped a rolled stack of printed pages to his chest. Three-hole punched, clasped with two brads. Connie grabbed it, gulping melodramatically.

  The pages were my original short movie script, a dialog sketch with just two actors. My big Broadcasting class project. Connie was going to play a fictional guy planning to triumphantly pull off the same motorcycle stunt that killed his daredevil father. The scenario goes like this: he’s having lunch one last time with his female friend since Kindergarten, he’s desperate to tell her that he’s in love with her, that he’s doing the jump for her, because it might be his last chance to spill his guts, but she’s too wrapped up in her college scholarship prospects to notice his inner crisis—you get the idea.

  This video project was the only school assignment that got me pumped, made me wish I could fast-forward through the day and get the camera rolling. It was going to be my contest entry for the internship at Silver Screen Studios, my future.

  “Your lines are all highlighted in green,” I told Connie.

  “We’re really going to go through with this?” he said, leafing through the pages. His brown and white bowling shirt would have to settle for his costume, since there was neither time nor budget for a change.

  “Right after school. I got permission to shoot at The Silver Bullet and everything.”

  “Shoot what bullet?” he asked.

  “The diner, the one called The Silver Bullet,” I said. We’d been talking about it for weeks.

  I knew what Connie was doing. He was just hoping if he pretended the planning never happened, the inevitable would just disappear. But I wasn’t about to back down. Yeah, I admit my dead-dad-
daredevil storyline cut a little too close to Connie’s real-life tragedy. But all that was off-camera, since I didn’t have the budget or know-how to record the actual motorcycle stunt anyway.

  Really, the stunt-boy character was more me than him, or at least a mash-up of the two of us. Besides, acting out the part would be good for Connie, therapeutic. He’d already agreed in theory. I wrote this part for him, to help him, and he knew it.

  “Just study your lines. You don’t need to act. You just need to be.”

  “But who’s going to do the other part, the girl?”

  “Leave that up to me. This thing’s in the can by sundown.”

  He wasn’t really listening. Something else seemed to be on his mind. He shot a glance back toward his second-story bedroom window.

  “You locked the front door, Connie, I promise.”

  “No, it’s not that,” he said. “More like—déjà vu. Like we did this before.”

  “It’s just performance jitters,” I assured him, and off we went.

  AT PORT City Academy, morning bells clanged at 8:20 every day. Televised announcements went live at 8:25. On every monitor in every homeroom beamed the sweet, sweet smile of Savannah Lark, our in-house anchor girl.

  Five minutes after Morning Broadcast started, ten minutes late for class, I showed up to Geek Central, the Media Lab. It was windowless, dimmed for taping, the only lights cast on Savannah at the news desk. She read from the monitor, luring volunteers for the Fundraising Committee’s annual bake-off.

  Mr. Yesterly, our media teacher, stood by the camera with his bulging earphones cockeyed on his head. He aimed two fingers at the kid cuing the pre-recorded tapes at the control deck. Sadly, the tape that ran alongside the sports highlights was a completely unrelated clip of volunteer seniors scooping poop at the Humane Society.

  “Crap—tape three,” Mr. Yesterly whispered hoarsely. “Tape three.”

  The control deck kid panicked. His fingers went all spidery, but he couldn’t manage to actually press a button. So I slid in, tagged stop, loaded the proper clip. Just like that.