by Sean McMahon
‘A bit late for him isn’t it?’ said Malcolm, laughing thickly.
‘Fake laugh.’
‘No it wasn’t,’ said Malcolm.
‘So was.’
‘Both of you, shut up,’ said Kara, and to her surprise, they did.
She took a breath and exhaled slowly, pinching the bridge of her nose as if summoning the negotiating prowess of Olivia Pope.
She and Hal broke it down for the killer, alternating between universal truths that all led to the same conclusion; that in order for them all to be free, they would need to work together. How none of them could truly fathom what damage they were causing to the future of thousands by indulging in their perpetual game of cat and mouse and, lastly, that in the end a truce was the only thing that could truly salvage their shared past.
Hal reasoned that by breaking the chain and by working together they could simultaneously manipulate their past-selves into achieving anything.
Malcolm listened far more intently that they could have hoped, before wetting his lips and offering up his response to the request of parlay.
‘You’ve both done exceedingly well,’ he said, in a tone that possibly could have sounded like respect, were it not for Malcolm’s innate ability to make every syllable that left his rotten lips sound condescending.
“More like a teacher speaking to school children who weren’t doing very well at all,” thought Kara.
‘But for all your efforts,’ he continued, ‘you are working on the assumption that you know all the facts.’
‘Of course we don’t know all the facts!’ scoffed Kara. ‘None of us do! Yourself included.’
‘Oh, I know more than you think I know,’ The Dark Restarter chuckled enigmatically, in a manner true to his unchosen namesake.
‘Maybe it’s all the time travel turning your brain into scrambled eggs,’ said Hal, getting just a bit too close to their captive, ignoring Future Malcolm’s very clear instructions to keep their distance at all times. ‘Or maybe you’ve always been a special kind of stupid. Either way, we don’t want to fight you! We can all get out of here if we just agree to stop this Spartan-kick-madness!’
Kara scrunched up her nose. ‘That a video game thing?’
‘No not…it doesn’t matter,’ said Hal.
Malcolm glared at them, before inhaling the out-of-phase air his mind continuously tricked him into thinking he needed, for the summary he was about to provide.
‘So, we stop this tit for tat one-upmanship?’ posed Malcolm. ‘I cease my own methods of obtaining freedom. And in exchange, you stop your attempts at interrupting the implementation of my plans? And we work together to uncover a mutually beneficial solution to our chronological quandary? Is that what you’re proposing?’
‘Yes!’ blurted Kara. ‘That! Exactly that. No one else needs to die.’
‘Very well. Untie me.’
Hal and Kara shared an uncomfortable glance, and turned back to their prisoner, whose eyes looked fully black in the dim light that refused to reflect in them.
‘And this is why,’ said Malcolm, ‘this will never work.’
‘It can work,’ said Hal, the words feeling hollow despite him wanting them to be solid. ‘We just need…time to get our heads around the…concept of working together.
‘You expect me to entertain this when you don’t even believe it can work yourself? And of course, there’s the small matter that Kara is wrong, wrong, wrong.’
‘What are you talking about,’ she said, slumping against the workbench and feeling foolish for ever thinking this would work.
Did she really think this version of Malcolm would be interested in an amicable solution? After all, the mere existence of Future Malcolm was testament to this being a fool’s errand. If the Malcolm of the past had agreed to their plea-bargain, Future Malcolm would have simply ceased to be. Which in turn would have meant he couldn’t have come back to aid them as he had done, which meant neither her or Hal would have ever even made it to this damn basement, let alone this very specific restart.
‘About no one else needing to die,’ their captive said, as if pointing out that the sky was blue. ‘Surely even you are not naïve enough to believe any of us can escape without at least one casualty? A life for a life, Kara. That’s how this works. It is the one rule we simply cannot bend. You know it to be true. After all, you both had to kill me to escape your own prison.’
‘It doesn’t have to be that way. We can beat this,’ her words a faint whisper, laced with the harsh reality that she didn’t really believe them herself. ‘We just–’
‘Don’t feel bad. All is not lost,’ their hostage said wickedly. ‘You have at least highlighted an interesting point. Admittedly, in your own typically moronic way.’
Their ears were greeted with the sound of an approaching rush of air, a bank of fog rolling in from nowhere, consuming the staircase and the floor. A fog that appeared white to the Restarters, and black as wood-smoke to Malcolm.
‘I think we’re done here,’ said Hal dismissively.
‘What point?’ said Kara, unable to help herself.
‘You still don’t see it?’ The Dark Restarter cooed.
‘Kara, we should leave.’ The last thing Hal wanted was for the killer to have another chance to get in their heads, but it was too late for that. This was what he did. And he was dragging them down to his level, intent on beating them with experience.
‘If it wasn’t I that brought you here…who did?’
The question caused their stomachs to lurch.
‘It seems we are done here,’ said Malcolm happily, content that he had clearly succeeded in driving a maliciously delivered railroad spike into their lives. ‘Regretfully, I must decline your offer. Though I will offer you one parting piece of fair warning; stay out of my way. And I’ll do my best to spare you too much pain. Probably.’
Before Hal could splutter a witty response, his body, along with any misguided hopes of an alliance, disintegrated into nothingness, as the three of them were swallowed up by the universe, and spat back out into a brand-new day.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Time Crisis
187th Restart – Friday, August 24th, 2018, 2:47pm
His words, even seven restarts later, hung over them like a sickness.
They knew the secret to his ability to get under their skin was that he tended to lace his malice with just enough cyanide-coated sprinkles of truth, in order to make them linger long after he had spoken them.
If it wasn’t I that brought you here…who did?
“That sonuva bitch,” thought Kara, angry at herself for giving him power.
Of course it had been him. It had to be. The how didn’t matter. He did it. He did do it.
Didn’t he?
She shook off the memory, knowing it would return in force soon enough anyway.
Kara could tell this was going to be a nothingy kind of restart, and instead busied her mind unpacking what she assumed to be another undocumented truth; that when it came to time travel, it wasn’t just the Flutterby Effects and trans-dimensional traversal that dragged you down, nor was it the emotional anguish that simmered quietly along the fringes of her consciousness. In fact, she tried not to dwell over how – in her current out-of-phase state – she was an ambassador of a future that no longer existed, or that she was a relic of a past that didn’t want her.
Nope. It wasn’t any of those things that bothered her the most. Despite all that temporal mumbo-jumbo, there was one thing she resented more than anything else;
The waiting.
It was during such a restart that she had decided to kill some time by shooting the reformed bottles of water and cans with Hal’s hand-cannon, making sure to remove the gunpowder caps to maintain their current cloak and keeping them off the grid.
Their attempt at bringing past-Malcolm around to their way of thinking had proven to be a total bust, and each of them had expected all hell to break loose, waiting for whatever twisted retaliation h
e settled on to drop down on them like an atom bomb.
But over the next seven restarts their assumptions had been all but disproven. In fact, The Dark Restarter has seemingly fallen off the map entirely.
They had spent a lot of time brushing up on their fight training, but boredom was starting to take hold, and Kara found herself feeling guilty for wishing something would happen.
Heck, that anything would happen. Just something they could latch onto to refuel their sense of purpose.
She pulled back the hammer, closed her right eye, and looked down the sights at her unsuspecting targets, situated an impressive fifty yards-or-so away on what she bizarrely realised had become her favourite log.
Kara exhaled and pressed the trigger, rather than pulling it, letting the gun do all the work, and the bullet sailed through the air at a blink-and-you’d-miss-it speed, unimpeded by the soft breeze she knew was there, but was failing miserably at connecting with the temporally-misaligned metal pellet.
The bottle quivered as the bullet of the past connected with it, and flew backwards off the log. Kara, shot the next bottle, then the two cans of energy drink, each attempt hitting the mark until the log was barer than today’s itinerary.
The Restarter lowered the weapon, deciding to check her handiwork, and walked towards her no-frills fairground attraction, dragging her feet with boredom.
Jumping over the log and taking a seat, she noted how the contents of the bottles had spilled onto the dirt, dispersing like translucent blood, the liquid stubbornly refusing to seep into the ground. She tapped the water with her foot, and whilst it adhered to her boot, the action had also sent a ripple across the water, making it shift across the ground like mercury, until it eventually embraced the neighbouring liquid of the bullet-ridden energy drink.
The fluids found solace in their mutual alignment with the universe, swirling together like two desperate humans eager to make a connection.
Kara felt a pang of guilt as she thought of Greg. Where even was he right now? Was her boyfriend even alive? Did the future exist without her?
She shook away the thought, wincing at the notion.
Of course it did. To think otherwise was insanely narcissistic. She simply wasn’t that important in the grander scheme of time.
The future was there. It was just a future without her in it.
‘You’re really good at that!’ said Hal, catching her off guard, and for a moment she interpreted his words as meaning she was good at moping, as he hopped over the log and forced her to shift over to make some space for him to sit down.
‘Where did you learn to shoot like that?’
Kara smiled, his presence lightening her mood in that typical Hal kind of way that he didn’t even know he was capable of.
She stood up, restacked the targets, and marched back even further than she had been standing before, eager to increase her range.
‘Oh sick, you’re going again?’ said Hal, trailing behind her and watching her excitedly as she lined up her shot.
Their Malcolm, a term that was firmly cemented into their shared lexicons as the norm at this point, skulked up behind them, causing Hal and Kara to roll their eyes in unison. They really weren’t in the mood for another “I told you so” speech. But instead, he said something relatively unexpected.
Fun, almost. For a Malcolm.
‘You need to adjust your wrist, you're aiming at an angle.’
‘Since when are you a gun expert?’ said Hal. ‘Besides, I figured you more as a sort of “I despise weapons of this ilk?” kinda dude?’ he said, totally nailing his Malcolm impression.
‘That… is not how I sound,’ said Malcolm.
‘Actually, it was bang on,’ said Fearne, who had returned from wherever it was she was hiding these days, having reverted to distancing herself from the group.
Hal had asked Kara to speak to Fearne about it, reasoning that going lone wolf throughout a restart chain was not the best way to stay sane. But Kara had decided to give her some space, assuming it was just another stage in her grieving process.
‘Just because I find them distasteful does not mean I’m incapable of using them,’ a faint shimmer of competitiveness in his voice. ‘Here, give it to me.’
‘Sure,’ said Kara, before firing off the remaining two rounds of the six-shooter, each one hitting the restarted objects she had carefully lined up.
‘Woah,’ said Fearne.
Kara raised the gun into the air, blowing the non-existent smoke from the barrel, the afternoon glare of the sun stubbornly refusing to reflect itself onto the out-of-phase chrome.
‘Knock yourself out,’ said Kara, passing Malcolm the gun, knowing it would be devoid of pellets until the next restart.
‘That was the last bullet wasn’t it,’ said Malcolm grumpily.
‘Oh, was it?’ Bummer.’
Her top lip curled with more than a hint of smile.
‘Seriously, where did you learn to do that?!’ said Hal, more than an edge of jealously sprinkled amidst his equally-blatant admiration.
‘My brother Justin and I used to play Time Crisis a lot, in the arcade at Southend,’ said Kara, with a modest shrug.
They looked at each other for a moment, before bursting into laughter.
‘Time....Time Crisis?’ said Hal, struggling to get the words out due to his splitting sides.
Kara couldn’t help but laugh along with him, the ironically absurd name of the game she played religiously in her teens suddenly becoming the funniest thing in the world. ‘We...we...could never get pass the final boss,’ she added, cracking up further.
‘St-stop. Too much!’ said Hal, his laughing fit sending tears streaming down his desynchronized cheeks.
‘It seems unlikely,’ said Malcolm, chiming in, ‘that anyone could have predicted such a juvenile endeavour would end up proving to be a transferable skill for actual time travel.’
And for the first time ever, the three of them laughed together, Hal and Kara continuing their seemingly endless tirade of guffawing, with Malcom’s own quiet chuckle sending an out-of-character shaking to surge across his shoulders, as Fearne stared back at them with a barely-there smile.
‘Ohhh doctor,’ said Hal, their laughter winding down to a simmer of giggles before petering away into nothingness. ‘Amazing. Time crisis. Brilliant.’
‘I needed that,’ said Kara. ‘So, what now? Malcolm’s gone dark, so to speak.’
‘Heh. Nice. What’s his next move…guy who…was…the killer on the…Orient Express?’ said Hal, grimacing at how tenuous and poorly formed his latest attempt at burning Malcolm with a killer reference from a movie had landed.
‘Urgh, Hal, that sucked,’ said Kara, embarrassed for him.
‘It’s been like twenty weekends now,’ said Hal, not so much defensively, but more as an apology. ‘I’m running out of bad guys.’
‘You could try stopping altogether?’ suggested Malcolm.
‘Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you Hans Gruber!’
‘Annnd he’s back. So, what is his next move?’ said Kara, as if the man from the future was a Magic 8-Ball with all the answers on the Dark Restarter’s whereabouts. Which, as it happened, he kind of was.
‘I’ve told you, it doesn’t work like that,’ said Malcolm. ‘He appears to be in-between decisions, which leaves us with…little in the way of pre-emptive opportunity.’
‘Maybe he’s reconsidered,’ suggested Kara, taking a seat on the ground once more. ‘About working with us?’
‘That is…unlikely.’
‘Whatever happens next, we need eyes on the future,’ said Hal. ‘This “life for a life” business can’t be the only way.’
‘You need to accept what I am telling you,’ said Malcolm. ‘The only way to reach the future you’re so keen on glimpsing is to end my past-self. Only then can we rebuild and…’
Fearne listened, as a penny dropped in her mind, as if seeing the world clearly for the first time.
“Again with t
he talk of killing his past self,” she thought.
Since the moment they got here, the Malcolm of their future had been saying the only plan worth following was to kill his younger-self.
“But how did he even know it was possible to kill someone in Restarter form to begin with? Unless…” and then it dawned on her. She was starting to gain concrete evidence that their Malcolm had known what would happen to Peter all along...
Re-joining the conversation, Fearne’s eyes fluttered as she banked the additional facts.
‘The younger you said something about us not having all the facts,’ said Hal, addressing Malcolm directly and deciding it was time to let that fact out into the world. ‘What do you suppose he meant by that?’
‘Did he now? Showing off, I expect,’ replied Malcolm, with barely a nanosecond of hesitation.
‘Hmm...’ said Kara, sensing yet another lie.
‘So what if he knows something we don’t,’ said Hal, using the opportunity to return to his idea of glimpsing the Sunday they were creating as they manipulated the past in real time. ‘What if we could learn things he had no way of knowing?’
‘We’ve tried everything,’ said Malcolm, not so much frustrated as he was weary. ‘Explored all of our theories.’
Hal thought about that.
There was so much at stake.
They had lost Peter, and it felt as if every road they took towards reaching a peaceful resolution with Malcolm’s past-self led them further and further towards the darkness they were fighting so hard to avoid.
A thought flitted through Hal’s mind, one so obvious he would have urged his physical self to kick, well, himself, had he been close by. They had spent so much time running through their own history, towards a goal that Future Malcolm had assured them was unavoidable, that they hadn’t truly taken time to breathe. But they had a wildcard up their Restarting sleeves that they had yet to take advantage of.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Hal, which threw Malcolm off for a moment. ‘All of our theories…’ he repeated.
