by Sean McMahon
Robert being completely dry; despite having come from the hot tub where he lived.
The phone; clearly the one he had discarded earlier. The battery as dead as a Restarter.
A Restarter…like Robert.
‘It’s okay to face-palm like Picard,’ said Robert. ‘I won’t tell anybody.’
‘Clever boy,’ The Dark Restarter conceded. ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you. A Restarter.’ It wasn’t really a question.
The blade passing through him like butter and not leaving a mark had already proven that.
‘It’s not my first time,’ said Robert. ‘Third actually. Looks like your knives can’t hurt me,’ he added smugly.
‘That knife, perhaps…’ said Malcolm, with a wicked flicker in his eyes, his physical-self standing tall like a sentinel waiting to be unleashed. ‘But this one?’ he added, brandishing his own out-of-phase blade, Robert having no idea how wrong he was in making that assumption.
‘I was wrong…’ said Robert.
‘…About what?’ said Malcolm, well and truly distracted.
Robert finished off his beer, spinning the restarted beer bottle in his hand, tiny droplets of out-of-phase froth hitting the floor. Outstretching his arm through Malcolm’s living body, he directed the bottle towards the Malcolm he was now in-phase with, tipping the end of the container in a gesture reminiscent of a Kung Fu master summoning an adversary to try their luck, before responding with a sentence that Hal would have loved.
‘Restarters.…When I said that sounded like a terrible name for a movie? It’s actually not that bad.’
*
202nd Restart – 8:39pm
‘Oh man, it’s Robert,’ whispered Alex. ‘Should we go help him?’
‘We should stay up here,’ instructed Kara, hoping Fearne and Future Malcolm would trigger a much-needed restart any second now.
‘There’s cake?’ said Jon.
‘Just kidding. There’s never any cake, Jon,’ said Hal sadly. ‘The cake is a lie.’
‘Erm, bro…’ said Alex, addressing Hal, or more specifically Hals’ arm, which had just turned invisible.
Dropping the sarcasm for a moment, Hal stared at his own hand, twisting it in front of his face, watching as it phased in and out of existence. ‘Umm, Kar’? I’m kind of Marty Mcfly’ing over here.’
For once, Kara almost wished that was a reference she didn’t get, as all of their attention was pulled away from Robert to the issue of Hal falling to literal pieces.
‘Kara…I don’t feel so good…Somethings wron–’ but Hal’s sentence was cut off like the arm he was now missing.
His whole body seemed to shake in agony as he keeled over onto the floor.
‘Hal!’ shouted Kara, the final syllable being drowned out by an almighty crack of thunder that caused the whole lodge to shake, forgotten fragments of wood shavings and dust showering over them all from the load bearing supports of the structure, like sprinkles of pixie dust that passed right through their bodies.
Hal heard a scream so blood-curdling that he actually would have recoiled, were it not emanating from his own voice box. Well, that and not having control of his body, which was convulsing in an agony of such intensity that he found himself wondering if a wizard had just blasted him with the Crucio curse.
The wisps of fog wrapped around his frame, as Alex tried to pull him upright.
But the hungry serpents were ruthlessly efficient.
Consuming him. Claiming him.
“Eating me,” he thought deliriously.
And then his scream became muffled, as the fog flew down his throat, eager to erase his internal organs, and he realised this must have been how it had felt to Peter when he was taken.
Kara stood there, feeling utterly useless, an inconsequential onlooker. From her perspective, all she could see was her friend disintegrating into a million tiny blue shards of energy, the savagery of the fog not meant for her or Alex or anyone else’s eyes, until Alex was clutching little more than a memory of his brother.
‘No, no, no!’ shouted Kara, as it suddenly dawned on her that if she wasn’t hideously out of her depth before, she sure as shit was now.
Hal was gone.
CHAPTER SIXTY
The Santa Clause
202nd Restart – Saturday, August 25th, 2018, 8:30pm
Fearne and Malcolm travelled silently, making their way to the boundary line as quickly as they could, as Malcolm once again fell to his knees.
Fearne looked up at the night sky, pleading to be blessed with a patience she in no way felt.
‘Malcolm, we need to go! Now.’
‘I’m sorry I….’
‘You may have them fooled,’ said Fearne. ‘But I’m not buying any of this. So get up, and keep moving!’
Malcolm pressed his palms against his temples, indicating more memories were flooding into a fifty-eight-year-old brain housed within a forty-five-year-old body.
‘Malcolm. Get. Up.’
Malcolm stopped, pulling his hands away from his head and dropping the act.
‘I’m no expert on time travel, not like Hal,’ said Fearne, the inflection of her friend’s name surprisingly bitter. ‘Or rather, not like Hal pretends to be. But I know enough about how all this works to spot a huge plot-hole in your claim that your past-self is going off script.’
‘Pretends to be?’ said Malcolm, curiously.
‘Oh, you know, Hal bases his entire knowledge of our situation on movies he’s seen. Chucking in the word “Temporal” and “Phased” in front of everything as often as possible to hide the fact he’s just as lost as we are.’
Malcolm stood up, not bothering to dust himself down. A habit he had long since forgone unless he was trying to fool others into forgetting he was far older than he appeared to be. At least mentally.
‘How long have you known?’ he said calmly.
‘That you’re a big fat faker? Round about the time Peter died,’ she said icily.
‘I see.’
‘There’s no way in hell you didn’t know that was coming. Just like all these new memories you keep harping on about. You’ve had them all along. So, cut the shit and help me restart this nightmare so we can start formulating a real plan.’
‘Are you intending on telling the others?’
‘Of course I bloody am! As soon as we get back. Assuming there’s anything to go back to if you refuse to hurry up.’
‘Very well,’ said Malcolm.
They sized each other up.
‘And before you get any ideas, you can’t touch me, remember? You need me to trigger this restart.’
‘I have no desire to harm you, Fearne. I need you,’ he said, in a statement truer than she could ever know. ‘You’re no good to me dead,’ he added for good measure.
‘Whatever. Now come–’
A thunderous bolt of lightning cut across the sky, causing the ground to tremor.
‘What the hell was that?’ said Fearne, her ears covered and eyes wincing.
‘Okay, now we can go,’ said Malcolm, the anger of the world around them acting as his clock.
*
Kara’s world stopped.
Hal was gone.
The same way Peter had been taken from them.
His Restarter-self erased entirely due to Malcolm killing him in the past earlier than was destined.
But if that were true, why hadn’t a freshly-Restarted Hal reappeared?
‘Time travel is bullshit,’ muttered Kara.
‘Kara,’ whispered Alex, ‘Tell us what to do.’
‘Right. Right!’ she said, shaking off the loss of her best friend. Something told her she’d have all the time in the world to mourn. But right now, her other friends were depending on her.
With Hal gone, there simply was no one else to guide them through this.
‘Everyone back up,’ ordered Kara, pointing to the balcony behind them at the far side of the communal living room. ‘We all have one job now. Stay alive. And protect Ja
smine, Daisy, Michaela and Gavin.’ She added, the last remaining survivors frantically trying to stay hidden whilst Jasmine called the police.
Kara took a deep breath, then looked back down the staircase.
‘Actually, scratch that. Everybody link arms with me…’
*
For all of the Dark Restarter’s planning, after all his countless years of observing, in his excitement to execute his plan and…well…everybody in Fir Lodge, he had overlooked one key factor;
That time itself was working tirelessly to counteract his meddling, and was reshaping the time-bubble they were all occupying to stop the monumental changes he was trying to cement into a permanent state.
In the 165th restart that they were all reliving, Hal had tripped the trip switch on the hot tub, causing Robert to get out.
What no one could have possibly known is that when Malcolm erased Hal from time, he also upset the balance of their 165th restart entirely. With Hal not around to carry out that tiny act, or any others for that matter, The Dark Restarter had inadvertently created a vacuum in history that needed to be filled in order for it to stabilise.
As time worked frantically to rearrange itself, the universe’s answer to that paradox was apparently to revert to a previous restart, one where Hal had accidentally killed Robert.
And so it was that Robert came to be, retaining all of his memories from his previous two restarts.
Robert knew Hal and Kara would be on top of the shitstorm that was unfolding.
They would have a plan.
But from the squabbling upstairs he also knew that him being here was no accident.
It held purpose.
And he reasoned that purpose was to keep every version of Malcolm – Restarter or otherwise – as far away from his wife as possible.
Right or wrong, that was Robert’s goal.
Stalling for time seemed like a great place to start.
‘So much like your friend Harold,’ said Malcolm, his distaste in Robert’s pose of apparent challenge falling notably flat. ‘She will fall just as they all will,’ The Dark Restarter muttered, waving his blade as if swirling a fine glass of wine to allow it to breathe.
Robert’s eyes flared blue, and he felt a power similar to the time Hal and Kara had tried to pin him down in the rear garden the first time he had attempted to investigate a scream emanating from Fir Lodge. A scream he still remembered.
“Was that now?” thought Robert, fear filling his heart. “Was her scream due to this man running steel through her? Was he already too late?”
It wasn’t of course. That scream from his wife had merely been in response to her discovering his floating corpse in the hot tub.
But he had no way knowing that, as the power within him amplified.
Malcolm raised an eyebrow, taking the minutest fraction of a step backwards, but Robert merely grinned, looking down at his hands as energy arced ferociously between them.
‘You must be fucking up time pretty bad for a side-character to get pulled into all of this,’ said Robert candidly.
‘You people and your oddly chosen words,’ said Malcolm, sighing deeply. ‘Come on then, let’s finish this up.’
As the time-travelling incarnation of Malcolm ran at him, Robert held the line, preparing to put all of his weight into bringing the killer to a halt.
It wasn’t bravery exactly, more the fact Robert believed he was immortal, having not seen what a restarted knife to the heart would do to him if he didn’t keep his distance.
They locked arms, and Robert bonked Malcolm repeatedly on the head with the beer bottle he had died with. Another gift from the world of the living.
‘Stop that!’ said Malcolm irritably.
‘Man, glass acts weird here,’ said Robert, equally mystified by why the bottle refused to crack despite him giving it his all.
With his back pressed against the long edge of the pool table, Robert got in a surprising amount of decent punches, bottle attacks, and even a cheeky knee to the killer’s groin before his luck ran out, and he fell to Malcolm’s superior might.
Ultimately, his downfall rested within the reserves of Restarter juice Robert was haphazardly tapping into, fuelled by his desire to protect the ones he loved.
With no practice under his belt on how to wield it, he found himself in a vicious transference, as all of his best laid plans were siphoned off into Malcolm, hoovered up like an insatiable smart-phone that had too many applications running all at once.
In a moment of eternal finality, Robert felt the blade run through him.
As Robert dissolved back into the timestream, Malcolm refocused his mind, span on his heel and re-established his connection to his alive-self, who responded by pulling his very real knife out of the doorframe.
‘Upstairs,’ he ordered, his foot brushing against the phone Robert had dropped. The Dark Restarter kicked it angrily, sneering at the belated revelation, and feeling incredibly idiotic for falling for the pantomime. Pretending to call the police on a phone that was deader than he was showed undeniable genius.
*
Kara stood there continuing to draw a charge from her friends, her face contorted in frustration as if she were desperately trying to refuel her car despite already being late for an important work meeting.
‘Come on, come on,’ she said to herself, clenching her eyes closed in case it helped. She suddenly felt the connection falter. She stole a look, greeted by a thick fog which began to spill across the upper level of the lodge, this time coming for her, she was sure of it.
She clenched her fists and strode towards the staircase, locking her sights onto the only thing that mattered; the alive Malcolm of the past. A towering behemoth, existing out-of-phase to her, occupying a slice of time which she knew she couldn’t interact with physically.
But Kara was never one to be told what she could and could not do.
She drew back her hands, as a familiar blue energy sparkled in her eyes, allowing her body to embrace the unparalleled anger she was feeling, knowing that this monster was about to attack the last of her remaining friends that were still drawing breath, and that the Dark Restarter was surely hot on his heels, preparing to truly end the ones who had already fallen.
If she really was about to be erased, she would go out swinging.
Alive-Malcolm had reached the top of the stairs now.
‘No,’ she whispered, as she shoved her hands directly into the man’s chest, dispelling the entirety of the small charge she had managed to draw through her palms and into her attacker, stopping him in his tracks, forcing him to take a step backwards, then another, backtracking and falling victim to his own momentum.
Malcolm’s alive-self lost his footing, and tumbled backwards down the staircase, landing on the broken body of Kara’s past-self.
If she wasn’t dead before, she certainly was now.
*
The Dark Restarter grimaced at the pathetic sight of his past-self, who was trying to pull himself up from the floor in an attempt to regain his composure.
Leaning over the banister rail of the staircase, he peered upwards, catching a glimpse of a familiar blue light, as Kara stared back at him, a crack of thunder ringing out above Fir Lodge like gunfire.
‘You’re in over your head, little girl.’
His past-self echoed his words and he smiled, happy that they were finding their way into the ears of those that dared to stand against him, sounding more like an automated recording than a man thinking of his own volition.
Kara’s rebellious smile waned, however, thanks to a tingle in her arm.
The Dark Restarter breathed a sigh of elation. ‘It seems my work here is done,’ he said happily.
She looked down, horrified to see her hand was out-of-phase with time, shifting in transparency.
‘Super,’ she said to herself, trying to run the numbers on what this chaos would mean for her and Hal.
The sheet of fog increased in density, wrapping around her legs, movi
ng up to her knees, and claiming her chest. She looked upwards at the ceiling, as the now-solid whiteness made its way towards her mouth, her eyes wide in terror.
With her mouth now covered, the only air she could draw was through her nose, until that too was smothered.
Kara’s suffocation took an even darker turn, as her sight was stripped from her.
Finding herself suddenly blinded thanks to her slowly disintegrating eyes, she tried to scream, but the insatiable fog refused her the indulgence, cutting through her vocal chords as it travelled down her throat.
Without reason, the static mist stopped, releasing its hold on her, freeing her nose, allowing her once more to draw the air she had forgotten she didn’t actually need to stay alive in this place, and Kara felt a surge of relief.
A new wave of fog rolled into the lodge, wiping her surroundings from existence, clearing away the dead bodies of her friends that littered the lower level of the lodge, their Restarted duplicates, and both incarnations of Malcolm.
Finally, she was claimed as well, possessing just enough cognitive resilience to think about where she was being taken next, as her temporally-displaced body and sense of consciousness were torn to shreds.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Full Blue
203rd Restart – Friday, August 24th, 2018, 12:01pm
Kara reappeared outside Fir Lodge in a fresh restart to the dual sounds of rushing air and screaming. She covered her ears to determine the source, before experiencing a sense of relief so intense she could have cried.
‘Hal?’
But her friend was far too busy rolling on the floor to hear her.
‘Hal!’ she shouted, more firmly this time.
‘Oh,’ said Hal, stopping mid-scream. ‘Sup. Had a bit of a…situation there,’ his embarrassment clear as the sky was blue, as he picked his restarted gun off the floor and holstered the weapon.
She hugged him tightly, fighting against the current.
‘I thought I’d lost you!’ she whispered.
‘Looks like the universe had one last spare sheet of paper in the photocopier,’ he replied, before lowering his volume to that of an equal whisper. ‘But you’ll never lose me, you know that.’
