Yesterday Never Dies (Die Again to Save the World Book 3)

by Ramy Vance

  Chapter Five

  Tuesday, May 23, 1:17 a.m.

  Now mostly dried off and wearing white silky guest robes that Buzz had for them, they filtered into the living room.

  Rosa had been watching a soap opera, but she flipped off the TV. “Ay, Mr. Buzz, maybe tomorrow we will find out if Pedro survives.”

  Buzz leaned against a couch. “Again? What happened to Pedro this time? He didn’t try to fake his death again, did he?”

  She shook her head vigorously. “Oh, it was terrible. His new wife found him in bed with another woman, so she pushed him through the window. He smashed right through the glass and fell from the third story. Then…”

  She gasped and held her hand over her heart. “Then roll credits! Ay! Now we have to know if he made it. Especially because he has a secret love child that is on her way to find him after the cartel killed her mother. Now, the father she never knew might be dead too. Dios mio!”

  She clasped her palms around her cheeks and shook her head. “Oh, Mr. Buzz. I prepared a special tart. Would you like to sample it?”

  Buzz lit a cigar and cocked his head. “Sounds good. Could you bring coffee and snacks for our guests? We’ve all imbibed quite a bit tonight. I think food might do us all good.”

  When the doorbell suddenly rang, Buzz frowned. “Hm, must be those Bible thumpers again trying to change my mind on evolution. Rosa, check the door, too?”

  “Of course. Bring snacks and answer the door.” The maid padded off to the kitchen, and Buzz and Rueben shared a smile. Carolyn pointed toward where Rosa had gone. “You still have Rosa?”

  Buzz looked at her curiously. “Still?” He turned to Rueben. “This really is going to be a lot to take in, isn’t it?”

  Rueben nodded.

  Buzz turned to Carolyn. “All right, Carolyn, you have the floor.”

  Carolyn clasped her hands together and pursed her lips. For a time, the room remained silent. “I honestly don’t know where to begin.” She glanced at Rueben, and he nodded for her to go on. “Obviously, all of you know that Rueben has…certain powers?” They all nodded. “And you all have met, of course, future Rueben from another world. I believe you call him Pete?”

  They all nodded as Rosa appeared with lemon tarts arranged on a silver platter as well as a coffee carafe. She poured everyone a cup. “Mr. Buzz, there was no one at the door. They must have left. Want me to check the security cameras?”

  “Nah. Those people are harmless.” Buzz dismissed her and Rosa left the room.

  Carolyn sipped her coffee, and they took small bites of the tart as she continued her story. “Pete and I… we are from a different universe.” She paused as if expecting Martha, Aki, and Buzz to gasp but they only nodded. “A parallel one, to be exact. One that’s a bit further along on the timeline. Twenty years in the future.”

  Martha was the first to speak. “We found a barn that another Buzz had somehow transported throughout the multiverse.” She bit her lip. “Do we all exist in other universes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then Rueben…he can ‘warp’ in all of them?” Buzz asked.

  “No,” Carolyn said. “Out of all the parallel worlds, only two Ruebens can warp.” She nodded at Rueben. “The Rueben from this world and the Rueben from my world. Pete, as you call him.”

  “Very interesting,” Buzz said. “I’ll add this to my Rules for Repeaters. Can anyone else warp? Besides Pete and Rueben.”

  Carolyn shook her head. “No. As far as I know, the Ruebens and I are the only ones.”

  Martha and Aki gasped. Buzz cocked an eyebrow. “You’re a Repeater, too?”

  “Yes. From everything I can tell, it’s hereditary.”

  “I knew it.” Buzz raised a triumphant fist. Everyone looked at him. “Ahh, sorry. Go on.”

  Rueben raised a hand to stop her. “If it’s hereditary, then where did you get it, Mom? Did either of your parents act strangely? Like they could’ve been warping back in time while you were a kid?”

  Carolyn shook her head. “As far as I can tell, no. They were normal. And so were my grandparents. But I don’t know. Maybe they hid it well like I did with you. Or, maybe they never died early enough to find out that they would warp back in time afterward. Maybe…they just died of old age without ever knowing.”

  Following her cop’s intuition, Martha narrowed her eyes. “How did you get here? If your universe is farther along than ours, why do you look around Marshall and Pete’s age? Shouldn’t you be older than Pete?”

  Carolyn looked flushed. “Ahh, well, you see, I’ll have to go back to the beginning.” She gripped her glass and stared into the dark liquid as she spoke. “Many years ago, our Earth…died. Rueben—I mean, Pete and I warped back and tried to save it. So, so many times, we tried. Buzz, you were there. You tried to help us.”

  “Cool. Am I hot there?”

  Aki threw a pillow at Buzz.

  “Actually,” Carolyn said, “you had plastic surgery back on my Earth.” When Buzz’s eyebrows raised curiously, Carolyn scrunched up her face. “It didn’t turn out too well for you in my opinion.” She glanced down at her cup and smiled. “All of you are mostly the same in every universe. Sometimes you make different choices here and there that affect your trajectory in small ways. Overall, you’re mostly the same.”

  Martha raised her hand. “So, this other Earth is the real Earth? This one is the fake one?”

  Rueben interjected. “Well, I don’t think the word ‘real’ applies here. I think everything is real. We’re just, like she said, in a different parallel version of the same Earth.”

  Buzz nodded sagely and puffed on his cigar.

  Carolyn continued. “In ‘my’ world—”

  Rueben interrupted her. “How about this? How about we give it a name? Like, say we call your world Earth-Z. And we’ll call this one Earth-A.”

  Aki nodded. “I like Earth-Z. It makes sense.”

  Buzz frowned. “I would’ve used Greek terminology, but go on.”

  Carolyn continued. “So Earth-Z, as I guess we’re calling it, suffered destruction. Rueben on that world, we’ll call him Rueben-Z, and myself, we tried to Repeat and save Earth-Z time and time again. Nothing we did worked.”

  “What kind of destruction are we talking about?” Buzz said.

  Carolyn shuddered. “It’s…it’s like a withering growth that spreads rapidly throughout the world, shriveling all life—plants and animals alike. I’ve never seen anything like it. It spreads and spreads until the entire world is a lifeless husk and Rueben-Z and I are the only two left alive.”

  “Hell of an epidemic,” Buzz mused. “All biological life shrivels up and dies?”

  Carolyn nodded. “Turns into dust.”

  Martha shook her head sadly. “That’s awful.” Aki nodded.

  “But what’s causing it?” Buzz said.

  Rueben’s eyes widened. “Every living creature withers to dust?” When Carolyn nodded, Rueben said, “Like the passage of a very long amount of time? Like a…time disease?”

  “Time disease, eh?” Buzz chewed that over. “I like it, buddy. Some unknown phenomenon ages all living organisms at an exponentially accelerated rate until they simply turn to dust.”

  Carolyn touched her chin with a thoughtful look on her face. “Hmm. I never thought about it like that before.”

  Buzz continued. “It would explain why you and Rueben-Z are unaffected by the effects. You both are Repeaters and thus may be immune to its effects, unlike us paltry mortals.” He flashed her and Rueben a jealous grin.

  “If that is what’s really going on, this…changes things,” Carolyn said. “A time disease.”

  Buzz eyed her closely. “You mean to say my doppelgänger on your world never surmised that?”

  “This ‘phenomenon’ as you put it does not act like any known disease. It behaves more like a storm or some part of the environment.” Her shoulders sagged as she exhaled loudly. “Like a living curse.”

  Aki cleared her throat.
“When does this time disease or whatever it is start to attack your Earth?”

  Now Buzz leaned forward on his arms. “Yes. What seems to be the trigger for the disease?”

  “We’re not exactly sure,” Carolyn said exasperatedly. “One day it just gets airborne somehow and starts killing every living thing. It starts in different places. When we warp back farther, it happens even sooner than the last time. As if it’s following us.” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “You could see why we thought it more like a curse than a disease.”

  Buzz shook his head. “And I went along with that notion? I find it hard to believe there’s a version of me that believes in curses.”

  Carolyn sipped her coffee and shifted uneasily on her seat. “You would be correct. Buzz on my world, Buzz-Z, if you will…he tried what he could. But this time disease. It scared him. Badly. The phenomenon just wasn’t predictable, except that it kept happening sooner and sooner with each warp back in time Rueben-Z and I did. He did, however, have an idea.”

  Buzz urged her to continue.

  “He postulated that perhaps that world couldn’t be saved—at least not on its timeline. What he suggested was that if we could hop to a parallel universe, maybe then we could figure out a way to undo and fix everything back home.”

  “How is that even possible?” Martha asked.

  Buzz uttered something under his breath, and Aki, who’d been watching him, said, “Space and time capsule?”

  Buzz nodded.

  So did Carolyn. “Exactly. About twenty years earlier, Buzz-Z had been tinkering with a prototype capsule. Kinda looked like Superman’s Kryptonian rocket only with more than one seat. He started working on it again when the phenomenon struck, and he devised a ‘theoretical’ way to jump from our Earth to other parallel Earths.”

  “That’s incredible,” Aki said.

  Buzz made a hurry-up gesture. “You jumped worlds then?”

  “We did. Rueben-Z and I. It was…well, you can imagine how disorienting arriving on a parallel world might be.” Carolyn watched as everyone nodded and exchanged glances. “Long story short, Rueben-Z and I couldn’t find anything that could help on any of the worlds we visited. No matter what we did, no matter how many Buzzes we consulted with, we were unable to save Earth-Z when we returned. Even worse, each parallel world we visited inevitably suffered the same…time disease. As if the phenomenon was following us.”

  “Like a curse,” Martha whispered.

  Carolyn drew a breath and wiped her hand across her forehead.

  Buzz gestured with his cigar. “Surely you had a working idea of what was causing it.”

  “We thought the ‘curse’ was one of two things: an extremely powerful and deadly virus that could kill all life on Earth or some kind of alien invasion. We couldn’t prove either so we weren’t sure which it could be.”

  Rueben eyed his mom. “An alien invasion?”

  Carolyn shrugged helplessly. “It’s just that it’s unlike anything we know, so we thought it must be alien. At the same time, Buzz-Z used every known instrument possible to detect the presence of aliens—and found nothing. Which scared him even more.”

  Buzz tapped his fingertips together. “Artificial virus, perhaps? Pathogen evolution gone wrong? Maybe advanced technology from twenty years in the future…” Buzz ordered his thoughts internally for a moment and asked, “What exactly did I—and by ‘I,’ I mean Buzz-Z—do to try and stop the phenomenon?”

  “Do you want a list?”

  “I do,” Buzz said soberly.

  “Okay, I’ll try to think back and write you out a list. For now, know that the only true breakthrough he had was figuring out the space and time capsule to jump universes.”

  His face lit up. “So Buzz-Z went with you and Rueben-Z to this Earth?”

  “Actually, no. You didn’t want to go. You stayed on Earth-Z and perished with everyone else, waiting for us to return, earlier and earlier in the timeline with a possible solution.”

  “Shit,” Aki said. “That must have been hard to leave him.”

  Carolyn wiped a tear from her eyes.

  “Mom.” Rueben bit his lip. “I think you’re burying the lead here. What,” he hesitated, “what happened to Rueben-Z? I mean, he’s driven by fury and near-insanity. Why is he…well, why is he like how he is now?”

  Carolyn took a calming breath. “We jumped to countless parallel Earths in our search for the solution. At first, we didn’t understand that we were carrying the phenomenon with us to each one. Later we did. We realized we’d been inadvertently causing the deaths of billions.

  “Rueben-Z…now, understand that it was hard for us both. We thought that we could find a way to reverse all the damage on all Earths we’d been to. We just had to find the solution. It was my fault, but I should have paid more attention to Rueben-Z. He…hid his anguish well. Eventually, one day he just…I don’t know. Suffered a complete mental breakdown.”

  Everyone winced.

  Rueben was glad that things were starting to make sense now.

  Carolyn continued. “I stayed with Rueben-Z. He was my son. But his anxiety and furor seemed to grow every time he died and warped back in time. He grew almost…psychotic. The only thing that seemed to reset his symptoms was when we hopped to a new Earth. It was as if being on a new world reset both the time disease and his insanity. After jumping, he’d be more rational. I could reason with him. Talk to him.”

  Wow, Rueben thought. This had to be so hard on his mom to say all this. How long had she been holding it all in? Anyone she tried to talk to about it on all those Earths was doomed to die at the hand of the time disease.

  “On one Earth,” Carolyn said, “Buzz pinpointed that Rueben-Z was transmitting the time disease to each of the worlds. Don’t ask me how he determined it, but he said that Rueben-Z was the cause, and not me even though we were both going to the same worlds.” Carolyn shuddered.

  “Rueben-Z was so furious that he strangled Buzz to death right in front of me.” Everyone gasped. “He immediately warped back to before that, but I knew right then and there that Rueben-Z was beyond my help. The universes were beyond my help.

  “You can say that I…gave up on my mission. Accepted defeat. I was so weary. All those deaths I’d seen. Since I knew I wasn’t the cause, I hatched an idea that I still haven’t forgiven myself for.”

  “You decided to leave Rueben-Z,” Aki said.

  “Yes.” Carolyn was fighting back tears now. “We had only one space and time capsule. By that point, I was familiar with all the controls—I knew how to pilot it to other Earths. So I waited until Rueben-Z was asleep. Then I snuck onto the capsule and left that world in the dead of night.” She drew a shallow breath and wiped the sweat from her forehead.

  “Earth-A wasn’t the first Earth I stopped at once I left Rueben-Z behind. But once I found Earth-A and decided it’s where I wanted to stay, I…self-destructed the space and time capsule in case there was any way that Rueben-Z could locate it.”

  Rueben massaged both his temples with his thumbs. “Wow, mom, I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of that. It’s amazing you’re holding together at all after what you’ve been through.”

  “Yes,” Buzz agreed, studying Carolyn. “But you never addressed the original question. Rueben-Z appears to be in his mid-forties. And…” He gestured at her body. “You also look mid-forty-ish.” He ignored Martha’s and Aki’s indignant glances at him outing a woman’s age. “Care to explain?”

  Carolyn sighed. “I can try. Although it’s really just a guess. The Carolyn on this Earth—Earth-A—died when she was young.” Rueben started, as did Martha. “She didn’t have the Repeater gene, which is consistent with the Carolyns on the other parallel worlds I’ve been to. And somehow—I don’t know how—when I arrived on this Earth, I…grew younger. I reverted to the age she would have been if she never died. It’s like I…took her place.”

  Buzz nodded matter-of-factly. “Temporal displacement.”

  Rueben, Ma
rtha, and Aki gave Buzz confused looks.

  “It goes like this: the multiverse is populated by infinite copies of us, all living our lives fairly uniformly. Like Carolyn said, we might make different decisions to change things slightly, but for the most part, parallel universes are exactly that: parallel.” He gestured with the butt of his cigar. “So if one were to jump from Universe A to Universe B, two of you now exist in the same world.”

  Rueben eyed Buzz. “And if we touch, one explodes, or there’s a rip in the reality of space.”

  Buzz shook his head. “You’ve been watching The One with Jet Li again. No…it’s more of a Rick and Morty situation. The two of you can interact, talk, hang out. But if one of the universes doesn’t have you there, you take that person’s place on their timeline until you jump again.”

  “Quantum Leap?” Rueben offered.

  “Exactly, except you can only occupy yourself. Temporal displacement. That’s what Carolyn did. Carolyn-A no longer existed on Earth-A so Carolyn-Z ‘replaced’ herself on this Earth. And will continue to do so until she leaves. Fascinating. What happened next?”

  Carolyn continued. “Seeing I had a second chance at life—and was twenty years younger—I did the only thing I could think of doing. I tried to enjoy life. I made some friends. Then I let slip about my powers, and I spent some time in a psych ward.

  “After that mess, I went looking for the love of my life. Marshall.” She smiled at the memory. “He was the sweetest guy. He always is, in every universe. A bit dorky, awkward, and utterly loveable.”

  “Marshall?” Aki said.

  “Yes.”

  Martha tilted her head in confusion. “Marshall, Marshall?”

  “Yes. He was at New York State, studying computer engineering. I soon got a job at the college coffee shop, planning to take it slow and meet Marshall. The way he asked me out was the sweetest thing. He was so shy and awkward, and he spilled his coffee all over me.”

  Buzz snorted. “That was a play, you know.”

  Carolyn blushed. “Oh, please. Marshall? In those days, that poor guy wouldn’t know game if it walked up and introduced itself.”