Dark Matter (34 page)

“I wouldn't, actually. I thought so at first, but I wouldn't.”

I slide my arms out of the sleeves, toss him the shirt.

I know what he's planning: dress himself in my clothes. Go to Daniela pretending to be me. He'll have to reopen the slash across his face to make it look like a fresh wound.

I say, “I had a plan to protect her.”

“Yeah, I read it. I'm not sacrificing myself so someone else can be with my wife and son. Jeans too.”

I unbutton them, thinking, I misjudged. We're not all the same.

“How many of us have you murdered tonight?” I ask.

“Four. I'll kill a thousand of you if that's what it takes.”

As I pull off the jeans, one leg at a time, I say, “Something happened to you in the box, in those worlds you mentioned. What turned you into this?”

“Maybe you don't want them back badly enough. And if that's the case, you don't deserve them any—”

I throw the jeans at his face and rush him.

Wrapping my arms around Jason's thighs, I lift with everything I've got and run him straight into the wall, crushing the air out of his lungs.

The gun hits the floor.

I kick it into the kitchen as Jason crumples and drive my knee into his face.

I hear bone crunch.

Grabbing his head, I bring my knee back for another blow, but he sweeps my left leg out from under me.

I slam into the hardwood floor, the back of my head hitting so hard I see bursts of light, and then he's on top of me, blood dripping off his ruined face, one hand squeezing my throat.

When he hits me, I feel my cheek fracture in a supernova of pain below my left eye.

He hits me again.

I blink through a sheet of tears and blood, and the next time I can see clearly, he's holding a knife in the hand he was hitting me with.

Gunshot.

My ears ringing.

A small black hole through his sternum and blood spilling out of it and down the center of his chest. The knife drops from his hands onto the floor beside me. I watch him put a finger in the hole and try to plug it, but the blood won't be stopped.

He takes a wet, ragged breath and looks up at the man who shot him.

I crane my neck too, just enough to see another Jason aiming a gun at him. This one is clean-shaven, and he's wearing the black leather jacket that Daniela gave me ten years ago for our anniversary.

On his left hand, a gold wedding band gleams.

My ring.

Jason2 pulls the trigger again, and the next bullet shears off the side of my attacker's skull.

He topples.

I turn over and sit up slowly.

Spitting blood.

My face on fire.

Jason2 aims the gun at me.

He's going to pull the trigger.

I actually see my death coming, and I have no words, just a fleeting image of me as a child on my grandparents' farm in western Iowa. A warm spring day. A massive sky. Cornfields. I'm dribbling a soccer ball through the backyard toward my brother, who's guarding the “goal”—a space between two maple trees.

I think, Why this last memory on the brink of my death? Was I the most happy in that moment? The most purely myself?

“Stop it!”

Daniela is standing in the kitchen nook, dressed now.

She looks at Jason2.

She looks at me.

At the Jason with a bullet through his head.

The Jason on the screened-in porch with his throat cut.

And somehow, without so much as a tremor in her voice, she manages to ask, “Where is my husband?”

Jason2 looks momentarily thrown.

I wipe the blood out of my eyes. “Right here.”

“What did we do tonight?” she asks.

“We danced to bad country music, came home, and made love.” I look at the man who stole my life. “You're the one who kidnapped me?”

He looks at Daniela.

“She knows everything,” I say. “There's no point in lying.”

Daniela asks, “How could you do this to me? To our family?”

Charlie appears beside his mother, taking in the horror all around us.

Jason2 looks at her.

Then at Charlie.

Jason2 is only six or seven feet away, but I'm sitting on the floor.

I couldn't reach him before he pulled the trigger.

I think, Get him talking.

“How'd you find us?” I ask.

“Charlie's cell has a find-my-phone app.”

Charlie says, “I only turned it on for one text late last night. I didn't want Angela to think I'd blown her off.”

I look at Jason2. “And the other Jasons?”

“I don't know. I guess they followed me here.”

“How many?”

“I have no idea.” He turns to Daniela. “I got everything I ever wanted, except you. And you haunted me. What we could've been. That's why—”

“Then you should've stayed with me fifteen years ago when you had the chance.”

“Then I wouldn't have built the box.”

“And that would be so terrible, why? Look around. Has your life's work caused anything but pain?”

He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.”

Daniela says, “Life doesn't work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don't cheat the system.”

So slowly, I transfer my weight onto my feet.

But he catches me, says, “Don't even.”

“You going to kill me in front of them?” I ask. “Really?”

“You had such enormous dreams,” he says to me. “You could've stayed in my world, in the life I built, and actually lived them.”

“Oh, is that how you justify what you did?”

“I know how your mind works. The horror you face every day walking to the train to go teach, thinking,
Is this really it?
Maybe you're brave enough to admit it. Maybe you're not.”

I say, “You don't get to—”

“Actually, I do get to judge you, Jason, because I
am
you. Maybe we branched into different worlds fifteen years ago, but we're wired the same. You weren't born to teach undergrad physics. To watch people like Ryan Holder win the acclaim that should've been yours. There is
nothing
you can't do. I know, because I've done it all. Look at what I built. I could wake up in your brownstone every morning and look myself in the mirror because I achieved everything I ever wanted. Can you say the same? What have you done?”

“I made a life with them.”

“I handed you, handed both of us, what everyone secretly wants. The chance to live two lives. Our best two lives.”

“I don't want two lives. I want them.”

I look at Daniela. I look at my son.

Daniela says to Jason2, “And I want him. Please. Let us have our life. You don't have to do this.”

His face hardens.

His eyes narrow.

He moves toward me.

Charlie screams, “No!”

The gun is inches from my face.

I stare up into my doppelgänger's eyes, ask, “So you kill me and then what? What does it get you? It won't make her want you.”

His hand is trembling.

Charlie starts toward Jason2.

“Don't you touch him.”

“Stay put, son.” I stare down the barrel of the gun. “You've lost, Jason.”

Charlie is still coming, Daniela trying to hold him back, but he rips his arm away.

As Charlie closes in, Jason2's eyes cut away from me for a split second.

I slap the gun out of his hand, grab the knife off the floor, and bury it in his stomach, the blade sliding in with almost no resistance.

Standing, I jerk the knife out, and as Jason2 falls into me, grasping my shoulders, I stick him again with the blade.

Over and over and over.

So much blood pouring through his shirt and onto my hands, and the rusted smell of it filling the room.

He's clutching me, the knife still embedded in his gut.

I think about him with Daniela as I twist the blade and rip it out and shove him away from me.

He teeters.

Grimacing.

Holding his stomach.

Blood leaking through his fingers.

His legs fail him.

He sits, and then, with a groan, stretches out on his side and lets his head rest against the floor.

I lock eyes with Daniela and Charlie. Then I go to Jason2 and search his pockets as he moans, finally emerging with my set of car keys.

“Where's the Suburban?” I ask.

When he answers, I have to lean in close to hear his voice: “A quarter mile past the turnoff. On the shoulder.”

I rush over to the clothes I stripped out of just moments ago, dressing quickly.

When I finish buttoning my shirt, I bend down to tie my boots, glancing over at Jason2, bleeding out on the floorboards of this old cabin.

I lift the gun from the floor and wipe the grip off on my jeans.

We need to leave.

Who knows how many more are coming.

My doppelgänger says my name.

I look over—he's holding my wedding band in his blood-soaked fingers.

I walk to him, and as I take the ring and slide it onto my finger over the ring of thread, Jason2 grabs my arm and pulls me down toward his face.

He's trying to say something.

I say, “I can't hear you.”

“Look…in…the glove box.”

Charlie comes over, wrapping his arms fiercely around me, trying to hold back tears, but his shoulders jerk and the sobs break loose. As he cries in my arms like a little boy, I think of the horror he's just witnessed, and it brings tears to my eyes.

I hold his face between my hands.

I say, “You saved my life. If you hadn't tried to stop him, I never would've had a chance.”

“Really?”

“Really. Also I'm going to stomp your fucking phone into pieces. Now we have to leave. Back door.”

We rush through the living room, sidestepping pools of blood.

I unlock the French doors, and as Charlie and Daniela move out onto the screened-in porch, I glance back at the man who caused all this.

His eyes are still open, blinking slowly, watching us go.

Stepping outside, I pull the doors closed after me.

I have to track through the blood of one more Jason to reach the screen door.

I'm not sure which way to go.

We head down to the shoreline, follow it north through the trees.

The lake as smooth and black as obsidian.

I keep scanning the woods for other Jasons—one could step out from behind a tree and take my life at any second.

After a hundred yards, we turn from the shoreline and move in the general direction of the road.

Four gunshots ring out at the cabin.

We're running now, struggling through the snow, all of us gasping for breath.

The adrenaline tide is keeping the pain of my bruised face at bay, but I wonder for how much longer.

We break out of the forest onto the road.

I stand on the double-yellow line, and for a moment, the woods are silent.

“Which way?” Daniela asks.

“North.”

We jog down the middle of the road.

Charlie says, “I see it.”

Straight ahead, off the right-side shoulder, I clock the back of our Suburban pulled halfway into the trees.

We pile inside, and as I push the key into the ignition, I catch movement in the side mirror—a shadow sprinting toward us on the road.

I crank the engine, release the emergency brake, and shift into gear.

Whipping the Suburban around, I pin the gas pedal to the floor.

I say, “Get down.”

“Why?” Daniela asks.

“Just do it!”

We accelerate into darkness.

I punch on the lights.

They fire straight onto Jason, standing in the middle of the road, aiming a gun at the car.

There's a burst of fire.

A bullet punctures the windshield and rips through the headrest an inch away from my right ear.

Another muzzle flash, another gunshot.

Daniela screams.

How broken must this version of me be to risk hitting Daniela and Charlie?

Jason tries to step out of the way a half second too late.

The right edge of the bumper clips his waist, the contact devastating.

It slings him around hard and fast, his head slamming into the front passenger window with enough force to break the glass.

In the rearview mirror, I watch him tumble across the road as we keep accelerating.

“Anyone hurt?” I ask.

“I'm fine,” Charlie says.

Daniela sits back up.

“Daniela?”

“I'm okay,” she says, beginning to brush the pebbles of safety glass out of her hair.

We speed down the dark highway.

No one says a word.

It's three in the morning, and we're the only car on the road.

The night air streams through the bullet holes in the windshield, the road noise deafening through the broken window beside Daniela's head.

I ask, “Do you still have your phone with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Give it to me. Yours too, Charlie.”

They hand them over, and I lower my window several inches and chuck the phones out of the car.

“They're going to keep coming, aren't they?” she asks. “They're never going to stop.”

She's right. The other Jasons can't be trusted. I was wrong about the lottery.

I say, “I thought there was a way to fix this.”

“So what do we do?”

Exhaustion crushes down on me.

My face hurting more every second.

I look over at Daniela. “Open the glove box.”

“What am I looking for?” she asks.

“I'm not sure.”

She pulls out the Suburban's owner's manual.

Our insurance and registration paperwork.