Paul

Something stupid was happening, and I had no idea what, but it had something to do with that weird hole in reality.

Usually, a day restarts when I either get killed, or I fuck up the timeline so badly that it seems to reset itself. As time had gone by (hah! Laugh!) I had improved at taking advantage of negative futures. I still wasn’t able to get a decent night’s sleep without dosing myself up with some of the hardest substances I could find.

Last night, hah again, I had managed to get ahold of some echo. The stuff was powerful as hell and replaced my usual nightmares of future deaths with a pleasant dream of psychedelic sunsets naked with Nicole and football championships.

I was generally immune to the side effects of echo, but I could see why it was so popular despite being damned near deadly. It let you relive the best moments in your memories, only they were way better than you remembered them being, and blended together. Nicole had been a theater girl, not a cheerleader, but my dream had put her in a cheerleader outfit right after the one game where I had been instrumental in winning against Wooton 14-6. I had been rewarded handsomely after the game by Samantha, not Nicole, but that didn’t seem to matter to my dream.

If I overdosed enough on echo it sort of started a restart without actually killing me, with pleasant dreams in between, which is why I carried a half dozen doses with me now instead of a pistol. Blowing your brains out hurts more than you could imagine, but sticking six pieces of paper in your mouth that tasted vaguely of tangerines and then dreaming happy dreams until I reawoke in a reset worked out wonderfully.

Resets didn’t always restart me at exactly the beginning of my day anymore. It seemed to have about a hundred-mile radius, and I made sure I always had enough money in my pocket for a motel or something because it restarted me waking up within that distance. If I went into the day broke or with no place around, I would wake up in a park covered with newspapers, in an alley, or under a tree. If there was a motel nearby and I had money, I would wake up in a bed with vague memories of having checked in the night before.

I knew damned well that I had spent yesterday? Flying from Nevada to Atlantic City. Sometimes the details got a little fuzzy. I generally was able to check the date on my phone so I could make sure it was the next day rather than a respawn in some of the weirder cases, often involving a metahuman.

My power fritzed around metahumans, probably because it was a metahuman that killed me the first time or one that awakened me or something. Sometimes I would respawn a couple of days earlier or only a couple of hours, and when a metahuman was involved in one of my dreams, things got even weirder. My life was bad enough without throwing metas into the mix.

I had even avoided Louis. I knew his life was currently shit, and I had tried to rescue him six times. Once I tried to ransom him but got laughed at since apparently, even 5 million dollars was not worth as much as he was. Four times I had tried various sneaky ways and gotten respawned amidst a hail of gunfire for my efforts, and the last time I had gone in guns blazing and actually rescued him, dragging his emaciated body to a Cherokee I had hidden nearby, only to find myself waking up in the jungle before the rescue ever took place. That was the last time I tried.

I had gotten out of the airport and had noticed a weird hole, like something out of a Michael Bay movie, just sitting on the loading and unloading strip between the airport and the enormous parking structure nearby. Nobody else seemed to notice it, although no one seemed to walk directly through it, and I avoided it like a plague.

I had a pocketful of crypto, three cards equally nearly a hundred thousand, I had picked up in Vegas. See, even with my ability to reset, when you have a particularly lucky day the local cartels usually noticed. Vegas had some of the strongest facial recognition and pattern analysis software in existence. I had had a particularly lucky day, ensured by reliving it twice, and hit the limit of what I could win before they noticed someone monkeying with the odds and sent a few guys to make sure that I respawned. The maximum safe limit before it was time to leave was the hundred grand and change I had won, and then it was time to go. I could come back in a couple of months, but until then it was time to drift to a better venue before I could set up a streak again.

I was not a superhero, because superheroes always tried to stop crimes rather than just telling people about them. The simple fact was, that nobody ever believed me.

I mean, I am not the world’s greatest liar, I tried, but for some reason, if I called 911 to report a murder in progress, I was usually at the top of the list of suspects. I tried to tell them I had a meta ability to see the future, but they laughingly informed me that psychic powers like that didn’t exist, and if I tried to prove it, I almost always had to force a reset. If you know where the bodies are buried you are obviously the one that created them in the first place.

Add metahumans into the mix, and shit got downright strange. Call me squeamish, but after the first time, I tried not to ever touch dead bodies, especially metahumans, except for twice.

I was in DC at the time, and I had dreamed of a guy getting murdered by a vigilante. He was a courier, and apparently, the vigilante that got him, a girl by the name of Hitter that had an exceptional fondness for knives and a complete lack of originality, had taken him out on her way into a den of iniquity and hadn’t bothered checking his backpack.

I did because I had seen him carrying almost ten grand in cash and a big stash of echo. He was a meta speedster, but Hitter had caught him by surprise with a knife to the throat as he had closed a door behind him.

Look, I get it, Drug dealers suck, but this kid had just been making a living and had no idea what he carried back and forth and didn’t really care. He picked up a backpack, ran it someplace else, dropped it off without any interference from the cops or vigilantes, and got paid a couple of hundred. Even metas gotta eat, speedsters more than most, and since he didn’t seem to have any extreme durability he wasn’t going to play the super game.

I had touched bodies before and hated it because it always felt like there was something struggling to get out, even if they had been dead for a while. It was creepy as hell. After touching them, whatever it was stopped and disappeared, but at the moment I touched them it was like their bodies changed or something, and I was convinced that one day there would be something that popped out of their chest with giant teeth and a hunger for human flesh.

This time I accidentally brushed his bare arm and he immediately stood up. I don’t mean that his body stood up, but something that looked exactly like the body on the ground, sans the knife, sticking out of his throat and a stitch of clothing, stood up from the body and looked at it.

I stumbled back, freaking out a little, okay a lot. He looked down at his body, and then looked at me, and said “I just died, didn’t I?”

I nodded at him, clutching the backpack. Weirder things had happened before, although this was pretty damned close to the top of the pile. Was this a weird meta ability? “Do you respawn? You like, clone yourself when you die?” Like I had said, I had seen weirder meta abilities.

He shrugged, and bent over his body, “I never died before. Maybe it’s a new power.” he leaned over his body and started trying to get his clothes off, but even though he seemed to be touching it, nothing moved. “Weird, I can’t feel anything. Or move anything. I think I might really be dead or something.”

He watched me for a minute and took a step toward me, and I scooted back. “Why are you holding my pack?” he asked curiously.

“Because you were dead, and you were carrying a decent stash. I didn’t figure you needed it.” I offered.

He nodded, “Yeah, I feel like I don’t. I am supposed to go someplace, but I am not sure where. It’s kind of weird like I am remembering things but they are all hazy and just not very important.” he looked thoughtful and seemed to be ignoring the fact that he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. “Do you know where I am supposed to go? Is that your ability, to see dead people, like that kid in the movie?”

I shook my head, “It wasn’t before. I don’t have any idea. I can see when people are going to get fucked up, and usually, someone dies, but I cannot do anything about it. I knew you were going to die, but if I tried to interfere I’d just get killed myself and respawn, or screw it up even worse.”

He nodded and took another step closer, sticking out his hand. “What’s your name? You might be the last person I ever meet. My name is Leroy. Leroy Williams.”

I nodded, slowly, “Paul. Paul McCarthy.”

He grinned, “Like that singer from the Beatles?”

I shook my head and reached out to shake his hand. What’s the worst that could happen? I would respawn. I had heard that question too many times to count. “That’s McCartney, the Beatles guy.” and I shook his hand. It was warm, and just as real as any other hand I had ever shaken, and he suddenly looked surprised.

“I know where I am supposed to go now. Shit. Thanks, Paul McCarthy. Nice to meet you. I get to go meet my little girl.”

“Your little girl?” I asked curiously.

He nodded, “Yep, she got shot in a drive-by a few years ago. She and her mother and my brother. I don’t care for her mom much, she was a bitch, but it will be nice to see my baby again. Hey, I gotta hurry. Catch ya later?”

I nodded slowly to the man, “Probably. If I am lucky someday.”

He grinned, “No sweat. I appreciate the help. You take it easy, and I love the wings.” Leroy turned and started running, vanishing after a couple of footsteps.

What wings?

I wasn’t too proud to admit I found a fast food joint very quickly after that and took full advantage of their restroom. The whole thing scared the shit out of me to the point where I had to hurry up or clean up, and I chose to hurry. I felt exhausted afterward, but unlike a lot of my weirder experiences, this one didn’t force a respawn.

There was a huge upshot, though. I actually got a good night’s sleep that night in a real bed at a Holiday inn, with no horrible dreams at all, I guess the ghost or something had shocked me enough that my brain had to reset, and didn’t plague me with horrid visions of the future that I often got. I never had a clean night’s sleep without chemical assistance, and I woke up feeling good for the first time in years like I had actually accomplished something besides the backpack full of cash.

I lived well for several months, but I was not that great with money and often seemed to lose it in weird ways, like resetting naked in a park with basically no clue how I had gotten there.

The second time I touched a meta was almost entirely unintentional. I was in Vegas a few weeks ago, figuring out the best way to get a cash run without resetting too often, and a hooker that I had no vision about had gotten hit by a car.

She flew past me and right into the side of a building, and by into I mean she didn’t hit the wall, she started flying backward right through it. She must have just wakened when the car hit, because as she was flying through the wall her eyes widened and she suddenly stopped, and the wall crumbled, along with flying chunks of her body.

Look, two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time, you know? She must have desolidified after the car hit her, and then, panicked about what was going on, instantly solidified, not realizing she was halfway through a wall. That and falling to death from a great height when you forget how to fly or your energy runs out are two of the leading causes of self-extinction among new metas. Trust me, I’d seen it all.

I guess I was lucky that her ghosting was a sort of spectral form rather than energy because I had heard energy resolidification could cause weird atomic reactions, sometimes leading to massive explosions. This was more of a crunch, and flying bits.

I was slapped with a bloody bit, and the girl appeared beside me. It had to be something about my own powers because she took one look at me and started running in my direction, crying her eyes out.

I was a little terrified, but less so than last time, and noted she was surprisingly solid when she wrapped me in a hug. Without the hooker getup and make-up, I realized she looked maybe 15 years old, tops.

After a moment she looked up at me smiling, and I had no problems ignoring the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything. Yes, I was a scumbag, but I have zero interest in children. Even high as a kite, I had kicked more than one hooker to the curb when I realized she was underage, and seeing their death was a great equalizer for figuring out their real age. I couldn’t save everyone, but I had managed to get a couple away from their pimps long enough to get into what I hoped was a better situation, at least when their future deaths didn’t indicate getting beaten to death or ODing in the next few months or years.

Drugged-out scumbag? yes. Murderer? At least twice. Loser? With the hand I was dealt, that was an absolute given. Pedophile? I’d kill someone first. Even scum like me had standards. It probably helped that despite my habit of sleeping with chemical assistance, I never seemed to become truly addicted or look like a junkie or tweaker.

I was decent-enough looking that if it weren’t for the glassy-eyed stare when I had consumed enough junk to put up with seeing someone I planned to fuck dying, I would probably have never needed to touch a hooker.

To be honest, I sort of fucking hated drugs. The problem is, legal sleep aids did almost nothing, it wasn’t until you got into true psychedelics like PCP and echo that the dreams stayed away. I didn’t get high, although I did space a little when I was really cranked. I guess I was rationalizing it, but I considered my needs to be medicinal. Medicinal angel or echo to give me sweet dreams, or medicinal GHB to let me sleep without dreaming.

I avoided stimulants like a plague since the only thing they did was make me jumpy for a bit like too much coffee. I’d even tried out that new shit once, rapture, but it had done exactly nothing for me except make me a little horny for a while. Thousands of dollars down the drain. It was supposed to be a new meta-drug, made by Echo, and I had high hopes, but it was utterly worthless.

She looked up at me, a big smile on her face, and said “Thank you angel. I am so glad to see you. I was scared someone would drag me to hell,” then she turned, and like Leroy ran into nothingness. Another decent night’s sleep, and a week later and several grand richer I was here, in AC, looking to score more mafia cash without dying too often.

And now, while walking towards the taxi lane, there was a meta portal that only I seemed to see, leading to god knows where. That was a nope with a giant capital N.

That evening I had a fantastic dinner of fried fish from a wharf-side restaurant, and a few tabs of echo later, I turned in at a nice hundred-dollar-a-night hotel. I didn’t know how long the money would last, so I intended to enjoy it while I had it.

I didn’t sleep, I respawned, and the nightmare was far more hideous than usual. This time there was a sweeping wave of some of the most awful monsters I could imagine, bugs and humans covered with horrible squirming mouths and worms, culminating in a bunch of meta deaths, but most particularly that of a gorgeous young black-haired woman in a super suit.

Another downside of my abilities was that I never saw real bad guys getting it. If I watched someone die, it was almost a guarantee that they were ethical, sweet, naive, or innocent. If my nightmares had involved pimps and drug dealers spilling out their guts, I could probably sleep securely despite them, but they never were. They were always someone that didn’t deserve to die, would be missed, or had a bright and promising future ahead of them. Being some kind of god of death sucked more than you could possibly imagine.

When I respawned, I was in a different room than the one I had remembered lying down in, at a much cheaper hotel, which made sense since it looked like my haul from the previous evening had vanished. I had a couple of thousand, but the hundred grand I had possessed last night had vanished.

Not terrifically unexpected, it might even turn up again farther down the road, but it made me wonder if my real power was some kind of dimension-hopping ability. Earth never changed much, but my own circumstances often changed dramatically. I still had my own ID and clothes that fit me, so it wasn’t like a respawn put me in a stranger’s body, and usually, I woke up to the exact same day I had repeated before.

Was I a time traveler? Or was it possible that I never respawned at all, and only my memories of repeating the same day previously were created by my ability? There was no question that I knew about things before they happened, especially when I repeated a day, but sometimes stuff changed slightly after a respawn. Animals, especially, seemed to have a connection to whatever happened before, and I had lost money several times watching races where one horse had won the first time, and an entirely different horse succeeded during the respawn. Dog tracks were even worse, I had given up entirely on fixing dog races.

Computers, on the other hand, especially those giant machines that randomly chose to give a gambler rewards, were utterly consistent. I had won cars twice by noting the exact time a reward was given and then making sure I was there, at that time, feeding dollar tokens into the machine when it popped.

Did my power reset the entire world? Interesting question if I were a power researcher or a philosopher, but not terribly important to my day-to-day existence. Maybe I had some great destiny to save the world or something if a comet hit it, but getting a decent night’s sleep seemed to be more immediate.

I wandered the city a bit, and right at 4 o’clock, the same time as at the airport yesterday, a weird flickering portal appeared. This time it was right in front of the Casino I had been mapping, keeping an eye on some of the bigger payouts.

I ignored it again, but that night when I used echo to reset, I had another horrible vision and this time, I respawned into an even cheaper, seedier motel with only a couple of hundred bucks to my name. Was someone trying to tell me something? Was I being punished for ignoring the portal?

This time, I was eating a late lunch, at a cheap Cafe near the boardwalk, when right at 4 another portal appeared, this time at the edge of the sand. Someone or something was clearly screwing with me, but I was getting sick of my money disappearing. Someone had to know about my respawn, more than I did, and I intended to get to the bottom of it.

What’s the worst that could possibly happen? I thought to myself as I stepped into the odd vortex.

You know, a lot of people have a superstition about using phrases like What’s the worst that can happen? Or Nothing can stop us now. Well, I regularly lived through the blunt application of that superstition. Using such phrases had absolutely zero effect, since I was already living through the worst that could happen, and was inured to getting stopped every time anything remotely good happened to me.

This time was exceptionally dismal. I popped out into a miserable, cold wasteland. Whatever meta sent the portal was nowhere to be found. Instead, I found myself in the middle of a battle.

Not the middle, more off to one side, but still. There were metas and military vehicles smashing through some of the nastiest creatures you could imagine, stuff that would make John Carpenter puke.

I knew where I had to go, and what I had to do. There were plenty of deaths, but none of them had caught my focus in the nightmares save one. I was not in the middle of the action in the slightest, but the heroes, and occasional villains, I saw, seemed to be holding their own fairly well.

I was not some super-tough meta hero. I tried to stay as far away from the action, the people battling monsters, as I possibly could. Nearby, out of the direct fight, there was a sort of camp, surrounded by walls of stone and dirt that some meta had raised and was still raising higher. There were not many monsters around it, and a couple of the metas were killing any that approached too closely.

There were these giant rifts that looked like tears in the air itself, and out of them stepped not only hordes of the smaller creatures, but what looked at first like furry praying mantises with far too many legs. They were incredibly huge, the size of skyscrapers, and eventually, I realized that the ‘fur’ was the same sort of disgusting double-ended snakes that seemed to be covering everything else.

I approached the tent in the middle of the walls and saw a woman standing outside. Every once in a while she would wave her hand and a hole would appear in the air. Not like the one I had traveled through, this one more resembled the gates from that movie with Kurt Russel. People would rush or be pulled through the portal, into the courtyard, often with those nasty snakes attached to them or followed by a monster that the defenders quickly ganged up on and smashed.

This woman was the one that I saw dying. No one ever believed me when I told them what would happen, but I usually tried anyway. She was flat-out incredibly beautiful, with long black hair and wearing a purple costume, but then, most metahumans were.

For some reason, just like people never believed me when I told them they were going to die or something horrible was going to happen, most people ignored me unless I called attention to myself or they were specifically looking for me.

One very tall and gorgeous blonde with short-cut, spiky hair and a spear that was mowing down incoming creatures was staring at me, however. No one ever stared at me. A battlefield full of metas and monsters, death on its way, and that very attractive and frankly huge woman staring at me was what was creeping me out.

Above me, I saw several flying metas. One was a girl that looked to be a late teenager, wearing an interesting outfit that looked like a piece of the night sky, carrying a very broad man who was throwing balls of energy down into the thickest mass of monsters, blowing them into huge piles of slightly-steaming meat. Farther away, two flying metas were battling it out with a giant mantis, one with huge wings that used them to slice open the kaiju, while another one shot at it, seemingly ineffectively, with light rays from his eyes.

I knew that these were the big bad threats, which meant I was in Siberia. I really didn’t want to get stuck respawning somewhere here, so I took care not to attract monstrous attention. I wish I had some way of fighting, maybe finally doing something I could be proud of, but I suspected I was here for an entirely different reason.

The woman was standing closer to me now, the tall one, and looked at me closely. “I didn’t expect to see your kind here.” She said.

“My kind?” I replied, over the sounds of fighting. “What kind would that be?”

She shook her head, “I am not so much a fool as to speak your name aloud.” She stated simply, tilting her head. “But there are many here that have died gloriously and deserve to join the Aesir.”

I shrugged, “Then I am probably not what you think I am.” I answered her honestly. “I am here because I got stuck being here. But maybe, possibly, you will listen to me, I need to pass on a warning, but no one will believe me, probably not even you. In a few minutes, one of those giants is going to stomp through here and kill everyone in this camp, unless you evacuate now.”

She nodded, holy crap, she believed me? “You have Cassandra’s curse. I think I know you. You are kin to Louis?” she asked, pointing at the metas battling it out in the sky.

I looked back up and holy shit! She was right. Where the hell had he gotten wings? He was a very far cry from the nerdy teenager I remembered or even the muscled oaf I had bummed money from. He was still battling it out with the giants, but one of them was pulling inexorably closer to the camp.

“Yes, I am Paul. You have to clear the camp! Seriously. I have seen one of those things stomp through and kill everyone. Some people are going to die, but not everyone has to.”

She nodded, “You are the one he has chosen to hate because he thinks you betrayed him, but you are a chooser. You can no more betray him than Vectress could. Do what you are here to do, choose those who you are here to choose, and I will ignore the curse that is screaming at me to ignore your words.”

She spoke hurriedly to the one that was portaling people in, and she shook her head. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the tall blonde glared for a moment, and then the shorter one nodded and created a portal, ferrying people out of the tent.

I didn’t need to stick around for this. I hated when I was right. I hurried out of the walls and saw the giant creature step on it. Most people seemed to have gotten clear, but Louis landed inside, and eventually, I saw black wings flash open, cutting through stone and tent alike and narrowly missing me. The monsters had mostly been cleared out, and Commander Freedom landed inside as well after a moment.

I finally came back in, after Louis was gone. There was something about his wings that bothered me. It wasn’t that he was a winged human, I had seen that before, but something about them just didn’t feel right, like they belonged to someone else.

The tall woman was still there, watching Louis depart, and Commander Freedom had already left. She looked at me, and said “I thought perhaps you were here for me.”

I shook my head, “No, the one still in there is who I kept having visions about. I think, but I am not sure, I need to touch her so she can move on to whatever she needs to move on to.”

She nodded, “Can you talk to her?”

I nodded, “I think so, I mean, I have with other metas before.”

She smiled, a hint of sadness tugging at her eyebrows. “Tell her that we will miss her very much and that Sif wishes her next existence, whether it be Elysian fields, the Aesir, or a new life, to be the very best.”

I shook my head, “I will tell her that, but I am kinda flailing in the dark here too.”

I went into the tent, and there she was, half-crushed. I lightly touched a part of her other shoulder, the one that was mostly undamaged, and was unsurprised when she stood up.

The world narrowed as I was thrust into another respawn. Seriously? What the hell had I changed? I woke up because something was sending electrical jolts through me like I had stuck a finger in an outlet.

I opened my eyes and saw the Black-haired woman standing over me, her hand resting against my shoulder, and the waves of shocking electricity were coming from her.