I looked Cece in the eye, trying to decide how much to tell her. I cast my mind back. When was the last time I had tried to tell her everything? I couldn't remember. My line of thought kept getting derailed by watching Mrs. Streep die. For some reason, I just couldn't follow the threads farther back.

I opened my mouth, ready to try and give my best attempt at an explanation, when Cece cut me off.

"What the fuck?" she said.

She was looking out the front windshield. I turned and looked, fearful that I would see the giant head. What I saw was not much better. I hadn't paid very close attention because Cece had been driving so fast, but we had been the only car on a four-lane highway for quite some time.

Set out in a row in front of us was a cordon of police cars, lights flashing, parked nose to nose, officers aiming over the cars. Cece brought the car to a gradual stop a good fifty feet from the cordon, careful to keep her hands on the steering wheel and in sight.

I looked at Cece. "What is this?" I asked.

Cece shook her head. "I don't know. You tell me, Freak," she said. "What kind of trouble did you get into?"

Instructions were shouted: to roll down the driver's window, turn off the vehicle, throw the keys on top of the car, and with both hands, reach out the driver's side door and open the door. Cece complied.

I couldn't blame her. There were eleven officers with guns pointed in our direction. There was a helicopter parked behind the police cordon. I hadn't caught sight of it at first because the flashing lights obscured my vision of anything beyond the vehicles. They were bright even during the daytime. I squinted, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from the men with guns.

Cece was told to take eight steps forward and then kneel with her hands interlaced behind her head. At this point, three officers advanced on her, keeping their weapons trained on her chest. Once she was being covered from ten feet away, two officers holstered their weapons, roughly got her on the ground, and cuffed her hands behind her back. Cece didn't say a word, remaining mute.

I sat frozen, having no idea what to do. After the cuffs were on and they frisked her, she was hauled to her feet and escorted off by one of the officers. Another officer walked around to my door and pulled it open.

"Timothy Thompson?" the man said.

I nodded, unsure how to respond.

"Are you hurt, son?" he asked.

I shook my head, feeling the need to explain. I started to say that she was my babysitter, but the man put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Save it for later, kid. You're safe now. Come with me." He helped me get out of the vehicle.

The officers in the traffic cordon had put their weapons away, and I no longer had guns pointed in my direction. I tried to catch sight of Cece, but she had been bustled off to one of the cars, and she was now face down on the hood while several officers said something to her. I couldn't hear what was going on. The rotors on the helicopter were still spinning, and they had a remarkable ability to wash away sound.

I was escorted beyond the line of police cars and the flashing lights until I was within twenty feet of the helicopter, the rotor wash tugging at my clothing.

A man stepped out of the helicopter and instantly my stomach tied itself in a knot, and I felt a wash of cold rush over me. The Tall-man, once more looking like a businessman, perfectly human— if otherworldly handsome— stepped forward from underneath the spinning helicopter rotor. His face was unsmiling.

He walked up to the officer who was escorting me and nodded at him. "I'll take it from here," he said. He looked down at me. His eyes were again flat. His eyes were a stony gray color. His face had angry red blotches across it, as if he had received a steam burn.

He looked down his nose at me. "I'm no longer amused," the Tall-man said.

I realized then that he was interacting with other people like he was a real person. I shook my head, taking a step back from him.

"You're not really here," I said, even though the statement sounded absurd to my own ears.

"No, Timothy Thompson," the Tall-man said. I felt an electric jolt run up my spine as he said my name.

"I am really here," he finished.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

He raised his hand and signaled to somebody. I had to make a break for it. My mind was starting to lock up again in his presence, the feeling of hopeless futility washing over me in cascading waves as I stood near him. I turned and made my best stumbling start to run.

I only got about fifteen feet before strong hands laid hold of me. My mind was locking up. In a panicked state. I couldn't look at who had me. I couldn't think what I should do. I was hauled bodily to a long black car and put in the back. Two large men in suits slid in after me and sat on either side. The Tall-man entered the car a few minutes later, sitting across, facing me. His mouth still set in a hard line, his gray eyes flat and murderous like a reptile.

The car started to move, and I tried to claw my way back to the surface of an ocean of despair, like I had jumped off a cliff and landed in deep water. Disoriented, unable to find the surface, I floundered in the mire, trying to regain my ability to think. I sat that way for a while. I don't know how long it lasted, but the three men in the back seemed to lose interest in me. The Tall-man was speaking on a cell phone, paying me no mind. The two bruisers on either side of me were staring out the window or into the middle distance, not apparently interested in the 12-year-old they had pinioned between them.

As the focused attention of the Tall-man was redirected, I began to be able to fight my way to the surface. I reached down and felt for my jeans pocket. I couldn't remember… Yes, I still had my pen. No, they hadn't frisked me. No, it apparently had not fallen out while I ran. This was good. I suppressed a grin. It was time to test out a theory.

Handling my mounting nervousness with square breathing, I withdrew the pen as slowly as I could, avoiding drawing attention to my movement, masking it by acting like I was uncomfortable, shifting from side to side a little and wincing. After a moment, I had the pen concealed in my palm, and still no one was paying direct attention to me. So I very carefully inked the luck symbol on first one palm and then the other.

I believed what the Tall-man had said to me before was correct. There was no way that I could hold any more than plus thirty-six luck, but I had spent twelve. We were on the freeway, and the car was moving at a good clip seventy-five, maybe eighty miles an hour. Shifting my pen, hoping that my nervousness didn't cause the ink to smudge with my sweat, I drew the symbol on my other palm. I had a decision to make about how to play this. I decided to see if natural instinct would work against the people in the car with me.

I let the pen fall from my hand. It bounced off my knee, and clattered to the floor. It rolled across the expanse of carpet between me and the Tall-man. All eyes fell to the pen on the carpet.

"Whoops," I said, looking away from it, acting as if I wanted nothing to do with it.

"Pick it up," I heard the Tall-man's command.

I shook my head, trusting that a small amount of pushback was necessary to allay suspicion. One of the men got his hand around the collar of my shirt and hoisted me out of my seat, dropping me bodily onto the floor. I let myself land hard and then came up, pretending to be a little more hurt than I actually was. Truthfully, luck still seemed to be on my side, and the landing had been very graceful. My elbow was still throbbing from the earlier impact with the door. It helped focus my mind and keep me from sinking into despair as the Tall-man's attention was once again on me.

How interesting. Pain was a useful counter to mind control. I focused on this, welcoming the pain as I crawled forward towards the pen. I moved slowly, careful to keep my movements non-threatening as I got into a kneeling position and then a crouch. I reached for slow time, hopeful that I could use it twice this loop, but it wouldn't come. Resigned to doing this the old-fashioned way, I looked up at the Tall-man, who was now within my reach.

"If you're going to offer to swear and serve now," the Tall-man said, "it's too late. The time has passed."

I shook my head. "No," I said. "I just wanted to point out," the Tall-man raised an eyebrow, "You’re it." I reached for him.

His knees were closest, and I was able to lay hold of both, one hand on each. Luck clamped on like an impossible magnet, and I had enough time to watch his eyes grow wide before he was bodily yanked off his feet, my hands and his knees colliding with my chest, pushing me into the bruiser behind me at eighty miles an hour. I heard a sickening crunch as my hands and his knees plunged through my chest and out the back of the car.

***

I stumbled into the familiar hallway and was so disoriented that the first person who bumped me knocked me over. I sat down with an “oof”, taking in great gasping gulps of air, still feeling the crushing force of the impact on my chest, first crushing me backward and then pushing me bodily through another person.

I don't think I would ever forget the sensation of my ribs breaking, my lungs collapsing, the person behind me crumbling, the seat behind us both engulfing a portion of both of our torsos. There had been a horrible moment in which I was still conscious as blood spray and gore went everywhere, the Tall-man's knees doing the world's fastest pile driver.

"Yo! Sorry about that."

I looked up. It was unusual to be spoken to this early in a loop. It was a tall redhead with a bright smile and freckled face. He waggled his phone at me. "Totally didn't see ya." He helped me to my feet. "Must be tough being that short in a place like this," he joked with me.

I blinked, trying to clear the images of violence and focus on the person in front of me. I'd been bumped by this kid over a hundred times. But he was being polite to me for the first time ever. Why?

I looked down at my core and was startled to see that I was still at plus twenty-four. True, I didn't die in a wave of aura wash in which I had to try and heal whatever it was inside of me that I tore each time. But I had carried positive luck through that experience before. I always started the loop at zero.

What was different this time?

"You okay, dude?" the redhead asked. He had a puzzled look on his face.

I realized that I was looking down at my chest instead of answering him. I glanced up and gave him a weak smile. "Yeah… I just had the wind knocked out of me for a moment," I said.

"Alright," the redhead said. "Well, as long as you're all right." He moved on.

As I stood like a stone in a human river, puzzling what it meant that I had carried luck through for the first time, the bell rang. The hallway began to clear, and I wasn't bumped once.

As I stood there, marveling at the effect of having positive luck, I realized what it was that was different. The luck I had, I had stolen from the grim squeezer. I wandered to one of the school bathrooms and waited until the final bell rang and it cleared out. I walked over to the mirror and watched as Zombie-Kaye appeared. She had still not decayed beyond the gray skin.

Not-me nodded slowly. "Alright. That was slick," he said. "I'm gonna start calling you hot-shot. You have a knack for breaking shit that I never would have thought possible. The look on his face when you grabbed hold of him with the luck..." Zombie-Kaye made a smacking appreciative sound in the mirror. "Delicious. That's one I'm gonna treasure forever," Not-me said. "Only next time, you gotta figure out how to do that without killing yourself in the process."

"Can they be killed?" I asked.

Not-me studied me for a minute. "Not exactly," he said. "But they can be deprived to the point where they lose their hold on this plane of existence and get stuck."

"Deprived?" I asked.

"Enough time without access to any luck, and they're in danger of getting trapped between worlds. Unable to come back and influence this one.”

"What does it mean that I'm still positive twenty-four luck?" I said.

Not-me raised his eyebrows. "Well, I can't see that. You gotta report that shit," he said.

"Well, I'm still positive twenty-four luck," I said, rolling my eyes.

"The same amount you exited last loop with?" Not-me asked.

I nodded.

Not-me frowned. "Well, that means that wherever that heart attack starts this point of the loop, he will now suddenly be missing all the currency that he was carrying. It looks like a full purse," Not-me frowned. "That means you probably have about thirty, maybe forty minutes before the Tall-man shows up to look for whoever robbed his minion."

"That's going to make today harder," I said.

Not-me nodded.

"Is there any chance that the Tall-man started this loop dead?" I asked, feeling hopeful.

Not-me shook his head. "No. But there is a chance that you could get your hands on him and take his luck," Not-me frowned. "But as I think you saw from your last encounter... it's going to take some planning."

***