Chapter 6 - Jane, Interrupted

Neither she or Cooper said much on the drive back. Cooper’s jaw kept clenching, as if he was being stabbed repeatedly and was trying to hold back a yelp of pain. Jane couldn’t stop cracking her knuckles and worked her fingers methodically, one digit at a time, sometimes popping the bone so hard it hurt.

She felt untethered; adrift. What were they supposed to do now? Richards had been a completely pointless dead end with his nonsense findings of, ‘this is you’. Reflecting more on the situation, she found herself getting angry. Anger was good. Much better than the alternative. She was angry at Richards, angry at the people messing with her and Cooper, angry at whoever wiped their memories, angry at the world. None of the anger helped, but it was better than helpless.

Cooper broke the silence first.

“And thus, the native hue of resolution,” he said, slowly, “is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. And enterprises of great pitch and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.”

“Shakespeare?” Jane said.

“Hamlet,” he nodded.

“I love you, but I don’t feel one single ounce closer to having a solution. That was enormously unpractical. What’s even the point of that quote?”

“It’s about how too much reasoning and thought can paralyze us. It’s reminding us to have a bias towards action.”

“I absolutely refuse to be lectured about inactivity by Hamlet, of all people.” she said.

Cooper chuckled and steered them onto the highway. Jane recognized what he was doing; getting her talking and out of her head by coming at her from a different direction. He was a total goof, and she loved him for it.

“Richards must be wrong,” he said. “That’s all there is to it.”

She nodded. “Agreed. He’s burnt as a contact from now on. What an absolute waste of time that was.”

“It’s our own fault for trusting our fates to a gambling-addicted degenerate.”

“Sadly, most of our contacts dabble in degeneracy.”

“Let’s bail on the motel,” Cooper said. “We go into deeper hiding.”

“We can’t ignore the missing month anymore.”

“We don’t know those two things are related, Jane.”

“Yes we do, Cooper,” she replied, her voice rising.

“We don’t,” he said, stubbornly. “You’re establishing a connection that hasn’t been proven. There are thousands of reasons we could be missing a month of memories that have nothing to do with our own duplicates attacking us.”

She gave him a flat stare. “Do you hear yourself? That’s patently absurd.”

The flush in Cooper’s neck rose to his cheeks and his nostrils flared. Rather than respond, he turned his attention back to the road, gripping the wheel tighter. Jane harumphed and crossed her arms.

This was horrible. They weren’t even on the same page. Her and Cooper were always on the same page, but this impossible thing had driven a distance between them, and one she didn’t know how to solve. Cooper was only doing what he always did, putting any emotion aside and looking at raw facts. But he knew as well as she did that the answers weren’t always so cut and dried. And his reluctance to keep pulling at the missing month pissed her off.

They didn’t speak for the remainder of the drive and by the time they pulled into the motel, it was fully dark out and the only illumination came from the flickering neon lights that lined the exterior of the building. All the rooms in the single-story dwelling were accessible directly from the parking lot and they swung into the empty spot in front of their unit.

A small, ever so slight tickle at the back of her neck gave her a moment’s pause getting out of the car, but she shrugged it off to her mood and the strange events of the day. Cooper went before her, reaching out swipe their card and open the door.

“Huh,” he said as he turned the knob. “Knob feels loose.”

The door swung inward and Cooper stepped through the frame.

Knob feels loose.

Jane’s body moved with purpose and before she knew what she was doing, she gave Cooper a shove, pushing him all the way into the room. He stumbled forward just as the machete from the figure hiding behind the door whooshed down in the space he’d just occupied. Diving low, she slammed into the attacker’s legs.

Chaos followed.

Cooper turned towards her with a yell of warning just as a figure rushed from the bathroom and hit him with what looked like a police baton. He cried out and dropped to a knee. Jane couldn’t help as she was dealing with her own problems, specifically the person trying to carve her in half with a machete.

She rolled away from the door towards the side of the bed. The attacker – masked and dressed in black like the others – stood up and hesitated, looking back and forth between her and Cooper, who had now thrown his assailant to the ground and was wrestling to get the baton. Jane didn’t hesitate; she reached out and grabbed whatever her hand closed around, not caring in the slightest what it was. As it happened, it was the motel digital clock, a small rectangular box that was probably considered cutting edge in nineteen eight-five, which she brought up in front of her face, just as the machete slashed downwards.

The blow knocked the clock from her hands and she spun with the force, whipping her leg around and spin-kicking her attacker in the face. As they fell to the ground, she followed with her elbow and heard Cooper yell, “don’t kill him!”

Too late.

Her elbow slammed firmly into her attacker’s neck, and cartilage tore with a damp crunch

She collapsed on top of him, breathless and shaky. Almost dizzy, she watched Cooper finish off his assailant with a well-aimed punch to the temple.

The whole thing had taken maybe ten seconds.

Fights were typically like this. Fast. Vicious. The movies showed elaborate, fifteen-minute battles, elegantly choreographed, but real fights lasted moments and often the people who won were the people who moved first.

Her and Cooper always moved first.

She groaned and rolled off the body, suddenly exhausted. Her body always reacted the same in the aftermath of combat, when all the adrenaline pumped out of her body. In the Mount Rushmore of stimulants, there was ecstasy, cocaine, meth and then way above all of those was adrenaline during a fight. The comedown was brutal, though.

“Are you hurt?” Cooper rushed to her side.

“No. They got your shoulder? Are you okay?”

“I’m going to be bruised tomorrow, but it’s not broken. I managed to shift a little and take it on the muscle. Did you kill yours?”

“Yeah.” She took his hand and got to her feet. They took a moment for a fast embrace.

Safe. This was the only place. His arms. She couldn’t spend too long here, or she’d never leave, but she did give herself to the count of five. It had been a trying day.

“Okay.” She smiled weakly at him and caressed his cheek. “I guess we’re back on the clock.”

“You pushed me because I said the door felt weird, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. That and I felt a tickle and like a nerd on their first assignment, I ignored it.”

“No harm done and you paid attention to it when it mattered.”

“You kept yours alive?”

“I did, but I don’t know how long they’ll be out for.”

“I wonder—” she started and then broke off with a gasp, realizing something.

The man.

Leaving Cooper behind with a stunned open mouth, she turned and slammed her shoulder into the motel door, bursting outside. The streetlights and flashing neon signs from the surrounding gas station meant there was enough light to see past the parking lot.

The man, she thought. It was the only thing she thought. The man from the video. Where…?

There.

She saw him. Across the street, beneath the giant sign that advertised the mall. It was far enough away that she couldn’t see him perfectly, but she could at least make out the brown of his seersucker suit. That was him. She was sure of it.

“Hey,” Cooper said from behind her, following her outside. “What are you doing?”

“The guy!” she yelled, taking off through the parking lot. “The man!”

Her feet slammed on the pavement as she crossed the distance. She wished she was armed. Not that she didn’t think she could take him down, but better safe than sorry.

Much too far away for her to reach in time, a car pulled to a halt in front of the shadowy figure, who scrambled to get in the back seat. Realizing she wasn’t going to be able to get to it in time, she pulled out her phone and started snapping pictures as she ran. Most of them would likely be blurry and unusable given she was running at a full sprint; even so, it was something.

Before running into traffic, she skidded to a halt at the same time the car peeled away from the curb. She swore softly under her breath, and then because she felt like it, louder.

“Fuck,” she said.

“Jane, what the hell?” Cooper pulled up behind her, barely out of breath despite having just sprinted across a parking lot. Cross-fit really paid off.

“It was the guy. From the video.”

“Did you get pictures?”

She waggled her phone. “Hopefully. Let’s get back into the room before your guy wakes up.”

“We should have awhile. I was incredibly irritated at being attacked for a second time and it’s possible I hit them too hard.”

“You’re a model of restraint, love.” She gave him a pat on the cheek, and he leaned into it.

“This has been a very unsettling twenty-four hours.”

“It has.”

“Who do you think attacked us this time?”

She snorted. “I’m afraid to look. What if it’s our parents or something?”

“Can you imagine? Or worse, what if they start DNA combining us and it’s both of us smashed together.”

“Wouldn’t that be awful?” She laughed. They were often like this right after a fight. Pumped full of life and so glad to be alive that they were almost giddy. Silly jokes helped keep them sane through an otherwise insane life.

“Remember that one we got done in Disney?” His eyes sparkled with mischief. “Where we had our pictures combined to predict what our child would look like? And it turned out it looked like the Karate Kid mixed with Aubrey Plaza?”

“The KaAubrey Kid.” She let out a laugh. “It still haunts my dreams.”

They crossed the parking lot, each still giggling at the dumb memory. In a few seconds, they’d have to walk through the motel door and back into a room where all that waited for them was another dead body, an interrogation and a step deeper into this madness they found themselves. But at least for the next few steps, she could pretend they were a normal couple.

Step.

Step.

Motel.

She took Cooper’s hand and gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Come one, love. Time to put on our game faces.”

They stepped through the door.

Onwards to chapter 7