I opened my eyes. I was on the balcony, elbow on the table, fingers against my forehead. Carmen – sat on the other chair next to me – yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. She turned to look at me and I got up before she could say a word, grabbed her hand and dragged her inside.

  “What is the matter with you?” she admonished me, but I looked at her with a finger to my lips and walked her through the lounge. When we were between the kitchen and the front door, I stopped.

  “I can reset time,” I said, pointing at the gem in my head. “That’s what this does. When you were on the balcony just now, you were going to tell me that you could have sworn it was nighttime. It was. I don’t know exactly how it works but it puts us back to that moment on the balcony after I’d explained to you about the girl, the head, the gem. But time is still moving forwards. It was 3 am when we were out there.

  “Now it’s,” I quickly grabbed my phone from my pocket before putting it back, “nine thirty-one. This is the fourth time I’m living through this. The System has initialised and put a bounty on my head and in about four minutes, Darren will be at the door coming to claim it.

  “I need you to trust me. Go to the bedroom, pack our gym bags with clothes for both of us. Get dressed and ready within ten minutes. Grab any cash you can and wake the girl up. We need to go. You can check the news on your phone. It will show you I’m not playing here.”

  I could see in her face that she had so many questions, but she did as I asked, grabbing her phone from the coffee table in the lounge and headed to the bedroom. I went into the kitchen and had a look for the biggest knives I could find. I grabbed a couple – maybe five or six inches long – stuffed them into the waistband of my jeans, and then headed back to the balcony. I approached at an angle to see if Darren was there without him being able to see me.

  When I couldn’t see him, I ventured out to the balcony to the side closest to his. The barrier came up to around the middle of my torso, just below the chest and there was a two metre gap between our balconies. I grabbed one of the chairs and placed it in the corner and used it to lift myself onto the barrier, its top wide enough for me to get purchase. I clung to the wall and didn’t look down, but I was confident I could get across.

  I stretched a leg across, facing the wall and planting my left hand against the wall on Darren’s side. I made it, rested my foot on their barrier and as I went to move my other leg across, I slipped. I tried my best to grab onto the barriers, either of them; tried to get some purchase somewhere but I hit my side against my balcony, knocked my head against Darren’s and fell through the gap. I hit the balconies below and then I was free-falling, hands and legs flailing at the air, my body wracked in pain. I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.

  I crashed into the ground with a force that I couldn’t even process.

  ***

  My eyes opened. Alrighty then. Take five.

  I was on the balcony. Carmen was not. She was outside my sphere of influence where I’d died. So would Darren and Michelle have been. I checked the time. 9.33 am. I didn’t have more than a minute or two. I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the knives and a wad of tissue paper and back out onto the balcony.

  I put the chair in the corner again, and quickly used the paper to wipe down the barrier. At some point during the night, it had rained a little, small droplets still spattered around. I attempted the move again. On the chair, on the barrier, face and body clinging to the wall as I stretched across. I took my time a little. Braced myself. Then I pushed off of my right foot, fingers doing their best to dig into the brick as I managed to get across with all the grace of a bear practicing ballet, my foot landing softly on Darren’s barrier.

  I waited a moment, listening out for whether they might have heard me or not. I could hear the sound of their TV playing a news channel. Maybe all the channels were like that now. It was big enough news to be an emergency broadcast.

  “…news is filtering in that police and security services are closing in on River Clarke’s location…”

  Well, that’s just great. I’d wasted too much time on these two twats. I got down quietly, ducked to the floor, and took a little peek through the two-pane glass patio doors. The side furthest from me was open. Their flat had the same layout as ours but with the dining room and lounge switched around. I could see the TV and as I nudged my head forward, keeping low to the ground, I could see the armrest of the sofa, a metre or so from me. Rolls of fat that resembled an arm rested on the top of it.

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  I could hear Darren talking now. “We need to get him before the police or anyone else.”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Michelle said.

  I watched as she struggled to get up from the sofa. Every time previous, she hadn’t been a couple of minutes behind Darren because it was pre-planned like that. It was because that’s how long it had taken for her to physically get there. Darren was the main threat right now, but to get to him, I needed to get past her first. It was like being stuck behind an eighteen-wheeler in the fast lane.

  I shuffled quietly to the open pane, tucked my head around the corner and watched as the pizza-lover waddled towards the opening to the hallway. Darren was already gone but I had a plan and if there was one thing I could say about my plans, it was that my plans always worked…sometimes.

  And I could reset for when they didn’t.

  As Michelle cleared the entrance, I got up and walked carefully through their through-lounge, careful to not make a sound. I sidled up to the entrance, listening out for them, but I couldn’t hear them at all. I took a risk, popped my head around and looked down the hallway. What was the guestroom in my flat looked to be Darren’s bedroom here. I could see him grabbing something from under the bed. The machete. With it in hand, he turned and I quickly tucked my head back.

  “Mum, I’m going,” I heard him say as his voice got closer.

  “I’m coming,” Michelle shouted back.

  I counted seconds in my head, and when I was sure he had got to the door, I made my move, grabbing one of the knives at my waist in my right hand. He had his hand on the handle of the door but turned his head when he felt my presence. He barely had the time to be surprised.

  I’d watched enough true crime in my life to know that what they taught you in the movies about stabbings and strangling’s was a load of bullshit. Both were very slow ways to kill people, unless you knew what you were doing.

  I didn’t know what I was doing.

  I did know that the best thing was to use my element of surprise and go feral on the prick.

  I slammed my blade into Darren’s neck as hard as I could, but he lashed out with the machete. I caught the blow with my left hand, which was as stupid as it sounds, but it was either that or let the blow hit my head. As it was, the machete still grazed my scalp and I had a nasty gash to my hand, but it didn’t matter anyway. Darren dropped the machete, hands clasping his throat. As he spluttered and gasped for air, I grabbed the machete and did like I had done before. Hacked as hard and as fast as I could. I wasn’t trained for this. I wasn’t prepared for this. I just knew I had to do what was necessary to keep myself and Carmen safe.

  After I was done with Darren, I moved towards the bedrooms, machete in hand. I didn’t bother looking back at him. I didn’t think I could. To see what I had done might’ve frozen me in my tracks. I was no killer. Isn’t that how we worked? Turn a blind eye to the things we didn’t want to see. If we didn’t see it, it didn’t happen. That’s what I needed to do to move forward.

  Michelle’s bedroom was the one opposite the bathroom. I took a peek, saw her putting ammo into the shotgun. I’d been in my fair share of scraps in my younger days and the truth was – Michelle was a big woman and not one I could easily take on. Especially not when she had that shotgun. I backtracked to where Darren’s body was, still careful not to look at him. I quietly opened the front door a tad, and then ducked into their kitchen, and waited for Michelle to stumble across his body. My hand was bleeding badly but the adrenaline pumping through my body stopped me from feeling the pain as I should.

  I kept my eyes on the door – Darren’s body was at the foot of it. Michelle came along a few moments later. She dropped to the floor when she saw him and knelt over him. She had her back to me, the shotgun on the floor next to her. Maybe fate was being kind to me for the four times I’d already died.

  I hacked down with the machete right into the back of her scalp as she knelt over her child. She wailed loudly and tried to turn, grasping for the gun but I got there first. Her eyes widened as she saw me.

  “Sorry,” I said as I pulled the trigger and looked away. It only helped me to not see her head, but bits of flesh and blood and brain splattered across the carpets and the walls. I gagged but held it in.

  Still, no time to rest. No time to consider what I had done. I jumped over their bodies to check outside the door but there was no-one outside. I shut the front door and made my way to their bathroom. It was as dirty as I would expect of these two but I put the shotgun on the floor, put the other knife from my waist on the edge of the bath and turned the taps of the washbasin on. The adrenaline was receding from my system and the pain of the gash had me wincing. There was blood on my hands. Looking in the mirror, there was blood just above the gem, trickling down from the gash in my head. The bags under my eyes seemed darker, my skin haggard and gaunt, a little wrinkled in places, and a little more chubby in the cheeks. I looked like I’d aged twenty odd years. This morning was taking its toll on me.

  I kept my left hand under the tap and every so often used water to clean my head too. With my free hand, I opened their cabinet and lo and behold, they had everything I needed. Gauze, bandaging, ethanol. I grabbed a towel, put it to the gash and let it soak up the blood and water, before using the ethanol to disinfect the wound, wincing through gritted teeth as I did. Quickly, roughly, I applied a wad of the gauze, then wrapped the bandage around it to keep it in place. Blood was seeping through immediately but it would do for now.

  I took a seat on the edge of their bath, put my head in my hands as I stared at their bathroom floor, my muscles aching a little, my knees a little wobbly. I let the moment sink in. I had just become a murderer. Never mind that I knew they would kill Carmen to get me. I had murdered them in cold blood.

  I must have been sitting there for a minute or two when I gave myself a slap around the face. I needed to snap out of it. No time to wallow in self-pity or regret. And truthfully, I didn’t regret killing them. The world’s better off without certain people in it. Subjective judgment or not, I believed it. And I’d lived it. Those two might have only wanted the money, but they had no hesitation to kill when they thought it necessary. I had only acted in kind.

  And I would do it again.