Page 360 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What?”

“What year is it? Back home, I mean.”

“Two thousand twenty-two.” Her mouth twisted with a grimace of distaste. “I know I’m probably not going to like the answer, but why?”

“Hm.” Morgan looked out the window on his side of the car. “Interesting.”

Silence reigned in the back seat of the squad car as they bumped and jostled down the unpaved road towards town. Finally, realizing he wasn’t going to say any more without some prompting, Audrey nudged him with her elbow. “Mind letting me in on whatever it is you find so interesting?”

“Time,” he said again, as if that should explain all. When she only gave him a blank look, he said, “It’s not constant; it’s relative. See, the movie runs for about an hour and a half, but for us, in this alternate dimension, it takes about a week to go smoothly from start to finish. As near as I can figure, I’ve been re-enacting this movie for fifty years, and apparently that was correct. But not a lot of time passes in here. I just,” he shrugged. “I find that interesting.”

“You don’t look over fifty. You don’t look over thirty-five.”

He cast her a very boyish smile. “Yeah. I find that interesting, too.”

“Alternate dimension,” Audrey mused. “Constant time, relative time. Are you a scientist?”

“Security guard. But I’ve seen a lot of Star Trek. Never missed a rerun. Nobody can watch that much Spock and not pick up a few things.”

Picking at her fingernails, in an uncharacteristic bout of timidity, she asked, “Have you picked up on how we can get out of here and back into our own dimension?”

“I’ve got a good idea. The way I figure it, we can do one of two things. We can play out the movie to its scripted conclusion, the reality will have been completed and it’s possible that we’ll end up back in our own reality.”

“Possible?”

“Well, I figure it’s either that or, when this dimension reaches its completion, the credits will roll and then the reality will collapse. We could end up fading into nothingness.”

“And if we don’t act out the movie to the end?”

“We stay, reenacting the same scenes over and over again until we do.”

She groaned “Do we have to play out every single scene? I mean, exactly like the script?”

“We have a little bit of leeway, as far as I can tell. The problem comes in when we alter the course of the script. I’ve made some little mistakes before and still completed the scenes to the end of the movie. If I veer too dramatically from the script though, then the scene starts over, and too many little mistakes spread out over several scenes can result in my going back two or three scenes. And of course, if I get killed or the spiders win, then the whole movie starts over.”

Audrey raised her hand. “Excuse me. Killed? What do you mean, killed?”

Morgan scratched one eyebrow, ducking his head a little sheepishly. “Well, in the beginning, for about three months I was a little suicidal. When it finally hit me that I wasn’t going home anytime soon, I tried a lot of—other ways to get out of this place. Thankfully, they didn’t work.”

She groaned again, turning her face back to the window.

“It was depressing,” Morgan protested. “I’m thirty-five, still in high school, and no matter what I do I’m always failing history. I’m a nerd, the school bullies pick on me, and I had to learn how to play the ukulele so I could sing a dorky little song about a sad frog in scene nine. I absolutely hate that song, but I have to do it because it’s in the script.”

“A sad frog?”

“It was the age of Elvis and Frank Sinatra, and that was the best the director could come up with.” Morgan shook his head, but then he laughed and covered his eyes with one hand. “Oh, and you’re going to love scene thirteen.”

For some reason, when he said that the fine hairs at the nape of Audrey’s neck began to prickle. Warily, she asked, “Why? What happens in scene thirteen?”

“I spank you for being unreasonable.”

“Okay, stop the car,” Audrey told the policemen in the front seat.

Neither man turned around or spoke, and the one who had cut a switch for her continued driving as though she hadn’t said anything at all.

“Do you guys understand English?” she demanded. “I said pull over!”

Neither officer showed any signs of having heard her.

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