Rewind, page 16
18:23 pm 6th November 2015
Bridget could taste blood on her tongue and her mouth smarted. She knew she’d lost a tooth, there was a tingling pain in her gums. She lifted her arms up once more, pinned between the manic flurry of punches being rained down upon her.
“GIRLS?!” their mother’s voice came from downstairs.
Bridget rolled side to side, trying to avoid the punches raining down on her head. She couldn’t manage to wrestle Chris off. She was pinned.
“CHRISTINE, stop that!” their mother was already at the top of the stairs.
“FUCK YOU!” She screamed. She sounded like a demon possessed.
Before Bridget could react, Christine threw herself up. She rushed to their mother and she thrust her backwards.
Bridget managed to roll onto her side when she heard her mother’s scream. There was several crashes and loud thumps. Then an eerie silence. Bridget clawed to her feet, feeling a thick string of blood ooze from her mouth. Christine was at the top of the stairs, their mother was at the bottom.
“NO!” She tore herself onto her feet. Christine was shoved to the floor as Bridget barged past.
“MUM?!” She cried in horror.
Their mother was laid broken at the bottom of the stairs. Her spine had been fractured in several places, her arms broken and bent back. A small steady pool of blood was seeping out of a cut to the back of her head. There was a look of horror on Diana’s face. A pain that told Bridget her worst fears had finally come true.
Her mother was dead. Christine had killed her!
“NO!” She screamed in a hoarse and broken wail. This was not how it was supposed to be.
She dropped to her mother’s side.
She was dead. Christine had killed her! She needed to undo this! She spat the mouthful of blood from her mouth and wiped her eyes.
She dug into her consciousness; like hands burrowing into soil she found the seed of travelling. With a great speed and dedication, she threw herself backwards in time.
18:23 pm 2nd November 2015 [redux]
She found herself back on the landing. Watching in slow-motion as Christine’s foot connected with Frank’s face. Her ears popped and her nose erupted in a gush of blood. This was another rewind within the rewind. A rewind in a part of the timeline she had never originally existed in.
“NO!” She threw herself at Chris. She wrestled her to the floor.
They squirmed and writhed, like a set of eels.
“FUCKING BITCH! STOP PLAYING WITH TIME!” Christine screamed.
Christine managed to wrest herself on top and she threw a punch straight into Bridget’s face. She caught her on the nose and broke it with a squelching crunch.
18:23 pm 3rd November 2015 [Redux]
“How did you like that bitch?” Christine growled.
Bridget’s rage reached a new whole new level. She wrenched Christine’s arm and tore her down to the floor. She thrust her knee into her sister’s groin. She climbed onto her and brought her forehead swiftly down on Christine’s nose.
18:23 pm 4th November 2015 [Redux]
Her face came away with a smear of claret where Christine’s nose had ruptured on impact.
“You evil-” Bridget screamed as she rained a punch down.
18:23 pm 5th November 2015 [Redux]
“-Fucking,” another punch.
18:23 pm 6th November 2015 [Redux]
“-BITCH!” Bridget sounded feral.
“GIRLS?! What’s going on?” They had ended up in exactly the same moment as before. Their mother was climbing the stairs already.
Bridget knew how the rest of this scenario played out, she needed to change it.
“Stay down there Mum! Don’t come up the stairs!” she roared.
Christine punched. Her blow caught her older sister in the stomach and winded her. She then threw her off and staggered to her feet.
Their mother was still ascending the stairs, each step groaning in protest.
Christine closed in on their mother, but not before kicking Bridget in the face. Her foot connected with Bridget’s broken nose and her head snapped back and smashed against the skirting board they’d fallen near. Bridget had never experienced a pain like it. It stung like a million needs had just been fired into her brain. She felt the world slip around her, but Christine held onto the timeline. With a sensation that felt like nails dragging down a chalkboard, she kept them from both folding through time. Bridget felt like a bubble had popped around her and her senses tingled.
Bridget grasped for Christine’s ankle, tripping her to the floor as Chris tried to lunge for the stairs. Christine landed flat on her face.
“Mum! STOP!” Bridget cried.
Diana faltered a couple of steps from the stop. Her eyes opened wide when she saw her daughters in the middle of a vicious fight. Both of them were bleeding and it was a frightening sight.
“What the hell is going on?! Where have you-?” Her ‘mother mode’ kicked in, she started coming up the stairs.
Christine surprised Bridget, she charged into her bedroom instead of aiming for Diana.
“Bridget, what the hell is going on?”
“Mum, get down the stairs. It’s not safe up here…” Bridget slowly pulled herself onto her feet. She felt woozy and sick.
Diana wasn’t paying attention, she was closing in. Her face melted into open anguish at the closer sight of Bridget’s broken and bloody nose. What the hell had happened between her daughters?
“MUM! GO DOWNSTAIRS!” Bridget bellowed with tears filling her eyes. She raised her arms to usher her downstairs. Her dramatic waving of the arms did not stop her mother closing in.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to kill you?” Christine appeared out of nowhere. She lashed out with the kitchen knife, slashing their mother straight across the throat. Claret erupted from the wound like a geyser.
“NO!” Bridget screamed.
Her mother’s hand instinctively went to her throat but it did nothing to suppress the blood spraying across the landing. It sprayed into the air like a fire-hydrant. A fine mist of droplets sprayed Bridget’s face and it disturbed her greatly.
Her mother’s face was of sheer horror and panic.
Bridget staggered clumsily towards her mother, her legs were weak and did not work correctly. The knock to her skull had disorientated her. “NO!” she cried hoarsely.
Her mother began falling to her knees.
Bridget burst into tears.
No. This was not supposed to happen.
She dug down, found her power and began rewinding.
“OH NO BITCH!” Christine snarled.
There was a slight knock, a slight wobble in reality as Christine began blocking Bridget’s rewind. She was trying to rewind Bridget’s rewind. The fabric of reality began to ripple, the colour draining from it. Bright sparks of colour flashed in front of Bridget’s eyes. She pushed and pushed mentally, trying to overpower Christine’s block.
Neither girl could overpower the other.
Then it stopped. The two sisters crumpled to the floor.
The air felt suddenly cool. Almost frigid. Like suddenly they were standing in a refrigerator. Bridget slowly lifted up onto her knees. She wobbled and had to use her hands for support.
“Oh my god…” she moaned. Her mother was frozen mid-fall, her hands around her throat. A long jet of blood was frozen in mid air. It was the most heart-breaking sight Bridget had ever seen. Her mother’s horrified expression would be forever etched in her mind.
“…Look what you’ve done. Now you’ve really broke time…” Christine snarled.
“Why? Why, why did you have to kill her?” Bridget burst into tears. She crawled to her frozen mother and reached out, she felt her mother’s arm. It felt cold to the touch, the fabric of her coat crunched under her touch just like snow.
“Because she didn’t love me. She only loved you… When you disappeared she put so much effort into finding you, she didn’t do the same for me… She didn’t care…”
“You fucking idiot, she loved you. She spent her entire life trying to get you to love her…”
“Bullshit, but what would you know…? You were always miss perfect wasn’t you…”
“Oh give it a rest… You have no fucking idea. You thought you was so hard done to. Well maybe if you’d have opened your goddamn eyes you’d have seen she was trying to get through to you,”
“She only wanted to know you,”
“That’s because you didn’t want to know her. You’re not quite the victim you pretend to be. You threw everything back in her face…”
“I read her fucking journal, I know she never loved me… I was an accident. I was unwanted…”
“You read journals from a decade ago, she’s not the same person… It was never that you was unwanted-”
“-Oh god Bridget, get your head out of her arse!”
Bridget turned her attention from their mother suspended mid-death.
“And what about Dad? What did he do to deserve your punishment?” She spat. The wooziness was washing over her in waves. She need a few moments to compose herself.
“…He didn’t love me either, I saw it in his eyes… I was the problem, the problem they wished would just go away…”
Bridget couldn’t quite believe that her sister was seriously this delusional.
“…And I did didn’t I! I went away and look how you all got on with life without me! Because I didn’t matter…”
“You was a bitch Christine. Don’t forget how fucking horrible you were most of the time. Nobody abandoned you, you drove them away! Dad never stopped loving you, even when you kept bringing the police to our door! He was disappointed in you! And you never did anything to right that. You were the reason you felt unloved… You made it impossible…”
“So what? I’m to blame for being the problem child? I’m to blame that my parents preferred you, over me?”
“Yes…You kept pushing people away. Eventually they stop trying…”
“Oh fuck you Bridget. Thinking you’re so fucking wise. You haven’t got a clue! You only know what it’s like to be the favourite…”
“You think I had it easy? Every goddamn time you fucked up, I had to compensate…”
“Boo-hoo, poor Bridget had to be a good girl…”
Bridget realised then that there was no hope. Her sister was twisted beyond all means of repair. There was no way she could win, no way she could get Christine to understand.
Had the power of time-control done this to her? Had it broken her that much?
She blinked and numbly watched Chris stoop before Frank. He’d been paused. Whatever they’d done to time had been strong enough to affect him. He was mid-run, three legs off the floor as he bolted for the stairs in a panic. It took Bridget a split second to realise that Chris had pulled a knife out of his side. She had stabbed him. The knife came away bloody.
It hit Bridget that her sister was just utterly deranged. She was a complete psychopath.
The tears welled up from the very depths of Bridget’s tortured soul, how could Chris be so evil? How had she fallen so far? How had one simple misconception turned her into this?
How could someone so evil have this power over time? It didn’t make sense. Was that why Bridget had the time? Was it her fate to stop her sister?
Her head spun and the thoughts were lost in a congealing mess in her mind.
She knew that when they left this broken state of time, Frank would die. Maybe even instantly and he would never understand why. He would just simply be.
The same could not be said for their mother. She had seconds left, seconds to bleed out and die.
“Chris, why are you doing this?”
“Because its who I am. I’m the bad daughter…The problem child remember…”
“You’re fucking insane… I won’t let you do this, this has got to stop…”
“You can’t stop me, all I need to do is dislodge you from time and bye-bye Bridget, I reckon if we keep rewinding enough one of us will disappear.”
“But what if it’s you?”
Chris shrugged. “I won’t be here for the mess…”
She approached swiftly. The bloody knife glinted evilly in her hand.
“You can’t dislodge me…”
Chris reflected on her words. “Maybe you’re right… But perhaps we’re both dislodged at the minute, time has broken after all…” she approached closer and closer.
“I will undo everything you do, I won’t let you kill them, I’ll undo everything you do,”
“I’ll do the same Bridget, I’ll undo everything you do, because why is it alright for you to play God? Why is it ok for you to talk down some girl off a bridge? Or spare your friend from being raped. Why is it okay for you to go rescue six people from a burning care home… Why do you get to change people’s fates? If you were so desperate to undo it all, you’d undo everything. What gives you the right to be the judge, jury and executioner? You thought you were being a hero by saving people, but you were being selfish. You were only saving the ones you thought were worth saving…”
“And what about you?”
“I admit that I did it for my own benefit! I don’t pretend I did anything to be a hero…”
“I was trying to put it all right…”
“But you didn‘t did you, you couldn’t let Max die. That was the original timeline!…”
“A timeline you‘d already manipulated long before I did… Not very original was it,” Bridget spat in Chris’ face.
“Do you want to know what happened?”
Bridget gave her only a dark glare.
“Rodney overdosed. The one person in this entire miserable world that understood me, died. In front of me. Choked on his own vomit. And I took that back. I rewound time, but by sparing him, his best friends died instead. They took the dose of heroin that was meant for him…”
Bridget didn’t show a single flicker of emotion.
“…And it spiralled further and further out of control, and one day you died. I thought maybe it was the answer to my prayers, maybe I’d finally have the mother I’d always been denied. But she walked out! On me and Dad! And do you know what she said to me, what she fucking said as she left. She said… I was the wrong child,”
The fact Christine spoke so candidly of her sisters death disturbed Bridget to the core.
“So I rewound time, brought you back from death. I’d gotten strong by that point. I could rewind a couple of days. It took all my strength and left me powerless for a few days, but I could do it. So I brought you back, because I was never going to get what I wanted…”
Bridget knew her mother had obviously said a terrible thing, but she couldn’t help but think her mother was right. She was a horrible person. Why would anybody want her?
Chris smiled briefly. It was a sinister one and it greatly unnerved Bridget further. For a private moment, a split second, she saw a darkness in Chris’ eyes that she’d never seen. This is what hate did to you. It made you the Devil.
“You could’ve done so much good with this power!” Bridget cried. More out of sorrow that her sister had fallen so far down a dark path.
“And what good did you do Bridget? You only changed the parts in the play, swapped people‘s fates…”
“…And it was wrong. We shouldn’t have this power…” Especially not an evil bitch like Christine.
“Stupid Bridget, it was the point of our power! We are Gods!” Chris cocked her head back, that wicked smile morphed into a leer, “I’m just sorry Bridge, there’s only room for one God in this universe,”
The knife slipped inside Bridget like a knife into butter. The sharp pain almost didn’t feel true, it took a moment for her brain to register it.
Slowly she looked down. The knife was embedded in her chest up to the hilt.
“Now when you die, there’ll be nobody to rewind time but me… I could handle you being the perfect daughter, I could handle you receiving all the things I wanted, but I can‘t handle you having this power… It‘s mine, just mine…”
Chris tore the knife free.
Bridget hit the deck. Blood bubbled up from the wound and she could feel it in her mouth suddenly. She pressed her hands to the wound, but the blood only seeped around her fingers.
“You stabbed me?” she cried in disbelief. Christine smirked and turned away. She tossed the knife to the floor, it landed point first in the floorboard.
The pain of the stab wound was beginning to spread through her chest. It was compromising her breathing.
She needed to rewind. She needed to undo the stabbing. She needed to undo all of this!
A sharp stabbing pain arched through her chest. Blood was gushing from her. She would bleed out before long. Her attention turned to her frozen mother. It was still a haunting sight, a still capture of death. Like a fleshed out photograph. Only the most macabre of minds could create the sight she saw. And this destruction was all Christine’s fault.
She needed to rewind. But she didn’t know how far she could travel. She didn’t even know if she could. Time was frozen stiff. She tried to take control but she couldn’t move it. Time felt slippery in her grasp. Perhaps she could use an anchor?
But she had no photograph to hand…
An idea uncurled in her mind.
She dragged herself onto her feet.
“What the hell are you doing?” Chris sneered.
A huge splat of blood hit the floor but Bridget managed to right herself onto jellified legs. With both hands she tried to compress the wound, but the blood only pumped and pumped.
This type of bleeding was catastrophic and she would be dead soon. Time was against her, she needed to do this quickly.
She staggered to the stairwell, nearly lost her balance and had to slump against the wall. She then carefully slid her way to the bottom, one careful step at a time. She left a bloody trail along the wall.
