More Than This (17 page)

At last, there didn’t have to be anymore, didn’t have to be anymore burden, anymore weight to carry.

He took a moment to try and shake off the tightening in his chest.

He breathed.

Seth leaps over the ticket barrier at the train station and pounds up the steps to the platform. He doesn’t look at the train as he heads for the bridge over the tracks. He hears nothing from the boar, no doubt sleeping away a hot day in the confines of its den.

Up the steps, across the bridge, and down the other side.

He took off his jacket, because that seemed right, too. He was only wearing a T-shirt underneath, and the wind stung his bare arms. He shivered more as he folded up his coat and placed it on his shoes.

He felt present there, but also separate at the same time, as if he was watching himself from a height, looking down on a shoeless, coatless boy, staring at the sea.

Like he was waiting.

But for what?

Whatever it was, it never come.

And then, “I’m ready,” he whispered to himself.

He found, to his surprise, with a sudden upsurge of grief that nearly knocked him flat, that he was telling the truth.

He was ready.

He began walking toward the sea.

He leaps over the gate at the other side of the train station and out the far exit. He pounds down the incline toward the first main road, wincing at the strain on his feet, but his muscles seem to be awakening, returning to the memory of themselves, returning to the memory of running –

He takes the first running steps into the destroyed neighborhood.

Everything around him is dead.

The cold of the water was shocking, brutally so, even in those first steps, and he couldn’t keep himself from gasping. A wave of gooseflesh marched up his arms, the thin black hairs standing almost vertical. It felt for a moment as if he had already started to drown ankle-deep in five inches of water.

He knew then that if the water didn’t get him, the cold would.

He forced himself to take another step.

And another.

It’s so quiet, all he can hear are his footfalls and his breathing. In this first street, everything’s been flattened, so there’s only blackened ground reaching out on either side. He kicks up clumps of ash into the air, some of it drying now in the sun and making a trailing cloud.

He turns his gaze forward again.

Toward Masons Hill.

His feet – almost blue with cold – went numb as they stepped from rock to rock. Each new shock as he waded in deeper was like a knife slicing into him, but he pressed on. The water reached his knees, his thighs, darkening his jeans to black. There was a long shallows, but he knew it deepened suddenly a little farther out to depths that had to be swum. He also knew there was a current, one that would take an unsuspecting swimmer and smash them into the rocks that loomed down the beach.

He was so cold now that it felt as if his skin had been dipped in acid. A larger wave splashed across his T-shirt, and he couldn’t help but call out. He was shaking uncontrollably and had to force himself to keep moving forward.

Another wave came, larger than the last and he almost lost his balance. Another followed that. He wouldn’t be able to stand for much longer, his feet and toes gripping hard on the submerged rocks, the tide pulling forward and back. He readied himself to let go, to plunge in, to begin the swim out into the farther cold, out into the terrible, terrible freedom that awaited.

He was here. He had made it this far. There was so very little distance left to go, and he was the one who had brought himself here.

It was almost over. He was almost there.

He had never, not once in his life, felt this powerful.

Down another street, the concrete frames of some houses are still standing, though burnt through, inside and out. Not just houses, but storefronts and larger structures, too.

All blackened, all empty, all dead.

His throat is burning, and he thinks he should have brought water. But the thought is fleeting and he lets it go.

Masons Hill remains firmly on the horizon, and that’s all he needs.

He feels empty. Emptied of everything.

He could run forever.

He feels powerful.

Then a wave, larger than any before, engulfed him, plunging him under the freezing water. The cold was so fierce it was like an electric shock, sending his body into a painful spasm. He was afloat, twisting underwater, narrowly avoiding cracking his skull on an outcropping.

Coughing, spluttering, he broke the surface as another wave crashed down. He surged up again, his feet scrambling for purchase, but the undertow was already pulling him out fast. He spat out seawater and was thrust under by another wave.

(He fought; despite everything, he was fighting –)

The cold was so enormous it was like a living thing. In an impossibly short time, he was unable to make his muscles work properly, and though he could still see the empty shore in the seconds he had above water, it receded farther and farther into the distance, the current pushing him toward the rocks.

It was too late.

There was no going back.

(He felt himself fighting anyway –)

Seth picks up his speed, his breath starting to come in raking gasps, pushing the memories away, not letting them take root.

I’ll make it,
he thinks.
I’ll make it to the hill. Not far now.

Another street, and another street more, empty buildings all around, reaching up like tombstones, his breath getting louder in his lungs, his legs growing weaker.

I’ll make it. I’ll run up to the top
–

Here is the boy, running.

Here was the boy, drowning.

In those last moments, it wasn’t the water that had finally done for him; it was the cold. It had bled all the energy from his body and contracted his muscles into a painful uselessness, no matter how much he fought to keep himself above the surface –

(And he did fight in the end, he did –)

He was strong, and young, nearly seventeen, but the wintry waves kept coming, each one seemingly larger than the last. They spun him round, toppled him over, forcing him deeper down and down.

He doesn’t think about his final destination as he runs, not in words. There is only intention. There is only a lightness.

The lightness of it all being over. The lightness of letting it all go.

Then, without warning, the game the sea seemed to have been playing, the cruel game of keeping him just alive enough to think he might make it, that game seemed to be over.

The current surged, slamming him into the killingly hard rocks. His right shoulder blade snapped in two so loudly he could hear the
crack,
even underwater, even in this rush of tide. The mindless intensity of the pain was so great he called out, his mouth instantly filling with freezing, briny seawater. He coughed against it, but only dragged more into his lungs. He curved into the pain of his shoulder, blinded by it, paralyzed by its intensity. He was unable to even try and swim now, unable to brace himself as the waves turned him over once more.

Please,
was all he thought. Just the one word, echoing through his head.

Please.

Please,
he thinks –

There is the sheer drop on one side of Masons Hill. He can see it in the distance.

Fifty feet down to concrete below –

Please
–

The current gripped him a final time. It reared back as if to throw him, and it dashed him headfirst into the rocks. He slammed into them with the full, furious weight of an angry ocean behind him.

But it didn’t make him free.

He woke up here.

Here where there is nothing.

Nothing but a loneliness more awful than what he’d left.

One that is no longer bearable –

He is nearly there. One last turn. One more long street, and he’ll reach the base of the hill.

He turns a corner –

And in the distance, far down the road in front of him, he sees a black van.

And it’s moving.

He stops so suddenly he falls, burying his hands in inches of ash.

A van.

A van that’s driving away from him.

A van that’s being
driven.

It’s going slowly, heading off into the distance, kicking up a low cloud of ash behind it, but there it is, solid as the world.

There’s someone else in hell.

Seth staggers upright, waving his arms over his head before he can even think if it’s a good idea or not.

“Wait!” he shouts. “WAIT!”

And almost immediately, the van stops. It’s far enough away that it shimmers in the heat rising from the drying ash, but it definitely stops.

It definitely heard him.

Seth watches, his heart racing, his lungs laboring for air.

The door to the van opens.

And a pair of hands slap themselves over Seth’s mouth from behind and drag him off his feet.

The hands bend Seth back so far he can hardly keep his balance. He tries to fight but finds himself so weakened – by lack of food and sleep, by the running, by the sheer weight on his chest – that all he can do is stumble backward, trying not to fall –

Despite how strangely small the hands seem –

They’re pulling him off the street, toward the shell of a collapsed structure that may once have been several stories high but is now a place of broken concrete walls and surprisingly dark shadows.

Someone might do anything to him if they got him inside there.

He drops his weight to the ground, falling to the ash-covered pavement and taking his attacker with him.

“Ow!” a voice shouts, and Seth rolls back, fists up, ready to fight whoever it is that’s suddenly materialized out of seeming thin air –

But it’s just a boy.

He can’t be more than eleven or twelve and is a good foot shorter than Seth. No wonder it felt so awkward; it was like a monkey hanging on to a giraffe.

“No!” the boy whispers in obvious panic. “We have to get off the street!”

He’s already rising, looking past Seth down to the van. Seth turns, too. In the shimmering heat, he isn’t sure whether he can see a figure, standing next to it –

The boy grabs Seth’s T-shirt. “Come! You must!”

Seth smacks his hands away. “Get off me!”

“No, you
must,
” says the boy, and Seth notices he speaks with an accent, maybe eastern European. Behind him, Seth can see a bike discarded in the ash at the front of the burnt-out building. The boy turns and calls, “Regine!”

A tall, heavyset black girl, much closer to Seth’s age, maybe even older, emerges from the shadows of the building, pedaling her own bike. Seth can see past her to a band of sunlight at the back which must be the opening they rode through. Clearly out of breath, the girl glares at Seth. “Jesus
Christ,
you run fast.”

“Who are you?” Seth demands. “What the hell –”