More Than This (19 page)

It doesn’t stop or veer.

Neither does Seth.

“COME ON!” he screams.

They’re fifty feet apart –

Thirty –

The van’s engine revs –

And right before impact, it pulls violently to the left, hitting a cracked curb and skidding into the burnt foundations of a house.

Seth makes another hard turn in the ash. “Go! Go! Go!” he yells at Regine and Tomasz, who’ve slowed to watch him. She starts pedaling again and disappears into the narrow opening under the bridge. Seth hurtles after them. They hear the engine revving again, but they ride without looking back, through the darkened dip under the bridge and out the other side.

“Will it come after us?” Seth shouts.

“I don’t know!” Regine says. “We should get to your house and hide.”

“
My
house?”

“The next crossing point is a bunch of streets north,” Regine says, Tomasz still hanging on to her. “We don’t think it knows where you live –”

“How do
you
know where I live?”

“We’ll hide the bikes,” she continues, ignoring him. “It usually doesn’t come over to this side at all –”

“Usually?”

Regine grunts in annoyance as they turn another corner. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

“But we do know some things,” Tomasz says.

“Like what?” Seth says.

“Like we were right to follow you,” Tomasz answers cheerfully. “Because you saved us.”

“What did I save you from?” Seth asks as they finally start slowing their pace. “What was that thing?”

Tomasz looks at him and says, “Death. It was death.”

“Not actual death,” Regine says as they hide the bikes in an overgrown garden two streets up from his house. “We call it the Driver.”

“
Maybe
actual death,” Tomasz says.

Regine rolls her eyes. “Not a skeleton in a cloak with a . . .” She makes a motion with her hands.

“Scythe?” Seth suggests.

“Scythe,” Regine agrees. “But it’ll kill you.”

“How do you know?”

“This isn’t the time to explain,” she says, leading them off down the sidewalk in the direction of Seth’s house. “We’ve got to get inside.”

“But who
are
you?” Seth says, following. “Where did you come from? Are there more of you?”

Regine and Tomasz exchange a glance. It’s enough to give him the answer in an instant. He’s surprised at how sudden his disappointment is. “There aren’t. Are there?”

Regine shakes her head. “Just me and Tommy. And whatever’s driving that van.”

“Three of us. That’s
it
?”

“Three is better than two,” Tomasz says. “And much better than one.”

“We figure there have to be more people out there somewhere,” Regine says. “It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

“Yeah,” Seth says. “Because everything else here makes so much sense.”

Tomasz frowns. “But sense is what it does not make.”

“Try not to use irony,” Regine says to Seth. “He doesn’t understand it.”

“I do, too!” Tomasz protests. “In my language,
plenty
irony. I could tell you story of the dragon of Krakow who –”

“We need to get inside,” Regine says. “I don’t think the Driver considers us much of a threat unless we get too close, but –”

“Too close to what?” Seth asks.

They both look at him, startled. Regine cocks her head at him. “Where do you think you
are
?”

Seth says, simply, “Hell.”

“Yes,” Tomasz says. “What
I
say.”

“Well,” Regine says, pressing on down the sidewalk, “that’s one way of putting it.”

They make their way carefully, walking on the least dusty bits of sidewalk, trying to disguise their footprints, but anyone looking for them could still find them pretty easily.

They’d have to be looking, though.

“Whatever that . . .
thing
is,” Seth says, “it’s never come this way before. Trust me. Nothing’s driven down these roads for years.”

Regine hmphs. “I’ll still feel better when we’re in the house.”

“Do you have any food there?” Tomasz asks. Regine shoots him a glance. “What?” he says. “I am hungry.”

“Just cans,” Seth says. “Soups and old beans and custard.”

“Exactly what we’re used to,” Regine says.

They turn the corner at the far end of Seth’s street. “That one there, yes?” Tomasz says, pointing.

Seth stops walking again. “How do you know that? Have you been spying on me?”

Tomasz’s smile falters and even Regine looks uncomfortable.

“What?” Seth says.

Regine sighs. “Tommy saw you standing on top of the train station bridge a few days ago.”

“She did not believe me,” Tomasz says. “Said that I imagined you.” He smiles again. “I did not.”

“We’re in a house a couple miles from here,” Regine says, gesturing northward, “but we were out gathering food and Tommy said he thought he saw someone.”

“We looked for very long time in rain that never stopped,” Tomasz says, nodding. “Got very wet.”

“And then we, uh,” Regine says, and she actually seems to blush, “we saw you showering. In the rain. Out in front of your house.”

Tomasz grins even wider. “You were pulling on your willy!”

“Tommy!” the girl snaps. Then she frowns at Seth. “Well, you
were.
And we weren’t going to say hello when you were
busy,
and we were hungry and wet, so we went back home and thought we’d come back when things weren’t so . . .”

“Private,” Tomasz stage-whispers.

“
Rainy,
” Regine says.

Seth feels a burning in his throat. “I thought I was alone here. I thought I was completely alone.”

“That is what I thought, too,” Tomasz says solemnly. “Until Regine finds me.” He smiles again, shyly this time. “And now you make three.”

“So we got here this morning,” Regine says, “only to find that you were running very, very fast toward something in particular.” She crosses her arms. “Almost like you had somewhere to go. Something to do.”

There’s a silence, which Seth doesn’t fill.

“And we could not let the Driver catch you,” Tomasz says. “So we followed. And here we all are.” He shrugs. “Still outside.”

Seth waits a moment without saying anything more, then heads down the street, leading them toward his house. He’s embarrassed about the shower business, but not as much as he could be. Something’s still not right about this. These two just
happened
to be there when he was running toward the hill, just
happened
to stop him before he made contact with the black van, just
happened
to find the perfect place to hide from the Driver?

He sneaks a peek back as he turns up the path to his front door.

A short, happy Polish kid and a big, suspicious black girl.

Did he create them? Because they’re just about the last and weirdest thing he’d pick to create.

He swings open the front door, and they follow him inside. Regine takes a dining chair and Tomasz slumps on the settee. “This is a very terrible painting,” he says, staring up at the panicked horse above the mantel.

“I’ll make something to eat,” Seth says. “It won’t be much. But while I do, you have to tell me what you know.”

“All right,” Regine says. “But first you have to tell
us
something.”

“And what’s that?” Seth says, heading toward the kitchen.

And he hears her ask, “How did you die?”

“What did you say?”

“I think you heard the question just fine,” Regine says, looking at him firmly, as if setting him a challenge. A test he has to pass.

“How did I die?” Seth repeats, looking back and forth between her and Tomasz. “So you’re saying . . . You’re saying this place really is –”

“I’m not saying anything,” Regine says. “I’m just asking how you died. And your reaction tells me you know exactly what I mean.”

“I got struck by lightning!” Tomasz volunteers.

Regine makes a loud scoffing sound. “You did not.”

“You do not know,” Tomasz says. “You were not there.”

“Nobody actually gets struck by
lightning.
Not even in Poland.”

Tomasz’s eyes widen in indignation. “I was not
in
Poland! How many times I have to say? Mother came over for better working and –”

“I drowned,” Seth says, so quietly he thinks they may not have heard him.

But they stop bickering immediately.

“Drowned?” Regine says. “Where?”

Seth furrows his brow. “Halfmarket. It’s a little town on the coast of –”

“No, I mean,
where
? The bathtub? A swimming pool –?”

“The ocean.”

She nods, as if this makes sense. “Did you hit your head?”

“Did I hit my –?” Seth says, and then stops. He touches the back of his skull where it smashed into the rocks. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I . . .” Regine starts, then looks down at the freshly swept floor Seth left behind this morning. “I fell down a flight of stairs. Cracked my head on a step on the way down.”

“And you woke up here?”

She nods.

“It was the lightning for me!” Tomasz says happily. “It is like getting punched on your entire body all at one time!”

“You did
not
get struck by lightning,” Regine says.

“Then you did not fall down stairs!” Tomasz says, upset bending his voice, a tone Seth recognizes from a hundred and one fights with Owen.

“So you both . . . ?” Seth doesn’t finish the sentence.

“Died,” Regine says. “In a way that caused a specific injury.”

Seth feels the back of his head again, where he hit it on the rocks. He remembers the horrible finality of that collision, could swear he still feels the bones breaking, in a way from which there was no return.

Until he woke up here.

There are no broken bones now, of course, that was another place, another
him,
and all he can feel is the still-brutal shortness of his hair, something that Regine and Tomasz have clearly been here long enough to outgrow. There’s nothing else unusual, just the inward curve of his neck leading up to the outward curve of his skull.

Regine looks at Tomasz. “Show him,” she says.

Tomasz leaps up from the settee. “Lean down, please,” he says. Seth stoops to one knee and allows Tomasz to take his hand. He splays Seth’s fingers so the first two are a particular distance apart. Tomasz sticks out a little nubbin of tongue as he concentrates, and once more, he reminds Seth so much of Owen, Seth feels his chest contract.

“Here,” Tomasz says, placing Seth’s fingers on a particular stretch of bone just behind his left ear. “Can you feel that?”

“Feel what?” Seth says. It’s exactly where his head struck the rock, but there’s nothing unusual there, nothing but a stretch of –

There’s something. A rise in the bone so slight as to almost not be present, so slight he didn’t feel it seconds ago when pressing in exactly the same place.

A rise in the bone.

Leading to a narrow notch in that same bone.

“What?” Seth whispers. “How . . . ?”

He
swears
it wasn’t there before. But there it is now, subtle but clear, the rise and the notch almost like a completely natural extension of his skull.

Almost.

“That’s where you hit your head?” Regine asks.

“Yes,” Seth answers. “You?”

Regine nods.

“And that is where the lightning punched me!” Tomasz says.

“Or whatever happened,” Regine mumbles.

“What is it?” Seth asks, feeling around on the same spot on his right side to see if there’s another one. There isn’t.

“We think it is a kind of connection,” Tomasz says.

“Connection to what?”

Neither of them answers.

“Connection to
what
?” Seth says again.

“What have your dreams been like?” Regine says.

Seth frowns at her. Then he has to look away, feeling the vividness of his dreams in a way that causes his skin to flush.

“The dreamings,” Tomasz says, patting Seth’s back sympathetically. “They are not easy.”

“Like you’re not just seeing it all again,” Regine says. “Like you’re actually
there,
back in time somehow, reliving it.”

Seth is surprised to find his eyes filling, his throat choking. “What is it? Why does it happen?”