More Than This (27 page)

He thinks about that feeling again.

It’s dangerous to do this, to think this way, he knows. Dangerous to revisit a place that most people never got to, most people never
wanted
to get to.

Is this what he died for? Was this what he’d been asking for all along? Was this what Tomasz and Regine and the Driver and all the convenient things had been leading him to?

Do I want this?
he thinks.

Do I still want this?

And he realizes that he doesn’t really know for sure.

Here is the chance –

Here is the doorway.

He lifts his hand and reaches through.

The surge of light is so bright it’s almost a physical assault. He squeezes his eyes shut like he’s been punched and stumbles back down into the square, ready to run –

But not quite yet.

He holds up a hand to shadow his eyes and opens them into the tiniest slits he can manage. The doorway, so solidly dark just seconds before, is now equally solidly white.

No. Not quite solid.

There’s something just inside.

Another door. A second door. Made of milky-white glass.

And it’s open.

Seth cautiously goes back to the front steps. The light seems to radiate not from any particular source but from every surface inside: the inner door itself, the walls beyond, and he can also now see the stairway going down from it deeper inside. All white, all seemingly made of glass.

It is absolutely
nothing
like the insides of the buildings around it.

He can hear something now, too. A
hum
of . . . what? Electricity? It must be, to generate a light this powerful. But also more. A
hum
suggesting further power, coming from down those stairs, but like the silent door opening, like the engine of the van, it’s a clean sound, sleeker and newer than any power source he’s ever heard.

Seth stops at the outer threshold. He leans down and reaches in a hand, touching the floor. It feels exactly how it looks, like a white pane of glass, and the air inside is cooler than out here.

He stands. The light is so naked, such an unmistakable signal in this dark night, he feels dangerously exposed. He looks around nervously. Surely some alarm must have been tripped. Surely the Driver must be making its way back here even now.

But he only hears the low
hum.
Nothing else.

No sound of the engine.

And without another thought, without letting himself disappear into another self-debate, he steps through the outer doorway.

Nothing happens. No sounds, no blaring sirens objecting to his presence, nothing. He looks back out onto the square, floodlit by all this brightness. Whatever he’s going to do, he needs to hurry.

It’s two steps to the inner door, and he takes them. Nothing still happens. The white glass stairs beyond it go down a flight and turn back on themselves, heading farther down. He can just about see the bottom of the second flight, where they reach what could possibly be another corridor.

Again, it’s nothing like the rest of the prison. It’s like he’s stepped into an entirely different building, an entirely different place altogether. Even the door has no latch, no way to open or shut it, or lock it either. It’s essentially just a panel on invisible hinges, unlike any door he’s ever seen. Except maybe on television. In shows about the future.

He puts a foot inside the second doorway. Nothing changes. He takes the first step down. Then another, and another. He glances back into the darkness, but there’s still nothing. He keeps going, trying to make his footfalls as quiet as he can, listening for any other sounds.

But there’s only him, and that low
hum.

He pauses at the turning. The same white walls and steps lead down to a short corridor with a door at the end. It’s closed. Seth continues on toward it, noticing that the underside of the stairwell is made of the same glassy material as everything else. This whole room could have been carved out of one solid block of milk-colored glass. He reaches the bottom and stops before the door. It’s like the one above, flat, featureless, and generating its own light.

He reaches out, but before he even comes into contact with it, it opens. He jumps back, but stops as he sees that it’s merely sliding smoothly into the wall, as if it’s simply responded to his presence by performing the most likely task he might ask of it. Beyond it, there’s just another white corridor with a turn at the end.

But the
hum
is louder.

He waits for another moment. Then another. But still, nothing happens. No one comes. He sees that the light down the new hallway is different, more than just the glow from the walls. Something changes beyond the turn.

Seth swallows. He swallows again.

Now or never,
he thinks.

It doesn’t work. He doesn’t move.

It’ll be nothing,
he thinks.
It won’t be what Tomasz and Regine think. It won’t be what I imagine. It won’t be stupid aliens, that’s for sure.

But he’s afraid, more than he was outside.

Because
something
is clearly down here.

He steps through the door.

He moves down the corridor.

He turns the corner.

And looks out.

Over a vast, vast room, as deep as an airplane hangar.

Which contains hundreds,
thousands
of shiny black coffins.

The room doesn’t match the stairwell. The walls and floor are a kind of polished, shiny concrete that looks spotlessly clean. Milky panels of light shine down on the coffins at intervals from the ceiling.

Over an area that stretches farther than he can see.

He’s on a rise, a small platform edging out from the door slightly above the floor of the larger room. Beyond, there are rows upon rows upon rows of coffins. They pull away from him, pushing into the distance, carrying on through faraway passageways into suggestions of deeper, even larger rooms beyond.

This place is
much
bigger than the prison above it. There are wide aisles down the center of the room, stretching as far into the depths as the coffins.
Wide enough for a van to drive through,
Seth thinks. Well, they had to get the coffins down here somehow, didn’t they? There could be any number of unknown doors back there, opening out at different points into the world above, but . . .

“How can this be?” he whispers. “How?”

The
hum
comes from here. He can see no source for it, no cables along the floor or any kind of separate machinery that’s not a coffin, but the sound is certainly this place, these things, operating however they’re supposed to be operating.

With people inside. Asleep.

Living their lives.

The platform he’s standing on has a short staircase at one end. He makes his way down to the shiny concrete floor, again expecting an alarm to warn him away or someone demanding to know what the hell he’s doing here.

He approaches the nearest coffin. It’s shut tight. He half expects it to pop open under his touch, like the door did, but nothing changes. He has to look for several long moments to even find the seal. The metal feels cool, but neither artificially cold nor hot. He moves around it, but everything’s the same as the one at his house, including – he kneels down to check – a small tube in the middle disappearing into the shiny concrete floor.

How can this possibly work, though?
he thinks, doubt creeping back in.
How can this possibly be real?

Because how did people have babies, huh? He turns around the room, the coffins stretched out before him like an army of the dead. And how did everyone stay healthy? How did they even get fed? He and Regine and Tomasz were maybe not prime athletes, but they were still functional human beings who could walk and lift things. He’d been weak for a bunch of days, sure, but his legs could still hold him up after years of lying down.

No,
he thinks.
No, this can’t be.

He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he’d been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some
particular
purpose. For him.

He doesn’t want the explanation to be the obvious one.

He sticks his fingers on the seal of the coffin, trying to find purchase. He can just about slide his fingernails – untrimmed since he woke, but yeah, how about that, how did everyone’s fingernails not grow? – into the seam. It doesn’t budge much, but he presses hard and lifts up.

The lid rises half an inch, an inch –

Before slipping from his grip and shutting again, pinching his fingertips painfully. He shakes his fingers out and tries again. And once more.

“Come on,” he grunts. “Come on!”

The lid opens so suddenly and so high, Seth loses his balance and falls hard to the floor, knocking his elbow on the concrete. He unleashes a long, loud shout of the worst curse words he knows, holding his elbow close to his chest until the pain ebbs.

“Shit,” he says, more quietly. More mildly, too.

Still breathing hard, he looks up to the now-open casket. He’s below the edge of it and can’t see inside, but already the underside of the lid looks like the one from his house, with tubes and strips of metallic tape, though this one has pulses of light moving along the length of it.

He drags himself to his knees, unbending himself slowly up and up, the pain in his elbow still throbbing, as the bed of the coffin comes into view.

He’s surprised. He shouldn’t be, he knows it, but he’s surprised at what he sees.

Because, of course, there’s a person lying inside.

A man.

A living, breathing man.

The man’s body is wrapped like Seth’s was when he woke, bandages around legs, torso, and chest. His genitals are exposed, and Seth can now see why. There are tubes connected to the man’s penis and another running down between his thighs, held there by medical adhesive tape. Seth remembers the marks on his own body. Marks where tubes must have gone into him exactly the same way. Taking away his waste, just like Regine and Tomasz had guessed.

Almost every other inch of the man is covered, down to his fingertips and almost his entire face. Seth doesn’t remember those bandages, but he does remember that horrible vague period after he died. That sense of disoriented panic. It had been a different kind of frightening, almost worse than the death itself, but whatever his mind had been doing, his body had been tearing bandages away from his hands and face, as he crawled out of the coffin and found his way downstairs. He wonders now how he made it without breaking his neck, how he knew where to go when he was so blind.

Instinct, he supposes. A memory he didn’t even know he possessed.

The only thing not covered on the man’s face is his mouth, which has a guard fitted between his teeth with a tube attached to the end of it, supplying food or oxygen or water, Seth guesses, but who could say for sure? Who could say for sure about
anything
? Did the metallic tape on the bandages provide the programming for the sleeping world? Did they stimulate the muscles so they wouldn’t atrophy? Did the tubes for waste also do the work of reproduction somehow?

Who knew? Who had the answers?

The man gives no sign at all of knowing that anything’s different, that someone is standing over him. His only movements are the slow rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. The top of the man’s head isn’t covered, and his hair is as brutally short as Seth’s. The man’s neck is uncovered as well, and Seth finds himself reaching for it, touching the skin there, lightly, gently, just to see if it’s real.

He’s surprised somehow to find that it’s warm, the warm, blood-filled skin of a living person. He’s even more surprised to find the man has stubble. Low and barely there, but still. How did that not grow into a beard? Did someone
shave
him? Were there drugs that stunted hair growth? How the hell did all of this work?

“And who are you?” Seth whispers. “Did I know you?”

Because all these people were from the same town,
this
town, wasn’t that the idea? All the people from the houses out there in the neighborhood moved to a single spot. So this man could have been a next door neighbor or a friend of his parents or –