More Than This (28 page)

“But I moved away, didn’t I?” Seth says. “Or in the imagined world, we did. And who knows where you imagined
you
went.”

He stares down at the man, uncomfortable at his sheer vulnerability. He looks like a patient lying there. Someone recovering from an indescribably terrible accident. Kept asleep because being awake was too painful and the recovery too long –

And then a notion takes Seth. A crazy one, an impossible one.

He resists it, crossing his arms, still looking down on the man.

But the notion returns.

Because he’s roughly Seth’s size, isn’t he? Pretty close in height and about the same weight, too. The same width across the shoulders and chest, the same skinny legs of a runner, the same color body hair.

“No,” Seth tells himself. “Don’t be stupid.”

But the idea won’t leave. The more he looks at the shape of the man through the tightly wound bandages, at the few stretches of skin and body that aren’t covered, the more he thinks –

“No,” he says again.

But he’s moving his hand back to the man’s face, back to the bandages there. He gently takes the edge of one and tries to peel it away. It doesn’t give. He follows it along, trying to find a seam to start the unwinding, turning the man’s head to look for it.

“This is crazy,” he mumbles to himself. “How would that make any sense at all?”

But he still needs to see. Needs to know for sure –

Because what if –

What if it
is
him?

What kind of answer would
that
be?

“Shit,” he’s saying, his anxiety rising, his heart beating faster. “Oh, shit.”

He finds the bandage end near the man’s left ear and starts peeling it back, working hard to get a start, then peeling more and more of it away. The bandage unwraps a layer across the man’s face, and Seth lifts the man’s head out of its cushion to unwind it around the back –

Where there’s a light blinking under the skin of the man’s neck.

Seth freezes, the man’s head in his hands. He’s suddenly aware, really for the first time, that he’s holding a living being, someone sleeping but
breathing,
warm to the touch.

Alive.

Gently, gently, he turns the man’s head to get a better look at the blinking light. It flashes on and off, green and sharp, in a regular pulse on a stretch of skin just at the base of the man’s skull below his left ear, uncovered by bandages.

At exactly where the bump is on the back of Seth’s own skull.

At exactly the point where he hit the rocks and everything here started.

Then he sees something else. He lifts the man’s head out farther. In the stretch of bare skin above the bandages on the man’s back is one of those quasi-Celtic tribal tattoos, stretching the width of the man’s shoulders.

A tattoo that Seth emphatically does not have.

Then of course he sees everything how it always was. The man’s hair is really a bit darker than Seth’s, and Seth’s stubble isn’t that thick anyway. The man’s torso is clearly shorter than Seth’s, now that he looks again, and frankly, as embarrassing as it is, he doubts there’s a teenage boy alive who wouldn’t recognize his own wang.

This man isn’t him.

Of course it isn’t him.

And all at once, touching the man feels too private, feels like an
invasion
of another person, almost criminal. He rewraps the bandage around the man’s head, saying “Sorry, sorry,” re-sticking the start of the adhesive to the spot by the man’s ear probably harder than he really needs to. He drops the man’s head back onto the cushion –

And that’s when the alarm finally goes off.

It’s not hugely loud, but it’s unambiguous, surging in and out like all bad news alarms everywhere. Seth looks around for the source of it but doesn’t see anything. He grabs the coffin lid to slam it shut. It swings down but then stops abruptly, finishing the journey in a slow, automatic smoothness, resealing itself and the man inside with a small hydraulic sound, looking as if nothing had ever happened.

The alarm is still blaring, though, and Seth is already running back to the platform to get back up the steps and –

He hesitates.

A display has appeared on the blank white wall, one long, milky rectangle sort of demisting to reveal that it’s been a screen all along. It’s now covered with words and boxes and symbols of different colors, just like you’d see on any computer pad. The alarm is still blaring, Seth still poised to run, but his eyes are caught –

Because on the screen, in a circular set of graphical symbols, the words C
HAMBER
O
PEN
flash in time with the alarm. Seth doesn’t even want to consider that this alarm must be alerting the Driver out there, that it can only be racing back here at top speed –

C
HAMBER
O
PEN
. C
HAMBER
O
PEN
. C
HAMBER
O
PEN
. In bright-red letters.

“But I
shut
the chamber,” he says and, almost in exasperation, he reaches out and touches the red symbols.

The alarm stops.

He lifts his hand away. The symbols have turned green, and figures and boxes and images suddenly appear on the rest of the display, whirring through their business, seemingly oblivious to his presence. One section shuffles through images of different angles on different rows of coffins, clearly a kind of surveillance, and Seth nearly jumps out of his skin when it shows an image of him standing in front of the display. But the image rushes on, as if his presence isn’t a threat.

He looks behind him to see where the camera might be, but there’s still only the blank whiteness of the lights, the endless spread of black coffins. Back on the screen, the images keep shuffling through, including what looks like a flash of a large, garage-size door on some distant wall, and he has a momentary unease that the van could come driving right up through here to get him, any minute now, any
second
–

But he can’t quite tear himself away. Boxes around the edge of the screen show things like temperature and humidity, others shifting clocks, only a few of which show anything like what the current time might plausibly be before being replaced by other times and then others still. The rest of the boxes contain graphs and displays Seth can’t even begin to guess at. What does M
ODULATION
R
ATE
mean? What’s B
ETA
C
YCLE
, S
EGMENT
F
OUR
? And F
LOW
M
ANAGEMENT
could be anything. Flow of what? Managed how? By who?

Seth knows he needs to go, that he may have shut off the alarm, but that doesn’t mean the Driver wouldn’t have heard a signal of some kind –

But he doesn’t go, not yet.

Because the center of the screen is asking him a question.

C
HAMBER
R
E-ACTUALIZED?
it reads.

Beside it, in the main body of the screen, is a green, graphical map of the coffins – he can tell it’s the ones behind him because the stairwell is there – and the coffin Seth opened is highlighted by a pointing line.

Connected to the line is a pop-up window with a picture in it of what can only be the man in the coffin Seth just opened.

It’s a head-on shot, like a driver’s license or passport. The man isn’t smiling, but he doesn’t look unhappy. More bored than anything else, like this is just one more bureaucratic photo that needed to be taken.

And his name is written below the picture.

“Albert Flynn,” Seth says out loud.

It gives other details, too. Something that could be a date of birth, but not written in a way Seth expects, and possibly height and weight, along with other measurements that aren’t clear. There’s a box labeled P
HYSICAL
M
ARKERS
, and Seth touches it. It opens up another box, displaying a picture of the man’s tattoo, stretching from shoulder to shoulder and down the backside of either of his arms.

Seth presses the box again and it disappears. He glances up to where the alarm symbol was. C
HAMBER
R
E-ACTUALIZED?
it still reads.

“Yes?” he says, and presses it. The symbol and words disappear, and the box with Albert Flynn’s face shrinks down to nothing, back into the graphical rows of coffins on the screen.

Seth glances around, worried again at the time that’s passing, but he still can’t hear anything from the stairwell. The sound of the engine had disappeared deep into the night when he was outside. Maybe the Driver went far from here, traveling down roads that didn’t allow for fast passage.

He presses one of the coffins on the graphical display. The face of a woman expands out into a box. Older, more smiley than Albert Flynn.

E
MILIA
F
LORENCE
R
IDDERBOS
.

Seth presses the coffin next to hers. Another face pops up, an older man.

J
OHN
H
ENRY
R
IDDERBOS
.

“Husband,” Seth automatically says, because how many Ridderboses could there be in the world? He moves to select the one next to John Henry, but he pauses. Yes, husband. Families would have entered here together, wouldn’t they? Husbands and wives. Parents and children.

Except Seth woke up alone, in his own home.

But here were two Ridderboses, next to each other in the same row.

“So what about the Wearings, then?” he says, scanning the rest of the read-out, wondering if there’s a way to –

There is. A box marked, simply, S
EARCH
. He presses it. A small keypad display appears, grouped in the normal keyboard arrangement.
So probably not alien then,
he thinks. He types in
Wearing.
He hesitates for a second over the word G
O
, but then presses it, too.

The graphical display of the coffins rapidly switches and turns, as if an overhead camera is zooming out over the vast rooms behind him before slowing down and closing in on a row, deep in some corner that he’d almost certainly never find.

First one coffin is highlighted, then another, and a list of names begins to emerge.

E
DWARD
A
LEXANDER
J
AMES
W
EARING
.

C
ANDACE
E
LIZABETH
W
EARING
–

Seth doesn’t even wait for it to finish processing. He presses his father’s name.

And there he is. Younger, obviously so, his hair a completely different style and no streaks of gray. But his eyes have that slightly medicated look that Seth knows all too well. Seth presses his mother’s name, and her picture pops up next to his father’s. She’s younger, too, her mouth pursed in that familiar defensive tightness, leaving no doubt as to who she is.

As simple as that, there they are.

Seeing them is unexpectedly hard. Worse than hard,
painful.
Seth’s stomach actually starts to hurt. The unmistakable faces of his parents, younger but immovably them, staring back at him.

And somewhere in the room behind him, too.

He turns to look, but the graphical search had moved so fast he couldn’t follow where it went. They could be anywhere, in any part of this vast complex.

Sleeping.

But also not sleeping. Living their lives, lives that to them were completely real. He turns back to the pictures and wonders what they’re doing, right now, right this second, in the world of their house in Halfmarket.

Are you thinking about your son?
he wonders.

The son who left without explaining or saying good-bye.

Their faces stare back at him from the screen, and he tries not to see accusation there.

Seth has to go. He knows it. It’s been too long. The Driver will be on its way, will probably be here any second.

He has to go.

But he keeps looking into the eyes of his mother and father.

Until he finally swallows away the pain in his stomach and taps their pictures lightly, collapsing them back into the grid of coffins. It’s time to leave. It’s
past
time to leave, but he has to see one more. He reaches over to the list of names to tap –

He stops.

Owen isn’t there.

The list of Wearing names is only two long. Edward and Candace, his father and mother.

Seth frowns. He opens the S
EARCH
box again and retypes his last name. It delivers the same results: Edward and Candace Wearing. He goes back to the S
EARCH
box once more and types in Owen’s full name.

N
O
M
ATCHES
F
OUND
, the screen tells him.

“What?” Seth asks, his voice getting louder. “
What?
”

He tries again. And again.

But Owen isn’t here.

He doesn’t believe it,
can’t
believe it. He types in his own name, but of course, he isn’t here either, because he was in a lone coffin, separate from the main group, out there in his house, on his own. Maybe there hadn’t been space. Maybe most of the coffins had been filled by the time his family came to join and other plans had to be made.