More Than This (41 page)

“Not a chance. Not even a little chance.”

“You came here to save me,” she says, shaking her head. “That’s enough. Really, you don’t even understand how much that’s enough. To have you
choose
to do that –”

“Regine –”

“You broke that loop somehow. You’ve already saved me –”

“I’m not leaving you here,” he says, raising his voice.

The footfalls begin again. The Driver is walking toward them, slowly. It takes out its baton, sparks flashing.

“It knows,” Regine says. “It knows it’s won.”

“It hasn’t won,” Seth says. “Not yet.”

But even he doesn’t really believe that.

He feels something at his hand. He looks down. Regine has taken it in her own. She squeezes it, tight.

He squeezes back.

The Driver is halfway down the wide central aisle now, the black screen of its helmet focused purely on them. Seth knows, somehow, that it’s not going to let him get away. Not this time. It won’t stop no matter what he does to any of the coffins. It will come to him first and it will run faster than him and it will be stronger than him and there will be nothing he can do to stop it.

But he’ll try. He’ll try anyway.

“Is Tommy safe?” Regine asks quietly.

“He ran off. Said he might have an idea.”

“So he’s bound to come in for a last-minute rescue, huh?”

Seth can’t help but grin crazily back at her. “If this was all a story my brain was putting together, yeah. That’s exactly how this would end.”

“For the first time ever, I’m hoping you might be right about that.”

The Driver has reached the end of their row. It stops once more, seeming to savor how trapped they are.

Seth grips Regine’s hand even harder. “We’ll fight,” he says. “All the way to the end.”

Regine nods at him. “Until the end.”

The Driver makes a snapping motion with its hand. The baton doubles in length, the sparks and lights flashing from it even more dangerously.

Seth plants his feet, ready to fight.

“Seth?” Regine says.

He looks at her. “What?”

But he never hears what she says –

Because a whining sound fills the room, low at first, but increasing –

The Driver hears, too, turning toward the passageway that extends deeper into farther rooms –

Where the sound is coming from –

Swiftly growing louder –

They see the Driver make to run –

But not fast enough –

As the black van flies out of the deeper passageway, slamming into the Driver at extraordinary speed, so fast one of its legs is knocked right off its body. The van pushes it down the wide central aisle, not stopping until it smashes into a far wall, trapping the Driver against it.

The Driver struggles for a moment longer. The van’s wheels spin fruitlessly against the concrete floor, sending up spirals of smoke, crushing the Driver into the wall.

And then it collapses across the hood of the van, dropping the baton, which goes clattering across the floor.

The Driver lies still.

The wheels of the van slowly stop turning.

Seth and Regine watch, dumbfounded, as a small figure climbs out the still-broken door.

“Is everyone all right?” Tomasz asks.

Tomasz throws his still-bandaged hands around Regine’s waist and embraces her like he might never let her go. “I am glad,” he says. “Oh, how I am glad.”

“I’m glad, too,” Regine says, pressing her face against his wild, wild hair.

Seth watches, still stunned, as Tomasz disentangles himself from her, then hugs Seth so hard it squeezes the breath out of him. “And you! You said we would save her and we did!”

“You did it mostly,” Seth says, looking back across the rows of coffins at the crashed van, at the motionless Driver still hunched across its hood. “Right in the nick of time.” He looks back at them both. “Again.”

Tomasz glances at Regine. “He is back to believing we are made up.”

“He may have a point,” Regine says. “How the hell did you manage to find the van and then drive it underground?”

“Was not the hell hard,” Tomasz says. “We thought it was parked around the prison somewhere. It was only matter of finding it.”

“And getting it started,” Seth says. “And driving it –”

“Well, okay, so a few weird things happen when I do find it, I confess,” Tomasz says. “The door is still off and I sit down in it and it starts automatically. I do nothing and it just starts. And then screens start lighting up, asking me questions I do not understand – and not because of language barrier but because they do not make sense. Numbers that mean nothing, camera views of huge rooms with all these coffins –”

“Yeah,” Seth says. “I’ve seen those.”

“And then there is this blinking box that says N
AVIGATE TO
D
ISTURBANCE
? Like that, like a question, so I figure D
ISTURBANCE
can only be you and so I say, yes, pressing box to N
AVIGATE
and then car just takes off! I am nearly falling out while it speeds away.” Tomasz mimes the turns with his body, this way and that. “And we zoom through the burnt-out neighborhood until we get to big underground carpark entrance and before I know it, we are driving down and down and down.”

He holds out his hands as if to say the rest is self-evident. “And here I am, in these rooms. And there is the Driver, standing in the middle of the path, and I take the steering so the van cannot steer away and I have to lean down to press my foot on the drive faster pedal and then
bang,
it is hit.” He claps his hands to make the bang. “And then we hit the wall.” He rubs the top of his head. “Which was hurtful.”

“You did great,” Regine says.

“Yeah,” Seth agrees. “More than great.”

Incredibly great,
he thinks.
Suspiciously great.

But then again, unlikely didn’t always mean impossible –

“I don’t suppose anyone’s seen my shirt,” Regine says.

“Here,” Tomasz says, squatting down behind the coffin and grabbing a bundle of cloths. “It is much torn up. I am sorry.”

“Never much liked it anyway,” Regine says, wrapping the remnants around her.

“And you are okay?” Tomasz asks her.

She’s silent for a moment and Seth thinks she won’t want to talk about it, but then she says, “Seth saw it. Seth saw my death.”

Tomasz turns to him, eyes wide. “Just like you saw mine.”

“Lucky me,” Seth mumbles.

“I could feel you there,” Regine says.

“You could?” Seth asks, surprised.

“Yes!” Tomasz says. “I knew you were there, too. I could feel you with me as I lived mine.”

“And somehow,” Regine continues, “just knowing you were there was kind of enough, in a way.” She rubs her eyes wearily with the palms of her hands. “I don’t know how to explain it. It was awful. Seeing that bastard again. Having to
live
it again.” She looks at Seth. “But then I knew you were there. And I knew . . . I guess I just knew that someone remembered who I was.”

Tomasz nods. “This is the best thing of all.”

“And it wasn’t okay that it was happening,” she says. “It was as scary as it had ever been. But somehow, it felt like, if it had to happen, then at least knowing you’d tried to stop it, knowing you’d made that big effort . . .”

She frowns. He can see her eyes welling again, see her reflex irritation at the fact.

“I understand,” Seth says.

She looks at him, almost accusingly. “Do you?”

Seth nods. “I think maybe I finally do.”

They walk through the coffins toward the main central aisle, Seth in the lead, Tomasz in the middle, Regine at the back, still clutching the shreds of her shirt around her.

Nothing around the van or the Driver moves.

“Leg,” Tomasz says, pointing to the dismembered limb. It’s been torn off at the thigh, a viscous dark liquid pooling around it on the floor. A liquid that definitely isn’t blood.

“Mechanical,” Regine says. “Way more advanced than anything we had in the other world.”

“Yeah,” Seth says thoughtfully.

“I hate it when you sound like that,” she says. “All suspicious-like.”

They approach the van slowly. There are sparks and smoke coming from where the Driver is slumped. One of its arms looks dislocated, and its head is twisted at an angle that could,
should,
indicate that it’s broken.

“Oh, boy,” Tomasz says, and they see him find the baton under a nearby coffin.

“Careful with that,” Regine snaps.

Tomasz rolls his eyes. “And still everyone thinking they are my mother. How many times I have to save your lives? How many – OW!”

He drops it as a bolt of electricity licks out and shocks him in the face. When the baton hits the floor, something triggers inside it and it folds back down into its smallest state.

“You all right?” Regine asks, trying not to laugh.

“Stupid thing,” Tomasz says, holding his cheek.

The new folded-down version of the baton seems inert, though, so he picks it back up. They don’t stop him when he puts it in his pocket. If anyone’s earned the right to it, it’s probably Tomasz.

They watch the van burn, coughing a little now at the smoke. The viscous fluid spills in larger quantities across the hood, dripping into pools down the side. The Driver seems clearly dead, but Seth notices how slowly they’re all moving, as if at any second they expect it to surge back to life and attack them.

That’s what would happen if this were a story, Seth thinks. The villain who wouldn’t stay dead. The one who has to be stopped over and over again. That’s what would happen if this were all just my mind trying to tell me something.

Except.

Except, except, except.

“I need to know,” he says.

“Know what?” Regine asks.

“What’s under its visor. I want to look at the face of the thing that wouldn’t stop chasing us.” He starts walking toward it. “I want to know exactly what it is.”

Which is when the van explodes.

The low sparks arc up suddenly bright, catching on a pool of the liquid beside the van. There’s a surprisingly soft
whoompf
–

And everything disappears in a fireball.

They’re blown back, flames washing over them as they fall –

But the first flash dissipates quickly, and as they tumble to the floor, it’s already receding, the most gaseous fumes burnt off in the first rush, the main fire reduced to the liquid fuel on the front of the van, burning surprisingly bright and hot.

The Driver now unreachable behind flames.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Seth says, coughing.

But Tomasz is already on his feet, looking around in panic at the coffins. “The people! They will burn! They –”

An intensely strong rain of water thunders down on them from newly opened ports in the ceiling. They’re drenched in seconds, the downpour bouncing off the sleek, shiny coffins. The fire is out almost instantaneously, but the spray of water continues. Billows of smoke and steam come rolling off the van, filling up the room. They breathe it in.

“It tastes like poison,” Tomasz says, wincing.

“It probably is,” Regine says. “None of that seems to be made of anything as simple as metal.”

Seth’s still staring at where the Driver was, now vanished behind the steam and smoke.