More Than This (42 page)

“I wanted to see what it looked like,” he says. “Underneath.”

“We beat it,” Regine says, shivering in the water. “Isn’t that enough?”

The poisonous-tasting steam fills the passageway back to the prison entrance. “We will have to go back the way I came in,” Tomasz says.

Regine holds out her hand for him. He takes it. They look at Seth expectantly.

“Yeah,” he says, still watching the churning smoke. “Yeah, all right.”

They head back up the central aisle. The overhead water stops in the next room, but when Seth looks behind them, there’s still nothing to see. They walk deeper and deeper, past row upon row upon row of coffins. Seth keeps checking back, but many, many rooms later, when they finally reach a ramp back up to the surface, their defeat of the Driver has long been lost to sight.

They don’t speak much as they climb, Seth in particular keeping his thoughts to himself. The ramp is circular, and he sees the dust and mud of the world above begin appearing in small layers the higher they go.

“Could you remember who you were?” he asks Regine as they slowly spiral up. “I know you said you felt me there, but could you remember this place?”

“Yeah, actually, I could,” she says. “I mean, being back there was just so
unfair.
I kept thinking, I can’t die here. If I die here, I die there. So I did remember this place.”

“I think time may work differently there,” Seth says. “The past can be closer than it is in real life. And maybe
everything
happens, all the time, over and over.”

Regine looks at him. “I get it. What you’re asking.”

“What?” Tomasz says. “What is he asking?”

Seth keeps walking. “The display said it was starting the Lethe process on you. The one that makes you forget.”

“But it didn’t,” Regine says carefully. “Or it hadn’t yet. I remembered everything. So that means –”

“That means,” Seth says, stopping her but not elaborating.

“That means
what
?” Tomasz says. “I am not happy with not being told what this means.”

“Shush,” Regine says. “Later.”

She keeps watching Seth, her eyes demanding. He stays quiet, though, as they walk up and up, this end of the storage facility clearly far deeper underground than the way he came in.

He’s thinking about all that’s happened, about
how
it happened. Everything that’s led them to this place, the three of them walking up this ramp, into daylight – and here it is, at the exit, warming them, Regine audibly sighing in pleasure – every single event that’s occurred to bring them,
him,
here, right now.

And as he looks out into the sun over the ash of the burnt-out neighborhood, he’s surprised – though maybe not so much – that a possibility is forming in his mind.

Because this place might be one thing.

Or it might be another.

Or it might even be something completely unguessed.

But he thinks he knows what he needs to do next.

“You ready to go home?” Regine asks.

She’s asking Tomasz, but Seth has to stop himself from answering.

Tomasz spends most of the long walk back to Regine’s house repeatedly recounting how he rescued them, each time becoming slightly more heroic, until Regine finally says, “Oh, please, you found a parked car and you sat down. That’s basically it, isn’t it?”

Tomasz looks horrified. “You
never
appreciate –”

“Thank you, Tommy,” Regine says, suddenly smiling. “Thank you for finding a parked car and sitting down and coming to the rescue at the very last minute. Thank you very, very much for saving my life.”

His face goes all bashful. “You are welcome.”

“You have my thanks, too,” Seth says.

“Ah, you did well yourself,” Tomasz says, generously. “Keeping the thingy person busy until I could drive in like a hero.”

“I’m just amazed you were tall enough to reach the accelerator,” Regine says.

“Well,” Tomasz admits, “it was not easy. Much stretching.”

They find their way to the train tracks, then follow them north. Regine repeatedly pats her pockets as they go, never finding what she’s looking for. She sees Seth watching and glares at him. “Don’t you think after dying a hundred times in a row I deserve one measly cigarette?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“
I
think you do not,” Tomasz says. “I think you have cheated death many times this day, so why not do it once more?”

“No one’s talking to you,” she says. But not as harshly as she might have.

After a good hour’s walk, under the partially collapsed railway bridge and over toward the supermarket – Seth suggests they stop at his house, but Regine is still shivering, despite the sun, and wants to get out of the bandages as quickly as possible – they cross the road where they saw the deer and turn up to Regine’s house.

“I keep expecting it to pop out,” Regine whispers as they approach her front walk. “Like it can’t possibly be this easy.”

“You think this was
easy
?” Tomasz says.

“That’s what’d happen if this was a story,” Seth says. “A last-minute attack. By the villain who’s never really dead.”

“You so need to quit saying shit like that,” Regine says.

“You’re thinking it, too,” he says.

She looks defiant. “I’m not. I still know I’m real. That trip back online was all the proof I needed.”

They keep on, and indeed there’s nothing surprising awaiting them at Regine’s front door. Inside, it’s the same sitting room as before, Regine’s coffin in the middle, sofa and chairs cramped around it. She heads upstairs to change, and Tomasz goes into the kitchen to make some food.

Seth sits down on the sofa, the coffin in front of him. He listens to Tomasz in the kitchen, clanking plates, swearing in Polish when the little gas stove doesn’t light on the first couple of tries. Upstairs, Regine is in the bathroom, running some water, taking all the recovery time she needs.

These two funny, difficult people.

He hears them and his heart hurts a little.

But he pushes on it and realizes it’s not a bad hurt. Not bad at all.

He smiles to himself briefly. And then, after a moment, he taps a finger on the coffin like he did down in the prison.

After a few tries, a display lights up, broken but readable.

A little while later, Tomasz comes out of the kitchen with some steaming bowls in his hands.

“Special occasion,” he says, handing one to Seth. “Hot dogs, creamed corn and chili con carne.”

“You’re making a joke, but for an American, this is almost a barbecue.”

“Ah, yes, I keep forgetting you are American.”

“Well, I’m not really anythi –”

“REGINE!” Tomasz shouts at ear-splitting volume. “Dinner is ready!”

“I’m right
here,
” Regine says, coming down the stairs in fresh clothes, pressing a towel against her hair.

“Is in the kitchen,” Tomasz says. “Keeping warm by lit stove.”

“Good way to burn the whole house down.”

“You are
welcome,
” Tomasz singsongs after her.

They eat in silence for a while. Tomasz finishes first, burping happily and setting his plate on a side table. “So,” he says, “what are we going to do now?”

“I’d like to sleep for a week,” Regine says. “Or a month.”

“I was thinking we could go back to the supermarket,” Tomasz says. “We never got back there. So much food and things for taking.”

“Yeah, I could use some more –”

“Do not say cigarettes!” Tomasz interrupts. “You are living now. We have saved you. Let the end of the smoking be a celebration.”

“Actually, you know what?” Regine says. “I think maybe we
are
in need of a celebration.”

Tomasz looks over, surprised. “You mean?”

She nods. “I mean.”

“You mean what?” Seth asks as she takes her plate into the kitchen.

“Well,” she says, “not everything goes bad after years and years, does it?”

Seth glances at Tomasz, who’s grinning madly. “What’s she talking about?”

“Celebration!” Tomasz says, then his face gets serious. “Though we have not had much to celebrate until now.”

Regine reappears in the kitchen doorway, a bottle of wine in one hand and three coffee mugs in the other. “We don’t have refrigerators, so I hope you like red.”

She opens the bottle with an alarmingly rusty corkscrew and pours a full mug for her and Seth, half a mug for Tomasz. “Hey!” he protests.

“Give him some more,” Seth says. “He’s earned it.”

Regine looks skeptical but fills Tomasz’s mug, then they raise them in an awkward toast. “To being alive,” Regine says.

“Again,” Seth says.

“Na zdrowie,”
Tomasz says.

They drink. Tomasz spits his right back into his cup. “Bleck!” he says. “People
like
this?”

“Haven’t you had communion wine?” Regine asks. “I thought Poles were Catholic.”

“We are,” Tomasz says, “but I always believed communion wine was flavored to be hard to drink, otherwise, why such a small taste? But
real
wine . . .”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, so Regine does. “Is supposed to taste like grape juice?”

He nods. “It does not.” He sniffs at his mug and takes another drink, a small sip this time. “It is terrible,” he says. Then he sips it again.

Seth drinks his own. He’s had wine at dinner with his mum and dad, much to the scandalized chagrin of his friends’ decidedly non-European parents. He never much liked it, too vinegary, but here, now, this feels like less a drink than a ritual, and he’s happy to have it.

Regine doesn’t drink much, though. She holds it in front of her awhile, then sets it down on the table.

“Don’t you like it?” Seth says. “It’s not bad. A little heavy, but –”

“
He
drank,” she says. “His breath, it always stank of . . . Even in the memory, it stank. I didn’t think it would bother me, I’ve had it before, but.”

“But,” Seth agrees. He sets his own mug down. Tomasz does too.

Regine scratches at a non-existent spot on her pants. “Is he down there, you think? I guess I didn’t really believe it till now but . . . He’s gotta be, doesn’t he?”

“My parents are,” Seth says. “I saw them on a display screen. They’re in there somewhere. Living their lives.”

“And my mother, too,” Regine says. “Carrying on with a dead daughter and a shit husband.” She coughs away some emotion, but there’s a dark question on her face and she says no more.

“My mother is dead,” Tomasz says, matter-of-factly. “But I find a new family! A brother and a sister.”

“
Step
brother,” Regine says, grinning as Tomasz makes to protest. “All right, half-brother. Adopted.”

“Oh,” Tomasz says, “I am thinking we are
all
adopted.”

“I saw a baby in there,” Seth says at this. “In one of the coffins. With its mother.”

They stare at them. “But how is
that
possible?” Tomasz asks.

“There are probably ways, if you think about it,” Seth says. “But however they did it, they believed in the future.” He leans forward and places his hands on the coffin in front of him. “Listen.”

Tomasz simply looks at him, but he can see Regine tense, see her bracing herself.

“Right,” he continues. “Okay. I saw both of your deaths. I didn’t mean to, but I did.” He taps the coffin, no longer looking them in the eye. “I think it’s only fair I tell you about mine.”

He begins to talk.

He tells them everything.

Including the end.

“You’ve got a visitor,” his mother said curtly through his bedroom door on a Saturday morning.

“Gudmund,” he said to himself, his heart lurching in his chest enough to make him light-headed. He hadn’t seen him since that night a few weeks back, when Gudmund had promised they wouldn’t lose contact, when he promised there was a future, if they just held out for it.

Since then, though, Gudmund’s cell phone had either been confiscated or had its number changed, and there were no answers at any of his e-mail addresses. But surely he could have borrowed someone’s phone at his new school or set up a fake e-mail account. You couldn’t keep people from communicating these days, not if they wanted to.