More Than This (45 page)

“Male hormones,” he says, knowledgably. “I am approaching my growth spurt. I will shoot up even taller than the two of you.”

“Yeah,” Regine says. “You just keep telling yourself that.”

Having lost or broken all of their bicycles, they set out walking.

“Just think,” Tomasz says to Seth as they go. “This may be the last time you see this house. If you die.”

“That’s kind of the point of the two of you coming along,” Seth says, “to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Oh, we will do our best, Mr. Seth, but it may not be good enough.”

“What happened to
Tomasz saves the world again
?”

Tomasz shrugs. “I am bound to muck it up one of these times.”

“Do you have a plan for when you get back there?” Regine says, crossing the main road. “What if you open your eyes and you have a broken shoulder and can’t save yourself?”

“You started there at the top of the stairs,” Seth says, “a little bit before the malfunction. Maybe I’ll start before I get too cold to swim. Maybe I’ll even start on the beach and can just not go in.”

“It may not be as easy as you think. I was overwhelmed by it. It’s hard to change something you’ve already done.”

“Would you really like me not to do this at all? Not even try?”

She pulls her mouth tight. “I just want to make sure you’ve considered everything.”

Seth grins. “I really came late to the guardian angel sale, didn’t I? To get the pair of you.”

“I think we have done just fine, thank you very much,” Tomasz says.

“I don’t believe in guardian angels,” Regine says seriously. “Just people who are there for you and people who aren’t.”

“Yes,” Tomasz says. “Yes, I agree with this.”

“Just people,” Seth says, finding he agrees, too.

They walk down the empty High Street where Seth first really saw this world, past the supermarket where he got so much needed food and the outdoor store where he got so much needed equipment.

And there is the thought again, never quite disappearing. How everything he needed to survive, food, shelter, warm weather, has been provided. How these two not-guardian angels have saved him at the last minute, over and over. How he’s learned vital information just when he needed it, to take just the right steps, toward . . .

Toward what? Acceptance? Going back? Dying?

“Well,” he says, almost to himself, “we’ll know in a minute.”

“We will know what in a minute?” Tomasz asks as they approach the sinkhole, the weeds growing out of it like slowly crashing waves.

“If this
is
my brain telling me a story –”

“Not this again,” Regine mutters.

“If this was a movie or a book, right?” Seth says. “If this was some kind of story I was telling myself, then it’ll be waiting for us.”

Tomasz and Regine stop when they realize what Seth means by “it.”

“This is not an amusing thing to say, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says.

“It’s dead and gone,” Regine says. “There’s no way it’ll be there.”

“All I’m saying is that’s what would happen if this was my brain trying to make sense of stuff,” Seth says. “The Driver would be there, half-burnt, insane with revenge, waiting for one last attack before we do whatever it is we’re going to do.”

“But that is okay, though,” Tomasz says, brightening. “Because in that story, there is always one last fight, and the hero always wins.”

“Hey, yeah,” Seth says. “I like that version.”

“The fighting’s over, do you hear me?” Regine says. “There’s not going to be anymore.”

“I’m just saying –”

“Well,
quit
just saying. You say way too much.”

Seth holds up his hands in surrender. “It was just a thought. Nothing’s going to happen. We killed it. It’s gone. The end.”

But they’re all quiet as they take the final turn into Seth’s street.

Which is empty. No van. No figure. Just the same old parked cars and weeds and mud. Regine exhales in relief, then she scowls at him. “Got us all scared,” she snaps. “Fool.”

Tomasz laughs. “For one moment there, I really thought –”

And the Driver steps out from where it was crouched between two parked cars. Its helmet is melted into a nearly unrecognizable shape, its missing leg replaced with a thinner, newer metallic lattice.

It grabs Tomasz with two melted, crackling fists, lifts him from the ground, and hurls him nearly all the way across the street, where he slams into the side of a car, tumbles to the ground, and doesn’t get back up.

I do not believe this,
Seth thinks even as Regine is screaming Tomasz’s name, even as the Driver is grabbing her arm and forcing her down.
I do not believe this is happening.

He goes in fighting anyway.

He throws himself at the Driver –

But even in his split-second leap, he can see that it doesn’t have the same effortless strength as before, that it’s struggling against Regine’s resistance –

He tackles it mid-chest, and they fall to the sidewalk. The Driver thuds beneath him, and this time, it’s like landing on a bag of metal shards. Seth doesn’t let go, though.

This isn’t happening,
a part of his brain keeps telling him.
This would only be happening if none of this were
–

“Shut up!” he growls as if it was the Driver talking to him. He strikes it across the helmet, but his fist glances off the melted facade, sticky black tar coating his knuckles. He rears back to strike it again –

The Driver’s arm shoots up and grabs him around the neck. It jerks him to one side, thumping his head into the door of the car beside them –

But Seth anticipates the move, and the Driver
isn’t
as strong as it was before. He checks its arm motion before he gets the full brunt of the car door on his head.

It’s still got a hand around his throat, though, and when thumping Seth doesn’t work, it starts to squeeze –

Seth hears a call to his right and a shadowy figure blocks out the sun. Regine is bringing down an enormous rock on the Driver’s head –

The Driver sees it coming (
How?
Seth has a mad moment to think,
With what eyes?
) and moves its head to one side. The rock catches it with a glancing blow, and the Driver uses its free hand to grab Regine by her foot. She stumbles back into some weeds behind her. With a cry, Seth pulls himself away, freeing his neck from the Driver’s hand and punching again with his own –

His fists fall on hard metal sections, all sticky with the tarry substance. The Driver makes to strike him back, but Seth blocks it with his arm –

And though the Driver is obviously weakened, it’s not exactly
weak.
The punch feels like it nearly breaks Seth’s wrist, and his recoil from the pain is enough to let the Driver land another blow. It catches Seth on the side of his head, rolling him onto the sidewalk –

Where the Driver begins to rise –

And this time Regine is on it again. She clubs it with another rock across the back of its head. It spins around and grabs her arm, squeezing it enough for her to cry out and drop the rock. It punches her, hard, in the face, sending her back over the low stone wall of an adjacent front garden.

She stays down.

The Driver turns to Seth. There’s only the two of them now.

Seth gets to his feet.

And a terrifying but somehow
true
thought enters his head.

I’ll win,
he thinks, dancing back as the Driver approaches.
That’s how this story goes, doesn’t it? The enemy makes a surprise return just before the end, facing the hero one last time
–

And the hero wins.

It takes a step toward him. Then another.

“You piece of shit!” Seth shouts. “You’re nothing! You’re just a hunk of plastic that’s got big ideas!”

The Driver swings for him again, but Seth jumps out of the way. It’s stumbling a little on its replacement leg, the thinner metal of it creaking at the knee. There’s a definite scraping as the Driver moves forward. When Seth knocked it to the ground, it must have snapped something.

Yes. Oh, yes.

“Not really fixed, are you?” Seth shouts, dodging another punch. “You’re breakable. And I’m guessing,
out of warranty
!”

Another punch dodged, another step.

Seth looks left and right, trying to find some ammunition, something to fight it with, but he can’t see where Regine got those rocks.

But maybe there’s a way to at least stop it. And if he can stop it, then –

I’ll beat it,
Seth thinks again.
That’s what happens. That’s the end of this story.

The Driver swings again, and Seth moves out of the way once more.

But he sees the way forward now.

“You,” he says, dodging one more blow, timing what he’s about to do, “are nothing more” – dodge, step – “than an obsolete” – dodge, step – “malfunctioning” – dodge, step – “JANITOR!”

He leaps toward the Driver’s punches –

Putting all his weight behind his right foot –

Aiming for the Driver’s creaking knee –

He hits it, full-on.

The leg snaps in two.

The Driver falls into the car next to it, shattering its window, but not reacting in time to catch itself before falling to the pavement. Seth leaps past it, swerving out of its reach. He picks up Regine’s first rock, the larger one, staggering under its weight. Jesus, that girl is
strong.

He turns back to the Driver, which is struggling to rise, the broken half of its leg lying uselessly in front of it. Seth gives a grunt and lifts the rock up high, above his head. He starts to yell, growing louder as he races toward the Driver –

Who looks up at him, the melted helmet facing Seth, as blank and unknowable as ever –

“I win!” Seth shouts. “This story is finished!”

He surges forward –

Heaves the stone back to throw it –

The Driver’s arm moves in a flash, faster than any living thing possibly could –

And Seth feels cold steel plunge deep into his front –

The stone clatters down in front of him, dropping harmlessly to the pavement –

Because the broken-off leg of the Driver is now sticking out of Seth’s stomach.

Seth collapses to the sidewalk, lying on his side, gasping, the steel both cold and somehow also burning all the way through his body. He grabs it instinctively, and his hands come away drenched with his own blood, which spills onto the mud and weeds. He twists his neck and sees that the metal shaft has gone all the way through him. The end of it is sticking out his back.

He glances up the sidewalk in shock.

The Driver has pulled itself upright on its one leg.

It balances with a hand on the parked cars lining the pavement.

It half hops, half drags itself forward.

It’s coming for Seth.

It had seemed so clear. The Driver was right where it was supposed to be, right where Seth half expected it to be.

And if that was true, then everything else had to be true, too.

He would defeat the Driver after it came back from the dead one last time. He would beat it, and then he’d go triumphantly into . . .

What?

He doesn’t know. The certainty’s gone.

Because here he is, the Driver’s latticed metal leg protruding from just below his rib cage, sticking out his back in a nightmare of pain and impossibility that his brain can’t even process, except to focus on the fact that he’s bleeding everywhere.

That he’s dying.

And that, at last, he desperately doesn’t want to.

“Please,” he hears himself whispering, trying to push himself back along the sidewalk. “Please.”

The horrible
wrongness
of the metal through his body is too much to contemplate. Because it means there’s no getting out of this one. No last-minute heroics. No Tomasz or Regine leaping to the rescue. It doesn’t matter if anyone stops the Driver; there’s nothing they can do before he bleeds to death.

It’s too late.

He coughs, and there’s blood in his mouth.

And the Driver pulls itself closer.

“Please,” he says again, but his strength is deserting him rapidly. And the
pain.
There’s no way he can move to lessen it, and for a moment, for a terrifying moment, he feels himself blacking out.