by Patrick Ness
Despite how strangely small the hands seem –
They’re pulling him off the street, toward the shell of a collapsed structure that may once have been several stories high but is now a place of broken concrete walls and surprisingly dark shadows.
Someone might do anything to him if they got him inside there.
He drops his weight to the ground, falling to the ash-covered pavement and taking his attacker with him.
“Ow!” a voice shouts, and Seth rolls back, fists up, ready to fight whoever it is that’s suddenly materialized out of seeming thin air –
But it’s just a boy.
He can’t be more than eleven or twelve and is a good foot shorter than Seth. No wonder it felt so awkward; it was like a monkey hanging on to a giraffe.
“No!” the boy whispers in obvious panic. “We have to get off the street!”
He’s already rising, looking past Seth down to the van. Seth turns, too. In the shimmering heat, he isn’t sure whether he can see a figure, standing next to it –
The boy grabs Seth’s T-shirt. “Come! You must!”
Seth smacks his hands away. “Get off me!”
“No, you must,” says the boy, and Seth notices he speaks with an accent, maybe eastern European. Behind him, Seth can see a bike discarded in the ash at the front of the burnt-out building. The boy turns and calls, “Regine!”
A tall, heavyset black girl, much closer to Seth’s age, maybe even older, emerges from the shadows of the building, pedaling her own bike. Seth can see past her to a band of sunlight at the back which must be the opening they rode through. Clearly out of breath, the girl glares at Seth. “Jesus Christ, you run fast.”
“Who are you?” Seth demands. “What the hell –”
“We have to go!” the boy insists, pointing down the road. “The Driver!”
They all look. The door to the van has shut. The van is moving again, turning around in a circle.
So that it can come back this way.
The girl jumps off her bike, her face newly terrified. “Tommy! Hide!” she shouts. The boy takes the bike from her, grabs his own, and drags them into the darkness of the structure. The girl takes two fistfuls of Seth’s shirt, trying to pull him there, too.
She’s much stronger than the boy.
“Get your hands off me,” Seth says, struggling.
She brings her face close to his. “If you don’t hide with us right now, you’re going to die.”
“She is not lying!” the boy says, popping up from behind a low wall in the structure, worry all over his face. “Please come!” He disappears behind the wall again, which seems to conceal a small, impromptu cave made out of fallen concrete slabs. He pulls the bikes in after him.
The girl is still yanking on Seth’s shirt, so hard it’s starting to tear. He resists her and looks down the road again. The van has made its way through the circle. It’s starting back down the road after them.
What the hell? he thinks. Seriously, what the hell?
The girl makes a frightened yelp, lets him go, and flees into the structure.
And that’s what makes Seth finally move. Her fear.
He runs after her into the darkness.
The shadows inside are so deep and black, Seth goes sun-blind for a minute.
“Quickly!” the girl says, pulling him down after her, over the low wall and into the small alcove, made even smaller by the boy and the bikes. Seth takes a moment to wonder why he never thought of finding a bike.
“This is ridiculous,” he says. “It’ll see us –”
“It’ll think we followed our tracks back out,” the girl says, “if we’re lucky.”
“And if we’re not lucky?”
She holds up her finger to stop him.
And he can hear it now, too.
The engine of the van. Almost here.
The boy lets out a whimper. “It is coming.”
The boy and the girl press back farther into the blackness of the little alcove, which now seems pathetically small to protect all three of them, tight against the bikes, sweating, panting, trying not to make a sound.
The van stops outside. Seth hears the door opening.
An arm moves across his chest. The boy, reaching for the girl. She takes the boy’s hand and holds it tightly.
No one breathes.
Seth hears footsteps, crunching across the ash. One person, Seth thinks, just one pair of feet.
And then he sees it, stepping into the shadows of the structure.
Impossibly in this heat, every inch of its skin is covered, fingertip to neck, in a black, synthetic-seeming material, almost like a wetsuit. Its face is hidden by a sleek helmet with features molded for nose and chin, but completely blank otherwise, just a smooth, metallic blackness.
Like the coffin on the top floor of Seth’s house.
Seth hears a slight breath at his right. In the shadows, the boy has his eyes squeezed shut and his lips are moving furiously, like he’s reciting a prayer.
The figure stops almost directly at their feet, its side turned to them. It only has to look in the right place, it only has to bend down and take one farther glance –
It steps past the alcove, out of Seth’s line of sight. He feels the girl exhale, but she holds her breath again as it walks back the other way. It stops once more, looking at the disturbances in the ash, disturbances that Seth is sure will lead it right to them. In its hand, Seth sees it’s holding an ominous black baton, one that looks for all the world like a serious, serious weapon.
The figure – the Driver, the boy called it – is inexplicably terrifying. It’s got a man’s shape, but something about the blackness of its clothes, something about the way it holds its body –
Isn’t quite human, Seth thinks.
There is no mercy in it, that’s what it is. Nothing to appeal to. It might kill you, like the girl said, but it would do so without you ever being able to convince it not to and without you ever knowing why you were dying.
It steps toward their alcove.
Seth feels the boy’s hand grip the girl’s more tightly across his chest –
But the Driver stops. It’s motionless for a second, then it steps back, walking quickly out of sight. Seth hears the door to the van slam, hears the engine rev, hears the van drive off.
“Thanks be to God,” the boy whispers.
After waiting another moment to be sure it’s gone, they crawl out of the alcove. The boy and the girl stand in the slanted sunlight, the boy looking sheepish, the girl defiant.
“Who are you?” Seth asks. “And what the hell was that?”
They look at him for a moment. Then the boy’s face scrunches up with tears. The girl rolls her eyes, but she opens her arms. The boy falls into her, grabbing on to her tightly, weeping into her embrace.
“Who are you?” Seth asks again, still staring. “What’s going on?”
“He’s kind of emotional,” the girl says, holding the boy. “I think it might be a Polish thing.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know that’s not what you meant.” She lets go of the boy, whose chin is still wobbling. “We’re good, Tommy. We’re good.”
“Safe?” the boy asks.
The girl shrugs. “As safe as we can be.”
She’s English, Seth notices, and her eyes are tired and baggy, her clothes that same combination of brand new and ash-covered as his own. She’s quite tall, taller than Seth, and her hair is pulled tight across her scalp by a clip at the back of her head. As for the boy, he’s so short it’s almost comical. Seth notes, too, the way his hair is that same spectacularly messy pile that Owen always wore. For a moment, he feels an unexpectedly deep pang for his brother.
“I’m Regine,” the girl says. “This is Tomasz.” She pronounces the names Ray-zheen and Toh-mawsh. Both she and the boy look at Seth expectantly.
“Seth,” he says. “Seth Wearing.”
“You’re American,” Regine says. “That’s a
surprise.”
“How do you know he is American?” Tomasz asks her.
“The accent.”
Tomasz smiles bashfully. “I still cannot tell. You all sound the same to me.”
“I was born in England,” Seth says, his confusion growing again. “I was born here. Wherever the hell here is.”
The girl starts pulling the bikes out of the alcove. “You’ll have to ride with him,” she says to Tomasz. Tomasz groans loudly but takes a bike from her. “Come on,” the girl says to Seth. “We really can’t hang around.”
“You expect me to come with you?” he says.
“We don’t have time to fight about this. You can come with us or not –”
“Regine!” Tomasz says, shocked.
“ – but if you stay here, the Driver will find you and you really will die.”
Seth doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what to answer. The girl stares back at him, and he sees her looking at his running clothes, his lack of water, sees her considering the way he was running, furiously, with purpose. She glances behind him, out to the landscape.
Out to Masons Hill.
It’s close, so close he could dash out of here right this second and run up it –
But that intention is less clear now. That feeling of release is gone, for the moment. The feeling that would have driven him up to the top.
To the edge of the sheer cliff.
They stopped him. In the nick of time.
And he considers this, too.
A boy and a girl, appearing from nowhere, stopping him just before he started up the hill, just before he met the black van.
Which also appeared from nowhere.
Did he call them into being? Did he make them arrive?
Just in time?
But Tomasz and Regine. Preposterous names, foreign, even here.
And the van. And the Driver.
What was that all about?
“Are you real?” Seth asks, quietly, almost to himself.
The boy nods a sympathetic yes.
“I know why you’re asking,” the girl says. “But the only answer I’ve got is that we’re as real as you are.”
Seth breathes. “What if that doesn’t feel very real at the moment?”
The girl looks like she’s understood him. “We really do need to get going. Are you coming?”
He doesn’t know what he should do, what he’s supposed to do. But there’s no denying that – whoever they are, whatever they might be – they feel a lot safer than the Driver does.
Seth says, “All right.”
Regine’s bike kicks up clumps of drying ash as she goes. Seth rides a short distance behind her, standing on the pedals. Tomasz sits on the bicycle seat, gripping Seth around the torso tighter than is probably necessary.
“I do not like this,” Tomasz says. “You are too tall. I cannot see.”
“Just hold on,” Seth says.
They ride through ashy streets, sticking close to where Regine and Tomasz’s original tracks are, watching for the van around every corner.
“Who was that?” Seth asks. “What was that?”
“Explanations later,” Regine answers.
“She saw it before,” Seth hears from behind his back. “She saw what it does.”
“Explanations later,” Regine says again, pedaling harder.
They ride around another corner, and another, making their way to the train station. The bicycle tracks in the ash are parallel to Seth’s footprints on the journey out. “You were following me,” he says.
“We were trying to catch you,” Tomasz says.
“How did you know where I was?”
“Later,” Regine snaps as they turn the last corner. “We’ve got to get away from – SHIT!”
The black van is there, waiting for them.
Regine swerves so hard she falls off her bike. Seth struggles to keep his own balance as Tomasz leaps off to help her. The van is down the road at an angle to them, clearly anticipating they’d come out from one of three streets. They’ve taken the one it obviously expected the least, but it’s already revving its engines to make the turn after them.
Though now that he’s got a full view, Seth sees that “van” isn’t the right word for it at all. Sleek and unearthly, its corners are rounded, its windows tinted so dark they almost seem of a single piece with the van itself. There are no other identifying marks on it at all. Even the ash and dust don’t seem to be sticking to it. It’s just a hard, cool piece of blackness in the gray landscape.
Just like the helmet the Driver was wearing.
Just like the coffin in Seth’s house.
“The bridge!” Regine shouts, righting her bicycle, not even pausing when Tomasz leaps on the seat behind her. “Before it can turn!”
She pedals off, unsteadily at first, but with increasing speed. She veers away from the front of the van, the quick dart of the bicycle skating past the bulkier vehicle, but that isn’t a matchup they’re going to win for long. Seth rides after her, leaping up on an ashy sidewalk to avoid the van swerving at him.
Seth can see the bridge she means. Down from the train station, the tracks go over a brick archway. It’s half collapsed onto the road below, but there’s a space on the right big enough for a bike to go through.
But not big enough for a van.
Seth pedals past Regine, who’s struggling with the weight of Tomasz. There’s a surge in engine noise, and when they look back, they see that the van has made its turn.
And is coming after them, at full speed.
“We are not going to make it!” Tomasz calls.
“Hang on!” Regine yells, her legs pumping frantically.
Seth looks back again. The van is bearing down on them.
Tomasz is right. They aren’t going to make it.
Without stopping to think, Seth veers hard to the right, sending up a wave of ash and turning back the way he came.
“What are you doing?” Regine screams.
“Go!” he yells back. “Just go!”
He rockets past them in the opposite direction, heading straight for the van.
“NO!” he hears Tomasz cry, but he keeps on, picking up speed.
“Come on,” he says as he rides toward the van. “Come on!”
It doesn’t stop or veer.
Neither does Seth.
“COME ON!” he screams.
They’re fifty feet apart –
Thirty –
The van’s engine revs –
And right before impact, it pulls violently to the left, hitting a cracked curb and skidding into the burnt foundations of a house.
Seth makes another hard turn in the ash. “Go! Go! Go!” he yells at Regine and Tomasz, who’ve slowed to watch him. She starts pedaling again and disappears into the narrow opening under the bridge. Seth hurtles after them. They hear the engine revving again, but they ride without looking back, through the darkened dip under the bridge and out the other side.
“Will it come after us?” Seth shouts.
“I don’t know!” Regine says. “We should get to your house and hide.”
“My house?”
“The next crossing point is a bunch of streets north,” Regine says, Tomasz still hanging on to her. “We don’t think it knows where you live –”
“How do you know where I live?”
“We’ll hide the bikes,” she continues, ignoring him. “It usually doesn’t come over to this side at all –”
“Usually?”
Regine grunts in annoyance as they turn another corner. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”
“But we do know some things,” Tomasz says.
“Like what?” Seth says.
“Like we were right to follow you,” Tomasz answers cheerfully. “Because you saved us.”
“What did I save you from?” Seth asks as they finally start slowing their pace. “What was that thing?”
Tomasz looks at him and says, “Death. It was death.”
<
br /> “Not actual death,” Regine says as they hide the bikes in an overgrown garden two streets up from his house. “We call it the Driver.”
“Maybe actual death,” Tomasz says.
Regine rolls her eyes. “Not a skeleton in a cloak with a . . .” She makes a motion with her hands.
“Scythe?” Seth suggests.
“Scythe,” Regine agrees. “But it’ll kill you.”
“How do you know?”
“This isn’t the time to explain,” she says, leading them off down the sidewalk in the direction of Seth’s house. “We’ve got to get inside.”
“But who are you?” Seth says, following. “Where did you come from? Are there more of you?”
Regine and Tomasz exchange a glance. It’s enough to give him the answer in an instant. He’s surprised at how sudden his disappointment is. “There aren’t. Are there?”
Regine shakes her head. “Just me and Tommy. And whatever’s driving that van.”
“Three of us. That’s it?”
“Three is better than two,” Tomasz says. “And much better than one.”
“We figure there have to be more people out there somewhere,” Regine says. “It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”
“Yeah,” Seth says. “Because everything else here makes so much sense.”
Tomasz frowns. “But sense is what it does not make.”
“Try not to use irony,” Regine says to Seth. “He doesn’t understand it.”
“I do, too!” Tomasz protests. “In my language, plenty irony. I could tell you story of the dragon of Krakow who –”
“We need to get inside,” Regine says. “I don’t think the Driver considers us much of a threat unless we get too close, but –”
“Too close to what?” Seth asks.
They both look at him, startled. Regine cocks her head at him. “Where do you think you are?”
Seth says, simply, “Hell.”
“Yes,” Tomasz says. “What I say.”
“Well,” Regine says, pressing on down the sidewalk, “that’s one way of putting it.”
They make their way carefully, walking on the least dusty bits of sidewalk, trying to disguise their footprints, but anyone looking for them could still find them pretty easily.
