No, it didn’t make sense.
Well, okay, it made more sense than any other explanation so far, but still. The world might have done that, gone online to forget itself, but his parents? They wouldn’t have chosen that. Seth sure as hell wouldn’t have chosen those things to happen to him.
Unless they hadn’t had a choice?
He stops before his front door.
Maybe the Driver wasn’t really guarding the people in the coffins from outside interference. Maybe it was there to make sure no one ever woke up. It didn’t look fully human, so maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was a robot. Maybe it was an alien and they’d forced humans to –
“Crap sci-fi,” Seth mutters to himself. “Life is never actually that interesting. It’s the kind of story –”
He stops again.
It’s the kind of story where everything’s explained by one big secret, like everyone going online and what’s real and what’s not being reversed. The kind of story you watched for two hours, were satisfied with the twist, and then got on with your life.
The kind of story his own mind would provide to make sense of this place.
He pushes open the door. It isn’t locked, never has been. The Driver could have walked in and killed them before they’d had a chance to run anywhere. And that would have been the end of that story.
Instead, they survived. In unlikely ways. The Driver had waited outside until Seth saw it, then taken its time coming into the house after punching him in the chest – he rubs the area now, still bruised, but not nearly as bruised as it should be – before taking its time again to chase them through the grass.
And everything else, too. An outdoor store to provide every bit of equipment he needed. A supermarket stocked with enough food to keep him alive. Rain that not only washed him, but showed up just in time to put out a fire that clearly – as he finds the lantern and flicks it on – hadn’t even reached the kitchen.
Everything inside is just as they left it. It smells of smoke, but that’s all. He climbs over the tumbled fridge and goes out to the deck. The tall grass is all burnt away, but the deck is intact, if blackened at the end. The pile of his original bandages is still there, too, the metallic strips reflecting the moonlight almost more than they should be able to.
He goes back inside, has a quick cold wash at the sink, and dresses in warmer clothes. He finds his torch, and that quickly, he’s ready to go.
But he takes one last look around the sitting room and finds himself doing what he told Tomasz he was going to do.
“Good-bye, Owen,” he whispers. “Good-bye, house.”
As he steps out the front door, pulling it shut behind him, he wonders if it really is the last time he’ll ever see it. He feels unexpectedly sad about that.
However real this house is, it’s meant something.
And then he remembers Regine’s words.
I’m the only real thing I’ve got, he thinks.
And then he remembers what else she said.
“Know yourself and go in swinging,” he says out loud.
It’s time to go to the prison.
Because, real world or not, maybe there are answers there.
He heads toward the train tracks on a path that’s become familiar. The moon is bright enough that he doesn’t need to turn on the torch. It’s completely quiet as he goes. No crickets. No owls. Still no wind, despite the earlier rain.
He keeps alert as he walks, ready to run at any movement, but he makes it to the passage between the blocks of flats without incident. He reaches the train station and treads quietly through it past the train, wondering all the while if boars are nocturnal. He hops lightly down onto the tracks and looks in the direction of the prison.
The tracks are strangely empty. There are tall weeds here and there, but it’s mostly just gravel and strangled-looking grass that barely reaches his ankles. He can still see the rails shining in the moonlight for much of their distance south. Maybe years of pesticides to keep them clear were hard to fight.
On the right, there’s a brick walkway, possibly for train repair crews, that still seems in pretty good shape. Seth makes his way over to it and heads out of the station building. To his left, over the low fences, he can see some of the burnt neighborhood. It’s too dark to make out any details, just shadows on the landscape that could be tombstones. He sees no signs of movement, just empty desolation, with the silhouette of Masons Hill on the horizon.
He knows from memory that this track goes all the way to the ocean, though they’d only gone a couple times, and frankly, it was about as appealing as the seashore in Halfmarket. All rocks and cliffs and outlandishly cold water. But before the train would reach there, he remembers, as it pulled out of the station heading seaward, it would start its journey by passing great rows of fences and walls, chain link and brick, cornered by towers poking out of the surrounding trees. An architecture designed to hide itself within its own folds: the prison.
In the moonlight, he can already see one of the towers through the treetops in the distance. It’s probably not even a ten-minute walk from here, when it should be, he feels, something that took hours.
Ten minutes seems way too easy.
And not nearly enough time to work himself up to it.
He keeps heading down the brick walkway, gripping the torch like his own version of the Driver’s baton. He checks back to make sure a boar isn’t after him, and he sees the bridge over the tracks, on top of which he caught his first glimpse of the burnt-out neighborhood, and from where Tomasz saw him for the first time, too.
He wonders if they were worried when they found out someone else was here. Frightened, even. For him. Of him. And what had they thought when they found him showering? In an intimate way. He feels himself blush, though Regine had seemed as embarrassed as he was and Tomasz took it in the same enthusiastic stride as he did everything else.
Seth feels a pang again at letting Tomasz go. He pictures him now, waiting at their house, cheerfully expecting Seth along any minute. And Regine, thinking she knew better. And maybe she did.
Tomasz and Regine. A boy and a girl come to stop him before he reached Masons Hill, before he ran straight into the arms of something dangerous. A boy and a girl to give him answers to all the questions he might have, though leaving just enough unexplained to let the mystery seem plausible –
“You need to stop this,” he says. “This kind of thinking will drive you crazy.”
Her slap was sure real. The hug from Tomasz and the faint, familiar stinkiness of a boy that age was tangibly real, felt on Seth’s skin and smelled through his nose.
And yes, okay, Tomasz was a lot like Owen, just like a helping figure his brain might have conjured up to help him . . . accept death or move to a different consciousness or whatever the point of this place was, if it even had a point, then that might have made sense.
But he wouldn’t have made Regine up. She wasn’t like anyone he knew, not anywhere. Not that accent, not that attitude.
No, they were real. Or real enough.
But then Gudmund –
“Stop it,” he tells himself again. He keeps on walking. Through the trees between the tracks and the prison, he can see that he’s nearing the corner of the fifteen-foot-high brick wall. The outermost of the prison defenses.
He’ll take it as it comes, he thinks. If it’s a big opening and he can see through it, he’ll have a look. If it seems safe enough to enter, well, then, maybe that’s what he’ll do. If it doesn’t, he can always come back another night. All they’ve got here is time, don’t they? There’ll always be another chance –
A hundred feet along the brick wall from where he’s standing, he sees a light.
Electric light. For that’s clearly what it is, an odd, blank whiteness different than flickering firelight and much too strong to be coming from a torch or a gas lantern. It’s filtering through some trees, through what should be – if the wall continues through the foliage – solid brick. It’s shining out,
low enough not to have been seen from his house.
Seth listens all around him, for other footsteps on the brick, the thrum of an approaching engine, even the snuffling of the boar. But there’s nothing except him and his breathing. The light is silent, too, no rumbling of a generator, no whine of burning filament. The harsh shine of it comes on him unexpectedly through the leaves as he continues on. He squints into the glare, holding up a hand to shade his eyes. He’s reached the break in the prison wall.
Regine was right. The opening here is huge. The outer wall has been ruptured, but so has every row of fencing inside it, including the wooden walls of what look like some kind of holding room, now nearly flattened. From this point, there’s a straight open line, right into the very heart of the prison.
The light itself is nothing more remarkable than a streetlight-size bulb attached to what he can see now is an inner fence, torn open and collapsed. The light illuminates bricks from the outer wall tossed in almost casual piles and the twisted chain link of the fences within fences behind it.
It looks as if something enormous broke through. As if something rose up from the center of the prison and went straight through everything in its path to get out.
But how? Seth wonders. What could have done this?
Whatever did it, though, whenever it might have happened, now there is only quiet, and the single light showing the way to the heart of the prison.
He stands there, unsure. The ground angles down through the broken walls and fences. He can see maybe a hundred feet before it returns to blackness.
There could be anything down there. Anything at all. People sleeping in their coffins. Or no people, just empty rooms. Or there could be a single figure, dressed all in black, waiting for him.
If it’s a test, Seth doesn’t know what the right answer is.
To go in, or to leave it all unknown.
He grips the torch firmly again.
“I’ll just see,” he says. “That’s all I’ll do. I’ll just see what’s next.”
He steps forward into the darkness.
He moves through the first random scatters of bricks. Some roll and tumble as he bumps them but settle immediately back into silence once they fall.
The outermost wall, the brick one, is the tallest, which makes obvious sense. There are three rows of chain link next, all with barbed wire – of a sharper, uglier kind than on regular keep-out fences – stretching across the top. He has to take great care to get past a particularly messy tangle of it, but after that, he’s through and next to the light itself, hanging down, almost broken off, from the third stretch of chain link.
Other light fixtures hang along the fence to either side, but this is the only one still working, a heavy plastic housing attached to the fence with a burning bulb still inside. No hint of where the electricity to run it is coming from. Seth wonders, in momentary panic, if the fence itself might be electrified, before remembering he’s grabbed it several times on the way through.
He heads farther in. The light is behind him now, facing the other way. It starts to grow darker, everything turning to shadow. The trees have all stopped, as it’s obvious they would. Why would you give prisoners something to climb? The ground keeps angling down, the prison built at the bottom of what Seth thinks must be meant by a “dell.”
He can see a bit of it in the moonlight, a complex of buildings spreading down the hill in front of him, some behind farther rows of fences, others stretched along a little service road. There are also wide expanses of empty space, covered in weed-broken asphalt, which might have been prisoner exercise yards. The three main buildings at the bottom are five stories high, marking off three sides of another empty square. It’s too dark to see them clearly.
Dark, he thinks. As in no other lights.
The rest of the prison is quickly resembling everything else in this world. Abandoned, silent, still. He walks through thick grass again, though it isn’t as tall as in his own back garden. As ever, there are no rustlings of birds or nighttime creatures.
He stops on the last of a little rise. He’s well inside the prison grounds now, and the row of breakages in the fences has ended. The moon is still bright and clear, and his eyes adjust enough to let him see it all before him.
There is nothing happening here. No sign of any activity, not even the sound of an engine running. No sound of anything, like there would have to be – you couldn’t keep that many people alive, even if they were asleep, without there being some noise. Tomasz said he woke up here and was trapped with countless coffins behind countless doors and walls, but there’s nothing here now. If possible, it’s even more dark and still and silent than the rest of this world. Even the air is stale, like the inside of a locked room.
Nothing. Really nothing. So much so that a thought wanders into Seth’s head.
Did they?
Did they lie to him?
Were they trying to keep him away? If so, they hadn’t tried very hard. In fact, he almost thought they’d talked about it in such a way to make sure he’d come here to look.
By himself.
“No,” he says out loud. “They may have been a lot of things, but they weren’t –”
A shaft of light pours out across the small square as the door to one of the three main buildings opens.
The Driver steps out into the night.
Seth drops to the ground. There’s nowhere to properly hide, no building close enough to run behind. He can only press himself down into the grass and hope it’s tall enough to block the view.
The Driver is still some distance away, five hundred feet or so, silhouetted against the light from the doorway. It stands there looking out, as if it’s sensed something and is coming to investigate. It moves down the steps and into the courtyard, its footfalls echoing heavily across the small dell.
Seth tenses, preparing to run. It must know he’s here. It could probably see quite easily in the dark –
But then the Driver returns to the door and closes it. The light vanishes, and in the temporary blindness that follows, Seth holds his breath, straining to listen. He waits to hear footsteps again, but there’s nothing. Has the Driver moved to a softer part of the square, something covered with grass? Maybe it’s coming for him right now, on a new silent kind of footing –
And then a step. A clear step, just like when it came through the window of his house, a thunk of surprising weight.
And then another. And another.
The sounds of the footfalls are bouncing between the three buildings, confusing any sense of where it’s going. Is it coming toward him? Walking away? Seth risks raising his head farther above the grass, but all he can see is the glowing purple spot on his retina left by the light from the door.
Step. And another.
Growing louder, unquestionably.
There’s no choice. He’s going to have to run as fast as he can back to the tracks, make his way out somehow, run toward –
But then he realizes he can’t run to Regine and Tomasz. He’d bring the Driver right to them.
Step. Step.
“I’m sorry,” he finds himself whispering, to Tomasz, to Regine, to himself, not knowing what to do, where to go. “I’m so sorry.”
He stands to run.
And he hears the engine of the van start up.
He drops back down. Out there in the darkness somewhere, the engine noise grows in an oddly smooth way, as if the volume on it had been turned down and is slowly being raised again. It’s somewhere off to the side of the three buildings, maybe even –
Yes, there. Headlights, coming from around the corner of the farthest building, the one the Driver walked out of. The van moves across the square and turns down the main drive through the center of the prison.
Away from Seth.
It heads toward the southern entrance, the one Regine said was locked down. The Driver obviously has a way out into the world to patrol it, fulfilling whatever mysterious role it’s been assigned or taken on for itsel
f.
Whatever it is, it’s leaving. The engine noise doesn’t quite disappear, but it grows more distant, distant enough for Seth to feel slightly safer. He spares a thought again for Regine and Tomasz, out there in the world, hiding somewhere while the Driver prowls.
“Be safe,” he whispers. “Be safe.”
He looks down toward the buildings again, toward the doorway – now shut tight, not a peep of light escaping from behind it. His night vision has returned. He can see the square in the moonlight now. See the buildings in their silent darkness.
See how they seem unattended.
The engine is still faintly whining in the distance, though it sounds so smooth, so efficient, that in a world with other cars, with any other sounds at all, you’d never hear it coming.
But still, it’s an engine that’s moving away.
The prison, for the moment, is possibly unguarded.
Seth rises. First to his hands, then with a deep breath, to his feet.
Nothing happens. Silence continues to unroll. The engine noise is now so distant sounding as to almost not be there.
Seth thinks, he feels, that he’s alone here.
And if it’s a story he’s telling himself or a path he’s supposed to be on or just another convenient thing that’s happened to lead him forward, well, does it matter, he wonders? Does any of it really matter?
Because he wants to know, more than anything, what’s behind that door.
He sneaks down to the nearest building of the three around the square, stopping to look in a window. It’s got prison bars on it, but inside, there’s only darkness. He flicks on the torch. Nothing happens until he hits it a few times, rotates the aging batteries, and hits it a few times more. It flickers to life with a light barely bright enough to read by, but it’s better than nothing.
Through the dusty wired glass that sits just behind the bars, all the torch illuminates is an empty corridor, stretching away from him. He can see the heavy-looking doors to rooms – cells, of course they are, actual prison cells. The doors have smaller barred windows set in them and none of them is leaking any light.