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?”