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.
31
“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.”
32
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.