Almost.
“That’s where you hit your head?” Regine asks.
“Yes,” Seth answers. “You?”
Regine nods.
“And that is where the lightning punched me!” Tomasz says.
“Or whatever happened,” Regine mumbles.
“What is it?” Seth asks, feeling around on the same spot on his right side to see if there’s another one. There isn’t.
“We think it is a kind of connection,” Tomasz says.
“Connection to what?”
Neither of them answers.
“Connection to what?” Seth says again.
“What have your dreams been like?” Regine says.
Seth frowns at her. Then he has to look away, feeling the vividness of his dreams in a way that causes his skin to flush.
“The dreamings,” Tomasz says, patting Seth’s back sympathetically. “They are not easy.”
“Like you’re not just seeing it all again,” Regine says. “Like you’re actually there, back in time somehow, reliving it.”
Seth is surprised to find his eyes filling, his throat choking. “What is it? Why does it happen?”
She glances at Tomasz, then back at Seth. “We’re not sure,” she says carefully.
“But you have an idea.”
She nods. “The things you dream. They’re important?”
“Yes,” Seth says. “More than I want them to be.”
“Some of it is good,” Tomasz says. “But good in painful way.”
Seth nods.
“But that, all that –” Regine makes a gesture in the air, capturing in a single twist of her fingers all the dreams he’s had –“all that is not your whole life.”
“What?”
“There’s more. There’s much, much more.” She gets a grim set to her mouth. “And you’ve forgotten it.”
For some reason Seth can’t quite put a finger on, this makes him angry. “Don’t tell me I’ve forgotten,” he says, fierce enough to surprise everyone, even himself. “I remember too much, is the problem. If I could forget some of these things, then . . .”
“Then what?” Regine says. “You wouldn’t have drowned?” She says the word with a sarcastic snap, challenging him with her eyes.
“Did you fall down those stairs,” he hears himself saying. “Or were you pushed?”
“Whoa,” Tomasz says, taking a step back. “Something has happened. I have missed it. Why are we fighting?”
“We’re not fighting,” Regine says. “We’re getting to know each other.”
“People who are getting to know each other share information,” Seth says. “All you’re giving me are riddles and hints about how much more you know than I do.” He stands, his voice rising with him. “Why do I have a brand-new notch in my head?”
Tomasz starts to answer, “It is not brand –” but Seth keeps going.
“Why did I crawl out of a coffin in the house where I grew up?”
Regine looks surprised. “You grew up here? In this house?”
But Seth is barely listening. “And where is everyone else? Who are you, anyway? How do I know you’re not working with that thing in the van?”
This causes a lot more outrage than he was expecting.
“We are NOT!” Tomasz shouts.
“You don’t know anything!” Regine says.
“Then tell me!”
“Fine!” she says. “Tomasz isn’t the first person I saw here. He was the second.”
Seth feels strangely victorious. “So there are others?”
“Only the one, before I found Tomasz.”
“And thank the Holy Mother she did,” Tomasz says, nodding vigorously. “Was in very bad way.”
“But before then,” Regine says, “there was another. A woman. I knew her one day. One day. And then I watched her die. She pushed me to safety and let the Driver catch her so it wouldn’t catch me. I watched it kill her. That baton has some kind of charge in it. It kills you. And then the Driver takes your body away.”
Tomasz frowns at Seth. “She does not like to talk about it.”
“So, screw you,” Regine continues. “How do we know you’re not –”
She stops.
Because they’ve noticed the sound.
A distant purring, a sound of the wind that isn’t the wind.
The sound of an engine.
Growing louder as it approaches.
35
They turn to the windows, though the blinds are still down and nothing can be seen of the street beyond.
“No,” Regine says, standing up. “It never follows this far. If we get away, it always stops.”
The sound of the engine grows louder, two, maybe three streets away.
And getting closer.
Tomasz scowls at Seth. “You were shouting! It heard you!”
“No, it didn’t,” Regine says. “It’s just searching, street by street, trying to find us. Now, be quiet.”
They’re silent, but there’s a shift in the sound as it obviously turns a corner –
And starts driving down the road to Seth’s house.
But Seth is thinking.
They only heard the engine after he spoke the words. After he accused them of working with it.
And now here it is.
I did this, he thinks. Did I do this?
“Our footprints are all over,” Tomasz says. “It will know we are here.”
“It’s driving,” Regine says. “It may pass by too quickly to notice –”
But she doesn’t finish.
Because the engine has come to a stop right outside.
Seth feels Tomasz’s hand slip into his own, gripping it the way Owen did every time they had to cross a street. Seth can feel the tension vibrating up from the little, stubby fingers, can see the nails that are bitten painfully down to the quick, can see the wide-open, terrified eyes looking back up from Tomasz’s face.
So much like Owen.
“It’ll pass,” Regine says. “It’ll drive on and out. Just nobody move, okay?”
They don’t move. Neither does the sound of the engine.
“What is it doing?” Tomasz asks, his voice a desperate whisper.
And Seth sees again the craziness of his hair, an avalanche of wiry tangle. Again, just like Owen’s. Seth looks at Regine, his mind racing.
Everything about this world has felt small. Everything has felt like he was hiding in a tiny pocket of a place with walls that pressed in from every side, in the form of memories he couldn’t shake, a burnt-out wasteland that made a border, and now these two, showing up just in time to stop him from going any farther, bringing him back to this same stupid house at the very moment he tried to leave it for good, and who knows, maybe even bringing this van after them.