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 itself.
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.
45
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.
It’s a dead place, as dead as everything else.
The next window has a number of its wired glass panes broken out, but inside is more of the same. Another stretch of corridor, another row of darkened, empty cells, no indication of life or movement or activity.
No indication of any coffins, that’s for sure.
Before he can check the third window, the last before the corner of the building, the torch goes out and refuses to light again, no matter how much he curses over it. He sighs, but he doubts there was much more to see anyway. Prisons probably didn’t bother much with variation. He makes his way instead to the corner of the building, the one that leads on to the square.
It’s a concrete expanse, broken by the usual weeds pushing up through cracks. There’s not even the remnants of anything else – old benches, concrete planters, nothing – just an empty space that would have been completely bare before things started growing up through it. Another exercise yard, maybe, or perhaps just a clear area where there was nowhere for a prisoner to hide.