Stretching in front of him are more coffins than seems possible, so many it’d take him hours to even partially count them. The wide passageways connecting the rooms stretch farther back than he can even see, turning around other corners, too, to delve who knows how much deeper beyond.
He starts running again, scanning right and left, looking for an opened coffin, but all he sees are innumerable closed ones, polished and clean and humming away with their individual lives being lived inside. The Driver clearly did its job with brutal efficiency.
Seth hazards a look back. It hasn’t followed him yet, but it can only be a matter of seconds. Seth nears the end of this second area and is about to cross into a third. He stops and opens another coffin, pressing its pad expertly now, lifting the lid with ease.
There’s a woman inside.
She’s holding a baby.
The woman is bandaged like everyone else, but the baby is wrapped up tight in a blanket that looks made of blue gel. Tubes run from it to the mother, but her arms are around the infant, holding it close, pressing it to her.
Like any mother and baby.
We’re on the threshold of reproduction and childbirth, the woman from the Council had said.
Well, they’d clearly managed to cross that threshold before everything went bad. Conception happening through the tubes, mothers giving birth while they were still sleeping, who knew how it exactly worked?
Children were being born.
Hope for the future, the woman from the Council had said, and here it was.
They’d believed there was a future.
He hears footfalls again.
The Driver is running, somewhere behind him.
Seth takes one last look at the woman and baby and closes their coffin. He opens the next one over. Inside is a chubby teenage boy. Seth yanks out tubes in three or four handfuls, then reaches under the boy’s shoulders to pull him out of the coffin –
The sound of footfalls enters the room, and Seth can see the Driver hurtle through the passageway, running fast.
A jolt of adrenaline gets the boy out and onto the floor. Seth sets him upright against the coffin, tearing out a few more tubes for good measure.
“Sorry,” he says to the boy and takes off running again.
As he passes out of this second room, he turns back –
And sees the Driver stop by the teenage boy.
But not go to him.
It keeps on looking at Seth, obviously conflicted.
There’s a terrifying moment when it looks like it may keep on coming –
But then it goes to the boy to put him back. Seth keeps running, thinking that the Driver must somehow be learning, and that next time this trick of taking someone out may not work, that he’s got to find Regine, he’s got to do it quickly, he’s got to –
And then he hears her scream again.
“Regine!” he shouts.
The sound came from the next room after this one, he’s sure of it, down through the wide passageway at the far end. She’s got to be in there. She’s got to be.
He hears the scream again. “No,” he says, sprinting now. “No, no, no, no, no –”
He sails through the passageway. He has no idea now where he is in relation to the surface. This series of rooms seems impossibly big, impossibly deep. His mind keeps telling him that it makes no sense. When was it built? Why was it built here?
She screams once more.
And he sees her.
Off to his right, down a row, nearly to the far wall. Her coffin is open, and he can see her lying there.
See her struggling.
She wasn’t struggling before.
“Regine!”
Unlike everyone else in the coffins, she’s still half-dressed, the bandages wrapped around her upper body and face, but her jeans and shoes still on, as if getting her memory erased was the most important thing, and why wouldn’t it be?
It’s the one thing that makes all this possible, Seth thinks.
But she seems to be fighting it, fighting against the bandages over her eyes, fighting the tube in her mouth, a tube doing nothing to stifle her screams –
“I’m coming!” he shouts.
He reaches her and pulls the tube out. It sends her into a spasm of distressed coughing.
“Regine?” he cries. “Regine, can you hear me?”
She screams, terrifyingly loud. Her hands are frantic, slapping at him, not in any coordinated way, just flailing around, striking wildly at the air.
“Can you hear me?” he shouts again. She jerks away from him, clearly in terror, and screams as loud as before.
“Oh, shit, Regine,” Seth says, distraught. He looks back across the rows of coffins, down the wide central passageway that links this large room to the one he just came out of and onto who knows how many beyond it the other way. No sign of the Driver yet, but there’s no way it can be far behind.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and with one hand he grabs Regine’s wrists, forcing them down. She’s strong and he can barely hold her there, the force just making her more upset. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, and he slips his free hand around her neck, trying to find the end of the bandages.
“You’ll see me! It’ll all make sense. I promise –”
His hand brushes against the rapidly red-blinking light on her neck –
And in an instant, he’s gone from the world.
68
“You’re nothing,” the man says. “You’re fat. You’re ugly. And too bloody monstrous for any boy to ever look at you.”
“Lots of boys look at me,” she says, but she’s got fear in her stomach. She can see his fists clenched at his side. She’s big, but he’s bigger, and she knows he’s not afraid to use those fists, like he used them on her mother just now, knocking her once across the kitchen table when the tea was too cold, a knock that sent Regine running up the stairs, him roaring after her.
He’s usually slow when he’s drunk, but she’s taken too long to grab her phone and her money, and when she left her bedroom, there he was, blocking the top of the stairs.
“No boy ever looks at you,” he spits at her. “You slut.”
“Let me pass,” she says, clenching her own fists. “Let me pass or I swear to God . . .”
He smirks. That stupid pink face of his, all lit up with ugly, drunk delight, that lank blond hair that always looks dirty, no matter how often he washes it. “Let you pass or you swear to God you’ll what?”
She says nothing, doesn’t move.
He steps back, gesturing grandly with one hand and bowing in a sarcastic way, giving her leave to go down the stairs. “Go on then,” he says. “Be my guest.”