Tomasz nods. “This is the best thing of all.”
“And it wasn’t okay that it was happening,” she says. “It was as scary as it had ever been. But somehow, it felt like, if it had to happen, then at least knowing you’d tried to stop it, knowing you’d made that big effort . . .”
She frowns. He can see her eyes welling again, see her reflex irritation at the fact.
“I understand,” Seth says.
She looks at him, almost accusingly. “Do you?”
Seth nods. “I think maybe I finally do.”
They walk through the coffins toward the main central aisle, Seth in the lead, Tomasz in the middle, Regine at the back, still clutching the shreds of her shirt around her.
Nothing around the van or the Driver moves.
“Leg,” Tomasz says, pointing to the dismembered limb. It’s been torn off at the thigh, a viscous dark liquid pooling around it on the floor. A liquid that definitely isn’t blood.
“Mechanical,” Regine says. “Way more advanced than anything we had in the other world.”
“Yeah,” Seth says thoughtfully.
“I hate it when you sound like that,” she says. “All suspicious-like.”
They approach the van slowly. There are sparks and smoke coming from where the Driver is slumped. One of its arms looks dislocated, and its head is twisted at an angle that could, should, indicate that it’s broken.
“Oh, boy,” Tomasz says, and they see him find the baton under a nearby coffin.
“Careful with that,” Regine snaps.
Tomasz rolls his eyes. “And still everyone thinking they are my mother. How many times I have to save your lives? How many – OW!”
He drops it as a bolt of electricity licks out and shocks him in the face. When the baton hits the floor, something triggers inside it and it folds back down into its smallest state.
“You all right?” Regine asks, trying not to laugh.
“Stupid thing,” Tomasz says, holding his cheek.
The new folded-down version of the baton seems inert, though, so he picks it back up. They don’t stop him when he puts it in his pocket. If anyone’s earned the right to it, it’s probably Tomasz.
They watch the van burn, coughing a little now at the smoke. The viscous fluid spills in larger quantities across the hood, dripping into pools down the side. The Driver seems clearly dead, but Seth notices how slowly they’re all moving, as if at any second they expect it to surge back to life and attack them.
That’s what would happen if this were a story, Seth thinks. The villain who wouldn’t stay dead. The one who has to be stopped over and over again. That’s what would happen if this were all just my mind trying to tell me something.
Except.
Except, except, except.
“I need to know,” he says.
“Know what?” Regine asks.
“What’s under its visor. I want to look at the face of the thing that wouldn’t stop chasing us.” He starts walking toward it. “I want to know exactly what it is.”
Which is when the van explodes.
71
The low sparks arc up suddenly bright, catching on a pool of the liquid beside the van. There’s a surprisingly soft whoompf –
And everything disappears in a fireball.
They’re blown back, flames washing over them as they fall –
But the first flash dissipates quickly, and as they tumble to the floor, it’s already receding, the most gaseous fumes burnt off in the first rush, the main fire reduced to the liquid fuel on the front of the van, burning surprisingly bright and hot.
The Driver now unreachable behind flames.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Seth says, coughing.
But Tomasz is already on his feet, looking around in panic at the coffins. “The people! They will burn! They –”
An intensely strong rain of water thunders down on them from newly opened ports in the ceiling. They’re drenched in seconds, the downpour bouncing off the sleek, shiny coffins. The fire is out almost instantaneously, but the spray of water continues. Billows of smoke and steam come rolling off the van, filling up the room. They breathe it in.
“It tastes like poison,” Tomasz says, wincing.
“It probably is,” Regine says. “None of that seems to be made of anything as simple as metal.”
Seth’s still staring at where the Driver was, now vanished behind the steam and smoke.
“I wanted to see what it looked like,” he says. “Underneath.”
“We beat it,” Regine says, shivering in the water. “Isn’t that enough?”
The poisonous-tasting steam fills the passageway back to the prison entrance. “We will have to go back the way I came in,” Tomasz says.
Regine holds out her hand for him. He takes it. They look at Seth expectantly.
“Yeah,” he says, still watching the churning smoke. “Yeah, all right.”
They head back up the central aisle. The overhead water stops in the next room, but when Seth looks behind them, there’s still nothing to see. They walk deeper and deeper, past row upon row upon row of coffins. Seth keeps checking back, but many, many rooms later, when they finally reach a ramp back up to the surface, their defeat of the Driver has long been lost to sight.
They don’t speak much as they climb, Seth in particular keeping his thoughts to himself. The ramp is circular, and he sees the dust and mud of the world above begin appearing in small layers the higher they go.
“Could you remember who you were?” he asks Regine as they slowly spiral up. “I know you said you felt me there, but could you remember this place?”
“Yeah, actually, I could,” she says. “I mean, being back there was just so unfair. I kept thinking, I can’t die here. If I die here, I die there. So I did remember this place.”
“I think time may work differently there,” Seth says. “The past can be closer than it is in real life. And maybe everything happens, all the time, over and over.”
Regine looks at him. “I get it. What you’re asking.”
“What?” Tomasz says. “What is he asking?”
Seth keeps walking. “The display said it was starting the Lethe process on you. The one that makes you forget.”
“But it didn’t,” Regine says carefully. “Or it hadn’t yet. I remembered everything. So that means –”
“That means,” Seth says, stopping her but not elaborating.
“That means what?” Tomasz says. “I am not happy with not being told what this means.”