More Than This

by Patrick Ness

  I do not believe this, Seth thinks even as Regine is screaming Tomasz’s name, even as the Driver is grabbing her arm and forcing her down. I do not believe this is happening.

  He goes in fighting anyway.

  He throws himself at the Driver –

  But even in his split-second leap, he can see that it doesn’t have the same effortless strength as before, that it’s struggling against Regine’s resistance –

  He tackles it mid-chest, and they fall to the sidewalk. The Driver thuds beneath him, and this time, it’s like landing on a bag of metal shards. Seth doesn’t let go, though.

  This isn’t happening, a part of his brain keeps telling him. This would only be happening if none of this were –

  “Shut up!” he growls as if it was the Driver talking to him. He strikes it across the helmet, but his fist glances off the melted facade, sticky black tar coating his knuckles. He rears back to strike it again –

  The Driver’s arm shoots up and grabs him around the neck. It jerks him to one side, thumping his head into the door of the car beside them –

  But Seth anticipates the move, and the Driver isn’t as strong as it was before. He checks its arm motion before he gets the full brunt of the car door on his head.

  It’s still got a hand around his throat, though, and when thumping Seth doesn’t work, it starts to squeeze –

  Seth hears a call to his right and a shadowy figure blocks out the sun. Regine is bringing down an enormous rock on the Driver’s head –

  The Driver sees it coming (How? Seth has a mad moment to think, With what eyes?) and moves its head to one side. The rock catches it with a glancing blow, and the Driver uses its free hand to grab Regine by her foot. She stumbles back into some weeds behind her. With a cry, Seth pulls himself away, freeing his neck from the Driver’s hand and punching again with his own –

  His fists fall on hard metal sections, all sticky with the tarry substance. The Driver makes to strike him back, but Seth blocks it with his arm –

  And though the Driver is obviously weakened, it’s not exactly weak. The punch feels like it nearly breaks Seth’s wrist, and his recoil from the pain is enough to let the Driver land another blow. It catches Seth on the side of his head, rolling him onto the sidewalk –

  Where the Driver begins to rise –

  And this time Regine is on it again. She clubs it with another rock across the back of its head. It spins around and grabs her arm, squeezing it enough for her to cry out and drop the rock. It punches her, hard, in the face, sending her back over the low stone wall of an adjacent front garden.

  She stays down.

  The Driver turns to Seth. There’s only the two of them now.

  Seth gets to his feet.

  And a terrifying but somehow true thought enters his head.

  I’ll win, he thinks, dancing back as the Driver approaches. That’s how this story goes, doesn’t it? The enemy makes a surprise return just before the end, facing the hero one last time –

  And the hero wins.

  It takes a step toward him. Then another.

  “You piece of shit!” Seth shouts. “You’re nothing! You’re just a hunk of plastic that’s got big ideas!”

  The Driver swings for him again, but Seth jumps out of the way. It’s stumbling a little on its replacement leg, the thinner metal of it creaking at the knee. There’s a definite scraping as the Driver moves forward. When Seth knocked it to the ground, it must have snapped something.

  Yes. Oh, yes.

  “Not really fixed, are you?” Seth shouts, dodging another punch. “You’re breakable. And I’m guessing, out of warranty!”

  Another punch dodged, another step.

  Seth looks left and right, trying to find some ammunition, something to fight it with, but he can’t see where Regine got those rocks.

  But maybe there’s a way to at least stop it. And if he can stop it, then –

  I’ll beat it, Seth thinks again. That’s what happens. That’s the end of this story.

  The Driver swings again, and Seth moves out of the way once more.

  But he sees the way forward now.

  “You,” he says, dodging one more blow, timing what he’s about to do, “are nothing more” – dodge, step – “than an obsolete” – dodge, step – “malfunctioning” – dodge, step – “JANITOR!”

  He leaps toward the Driver’s punches –

  Putting all his weight behind his right foot –

  Aiming for the Driver’s creaking knee –

  He hits it, full-on.

  The leg snaps in two.

  The Driver falls into the car next to it, shattering its window, but not reacting in time to catch itself before falling to the pavement. Seth leaps past it, swerving out of its reach. He picks up Regine’s first rock, the larger one, staggering under its weight. Jesus, that girl is strong.

  He turns back to the Driver, which is struggling to rise, the broken half of its leg lying uselessly in front of it. Seth gives a grunt and lifts the rock up high, above his head. He starts to yell, growing louder as he races toward the Driver –

  Who looks up at him, the melted helmet facing Seth, as blank and unknowable as ever –

  “I win!” Seth shouts. “This story is finished!”

  He surges forward –

  Heaves the stone back to throw it –

  The Driver’s arm moves in a flash, faster than any living thing possibly could –

  And Seth feels cold steel plunge deep into his front –

  The stone clatters down in front of him, dropping harmlessly to the pavement –

  Because the broken-off leg of the Driver is now sticking out of Seth’s stomach.

  Seth collapses to the sidewalk, lying on his side, gasping, the steel both cold and somehow also burning all the way through his body. He grabs it instinctively, and his hands come away drenched with his own blood, which spills onto the mud and weeds. He twists his neck and sees that the metal shaft has gone all the way through him. The end of it is sticking out his back.

  He glances up the sidewalk in shock.

  The Driver has pulled itself upright on its one leg.

  It balances with a hand on the parked cars lining the pavement.

  It half hops, half drags itself forward.

  It’s coming for Seth.

  It had seemed so clear. The Driver was right where it was supposed to be, right where Seth half expected it to be.

  And if that was true, then everything else had to be true, too.

  He would defeat the Driver after it came back from the dead one last time. He would beat it, and then he’d go triumphantly into . . .

  What?

  He doesn’t know. The certainty’s gone.

  Because here he is, the Driver’s latticed metal leg protruding from just below his rib cage, sticking out his back in a nightmare of pain and impossibility that his brain can’t even process, except to focus on the fact that he’s bleeding everywhere.

  That he’s dying.

  And that, at last, he desperately doesn’t want to.

  “Please,” he hears himself whispering, trying to push himself back along the sidewalk. “Please.”

  The horrible wrongness of the metal through his body is too much to contemplate. Because it means there’s no getting out of this one. No last-minute heroics. No Tomasz or Regine leaping to the rescue. It doesn’t matter if anyone stops the Driver; there’s nothing they can do before he bleeds to death.

  It’s too late.

  He coughs, and there’s blood in his mouth.

  And the Driver pulls itself closer.

  “Please,” he says again, but his strength is deserting him rapidly. And the pain. There’s no way he can move to lessen it, and for a moment, for a terrifying moment, he feels himself blacking out.

  The world goes inky and dark –

  – and there is Gudmund, taking Seth’s hand, in a world that’s just the two of them, and they’re watching TV, something unimportant and fo
rgettable, but Gudmund has reached over and taken Seth’s hand for no other reason than that he wants to, and there they sit, together –

  But the pain returns.

  And precious seconds have passed.

  He’s still on the pavement.

  Still with the metal shard stabbed all the way through him.

  Still bleeding.

  Still dying.

  And the Driver only needs one last scraping hop to reach him.

  It stands over him, looking down.

  And Seth hears nothing, no sound of Regine or Tomasz stirring, no last-minute roar of an engine, no calls of his name or cries of victory.

  There’s just him and the Driver.

  At the end.

  “Who are you?” he gasps.

  But the Driver, of course, makes no answer, just raises a cracked and melted hand to end Seth’s story once and for all.

  It doesn’t punch him, though. It does something much worse. It grabs the end of the leg sticking out of Seth’s stomach.

  Seth cries out in an agony so overwhelming, he wonders if he’s going to black out again, hopes for it, thinks he can hear himself begging for it –

  The Driver twists the leg, and impossibly, the pain increases. Seth’s whole torso feels like it’s being dunked in burning acid, like every muscle is snapping from the bone in metal cords.

  “STOP!” he screams. “PLEASE! STOP!”

  The Driver does not stop. It twists the leg once more in the other direction, as if testing the best way to cause Seth the most pain –

  And just like the first time Seth saw it, hiding in the burnt-out neighborhood with Tomasz and Regine, there is nothing to appeal to there, nothing human, no mercy to be asked for or given –

  The Driver changes its grip on the leg, fixes a hard fist around it –

  “No,” Seth says, sensing what’s coming. “NO! PLEASE!”

  It yanks the leg out of him in one terrible, final movement, and Seth loses his mind for a bit, the horror of just the motion of it passing through his back and out his stomach, the terror that all his guts must be spilling out onto the sidewalk (though when he looks there only seems to just be blood, blood and more blood), the utter certainty that his death is really here, that this really is it, that there will never be anything more –

  And then the Driver is pushing him over onto his back. He can no longer really breathe, the blood he’s coughing up choking him just like the seawater did.

  He’s drowning in it –

  (And maybe that, finally, is it –)

  (Maybe that’s what this has all been –)

  (Maybe he never stopped drowning –)

  The Driver effortlessly pulls Seth’s hands away from the wound, and though Seth’s brain is telling him to resist, to fight back, he doesn’t have the strength to do anything at all –

  He is at the Driver’s mercy –

  And the Driver has none to offer –

  It leans over him now, raising its arm above Seth, its hand clenching into a fist –

  Seth wishes so many things were different, wishes he knew that Regine and Tomasz would be okay, wishes only that he could have stopped the Driver for them –

  A line of spikes shoot out from the Driver’s knuckles, sharp and needle-like –

  Seth sees sparks start to flash between them, small arcs of electricity casting from one to the other –

  This is it, he finds enough strength to think –

  This is it –

  No –

  Bolts of electricity shoot from the Driver’s fist –

  For a split second, the pain is worse than should be humanly possible –

  And then there is only nothingness.

  “Eat up,” says his mother, setting the dish in front of him. “It’s not your favorite, but it’s what we have.”

  The table where he’s sitting is absurdly long, too long to fit in any normal room, and the clink as she sets the plate down echoes into the milky whiteness beyond. This is no place. No place he’s ever seen. No place that ever existed.

  “It’s my favorite,” Owen says, reaching across the table with a spoon and dishing out the steaming hot food onto his own plate.

  “Tuna-noodle casserole?” Tomasz says, sitting next to Owen. “I have not heard of this.”

  “It’s great!” Owen says, serving some to Tomasz.

  “Isn’t that the food you hate most, Seth?” H asks, in the chair next to him.

  “Is it?” his father says, down at the end of the table.

  “It is, I’m afraid,” Gudmund says, leaning forward on Seth’s right. “I mean, he really, really hates it. Cooked tuna is about the worst taste in the world. And then you mix it with onions –”

  “He’s right,” Monica says as Owen spoons some casserole onto her plate, too. “It’s disgusting.”

  “And that’s what the Internet age has done for us,” his mother says, sitting down. “Anything you don’t like is automatically disgusting and anyone who may like it themselves is an idiot. So much for a world full of different viewpoints, huh?” She takes a bite. “I think it’s delicious.”

  “Taste has become opinion,” his father agrees, picking up a newspaper and opening it. “When any fool knows they’re two different things.”

  “Still,” Tomasz says, frowning at his plate, “neither my taste nor my opinion of this is either of them very positive.”

  “You can have some of mine,” Gudmund says to Seth, offering his plate, which has the chicken mushroom pasta that’s Seth’s favorite.

  “Or mine,” H says, offering the same thing.

  “I want to get in on this action,” Monica says, lifting her plate across the table and offering it to Seth as well, the tuna-noodle casserole replaced on her plate with the same pasta.

  “I do not have that,” Tomasz says, his own plate now filled with a red savory-smelling mixture of meats and vegetables, “but this is my favorite from when I was a little boy.”

  His mother shakes her head. “Everyone thinks they know what’s best. Everyone.”

  And then a voice behind him says, “Sometimes you need to find out that you don’t, though.”

  He turns. Regine is there, a little away from the table, the light behind her making a silhouette. She is different from the others. Apart. He senses that she’s waiting for something.

  Waiting for him somehow.

  He squints into the light. “Is that what I’m supposed to find out?” he asks her, his voice raspy, as if it hasn’t been used for years and years and years. “Is that what all of this means?”

  Regine steps out of the light and it dims behind her, becomes a swath of stars against a night sky, the Milky Way blazing. She stands in front of him, the same big, awkward Regine he knows her to be.

  Except she’s smiling. It’s a don’t-be-an-idiot smile.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she says as the voices behind him fade.

  “This isn’t a memory,” he says. “Not like the others.”

  “Well, obviously.”

  He looks back to the quiet dinner, everyone still eating and talking around one table. All the people he knows. Gudmund glances back at him. And smiles.

  “It doesn’t feel like a dream either,” Seth says, his heart aching.

  “There you go again,” Regine says, “expecting me to have all the answers for you.”

  “Is this death?” He turns to her. “Have I died? At last?”

  She just shrugs.

  “What am I doing here?” Seth asks her. “What has all this been about?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “But haven’t you been leading me somewhere?” He gestures to the room, to the guests at the table again, Gudmund still watching him carefully, a look of concern crossing his face. “What does it all mean?”

  Regine chuckles. “Are you serious? Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.”
/>   She leans down until her face is close to his. “Now, make hay, dickhead. While the sun still shines.”

  He opens his eyes.

  He’s still on the pavement. The Driver is still over him. The sparks still coming from the needles on its fist –

  But they’re dying down, dampening, receding.

  Stopping.

  Seth takes in a breath.

  He can take in a breath.

  He coughs up some blood and has to spit it messily out –

  But he can breathe. His lungs feel wet and heavy, like he has a terrible cold, but they’re working. He breathes again. And once more.

  And it’s easier.

  “What’s happening?” he asks. “Am I dead?”

  The Driver remains motionless. The needle-like protrusions disappear back into its knuckles, but it stays looming over Seth. He tries to scoot away and pain shoots through his rib cage. He puts a hand on the wound –

  But something’s different.

  He’s still covered in blood, but it’s no longer spilling out of him in a great rush.

  “What . . . ?” Seth says.

  The Driver seems to be regarding him, watching to see what he’ll do –

  As if it’s waiting.

  The pain is still terrible as Seth pulls up his blood-soaked shirt where the Driver’s leg pierced him, and below, on his skin –

  Is the wound, set in the curve just below his ribs. It’s horrific to see, a wound that looks impossible, that looks fatal –

  That looks as if it’s sealing itself.

  Seth glances up in bafflement at the Driver, still motionless, still watching him, then back down at the wound. There are little sparks flashing within it, inside his skin somehow. He can feel the shocks of them as they fire –

  As they seem to be stitching the wound shut.

  It still hurts, a lot, but even as he watches, the torn layers of his skin are coming together, like little fingers reaching for one another. After a moment, there’s no trace of bleeding at all.

  He cries out as he feels the sparks moving deeper into his body, and he realizes he can feel them working on the exit wound on his back, too. He puts his hand there but has to pull it away when he’s shocked by the sparks.