“We all fall,” Ben finishes. “That’s why he wants you. Yer a symbol. Yer the last innocent boy of Prentisstown. If he can make you fall, then his army is complete and of his own perfect making.”
“And if not?” I say, tho I’m wondering if I’ve already fallen.
“If not,” Ben says, “he’ll kill you.”
“So Mayor Prentiss is as mad as Aaron, then,” Viola says.
“Not quite,” Ben says. “Aaron is mad. But the Mayor knows enough to use madness to achieve his ends.”
“Which are what?” Viola says.
“This world,” Ben says calmly. “He wants all of it.”
I open my mouth to ask more stuff I don’t wanna know but then, as if there was never gonna be anything else that could ever happen, we hear it.
Thump budda-thump budda-thump. Coming down the road, relentless, like a joke that ain’t ever gonna be funny.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Viola says.
Ben’s already back on his feet, listening. “It sounds like just one horse.”
We all look down the road, shining a little in the moonlight.
“Binos,” Viola says, now right by my side. I fish ’em out without another word, click on the night setting and look, searching out the sound as it rings thru the night air.
Budda-thump budda-thump.
I search down the road farther and farther back till–
There it is.
There he is.
Who else?
Mr Prentiss Jr, alive and well and untied and back on his horse.
“Damn,” I hear from Viola, reading my Noise as I hand her the binos.
“Davy Prentiss?” Ben says, also reading my Noise.
“The one and only.” I put the water bottles back in Viola’s bag. “We gotta go.”
Viola hands the binos to Ben and he looks for himself. He takes them away from his eyes and gives the binos a quick once over. “Nifty,” he says.
“We need to go,” Viola says. “As always.”
Ben turns to us, binos still in his hand. He’s looking from one of us to the other and I see what’s forming in his Noise.
“Ben–” I start.
“No,” he says. “This is where I leave you.”
“Ben–”
“I can handle Davy bloody Prentiss.”
“He has a gun,” I say. “You don’t.”
Ben comes up to me. “Todd,” he says.
“No, Ben,” I say, my voice getting louder. “I ain’t listening.”
He looks me in the eye and I notice he don’t seem to be having to bend down any more to do it.
“Todd,” he says again. “I atone for the wrong I’ve done by keeping you safe.”
“You can’t leave me, Ben,” I say, my voice getting wet (shut up). “Not again.”
He’s shaking his head. “I can’t come to Haven with you. You know I can’t. I’m the enemy.”
“We can explain what happened.”
But he’s still shaking his head.
“The horse is getting closer,” Viola says.
Thump budda-thump budda-thump.
“The only thing that makes me a man,” Ben says, his voice steady as a rock, “is seeing you safely into becoming a man yerself.”
“I ain’t a man yet, Ben,” I say, my throat catching (shut up). “I don’t even know how many days I got left.”
And then he smiles and it’s the smile that tells me it’s over.
“Sixteen,” he says. “Sixteen days till yer birthday.” He takes my chin and lifts it. “But you’ve been a man for a good while now. Don’t let no one tell you otherwise.”
“Ben–”
“Go,” he says and he comes up to me and hands Viola the binos behind my back and takes me in his arms. “No father could be prouder,” I hear him say by my ear.
“No,” I say, my words slurring. “It ain’t fair.”
“It ain’t.” He pulls himself away. “But there’s hope at the end of the road. You remember that.”
“Don’t go,” I say.
“I have to. Danger’s coming.”
“Closer and closer,” Viola says, binos to her eyes.
Budda-thump budda-THUMP.
“I’ll stop him. I’ll buy you time.” Ben looks at Viola. “You take care of Todd,” he says. “I have yer word?”
“You have my word,” Viola says.
“Ben, please,” I whisper. “Please.”
He grips my shoulders for a last time. “Remember,” he says. “Hope.”
And he don’t say nothing more and he turns and runs down the hill from the sematary to the road. When he gets to the bottom, he looks back and sees us still watching him.
“What are you waiting for?” he shouts. “Run!”
I won’t say what I feel when we run down the other side of the hill and away from Ben, for ever this time cuz how is there any life after this?
Life equals running and when we stop running maybe that’s how we’ll know life is finally finished.
“Come on, Todd,” Viola calls, looking back over her shoulder. “Please, hurry.”
I don’t say nothing.
I run.
We get down the hill and back by the river. Again. With the road on our other side. Again.
Always the same.
The river’s louder than it was, rushing by with some force, but who cares? What does it matter?
Life ain’t fair.
It ain’t.
Not never.
It’s pointless and stupid and there’s only suffering and pain and people who want to hurt you. You can’t love nothing or no one cuz it’ll all be taken away or ruined and you’ll be left alone and constantly having to fight, constantly having to run just to stay alive.
There’s nothing good in this life. Not nothing good nowhere.
What’s the effing point?
“The point is,” Viola says, stopping halfway thru a dense patch of scrub to hit me really hard on the shoulder, “he cared enough about you to maybe sacrifice himself and if you just GIVE UP” – she shouts that part – “then you’re saying that the sacrifice is worth nothing!”
“Ow,” I say, rubbing my shoulder. “But why should he have to sacrifice himself? Why should I have to lose him again?”
She steps up close to me. “Do you think you’re the only person who’s lost someone?” she says in a dangerous whisper. “Do you forget that my parents are dead, too?”
I did.
I did forget.
I don’t say nothing.
“All I’ve got now is you,” she says, her voice still angry. “And all you’ve got now is me. And I’m mad he left, too, and I’m mad my parents died and I’m mad we ever thought of coming to this planet in the first place but that’s how it is and it’s crap that it’s just us but we can’t do anything about it.”
I still don’t say nothing.
But there she is and I look at her, really look at her, for probably the first time since I saw her cowering next to a log back in the swamp when I thought she was a Spackle.
A lifetime ago.
She’s still kinda cleaned up from the days in Carbonel Downs (only yesterday, only just yesterday) but there’s dirt on her cheeks and she’s skinnier than she used to be and there are dark patches under her eyes and her hair is messy and tangled and her hands are covered in sooty blackness and her shirt has a green stain of grass across the front from when she once fell and there’s a cut on her lip from when a branch smacked her when we were running with Ben (and no bandages left to stitch it up) and she’s looking at me.
And she’s telling me she’s all I’ve got.
And that I’m all she’s got.
And I feel a little bit how that feels.
The colours in my Noise go different.
Her voice softens but only a little. “Ben’s gone and Manchee’s gone and my mother and father are gone,” she says. “And I hate all of that. I hate it. But we’re almost at the end of the road
. We’re almost there. And if you don’t give up, I don’t give up.”
“Do you believe there’s hope at the end?” I ask.
“No,” she says simply, looking away. “No, I don’t, but I’m still going.” She eyes me. “You coming with?”
I don’t have to answer.
We carry on running.
But.
“We should just take the road,” I say, holding back yet another branch.
“But the army,” she says. “And the horses.”
“They know where we’re going. We know where they’re going. We all seem to have taken the same route to get to Haven.”
“And we’ll hear them coming,” she agrees. “And the road’s fastest.
“The road’s fastest.”
And she says, “Then let’s just take the effing road and get ourselves to Haven.”
I smile, a little. “You said effing,” I say. “You actually said the word effing.”
So we take the effing road, as fast as our tiredness will let us. It’s still the same dusty, twisty, sometimes muddy river road that it was all those miles and miles ago and the same leafy, tree-filled New World all around us.
If you were just landing here and didn’t know nothing about nothing you really might think it was Eden after all.
A wide valley is opening up around us, flat at the bottom where the river is but distant hills beginning to climb up on either side. The hills are lit only by moonlight, no sign of distant settlements or anyway of ones with lights still burning.
No sign of Haven ahead neither but we’re at the flattest point of the valley and can’t see much past the twists in the road either before us or back. Forest still covers both sides of the river and you’d be tempted to think that all of New World had closed up and everyone left, leaving just this road behind ’em.
We go on.
And on.
Not till the first stripes of dawn start appearing down the valley in front of us do we stop to take on more water.
We drink. There’s only my Noise and the river rushing by.
No hoofbeats. No other Noise.
“You know this means he succeeded,” Viola says, not meeting my eye. “Whatever he did, he stopped the man on the horse.”
I just mm and nod.
“And we never heard gunshots.”
I mm and nod again.
“I’m sorry for shouting at you before,” she says. “I just wanted you to keep going. I didn’t want you to stop.”
“I know.”
We’re leaning against a pair of trees by the riverbank. The road is to our backs and across the river is just trees and the far side of the valley rises up and then only the sky above, getting lighter and more blue and bigger and emptier till even the stars start leaving it.
“When we left on the scout ship,” Viola says, looking up across the river with me, “I was really upset leaving my friends behind. Just a few kids from the other caretaker families, but still. I thought I’d be the only one my age on this planet for seven whole months.”
I drink some water. “I didn’t have friends back in Prentisstown.”
She turns to me. “What do you mean, no friends? You had to have friends.”
“I had a few for a while, boys a coupla months older than me. But when boys become men they stop talking to boys,” I shrug. “I was the last boy. In the end there was just me and Manchee.”
She gazes up into the fading stars. “It’s a stupid rule.”
“It is.”
We don’t say nothing more, just me and Viola by the riverside, resting ourselves as another dawn comes.
Just me and her.
We stir after a minute, get ourselves ready to go again.
“We could reach Haven by tomorrow,” I say. “If we keep on going.”
“Tomorrow,” Viola nods. “I hope there’s food.”
It’s her turn to carry the bag so I hand it to her and the sun is peeking up over the end of the valley where it looks like the river’s running right into it and as the light hits the hills across the river from us, something catches my eye.
Viola turns immediately at the spark in my Noise. “What?”
I shield my eyes from the new sun. There’s a little trail of dust rising from the top of the far hills.
And it’s moving.
“What is that?” I say.
Viola fishes out the binos and looks thru ’em. “I can’t see properly,” she says. “Trees in the way.”
“Someone travelling?”
“Maybe that’s the other road. The fork we didn’t take.”
We watch for a minute or two as the dust trail keeps rising, heading towards Haven at the slow speed of a distant cloud. It’s weird seeing it without any sound.
“I wish I knew where the army was,” I say. “How far they were behind us.”
“Maybe Carbonel Downs put up too good a fight.” Viola points the binos upriver to see the way we came but it’s too flat, too twisty. All there is to be seen is trees. Trees and sky and quiet and a silent trail of dust making its way along the far hilltops.
“We should go,” I say. “I’m starting to feel a little spooked.”
“Let’s go then,” Viola says, quiet-like.
Back on the road.
Back to the life of running.
We have no food with us so breakfast is a yellow fruit that Viola spies on some trees we pass that she swears she ate in Carbonel Downs. They become lunch, too, but it’s better than nothing.
I think again of the knife at my back.
Could I hunt, if there was time?
But there ain’t no time.
We run past midday and into afternoon. The world is still abandoned and spooky. Just me and Viola running along the valley bottom, no settlements to be seen, no caravans or carts, no other sound loud enough to be heard over the rushing of the river, getting bigger by the hour, to the point where it’s hard even to hear my Noise, where even if we want to talk, we have to raise our voices.
But we’re too hungry to talk. And too tired to talk. And running too much to talk.
And so on we go.
And I find myself watching Viola.
The trail of dust on the far hilltop follows us as we run, pulling ahead slowly as the day gets older and finally disappearing in the distance and I watch her checking it as we hurry on. I watch her run next to me, flinching at the aches in her legs. I watch her rub them when we rest and watch her when she drinks from the water bottles.
Now that I’ve seen her, I can’t stop seeing her.
She catches me. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say and look away cuz I don’t know either.
The river and the road have straightened out as the valley gets steeper and closer on both sides. We can see a little bit back the way we came. No army yet, no horsemen neither. The quiet is almost scarier than if there was Noise everywhere.
Dusk comes, the sun setting itself in the valley behind us, setting over wherever the army might be and whatever’s left of New World back there, whatever’s happened to the men who fought against the army and the men who joined.
Whatever’s happened to the women.
Viola runs in front of me.
I watch her run.
Just after nightfall we finally come to another settlement, another one with docks on the river, another one abandoned. There are only five houses in total along a little strip of the road, one with what looks like a small general store tacked onto the front.
“Hold on,” Viola says, stopping.
“Dinner?” I say, catching my breath.
She nods.
It takes about six kicks to open the door of the general store and tho there clearly ain’t no one here at all, I still look round expecting to be punished. Inside, it’s mostly cans but we find a dry loaf of bread, some bruised fruit and a few strips of dried meat.
“These aren’t more than a day or two old,” Viola says, twixt mouthfuls. “They must have fled to Haven yesterday
or the day before.”
“Rumours of an army are a powerful thing,” I say, not chewing my dried meat well enough before I swallow and coughing up a little bit of it.
We fill our bellies as best we can and I shove the rest of the food into Viola’s bag, now hanging round my shoulders. I see the book when I do. Still there, still wrapped in its plastic bag, still with the knife-shaped slash all the way thru it.
I reach in thru the plastic bag, rubbing my fingers across the cover. It’s soft to the touch and the binding still gives off a faint whiff of leather.
The book. My ma’s book. It’s come all the way with us. Survived its own injury. Just like us.
I look up at Viola.
She catches me again.
“What?” she says.
“Nothing.” I put the book back in the bag with the food. “Let’s go.”
Back on the road, back down the river, back towards Haven.
“This should be our last night, you know,” Viola says. “If Doctor Snow was right, we’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I say, “and the world will change.”
“Again.”
“Again,” I agree.
We go on a few more paces.
“You starting to feel hope?” Viola asks, her voice curious.
“No,” I say, fuddling my Noise. “You?”
Her eyebrows are up but she shakes her head. “No, no.”
“But we’re going anyway.”
“Oh, yeah,” Viola says. “Hell or high water.”
“It’ll probably be both,” I say.
The sun sets, the moons rise again, smaller crescents than the night before. The sky is still clear, the stars still up, the world still quiet, just the rush of the river, getting steadily louder.
Midnight comes.
Fifteen days.
Fifteen days till–
Till what?
We carry on thru the night, the sky falling slowly past us, our words stopping a little as dinner wears off and tiredness takes hold again. Just before dawn we find two overturned carts in the road, grains of wheat spilled everywhere and a few empty baskets rolled on their sides across the road.
“They didn’t even take the time to save everything,” Viola says. “They left half of it on the ground.”
“Good a place as any for breakfast.” I flip over one of the baskets, drag it over to where the road overlooks the river and sit down on it.