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“He’s a man.”
“How can you keep saying that?” she asks, her voice finally snappy. “How can you keep saying that he’s a man and you’re not? Just because of some stupid birthday? If you were where I came from you’d already be fourteen and a month!”
“I’m not where yer from!” I shout. “I’m from here and that’s how it works here!”
“Well, how it works here is wrong.” She lets go of my arm and kneels down by Mr Prentiss Jr. “We’ll tie him up. We’ll tie him up good and tight and we’ll get the heck out of here, all right?”
I don’t let go of the knife.
I will never let go of this knife, no matter what she says, no matter how she says it.
She looks up and around. “Where’s Manchee?”
Oh, no.
We find him in the bushes. He growls at us without words, just animal growls. He’s holding his left eye shut and there’s blood around his mouth. It takes a bunch of tries but I finally catch him while Viola takes out her medipak-of-wonders. I hold him down as she forces him to swallow a pill that makes him go floppy and then she cleans out his broken teeth and puts a cream in his eye. She tapes a bandage to it and he looks so small and beaten that when he says “Thawd?” thru one-eyed grogginess I just hug him to me and sit for a bit, under the bushes, outta the rain, while Viola repacks everything and gets my rucksack outta the mud.
“Your clothes are all wet,” she says after a while. “And the food is smashed. But the book’s still in the plastic. The book’s all right.”
And the thought of my ma knowing what a coward her son would be one day makes me want to throw the book in the river.
But I don’t.
We go to tie up Mr Prentiss Jr with his own rope and find that the electric shock has blown the wooden stock right off of his rifle. Which is a shame cuz it coulda come in handy.
“What was that you shocked him with?” I ask, huffing and puffing as we drag him to the side of the road. Knocked out people are heavy.
“A device for telling the ship in space where I am on the planet,” she says. “It took forever to pull apart.”
I stand up. “How will yer ship know where you are now?”
She shrugs. “We just have to hope that Haven’ll have something.”
I watch her go to her own bag and pick it up. I sure hope Haven has half what she’s expecting.
We leave. Mr Prentiss Jr was right about the stupidity of staying on the road, so we keep twenty or thirty metres away from it on the non-river side, trying to keep it in sight as best we can. We take turns carrying Manchee as the night passes.
We don’t talk much neither.
Cuz she might have a point, right? Yeah, okay, maybe that’s what the army’s after, maybe if they can make me join, they can make anyone join. Maybe I’m their test, who knows, the whole town’s crazy enough to believe something like that.
If one of us falls, we all fall.
But for one that don’t explain why Aaron’s after us and for two I’ve heard her lie now, ain’t I? Her words sound good but who’s to know if she’s making truth up rather than just saying it?
Cuz I’m never going to join the army and Mayor Prentiss must know that, not after what they did to Ben and Cillian, the truth of Mr Prentiss Jr’s Noise or not, so that’s where she’s dead wrong. Whatever they want, whatever the weakness is in me that I can’t kill a man even when he deserves it, it’s got to change for me to be a man. It’s got to or how can I hold my head up?
Midnight passes and I’m twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.
Cuz if I’d killed Aaron, he couldn’t’ve told Mayor Prentiss where he’d seen me last.
If I coulda killed Mr Prentiss Jr back at the farm, he wouldn’t’ve led the Mayor’s men to Ben and Cillian and wouldn’t’ve lived to harm Manchee so.
If I’d been any kinda killer, I coulda stayed and helped Ben and Cillian defend themselves.
Maybe if I was a killer, they wouldn’t be dead.
And that’s a trade I’d make any day.
I’ll be a killer, if that’s what it takes.
Watch me.
The terrain’s getting rougher and steeper as the river starts making canyons again. We rest for a while under a rocky outcropping and eat the last of the food that didn’t get ruined by the fight with Mr Prentiss Jr.
I lay Manchee across my lap. “What was in that pill?”
“It was just a little crumb of a human painkiller,” she says. “I hope it’s not too much.”
I run my hand over his fur. He’s warm and asleep so at least still living.
“Todd–” she says, but I stop her.
“I wa
She waits a minute and then she says, “Okay”, and we don’t say nothing more, just finish the last of the food.
The rain keeps up all night as we go and there’s no racket like rainfall in the woods, a billion drops pattering down a billion leaves, the river swelling and roaring, the squish of the mud under our feet. I hear Noise now and again in the distance, probably from woodland creachers but always outta sight, always gone when we get near.
“Is there anything out here that could harm us?” Viola asks me, having to raise her voice over the rain.
“Too many to count,” I say. I gesture to Manchee in her arms. “He awake yet?”
“Not yet,” she says, worry in her voice. “I hope I–”
And that’s how unprepared we are when we step round another rocky outcropping and into the campsite.
We both stop immediately and take in what’s in front of our eyes, all in a flash.
A fire burning.
Freshly caught fish hanging from a spit over it.
A man leaning over a stone, scraping scales from another fish.
That man looking up as we step into his campsite.
In an instant, like knowing Viola was a girl even tho I’d never seen one, I know in the second it takes me to reach for my knife, I know that he’s not a man at all.
He’s a Spackle.
The world stops spi
The rain stops falling, the fire stops burning, my heart stops beating.
A Spackle.
There ain’t no more Spackle.
They all died in the wars.
There ain’t no more Spackle.
And here’s one standing right in front of me.
He’s tall and thin like in the vids I remember, white skin, long fingers and arms, the mouth mid-face where it ain’t sposed to be, the ear flaps down by the jaw, eyes blacker than swamp stones, lichen and moss growing where clothes should be.
Alien. As alien as you can be.
Holy crap.
You might as well just crumple up the world I know and throw it away.
“Todd?” Viola says.
“Don’t move,” I say.
Cuz thru the sound of the rain I can hear the Spackle’s Noise.
No words come out clear, just pictures, skewed up strange and with all the wrong colours, but pictures of me and Viola standing in front of him, looking shocked.
Pictures of the knife now outstretched in my hand.
“Todd,” Viola says, a small warning in her voice.
Cuz his Noise has more in it. It’s got feelings, washing up in a buzz.
Feelings of fear.
I feel his fear.
Good.
My Noise turns red.
“Todd,” Viola says again.
“Quit saying my name,” I say.
The Spackle pulls himself slowly upright from where he’s ski
There’s also something shiny and long resting against the rock.
I can see the Spackle picture it in his Noise.
It’s the spear he’s been using to catch fish in the river.