Chaos Walking

by Patrick Ness

  Of everything coming back to one thing.

  I raise my eyes up to the girl’s and she steps back from the force of it.

  “You,” I say and there ain’t gonna be no stopping me. “This is all you! If you hadn’t shown up in that ruddy swamp, none of this woulda happened! I’d be home RIGHT NOW! I’d be tending my effing sheep and living in my effing house and sleeping in my own EFFING BED!”

  Except I don’t say “effing”.

  “But oh NO,” I shout, getting louder. “Here’s YOU! Here’s YOU and yer SILENCE! And the whole world gets SCREWED!”

  I don’t realize I’m walking towards her till I see her stepping back. But she just looks back at me.

  And I don’t hear a goddam thing.

  “You’re NOTHING!” I scream, stepping forward some more. “NOTHING! You’re nothing but EMPTINESS! There’s nothing in you! You’re EMPTY and NOTHING and we’re gonna die FOR NOTHING!”

  I have my fists clenched so hard my nails are cutting into my palms. I’m so furious, my Noise raging so loud, so red, that I have to raise my fists to her, I have to hit her, I have to beat her, I have to make her ruddy silence STOP before it SWALLOWS ME AND THE WHOLE EFFING WORLD!

  I take my fist and punch myself hard in the face.

  I do it again, hitting where my eye is swollen from Aaron.

  And a third time, splitting open the cut on my lip from where Aaron hit me yesterday morning.

  You fool, you worthless, effing fool.

  I do it again, hard enough to knock me off balance. I fall and catch myself on my hands and spit out some blood onto the path.

  I look up at the girl, breathing hard.

  Nothing. Just looking back at me and nothing.

  We both turn to look across the river. They’ve got to the bit where they can see the bridge clearly. See us clearly on the other side. We can see the faces of the men as they ride. Hear the chatter of their Noise as it flies up the river at us. Mr MacInerny, the Mayor’s best horseman, is in the lead, the Mayor riding behind, looking as calm as if it was nothing more than a Sunday ride.

  We got maybe a minute, probably less.

  I turn back to the girl, trying to stand, but I’m so tired. So, so tired. “We might as well run,” I say, spitting out more blood. “We might as well try.”

  And I see her face change.

  Her mouth opens wide, her eyes, too, and suddenly she yanks her bag out in front of her and shoves her hand in it.

  “What’re you doing?” I say.

  She takes out the campfire box, looking all around her till I see her see a good sized rock. She sets the box down and raises up the rock.

  “No, wait, we could use–”

  She brings down the rock and the box cracks. She picks it up and twists it hard, making it crack some more. It starts to leak some kind of fluid. She moves to the bridge and starts flinging fluid all over the knots on the closest stake, shaking out the last drops into a puddle at the base.

  The riders are coming up to the bridge, coming up, coming up, coming up–

  “Hurry!” I say.

  The girl turns to me, telling me with her hands to get back. I scrabble back a little ways, grabbing Manchee by his scruff and taking him with me. She steps back as far as she can, holding out the remains of the box at arm’s length and pressing a button on it. I hear a clicking sound. She tosses the box in the air and jumps back towards me.

  The horses reach the bridge–

  The girl lands almost on top of me and we watch as the campfire box falls–

  Falls–

  Falls–

  Towards the little puddle of liquid, clicking as it goes–

  Mr MacInerny’s horse puts a hoof on the bridge to cross it–

  The campfire box lands in the puddle–

  Clicks one more time–

  Then–

  WHOOOOMP!!!!

  The air is sucked outta my lungs as a fireball WAY bigger than what you’d think for that little amount of fluid makes the world quiet for a second and then–

  BOOM!!!!!

  It blasts away the ropes and the stake, spraying fiery splinters all over us and obliterating all thought, Noise and sound.

  When we can look up again, the bridge is already so much on fire it’s starting to lean to one side and we see Mr MacInerny’s horse rear up and stumble, trying to back up into four or five more oncoming horses.

  The flames roar a weird bright green and the sudden heat’s incredible, like the worst sunburn ever and I think we’re gonna catch fire ourselves when this end of the bridge just falls right away, taking Mr MacInerny and his horse with it. We sit up and watch them fall and fall and fall into the river below, way too far to ever live thru it. The bridge is still attached at their end and it slaps the facing cliff but it’s burning so fierce it won’t be no time at all before the whole thing is just ash. The Mayor and Mr Prentiss Jr and the others all have to back their horses away from it.

  The girl crawls away from me and we lay there a second, just breathing and coughing, trying to stop being dazed.

  Holy crap.

  “Y’all right?” I say to Manchee, still held by my hand.

  “Fire, Todd!” he barks.

  “Yeah,” I cough. “Big fire. You all right?” I say to the girl, who’s still crouching, still coughing. “Man, what was in that thing?”

  But of course she don’t say nothing.

  “TODD HEWITT!” I hear from across the canyon.

  I look up. It’s the Mayor, shouting his first words ever to me in person, thru sheets of smoke and heat that make him look all wavy.

  “We’re not finished, young Todd,” he calls, over the crackle of the burning bridge and the roar of the water below. “Not by a long way.”

  And he’s calm and still ruddy clean and looking like there’s no way he’s not gonna get what he wants.

  I stand up, hold out my arm and give him two fingers but he’s already disappearing behind big clouds of smoke.

  I cough and spit blood again. “We gotta keep moving,” I say, coughing some more. “Maybe they’ll turn back, maybe there’s no other way across, but we shouldn’t wait to find out.”

  I see the knife in the dust. Shame comes right quick, like a new pain all its own. The things I said. I reach down and pick it up and put it back in its sheath.

  The girl’s still got her head down, coughing to herself. I pick up her bag for her and hold it out for her to take.

  “Come on,” I say. “We can at least get away from the smoke.”

  She looks up at me.

  I look back at her.

  My face burns and not from the heat.

  “I’m sorry.” I look away from her, from her eyes and face, blank and quiet as ever.

  I turn back up the path.

  “Viola,” I hear.

  I spin around, look at her.

  “What?” I say.

  She’s looking back at me.

  She’s opening her mouth.

  She’s talking.

  “My name,” she says. “It’s Viola.”

  I don’t say nothing to this for a minute. Neither does she. The fire burns, the smoke rises, Manchee’s tongue hangs out in a stunned pant, till finally I say, “Viola.”

  She nods.

  “Viola,” I say again.

  She don’t nod this time.

  “I’m Todd,” I say.

  “I know,” she says.

  She’s not quite meeting my eye.

  “So you can talk then?” I say, but all she does is look at me again quickly and then away. I turn to the still burning bridge, to the smoke turning into a fogbank twixt us and the other side of the river, which I don’t know if it makes me feel safer or not, if not seeing the Mayor and his men is better than seeing them. “That was–” I start to say, but she’s getting up and holding out her hand for her bag.

  I realize I’m still holding it. I hand it to her and she takes it.

  “We should go on,” she says. “Away fro
m here.”

  Her accent’s funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown’s. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they’re swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they’re sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

  Manchee’s just in awe of her. “Away,” he says lowly, staring up at her like she’s made of food.

  There’s this moment now where it feels like I could start asking her stuff, like now she’s talking, I could just hit her with every asking I can think of about who she is, where she’s from, what happened, and them askings are all over my Noise, flying at her like pellets, but there’s so much stuff wanting to come outta my mouth that nothing is and so my mouth don’t move and she’s holding her bag over her shoulder and looking at the ground and then she’s walking past me, past Manchee, on up the trail.

  “Hey,” I say.

  She stops and turns back.

  “Wait for me,” I say.

  I pick up my rucksack, hooking it back over my shoulders. I press my hand against the knife in its sheath against my lower back. I make the rucksack comfortable with a shrug, say “C’mon, Manchee”, and off we go up the trail, following the girl.

  On this side of the river the path makes a slow turn away from the cliffside, heading into what looks like a landscape of scrub and brush, making its way around and away from the larger mountain, looming up at us on the left.

  At the place where the trail turns, we both stop and look back without saying that we’re gonna. The bridge is still burning like you wouldn’t believe, hanging on the opposite cliff like a waterfall on fire, flames having leapt up the entire length of it, angry and greenish yellow. The smoke’s so thick, it’s still impossible to tell what the Mayor and his men are doing, have done, if they’re gone or waiting or what. There could be a whisper of Noise coming thru but there could also not be a whisper of Noise, what with the fire blazing and the wood popping and the whitewater below. As we watch, the fire finishes its business on the stakes on the other side of the river and with a great snap, the burning bridge falls, falls, falls, clattering against the cliffside, splashing into the river, sending up more clouds of smoke and steam, making everything even foggier.

  “What was in that box?” I say to the girl.

  She looks at me, opens her mouth, but then closes it again, turning away.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m not gonna hurt ya.”

  She looks at me again and my Noise is full of just a few minutes ago when I was just about to hurt her, when I was just about to–

  Anyway.

  We don’t say no more. She turns back onto the path and me and Manchee follow her into the scrub.

  Knowing she can speak don’t help with the silence none. Knowing she’s got words in her head don’t mean nothing if you can only hear ’em when she talks. Looking at the back of her head as she’s walking, I still feel my heart pull towards her silence, still feel like I’ve lost something terrible, something so sad I want to weep.

  “Weep,” Manchee barks.

  The back of her head just keeps on walking.

  The path is still pretty wide, wide enough for horses, but the terrain around us is getting rockier, the path twistier. We can hear the river down below us to our right now but it feels like we’re tending away from it a bit, getting ourselves deep into an area that feels almost walled, rockface sometimes coming up on both sides, like we’re walking at the bottom of a box. Little prickly firs grow out of every crevice and yellow vines with thorns wrapping themselves around the firs’ trunks and you can see and hear yellow razor lizards hissing at us as we pass. Bite! they say, as a threat. Bite! Bite!

  Anything you might want to touch here would cut you.

  After maybe twenty, thirty minutes the path gets to a bit where it widens out, where a few real trees start growing again, where the forest looks like it might be about to restart, where there’s grass and stones low enough for sitting on. Which is what we do. Sit.

  I take some dried mutton outta my rucksack and use the knife to cut strips for me, for Manchee, and for the girl. She takes them without saying anything and we sit quietly apart and eat for a minute.

  I am Todd Hewitt, I think, closing my eyes and chewing, embarrassed for my Noise now, now that I know she can hear it, now that I know she can think about it.

  Think about it in secret.

  I am Todd Hewitt.

  I will be a man in twenty-nine days’ time.

  Which is true, I realize, opening my eyes. Time goes on, even when yer not looking.

  I take another bite. “I ain’t never heard the name Viola before,” I say after a while, looking only at the ground, only at my strip of mutton. She don’t say nothing so I glance up in spite of myself.

  To find her looking back at me.

  “What?” I say.

  “Your face,” she says.

  I frown. “What about my face?”

  She makes both of her hands into fists and mimes punching herself with them.

  I feel myself redden. “Yeah, well.”

  “And from before,” she says. “From–” She stops.

  “Aaron,” I say.

  “Aaron,” Manchee barks and the girl flinches a little.

  “That was his name,” she says. “Wasn’t it?”

  I nod, chewing on my mutton. “Yep,” I say. “That’s his name.”

  “He never said it out loud. But I knew what it was.”

  “Welcome to New World.” I take another bite, having to tear an extra-chewy bit off with my teeth, which catches one sore spot among many in my mouth. “Ow.” I spit out the bit of mutton and a whole lot of extra blood.

  The girl watches me spit and then sets down her food. She picks up her bag, opens it, and finds a little blue box, slightly larger than the green campfire one. She presses a button on the front to open it and takes out what looks like a white plastic cloth and a little metal scalpel. She gets up from her rock and walks over to me with them.

  I’m still sitting but I lean back when she brings her hands to my face.

  “Bandages,” she says.

  “I’ve got my own.”

  “These are better.”

  I lean back farther. “Yer . . .” I say, blowing out air thru my nose. “Yer quiet kinda . . .” I shake my head a little.

  “Bothers you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know,” she says. “Hold still.”

  She looks closer at the area around my swollen eye and then cuts off a piece of bandage with the little scalpel. She’s about to put it over my eye but I can’t help it and I move back from her touch. She don’t say nothing, just keeps her hands up, like she’s waiting. I take a deep breath, close my eyes and offer up my face.

  I feel the bandage touch the swollen area and immediately it gets cooler, immediately the pain starts to edge back, like it’s all being swept away by feathers. She puts another one on a cut I have at my hairline and her fingers brush my face as she puts another one just below my lower lip. It all feels so good I haven’t even opened my eyes yet.

  “I don’t have anything for your teeth,” she says.

  “’S okay,” I say, almost whispering it. “Man, these are better than mine.”

  “They’re partially alive,” she says. “Synthetic human tissue. When you’re healed, they die.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, acting like I might know what that means.

  There’s a longer silence, long enough to make me open my eyes again. She’s stepped back, back to a rock she can sit down on, watching me, watching my face.

  We wait. Cuz it seems like we should.

  And we should cuz after a little bit of waiting, she begins to talk.

  “We crashed,” she starts quietly, looking away. Then she clears her throat and says it again. “We crashed. There was a fire and we were flying low and we thought we’d be okay but something went wrong with t
he safety flumes and–” She holds open her hands to explain what follows the and. “We crashed.”

  She stops.

  “Was that yer ma and pa?” I ask, after a bit.

  But she just looks up into the sky, blue and spare, with clouds that look like bones. “And when the sun came up,” she says, “that man came.”

  “Aaron.”

  “And it was so weird. He would shout and he would scream and then he’d leave. And I’d try to run away.” She folds her arms. “I kept trying so he wouldn’t find me, but I was going in circles and wherever I hid, there he’d be, I don’t know how, until I found these sort of hut things.”

  “The Spackle buildings,” I say but she ain’t really listening.

  She looks at me. “Then you came.” She looks at Manchee. “You and your dog that talks.”

  “Manchee!” Manchee barks.

  Her face is pale and when she meets my eyes again, her own have gone wet. “What is this place?” she asks, her voice kinda thick. “Why do the animals talk? Why do I hear your voice when your mouth isn’t moving? Why do I hear your voice a whole bunch over, piled on top of each other like there’s nine million of you talking at once? Why do I see pictures of other things when I look at you? Why could I see what that man . . .”

  She fades off. She draws her knees up to her chest and hugs them. I feel like I better start talking right quick or she’s gonna start rocking again.

  “We’re settlers,” I say. She looks up at this, still hugging her knees but at least not rocking. “We were settlers,” I continue. “Landed here to found New World about twenty years ago or so. But there were aliens here. The Spackle. And they . . . didn’t want us.” I’m telling her what every boy in Prentisstown knows, the history even the dumbest farm boy like yours truly knows by heart. “Men tried for years to make peace but the Spackle weren’t having it. And so war started.”

  She looks down again at the word war. I keep talking.

  “And the way the Spackle fought, see, was with germs, with diseases. That was their weapons. They released germs that did things. One of them we think was meant to kill all our livestock but instead it just made every animal able to talk.” I look at Manchee. “Which ain’t as much fun as it sounds.” I look back at the girl. “And another was the Noise.”