Chapter 1 #2
Pop shakes his head. “They don’t see too good. I think it’s sensed something in the sand . . . Yep, there.”
There’s a lizard on the rocks above it, stopping to open its back sails and sun itself in the wrongest possible place. The catcher moves below it, slowly scaling the sandy slope, amazingly quiet for something so big and then–
Snap! One claw shoots out and the lizard is squished into three pieces and immediately disappears down the maw of the catcher, which doesn’t even seem to chew, just swallows it all down, standing there for a moment in the sunlight as if it needs to think about what it did, then stepping backward on four more legs down the slope and going back to being nothing more than an arc in the sand.
“Max,” Pop says, looking back up the slope we’re on, but slightly over my head. “I need you to move forward. Don’t look, just move. Right now.”
So, of course, like any idiot, I look. Above and behind me, an even bigger catcher than the one across the little valley is coming out of the sand. It rises, the sand falling off it, and I see a dozen little catcher babies hanging on to its underside.
Oh, eff.
“Run!” Pop yells.
I don’t need any encouragement. I blitz off down the hill, running toward Pop, who’s taking out his rifle. “Don’t shoot it!” I yell, even as I pass him. “It’s a mother!”
I see him release his hand from the trigger for a second and look above the rifle site. He sees the babies hanging from the catcher’s belly. He raises his rifle again.
“Pop, no!” I shout.
He fires, but it’s in the sand in front of the catcher.
The shot makes her rear back. He fires again, and she scrambles back up the hill.
She may not know what the rifle is–we’re probably the first humans she’s ever seen–but she can sure feel the vibrations from where the bullets hit.
She rises, arms out in a defensive array.
A swarm of little eyes on stalks emerges from the carapace, and we see ourselves reflected in her Noise, along with a huge wash of confusion and anger.
RUN, she says, and I’m not sure if she’s telling us to run or telling herself or if she’s just showing Pop’s word back to him, but you’d run, wouldn’t you?
We scramble down the valley, but Pop grabs my arm before I get too far ahead of him.
He nods around us. Catchers are emerging everywhere.
Dozens of them. They’re keeping their distance from us. For now.
“Go, go,” he whispers, and we cross the floor of the valley at a gallop. We get so close to one of the calderas, I can feel the heat rising from it. There’s steam in a single jet emerging from the vast dark hole, and as we run by, I see actual magma glowing down in there somewhere.
“Why would Granddad’s path come through here?” I ask as we climb up the other side. The catchers are all still out, watching us, their claws up, ready to mess with us if we come too close.
“I’ve no idea,” Pop says, taking my hand as he lifts me up the last ledge.
We stop for a second, looking back down the valley of the catchers.
They’re all still looking back up at us.
Then one by one, they start chattering their claws, a small, rattling sound that soon becomes a huge, rattling sound.
“We should really go,” I say.
“I tend to agree.”
Me and Pop go as quickly as we can, away from the rattling, which follows us for much longer than we’d like it to, but soon enough, the trees grow thick again and the forest swallows us.
The Noise is constant, little animals hunting, other little animals being hunted, a lot of them just wanting to have sex with each other.
Animals are super horny, all the time; so are teenagers, which is one really good reason not to have Noise.
Me and Pop walk through it all until the sun sets, and then we make camp on a rock overlooking a creek.
Pop takes out a comm from his pack and throws it over to me.
I wind it to get the battery started, then let the last of the sunlight fill its cells.
I hit a few buttons, and it rings. Mom’s face appears.
“Hey, baby,” she says with a smile. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We saw a bunch of things called catchers this morning . . .”
Then I see Pop shaking his head silently to me over the top of the comm.
“But only from a distance,” I add quickly, “and they all ran away.”
“Well, good,” Mom says. “Any sign of your granddad?”
“Not yet.”
“But we’re close,” Pop says, which surprises me.
“Are we?” I ask him. “How can you tell?”
He waves a general hand to the air. “The Conversayshun . . . It’s getting, I don’t know, thicker with him.”
I glance down at Mom’s face. She doesn’t know what this means either. “Everything okay in town?” I ask.
She sighs. “As it can be.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Burly is still Burly. Margery Wingard is still Margery Wingard. But nothing terrible’s happened.”
“Yet,” Pop says from where he’s setting out our dinner from a freeze-dried pack.
“I could say the same thing about you two,” Mom says, raising her voice so she’s talking to Pop.
“We’re fine,” Pop says. “No sign of any gods. No sign of any invasion. Max is still dreaming, though, even far from the city.”
“Pop,” I say.
“And I don’t like that,” Pop finishes.
“I don’t like it either,” Mom says.
“Not that anyone asked,” I say, “but neither do I.”
“I’m working on it,” Mom says. “We’ve got the chemical technology of the cure. If these dreams are Noise-based, then you’d think there’d have to be something in there to fix this.”
“If fixing it is what’s needed,” Pop says.
“We’re not having this argument again, Todd,” Mom says.
“Especially not when I’m holding the comm,” I say. “Where’s Ben?”
“Out with one of the Wingard twins,” Mom says, not sounding too happy about it.
I’m very surprised. “He is?”
She shrugs. “He doesn’t like having to be babysat every hour of the day. I guess strange times make strange bedfellows.”
“He’s sleeping with them?”
“No, Max, it’s just a saying. Look, you two be safe. And you let me know when you see your granddad. And”–she smiles now, the first real one I’ve seen in a while–“you tell him I said hello. And that it’s been too long.”
“I will,” I promise.
We hang up. Pop hands me a small plate with my dinner on it. I start eating the dry little cubes that taste way better than they look. We both chew in silence for a while, and then, what the hell, it worked last night, so I just ask it straight out.
“Are you and Mom breaking up?”
Here are the things Pop doesn’t do: He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t deny it immediately. And his Noise doesn’t rise in shock. I don’t like any of those responses, and you wouldn’t neither.
“I hope not,” he says, not looking me in the eye, but his Noise has nothing in it but doubts.
“She still loves you. It’s obvious.”
“And I love her.” He looks at me now. “And we both love you boys more than anything. Anything, Max. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t,” I say, and I realize my eyes have tears in them.
“Oh, son,” he says, putting down his plate and coming over to me. He puts an arm around me. “It’s nearing time for you two to make your own way, anyway.”
“And we really are making different ways,” I say. “Me and Ben.”
“That’s normal,” Pop says. “You’re different people, but you’ll always be brothers.”
“I don’t understand him half the time anymore. Why he thinks what he thinks. Why he’s always racing to prove how normal he is, how much he fits in. And it’s getting worse.”
“How?”
“Like, how it was so obvious I’d be the one out here with you while he stayed in the city. Why didn’t he want to come, too?” I eat a little cube, feeling grumpy. “No one ever said growing up was so lonely.”
Pop nods. Then he nods again.
“You were right,” he finally says. “I do wish you boys hadn’t had the cure. Who knows what kind of men you’d be now? What kind of men you’d be on your way to becoming? What paths you’d both be taking, together or separate?”
“You said the Noise was a living nightmare.”
“It was. But maybe we were on the way to fixing that.” He looks out into the red of the sky. “I don’t consider my life a nightmare. Your granddad doesn’t either.”
“You had to die to get that close to the Conversation, though.”
“Yeah, that’s not ideal, but it’s true, me and your granddad are close to the Conversayshun.
Always in it. Trying to understand this planet.
Trying to understand the Land. Trying to find a way to really live here, and not just be Burly and his city making a little Old World they can cling to like a drowning man does a log. ”
His Noise is sad, sad as I’ve seen it in a long while.
“So, yes,” he continues, “I wish now that you and your brother hadn’t had the cure.
But I also know that maybe you wouldn’t have survived without it, and that’s something I’m not willing to ever risk.
It’s more that I wish the world was different, and I can’t help but feeling like we missed our chance to make it so.
We had an opportunity to try one way or the other, and the way we chose, well, it closed off the other path forever. ”
“You don’t know that,” I say. “We may find a better cure. Or we may run out of the stuff that makes it. Or–”
“Or we may grow from being a parasite on this world into a cancer that kills it.”
“Well, that’s happy.”
“Don’t listen to me.” He turns to me now.
“You’re a star, you know that? You’re a brighter star than any I’ve ever seen in the sky.
You walk your path honestly and bravely, and you own who you are in a way that men like Burly and women like Margery Wingard will never understand in a million years.
If this place ever has a chance for humans, it’s going to be because of people like you.
And you and your brother may be far apart now, but you’ll both come round again.
I can see it. The future is yours and his and it needs you both. ”