Chapter 11
“ARROW!” Tara yells.
There’s too much to even type, so I just grab her arm, trying to pull her back. “We can’t just leave him!” she yells at me–
But I point up to the zigzag hole. The tendrils of flame are starting to pour out of the hole, twisting around themselves like a packet of snakes crawling down the front of the rock face. Tara and I get out of the way before they touch the ground.
“We have to get Arrow!” Tara yells.
How? Without being grabbed ourselves?
“Then we have to tell someone!”
Burly and your mom don’t want to believe us!
“I’ll make her!” Tara says.
The tendrils gather at the bottom of the rock face, more of them pouring out of the zigzag hole, and they’re starting to spin together now, forcing themselves into what looks like a shape.
Or two shapes. And all the while the screaming is coming, probably pouring right down the rock face with the tendrils.
And then I see the two shapes are skeletal feet.
Tara, I type, eyes wide.
“I see it,” she says.
It’s building a god. The fire from the rock face is building a god right in front of us.
The leg bones and muscles form above the feet, moving up to the body, twisting and wrenching in ways that look impossibly painful, forcing a torso into place, towering over us.
And all the while, the screaming goes on and on.
I grab Tara’s arm again, making a motion to run.
This time she agrees.
We run.
The only clear direction we’ve really got is back down the path, which unfortunately is pretty much the only way the god will be able to run, too. And it’s going to be bigger than us. And its steps will be faster.
“Come on!” Tara calls when I fall behind a little bit. Then she looks up past me. I turn around.
The god is coming.
Gigantic, screaming in agony, fully aflame, it’s coming for us. It’s got its arms out, its mouth open, its eyes lidless horrors.
I can’t make sounds. I can’t whistle or hum or grunt. Nothing that requires my brain to tell my throat to communicate in any way. I can’t scream in terror, no matter how much I want to.
We run, me and Tara. We hop over logs and stones, going as fast as we possibly can.
The god is coming faster.
Jumping back over the biggest log, I drop my comm. I see it smash against a rock. My spare one burnt up on the farm, and speaking comms are hard to come by these days. I realize I may have just silenced myself to most of the world for the foreseeable future.
All of this in the instant it takes to watch it fall and break.
“Ben!” Tara screams. “Faster!”
We’re heading back toward the river. I don’t know what we’ll do when we get there.
“Here!” Tara suddenly calls and makes a right so sharp, I nearly fall down trying to change my own direction. She’s jumped through a narrow opening between two trees–
I glance back as I jump after her–
And I just miss the long burning arm of the god swooping down at us. I can feel the heat of the flames as it whooshes by. I cringe forward as I jump, and I slam into one of the trees, scraping half the skin off my arm–
But I make it through. Tara’s already pulling me along, and for the briefest moment we’re on one side of a wall of smaller, younger trees with the god on the other.
“Keep running!” she says, and I don’t even need to be told.
The closeness of the forest means we have to go single file. Fortunately, she’s good at finding her way, ducking under branches, making sharp turns, calling back, “This way!” and “Watch out!” to me as we run.
The screaming has never stopped, and we hear it rise to a roar.
A roar of anger.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Tara says, hearing it, too, and putting on a burst of speed. I’m right behind her–
And then the sound is dropping away, fading behind us. We keep running. I’m not even sure which direction, because it’s all just trees. But who cares if we get lost, as long as we get away from that?
“This way!” Tara yells and takes off up a slope. I follow her. The slope is pretty steep, but about halfway up, we come out of the trees onto a narrow trail. Tara immediately follows it, carrying on up.
We reach the hilltop, and she finally stops and looks behind us, panting heavily. I stop, too. I don’t think I could run another step.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
I nod.
“Can you see it?”
We look out from the hill. The god isn’t where we think it’s going to be. Looking straight down where we came from, there’s nothing to see, just some burning trees.
“There,” she says, pointing in a way different direction.
I give her a look like, How did it get so far?
“What?” she says. “Where’s your voice thing?”
I mime it breaking.
“Oh, shit, Ben, I’m sorry.”
I shake my head, like there are bigger things to worry about right now.
“Oh, my God,” Tara says, and I must be a little in shock again, because I actually think a silent giggle to this, because we’re watching a god, and she’s saying, “oh, my god,” and it almost killed us and it killed Arrow or did something to him that sounded horrible, and I realize we’ve got to go back and try to save him or tell someone or do something when Tara says–
“Ben, look.”
And I look, and I see.
The god is storming through the trees, still roaring its cry of rage–
And it’s heading right for where nearly every human here lives.
Where my mom is right now.
It’s heading for the city.