#2
Then everything is chaos. Pop grabs me by the shoulder, pulling me along, saying, “Run! Run!” as if I need any encouragement, and Granddad is right behind him, and I see Granddad stumble, but Ess is already getting him to his feet and dragging him along, and the Land god screams in what sure as hell sounds like fury, and we hear a Noise yell as it grabs another member of the Land not lucky enough to get away, and I don’t look back this time, but the sound is more than horrible enough to stay with me forever, and I hear a few Land guns go off, and another one of them fires the spinning, burning arrows they have, but they don’t seem to affect the god at all, it just brushes off the arrow as if it was a feather and eats the gun guy first and the arrow lady second, and I run as fast as I can, as fast as I ever have, so fast I can barely feel the ground beneath my feet, and Pop is right behind me, and more Noise screams are cut short, more weapons are fired, and I think it’s killing every single Land it sees, and I realize I was at the back of the party when the god emerged, so now I’m somehow at the front, when I’m the least qualified to lead, but I just run, and away is the only direction I can think of–
And then I come through some trees to a raging river. I scramble myself to a stop, Pop doing the same behind me. When I say a raging river, I mean raging, all white water and killing rocks. We’d last about five seconds in that before being stoned to death and drowned.
“Pop?” I say, hoping he’s got an answer.
But he’s looking back into the woods. “Where’s yer granddad?”
“Here!” Granddad calls, as he and Ess come running out of the tree line.
Granddad scans the river, looks over to Pop for answers, Pop doesn’t have any, neither do I, and the god roars again, and we can see it above the treetops, and it’s almost on us, and I immediately change my mind about how dangerous the river is–
“Get in the water!” I scream.
“No!” Pop screams back, grabbing my arm to stop me.
“It went to water when we were by the lake!” I say, still screaming because the roar of the god is so effing loud. “It’ll disappear!”
“We can’t survive the river!”
And I clearly know this, but the god comes out onto the riverbank, knocking trees out of the way, and Pop forces me behind him again, and we can’t help it, we back up, until we’re ankle-deep in the water–
“When it goes for me,” Pop says, “you run. You run with your granddad and you don’t stop, no matter what.”
“No, Pop! I’m not leaving you!”
“No matter what!” he says again, and here comes the god, its burning, skinless face looking at us, the eyes mad in the sockets, the Land-shaped skull chattering its teeth in rage and pain and it runs for us–
“No!” Granddad calls out, and it stops, not because Granddad shouted. I’m not sure how I know this, but I do. The god looks at me and Pop and–
We’re not what it wants. It turns to Granddad and Ess, who’s a young member of the Land after all, and I get a feeling in my gut about what that means, but it disappears out of my head when the god lunges for them–
“Ben!” Pop calls out.
“Granddad!” I yell.
Granddad and Ess try to back away, but there’s nowhere they can really go. Granddad steps in front of Ess to protect him, and the god knocks Granddad with a huge fist, sending him flying into the river. He calls out a short yelp of surprise and disappears under the water.
“BEN!!” Pop screams, his Noise a wild dangerous thing, and the god has kept its eyes on Ess this whole time, and Ess tries to scramble back, but there’s no chance. The god grabs him–
“Ess, no!” I yell.
And the god falls into the river with him, both of them disappearing into the froth.
···
The god is gone.
Ess is gone.
And so is Granddad.
“Ben!” Pop is already screaming, running down the riverbank, looking in the raging water for Granddad. I run after him, yelling “Granddad!” but it feels so useless. We’ve just watched so many people die. Actually die. And Granddad went into a river that would kill anyone.
I start to shake, so bad I have to stop running, and I’m angry because it’s useless and it means I can’t help, but I also can’t help shaking.
“Max?” Pop says, coming back to me. “Max, you okay?”
I nod. “Go, go, keep looking.”
He squeezes my shoulder, looking me in the eye. “You survived. That’s how you find your way out of this. It feels like everything in the world just broke in half, but you’re still standing. That means you’re still in it, Max. That means the fight isn’t over, okay?”
I nod. I know what he means. “Let’s find Granddad,” I say.
We find him half an hour later. Pop sees him first, washed up on the other side of the river. He’s facing away from us, and he’s not moving.
“Ben!” Pop shouts, but Granddad makes no sound.
The river rages between us, but it’s narrowed a bit here. We can see him clearly, maybe just the length of our farmhouse away, but there’s no way to get to him without–
“Pop, no!” I say, as he’s already wading into the water. Just a few steps in is making him struggle with balance.
“He may still be alive!” Pop yells back.
“You can’t help him if you’re drowned ten miles downriver!”
Pop stops at this, looking back at me, then looking up into the trees above.
He looks down the riverbank, at how the woods have closed in.
There’s a point about a hundred feet away where the branches meet.
“Max?” Pop says, but I’m already racing there, shimmying up the trunk, grabbing onto branches as I go.
Pop comes out of the river and is at the base of the tree, looking to see if he can climb himself.
“You’re too big for the ones up here,” I call back down. “They’d break.”
“Can you get all the way across?” he calls back up.
“I think so.” I shimmy out onto the main branch that crosses the river. It thins a lot the farther it goes, but I think it might just bear my weight until I get to its counterpart coming across from the other side. The branch starts to bend as I go across it.
“Careful,” Pop says.
“I’m being careful,” I say, looking down into the waters below.
Yep, one fall and I wouldn’t come up ever again.
I keep sliding along, the branch keeps bending, but I grab the one coming across.
I pull hard, and for a second, I’m on both branches, not quite settled, not quite in a place that’ll take my weight, but I get across before the bend becomes too bad.
The farther branch is heavier, and as soon as I’m on it, I feel properly in place.
I get to its tree and try to find the best way down.
“Max!” Pop yells, and he’s looking upriver.
There’s a croc heading for Granddad.
“Careful, Max!” Pop yells, then he starts yelling at the croc. “Hey! Get away from him!”
This tree has a crowd of branches on it, and I’m finding it nearly impossible to get down. I can see the croc sniffing the air to where Granddad is and worse, I can hear its Noise. Eat, it says, human words that have clearly traveled the planet. Rip.
“Get away!” I shout. I jump from the only opening I can find. It’s too high, and I twist my ankle when I land.
“Max, don’t!” I hear Pop shout. I don’t stop, though. I wave my arms over my head and scream as loud as I can as I get closer to Granddad and the croc. That’s what we’re always taught to do if we see one, but it’s the same thing they taught us to do with rines and that sure didn’t work.
“Get away from him!” I scream and wave my arms with all I’ve got.
The croc, on the other side of Granddad to me, looks up, its Noise filling with questions.
I can see myself in it, see me waving my arms, and then I see it decide I’m not a threat.
EAT, it says, then lurches toward Granddad a little faster.
Its legs are stumpy, but it can move faster than my sore ankle.
I scream louder, I move faster, “Pop, help!” I yell, though I don’t know what he can do from across the river, and when I look, I can’t even see him. “Pop?!”
The croc is going to get to Granddad first, and honestly, what could I really do if I did beat it there?
It’s bigger than me, one bite would take my leg off.
I see a rock as I’m stumbling forward, and I pick it up.
I throw it, and it hits the croc right on the head.
Now it looks at me again, its Noise an angry red.
Kill, its Noise says. So all I’ve managed to do is piss it off.
It starts coming for me, and I see myself again in its Noise, and I see it recognize my hobbling ankle, it sees I’m injured, it sees I’m a target, too.
“Pop?! Oh, shit, POP!”
I’m trying to back up, but that is not a direction my ankle likes, and I see the croc go right past Granddad and head in a straight line for me, coming faster, faster, and I can’t keep it up and I fall on my back, trying to keep scooting away on my elbows, looking for another rock, and KILL, says the croc, and I wonder too late if there’s a tree I can climb again, but the croc is nearly here, the sail on its back opening wide, the sign it’s going to attack, and I hold out my arms to stop it, but it leaps–
And FOOM! It explodes sideways in a ball of flame so big it wraps around my own legs for a quick second, but its momentum is sideways, and it takes the croc with it, turning it into a spinning ball of fire crashing through the bushes.
I look across the river. Pop found one of the Land fire arrows and shot it. I just sit there panting, trying to catch up with everything that’s happened.
Then I barf from all the adrenaline.
What a shitty day.
“You okay?” Pop calls across the river. “Can you get to your granddad?”
But I’m already back on my hobbling feet, avoiding the small fire that’s now burning in the bushes, full of the smell of cooking croc, which covers the smell of barf but is nauseatingly delicious. I can feel my stomach rumble. I make my way over to Granddad, dropping down next to him.