2
We hear the screaming first. People screaming, not just the god.
Then we hear the guns.
“Oh, shit,” Tara says, stopping so abruptly I nearly knock her over.
We’re still up a hill over where the first houses of the town start.
We can see the god, burning and screaming, walking through first one house and then another, knocking them apart like they’re not even there.
Like out at our farm, I can’t be sure the god even knows it’s destroying something.
It just lurches forward on whatever mission it’s got, heading up the main hill to the rest of the city.
We can also see loads of people, most running in the streets, but a few firing back with rifles. The god walks right through them, and they basically just explode in flames.
Tara puts her hands over her mouth; her eyes are wide open. “It killed them,” she says through her fingers. “It just killed them like they weren’t even there.”
I try to give her a face like I know what she’s feeling because I’m feeling it, too, but I also try to show that we’ve got to keep moving because that thing is going to keep on killing people whether we stand here or not.
But I don’t have my comm and I have no idea what she’s seeing on my face because she doesn’t move.
I tug her arm.
“Yeah, yeah, all right!” she says, sounding half angry now, which is better than frightened, so I’ll take it.
I point to a side road that I know leads to the back of the Land Market. We could go that way, which seems to be parallel to the god’s path and hopefully will keep us away from both it and any stray bullets.
“Behind the Spackle Market?” Tara says.
I can’t even correct her on saying “Land” so I just nod.
“What are we standing here for then?” she says, and takes off running.
We run past the burning houses, people still screaming inside, other people trying to get them out, yet more people with rifles not knowing what to do with them now. I wonder if we should help, but Tara’s still running and my mom is in the city, so I keep on going.
Tara veers onto the dirt road between the houses, the one that snakes up around the non-river side of the city.
Everything goes quieter. It’s weird after all the screaming.
If we stopped, I could probably still hear the god rampaging through the streets, but all I hear now is my own breath, my own useless breath that can’t manage to make any kind of sound.
You know, I’ve never lost my communicators. Not once in my entire life. I’ve got one, and I’ve got a spare, and I’ve never even needed to replace either one of them. I’ve always had them.
And this is what’s going through my mind as we run along the back road: What if I can’t find my mom fast enough?
How am I going to ask people if they’ve seen her?
There’s paper and other things I could type into, but what if I only have split seconds?
What if the god is coming and I’m not able to do anything to save her? Not even shout for her to look out?
I’ve tried not to hate my silence.
I hate it right now.
“There!” Tara shouts ahead of me, pointing. She turns into the back of the market, running through some of the tarps they use for walls. I push through them, too.
In the middle of the marketplace, we see a couple dozen Land huddled together.
We also see Burly and Tara’s mother and a bunch of ugly-faced people who are pointing rifles at the Land.