Chapter 7
None of us stop until we get to the river, and Margery Wingard not even then. She runs into the water, splashing all the way up to her thighs. She’s still yelling her son’s name.
But there’s nothing in the river until the cloud of Noise rises from it.
“What is it?” she says, trying to get near it, wading in past her waist. “What’s it saying?”
“Mom!” Tara yells. “Stop! The current will take you!”
“I have to get Taper!”
“He’s not there!”
Margery Wingard looks back at us. For a second the cloud of Noise hovers around her, having its argument with itself in voices and words and images you still can’t quite make out, just the feeling of so many people, so many lives–
And then it’s gone.
“What do you mean, he’s not here?” she demands, now stomping against the current to get back to Tara. “What do you know, Tara?”
“I don’t know anything,” Tara says, sounding distraught. “Only that when they go into water, they’re . . . gone. No bodies, nothing.”
“No,” her mom says, looking furious. “None of that was true, and you know it!”
I don’t know what to do with this madness. Tara doesn’t look like she does either.
“You just saw it with your own eyes!” Tara says.
“I don’t know what I saw, but I will not listen to lies and nonsense. Now, what do you know and where is your brother?!”
“I just told you what I know–”
“It’s the Spackle! Where have they taken my boy?”
She’s still holding her rifle somehow, and she raises it again, as if she’ll shoot the first member of the Land she sees. Which she probably will.
“It’s not the Spackle, Mom,” Tara says.
“Yes, it is!” Burly shouts, showing up where he’s not wanted.
“No, it isn’t!” Tara says. “What is wrong with you?”
And there’s a moment, just a moment, where Burly is near us and none of the townsfolk who’ve all come out at the commotion are close enough.
Just for a second, it’s me and Tara and Burly and Margery Wingard, and he says, “We can’t fight a rock.
” It’s under his breath, ferocious, serious as a heart attack.
“We can’t fight gods who don’t get hit by gunfire. But we can fight Spackle.”
“Yes, we can,” Margery Wingard says, and starts running back up the hill, not even listening to us anymore.
“You’re insane,” Tara says to Burly.
“I’m so sick of explaining that I’m trying to keep this town together.”
“By picking an enemy that outnumber us by like a thousand to one?”
And yeah, I wish I had my comm so I could correct her math, please don’t hate me.
“If something is literally crawling out of rocks to attack us,” Burly says, “then we’ll go to pieces. We’ll scatter and die. But if we’ve got an enemy to unite against–”
“It’s suicide.”
“It’s solidarity. We’re never going to actually fight the Spackle.”
“You just shot a bunch in the marketplace!”
He waves his dismissive hand again. “They were warned to get out of the city. Some collateral damage is to be expected.”
My mouth is open at this. So, to her credit, is Tara’s.
“I’m trying to keep a cold war going,” he says. “It protects us both. Mutual destruction.”
“It’s not mutual, though,” Tara says. “If they decide to destroy us–”
“They don’t know how many more of us are coming,” Burly says. “As far as they’re concerned, we might never stop.”
“There’s no one else coming! It’s been decades!”
“We don’t know that. More importantly, they don’t know that. And since they can’t read Noise from most of us anymore, we live on the line of that doubt. That’s the only way we can stay here.”
I want to tell him so bad that’s obviously not the only way. That we could make peace. That we could live with the Land, not against them–
“Even I can see we need to find some kind of peace with them,” Tara says, as if she’s reading my mind.
“I’m not debating this with you right now, Tara,” Burly says. “You don’t know what they’re like. You don’t know how close they came to wiping us out.” He waves his rifle. “We have to show them we have strength. We have to show them they cannot simply push us around, give us their bacteria–”
“The one my mom obviously made for you?” Tara interrupts.
“Tara,” Burly says. “You don’t get to make the decisions in this town. I do.”
“You’re not a king. You’re elected.”
“That’s right, and if you don’t like it, you can vote me out when you turn eighteen, but until then–”
“Ben?” I hear my mom’s voice. “Oh, Ben, thank god.” She comes running over and nearly knocks me down in a hug. “Are you all right?”
I gesture to my throat and start signing, but Tara interrupts.
“He dropped his speaking thing,” Tara says, “when we were running from the god.”
“I only heard the screaming,” Mom says. “Is that what it was?”
“It was some trick of the Spackle,” Burly interrupts.
“And Burly is a liar,” Tara snaps, real heat in her voice.
“It is not a trick of the Spackle. It’s something that comes out of a rock in the woods.
It’s obviously connected to the Glyph. But Burly’s so interested in staying in power, he doesn’t actually care about the truth of a thing that came into our world and took my brother! ”
She’s shouting by the end of this, and I don’t blame her.
“Tara,” Burly says angrily, still holding his rifle.
“No!” Tara says, shouting so everyone can hear her. “This has to end! This isn’t some Spackle conspiracy! This is something they’re afraid of, too! Something is coming here and it’s taking your kids away from you!”
“You need to stop right now,” Burly says.
He raises his rifle.
He points it at her.
She sees it.
And she doesn’t stop.
“It took Taper! What more proof do you need?”
“Maybe that’s the proof,” my mom says, her eyes wide.
I look up to where she’s looking. Everyone else turns, too. Me, Tara, Burly, Mom, all the people who’ve come out to watch–
There are six gods–
No, seven.
Seven burning gods, standing at different points in the woods just outside the city–
And now there’s eight.
They’re all looking into the city.
They’re all staring at us.
Then they all start to scream.