Chapter 61 #3
“We’re wasting time! You know I’m right.”
And again, I take off running. Because there’s no other choice.
It’s much harder to see the canyon when we’re approaching this way. We climb up a hill, and it ends so suddenly at a clifftop I almost literally fall down into it.
“Max!”
“I’m fine,” I say, my heart beating heavy as I barely stop in time at the cliff’s edge.
Pop comes up beside me. “Shit,” he says.
The canyon is full of catchers. There must be hundreds, thousands even.
They stretch up and down the canyon, far as I can see in either direction.
They’re all out, claws up, as if they’re soaking in the sun.
They’re all weirdly silent, just slowly rocking back and forth on their back legs, front arms open, like they’re praying or something.
“What are they doing?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Pop says, “and I don’t care. If we go through that canyon, we’re dead, and no one gets any help.”
“Yeah,” I say, having to agree, despite the pain I actually literally feel at the thought of Ben and Mom.
“I know,” Pop says, putting a hand on my back. “Me, too, but we’ve gotta go around. Let’s get back down the hill and–”
The catchers start chattering. They click their claws together, like finger snaps. It’s a low sound at first, but it gets louder and louder as more catchers up and down the canyon start doing it. In seconds, it’s almost too loud to hear anything else.
“We should go,” Pop says. “Now.”
Another sound starts, a louder clattering.
The catchers are clapping their arms together now, and the clonking sound of the chitin hitting itself is even louder than the snapping.
I take a step back to get ready to run, and my foot knocks a rock over the edge of the cliff.
The first little outcropping it hits makes a different sort of loud sound than all the catchers–
It silences every catcher in the canyon.
The rock bop, bop, bops its way to the bottom, any catcher in the way easily stepping aside to let it fall. It hits the floor of the canyon with a thump. Then every catcher turns its eyestalks to look up at me and Pop.
“Oh, hell,” Pop says.
He grabs my arm as the clapping sound starts again even louder, and the catchers, as one, start flooding toward us. We’re not even ten feet back down the hill when the first come over the edge of the canyon–
And we’re not twenty feet back down the hill when something absolutely HUGE crashes out of the trees in front of us.
It’s so big, for a second I think it’s a god, that one followed us all this way just to blow us apart, but this is some kind of animal, a huge furry thing with a bloody, savage beak on its face.
It towers over us, twice or even three times the height of Pop.
“What the eff is that?” I say.
But Pop is already throwing himself in front of me, trying to get us off this path, but there’s nowhere to go. Catchers behind us, this thing in front of us, thick trees on one side and massive rocks on the other.
“Pop?”
“I know.”
“The catchers are coming!”
“I know!”
He’s kept me completely behind him, turning me so I’m against the rocks on our left.
He’s trying to block me as much as possible, but that’s going to work for maybe a second before we’re both completely torn apart.
I look up at the rocks to see if they’re climbable, and the giant thing roars.
It’s so loud, I can’t keep from screaming.
The torrent of catchers is rushing toward us, too.
It’s all louder than anything even Noise could be–
“Stay behind me,” Pop says. “When they attack me, run.”
“Pop, no–”
“Do not argue with me!” His fury is in his Noise, too, and I don’t argue.
The thing is coming up the hill, the catchers are coming down the hill.
“I love you, Max,” Pop says. “Don’t you ever forget it.”
“I love you, too, Pop,” I say.
The thing rises to attack, the catchers’ claws are out . . .
. . . and they don’t attack us.
They attack each other.
The thing barrels into the flood of catchers like a bullock going through a hay bale.
Catchers fly this way and that, but the thing is snapping at them with its beak, which seems specially designed to break through their outer shells.
The catchers swarm over the thing, but it shakes them off easily.
They keep coming, though, and they’re clearly going for the thing’s eyes, which may be its only vulnerable point through all that dense fur.
This battle is happening literally a few feet from us.
The thing is mostly winning, having broken enough catchers into pieces that it’s started to eat, licking away at the insides.
It keeps batting away attacks with its heavy, heavy paws, and it won’t be able to keep it up forever, but for now, it’s just eating.
“Pop?” I say.
“Stay still,” he says.
“The catchers.”
“What about them?”
“They’ve stopped coming over the cliff.”
He looks up. They have stopped. There’s a zillion out here on the path, but they’re mostly below us now, swarming over the creature still, who keeps knocking them away.
“The canyon might be clear,” I say, “but the way down is definitely not.”
This isn’t even something he can argue over.
He slowly starts moving us up the path toward the cliff’s edge.
The catchers and the creature don’t pay us any mind.
We start moving faster, as quietly as we can.
One catcher steps out of the fray ready to follow us, but the creature roars again, and the catcher leaps back into battle.
“Go,” Pop says.
I don’t need any encouragement. I run to the cliff’s edge. Not all of the catchers have gone, but there’s enough of a path below and across that we might even make it.
“Don’t stop,” Pop says. “No matter what you hear behind you, just keep running.”
And so I do.
“What was that thing?” I say when we’ve reached the other side of the canyon, past the still-steaming vents and more than a few snappy catchers. We’ve kept running until we’re far enough away that we literally can’t run anymore.
“I don’t know,” Pop says. “I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life.”
“You’re part of the Conversation. How can you not know?”
“I’m not part of it all the time. Plus, being in it doesn’t mean you know everything at every second. It’s like a database. You gotta ask it, or all the informayshun will drown you.”
“So there’s still stuff on this planet you don’t know about?”
He looks at me in surprise. “Plenty,” he says.
“So much I’d never learn it all if I lived another hundred years.
I mean, we know the general layout of the planet, the different continents and environments and stuff, but all those places are filled with different kinds of Land who’ve adapted to what those places needed.
I’ve heard there are Land who live on the water.
Not on islands, but on the water itself.
I’ve heard there are whole cities in deserts and on mountaintops.
And there are more animals than anyone could even begin to count. ”
“That’s what Granddad said. It seems so . . .” I don’t know the word.
“I know,” Pop says. “It makes you feel sad. All these things you don’t know and probably never will.”
“I’ll learn about them,” I say. “I’ll see them, too. You’ll come with me.”
He smiles at me, but I see the sadness still in his Noise. “I hope so.”
“Why ‘hope’? We’ll make it happen. Why wouldn’t we?”
“The future has a way of surprising you,” Pop says. “Good and bad.”
An hour later, we reach a hilltop where we get our first good view of the city in the distance. I see it first. Pop coming up behind me, then losing all his breath.
The city is on fire.