Chapter 5 #2
A bunch of people in the crowd shoot their arrows in panic. Not a single one hits a god.
“No!” Mom yells. “Use them at the last minute! We don’t have enough!”
But a few more arrows fly and a few more people run.
“Stand your ground!” Mom yells.
And some people stand their ground. Like that woman who yelled at Burly. I wonder who she lost.
“Hold!” Mom yells.
The god is thirty feet from us. Twenty.
“Hold!” Mom yells.
Ten.
The god is reaching down.
It’s reaching down for me.
Ben steps beside me and shoots his arrow–
It hits the god in the muscles of its chest. The god stops, almost in surprise. It reaches up a skeletal hand toward the arrow, then it seems to turn into a shimmer of water, hanging impossibly against gravity just for a second–
And it collapses down into a harmless puddle.
Everything goes quiet for a second.
I mean, I’m sure it doesn’t, but it sure as hell seems like it. I think all of us were pretty certain it wasn’t gonna work, even Mom, and that it did–
Well, I mean, wow.
“Ha!” Mom yells, and a cheer rises loud and astonished from the crowd.
“They aren’t stopping!” I yell. Because they aren’t. The other gods don’t even pause at the disappearance of the first one.
I raise my bow and arrow, because the next one is coming right for me. I pull back the string, I let it fly, and it bounces off at an angle from its collarbone.
“Eff!” I say.
Another arrow hits it, and it dissolves into water. I look over. Mom.
“If you’re out of the cure,” she says, “you need to get behind us.”
Ben and I run back through the crowd of people, who are now stepping forward and taking aim. Wilf shoots a god, Lee shoots another using Wilf’s Noise to aim, Bessie Jaye shoots a third. One god goes down. Then another. And another.
“It’s working,” I say to Ben, but he keeps looking out at the gods coming up the hill. I can tell he’s counting by the way he nods his head slightly, and I know what he’s realizing. There are more gods than there are vials of cure. And they keep coming, one after the other.
We’re not going to stop them.
“Mom!” I call.
She’s at the front of the crowd, rapidly tying another vial to an arrow. She must have stashed some in her pockets. I see her give one to the woman next to her. It still won’t be enough.
“Mom,” I say, pushing back to her, Ben coming with me. “We’re not going to have enough.”
“We’re still stopping them,” she says, as one more goes down. “Maybe they’ll get the hint.”
“But–”
“What else can we do, Max?” she says. “We fight or we give up!”
I swallow. “We’ll go look for more. Maybe there’s some hidden away in the annex.”
She nods, touches my cheek, then says, “Go! And check on your father!”
“Absolutely,” I say, and me and Ben run back into the annex. Pop is still lying on the bench, his eyes closed. “Pop!”
“Is it working?” he grunts, cracking his eyes open slightly.
“It’s working,” I say, “but we need to find more cure.”
“There may be freezers. If there’s a storage unit in the back?”
“I’ll go,” I say, turning to Ben. “You get him out of here if he needs to move.”
Ben nods, and I run off. I race through the annex, not bothering to look inside the classrooms where I used to dread going.
I run past the sports room where Mom got all the bows and arrows, trying to remember if there’s storage space anywhere.
There’s a first aid room, I know, but when I dash in, there’s nothing in the small fridge.
I run down the hallway farther in. I get to a wall at the back that has locked double doors that look like closets.
I pull and pull, but they’re not budging, so I start kicking.
One door finally opens, and I’m able to wrench the other one open, too.
One big freezer takes up all of it. I flip open the top, and my heart leaps.
Vial after vial of cure, dozens upon dozens.
I actually cry a little. Because, for the first time in who knows how long, I realize we’re going to win.
There’s hundreds of cures here. We can take out hundreds of gods.
And they’ll stop coming, right? When they see we can beat them?
And we’ll have time to save Pop. And we can figure out where the kids who were taken went.
We’re going to win. We’re going to win.
I grab the top tray–
And the ceiling explodes in flames from a god stomping into the back of the annex.
The tray is smashed out of my hands by falling wood, and the foot of the god only just misses me as it stomps right down on the freezer full of cure.
The ceiling collapses completely, trapping me against one wall.
I think my leg might be broken, but that’s not even the biggest thought in my head, because I look up through the hole in the ceiling as a god reaches its hand down, but all the broken cure is in a puddle at its foot, and the god disintegrates in a wave of water that soaks me.
I can’t do anything but spit it out and watch as it runs down the walls in a flood, and I see that flood wash away all the rest of the cure.
So that’s it, then.
That’s it.
As fast as that. As fast as we were going to win, we’ve lost. The gods will keep coming, have obviously kept coming. We don’t have nearly enough cure to stop them anymore.
That’s it.
It’s weird when hope dies. The world goes all quiet, even though everything’s still really loud here. I watch the water and the cure dribble away across the debris on the floor. It extinguishes the little fires the god left behind, but that’s not what we wanted it to do.
I hear a human scream, and I look up. A god is striding by, a young girl in its hand. Her mother’s chasing after it, empty bow still in her fist.
How did we not expect this? How did we think we were ever going to win over something so huge and unknowable?
The pain in my leg is starting to show up after the shock, and it’s pretty bad, and it makes me think, I hope it doesn’t hurt when the end comes. Not any more than my leg, I guess, which, nope, not gonna move anywhere without shoots of lightning all through my body.
I hope it doesn’t hurt.
I hope Ben gets away.
I hope Mom and Pop get away somehow, too.
I wait for my ending. Alone.
And then I hear broken boards and furniture being pushed out of the way.
···
Ben pushes his way through the wreckage. I see him before he sees me.
“I’m here!” I yell.
He hops up over the big cabinet door that fell when the god stomped on it. He slides down it and hugs me as he slams into me. I groan with the pain, but I don’t let him let go either. The hug is the best.
He looks me in the face, like Are you okay?
“I think my leg is broken,” I say. “Are Pop and Mom all right?”
He nods, but it’s a serious and desperate nod, like they’re okay for now, but he knows what I know. That our chances have all run out. I wave my hand over the ground.
“That was all the cure,” I say.
Of course it was, he signs. He tries to lift the boards off of me. They don’t budge even an inch.
I look him in the face. “I think you should run.”
Eff off, he signs. He doesn’t sign “eff.”
“Get out of here. I can’t go anywhere. I’m a sitting duck, and if you’re here, they’ll take you, too.”
Nope, he signs. Not leaving.
“Please, Ben. I need to know you’ll be okay.”
He shakes his head even more firmly. No way I’d let you face a god alone. No way.
“But Ben–”
He signs no a bunch of times.
I hate it, but I understand this.
If they want one of us, they’ll have to take both of us.
“That isn’t a good plan, you do know that?”
Still sounds right though.
He puts his arm around my shoulders. We lean our heads together under the open sky.
We can hear screaming and yelling. I don’t know where Mom and Pop are.
And through the hole in the roof, I see a god approaching, and another behind it, and another coming up from a different side of the hill. They’re converging on us.
I don’t say anything to Ben, just take his hand. He squeezes back.
“I really thought one of us would get left behind,” I say. He just squeezes my hand again.
We look up to face our doom.
The god right in front of us is hit by something in its shoulder. Something hard enough to knock it to one side. It roars at the attack–
And then it collapses in a puddle.
“What?” I say, sitting up.
Another hits the one behind it, and it’s gone in a splash as well.
“Those aren’t arrows,” I say.
They’re not our arrows, Ben signs.
The third god goes down in a rush of water, and we see the horn of a battlemore go by, just popping above the wreckage of the back wall, then we see the Land who’s riding on top of the battlemore, standing on its back, as is their way when they’re going into war.
He’s firing one of their weapons, bam, bam, bam, and the gods go down, one after the other.
Another battlemore goes by, then another and another.
The Land have come. And they’ve come to fight. Pop said they’d examined our cure and made it better.
Another battlemore walks up to the wrecked wall. Its rider leans forward to look at us.
It’s the Sky himself.
He opens his Noise to me.
And I understand everything.
I was right after all.
We’ve won.