Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy (8 page)

“It’s a girl,” I say again. I’m still catching my breath, still feeling the pressure on my chest,
definitely
still holding the knife way out in front of me.

A girl.

It’s looking back at us like we’re gonna kill it. It’s hunched down in a little ball, trying to make itself as small as possible, only taking its eyes off Manchee to snatch quick glances of me.

Of me and my knife.

Manchee’s huffing and puffing, his back fur all ridged, hopping around like the ground is hot, looking as charged up and confused as I am, tho completely hopeless about keeping in any way cool.

“What’s girl?” he barks. “What’s girl?”

By which he means, “What’s a girl?”

“What’s girl?” Manchee barks again and when the girl looks like it might be about to make a leap back over the large root where it’s huddling, Manchee’s bark turns into a fierce growl,
“Stay,
stay,
stay,
stay,
stay . . .”

“Good dog,” I say, tho I don’t know
why
it’s good what he’s doing but what else can you say? This makes no sense, no sense at all, and everything feels like it’s starting to slip, like the world is a table tilted on its side and everything on it is tipping over.

I am Todd Hewitt,
I think to myself but who knows if
that’s
even true any more?

“Who are you?” I finally say, if it can even hear me over all my raging Noise and Manchee’s nervous breakdown. “Who are you?” I say, louder and clearer. “What are you doing here? Where did you come from?”

It looks at me, finally, for more than just a second, taking its eyes off Manchee. It looks at my knife, then it looks at my face above my knife.

She
looks at me.

She
does.

She.

I know what a girl is. Course I do. I seen ’em in the Noise of their fathers in town, mourned like their wives but not nearly so often. I seen ’em in vids, too. Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it’s pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side. They do all the inside-the-house chores, while boys do all the outside. They reach womanhood when they turn thirteen, just like boys reach manhood, and then they’re women and they become wives.

That’s how New World works, or at least that’s how Prentisstown works. Worked. Was meant to, anyhow, but there ain’t no girls. They’re all dead. They died with their mothers and their grandmothers and their sisters and their aunties. They died in the months after I was born. All of them, every single one.

But here one is.

And its hair ain’t long.
Her
hair. Her hair ain’t long. And she ain’t wearing no dress, she’s wearing clothes that look like way newer versions of mine, so new they’re almost like a uniform, even tho they’re torn and muddy, and she ain’t that small, she’s my size, just, by the looks of her, and she’s sure as all that’s unholy not smiley.

No, not smiley at all.

“Spackle?” Manchee barks quietly.

“Would you effing well
shut up
?” I say.

So how do I know? How do I know it’s a girl?

Well, for one, she ain’t no Spackle. Spackle looked like men with everything a bit swelled up, everything a bit longer and weirder than on a man, their mouths a bit higher than they should be and their ears and eyes way,
way
different. And spacks grew their clothes right on their bodies, like lichens you could trim away to whatever shape you needed. Product of swamp-dwelling, according to another Ben-best-guess and she don’t look like that and her clothes are normal and so there ain’t no way she’s a Spackle.

And for two, I just know. I just do. I can’t tell you but I look and I see and I just know. She don’t look like the girls I seen in vids or in Noise and I never seen no girl in the flesh but there she is, she’s a girl and that’s that. Don’t ask me. Something about her shape, something about her smell, something I don’t know but it’s there and she’s a girl.

If there was a girl, that’s what she’d be.

And she ain’t another boy. She just ain’t. She ain’t me. She ain’t nothing like me at all. She’s something completely other else altogether and I don’t know how I know it but I know who I am, I am Todd Hewitt, and I know what I am not and I am not her.

She’s looking at me. She’s looking at my face, in my eyes. Looking and looking.

And I’m not hearing
nothing
.

Oh, man. My chest. It’s like falling.

“Who are you?” I say again but my voice actually
catches,
like it breaks up cuz I’m so sad (shut up). I grit my teeth and I get a little madder and I say it yet again. “Who are you?” and I hold out the knife a little farther. With my other arm, I have to wipe my eyes real fast.

Something’s gotta happen. Someone’s gotta move. Someone’s gotta do
something
.

And there ain’t no someone but me, still, whatever the world’s doing.

“Can you talk?” I say.

She just looks back at me.

“Quiet,” Manchee barks.

“Shut it, Manchee,” I say, “I need to think.”

And she’s still just looking back at me. With no Noise at all.

What do I do? It ain’t fair. Ben told me I’d get to the swamp and I’d know what to do but I
don’t
know what to do. They didn’t say nothing about a girl, they didn’t say nothing about why the quiet makes me ache so much I can barely stop from ruddy
weeping,
like I’m missing something so bad I can’t even think straight, like the emptiness ain’t in her, it’s in
me
and there ain’t nothing that’s ever gonna fix it.

What do I do?

What do I do?

She seems like maybe she’s calming down. She’s not shaking as much as she was, her arms aren’t up so high, and she’s not looking like she’s about to run off at the first opportunity, tho how can you know for sure when a person’s got no Noise? How can they
be
a person if they ain’t got no Noise?

And can she hear me?
Can
she? Can a person with no Noise hear it at all?

I look at her and I think, as loud and clear as I can,
Can you hear me? Can you?

But she don’t change her face, she don’t change her look.

“Okay,” I say, and I take a step back. “Okay. You just stay there, okay? You just stay right there.”

I take a few more steps back but I keep my eyes on her and she keeps her eyes on me. I bring my knife arm down and I slide it outta one strap of the rucksack, then I lean over and drop the rucksack to the ground. I keep the knife in one hand and with the other I open up the rucksack and fish out the book.

It’s heavier than you think a thing made of words could be. And it smells of leather. And there’s pages and pages of my ma’s–

That’ll have to wait.

“You watch her, Manchee,” I say.

“Watch!” he barks.

I look inside the front cover and there’s the paper folded in just like Ben said. I unfold it. There’s a hand-drawn map on one side and then a whole buncha writing on the back but it’s all a big block of letters which I ain’t got the calmness of Noise to even try right now so I just look at the map.

Our house is right at the top and the town just below with the river Manchee and I came down off to one side leading into the swamp and that’s where we are now. But there’s more to it, ain’t there? The swamp keeps going till it starts being a river again and there’s arrows drawn along the riverbank so that’s where Ben is wanting me and Manchee to go and I follow the arrows with my fingers and it leads right outta the swamp, it leads right to–

WHUMP!!
The world goes bright for a second as something clubs me up side the head, right on the sore spot where Aaron punched me, and I fall over but as I’m falling I swing the knife up and I hear a little yelp of pain and I catch myself before I fall all the way down and I turn, sitting down on the ground hard, holding the back of my knife hand to the pain in my head but looking at where the attack came from and it’s here that I learn my very first lesson: Things with no Noise can sneak right up on you. Sneak right up on you like they ain’t even there.

The girl is on her butt, too, sitting on the ground away from me, holding on to one of her upper arms with her hand, blood coming from twixt her fingers. She’s dropped the stick she hit me with and her face is all collapsed in on itself with what she must be feeling from that cut.

“WHAT THE HELL D’YOU DO THAT FOR?” I shout, trying not to touch my face too hard. Man, am I sick of being hit today.

The girl just looks at me, her forehead still creased, holding her cut.

Which is kinda bleeding a lot.

“Stick, Todd!” Manchee barks.

“And where the hell were you?” I say to him.

“Poo, Todd.”

I make a “Gah!” sound and kick some dirt at him. He scrabbles back, then starts sniffing at some bushes like there ain’t nothing unusual going on in the world. Dogs got attenshun spans about as long as a matchstick. Idiot things.

It’s starting to get dark now, the sun really setting, the already dark swamp getting even darker, and I still don’t have no answer. Time keeps passing and I ain’t sposed to wait here and I ain’t sposed to go back and
there ain’t sposed to be a girl
.

Boy, that cut really is bleeding on her.

“Hey,” I say, my voice shaky from the charge running through me.
I am Todd Hewitt,
I think.
I am almost a man.
“Hey,” I say again, trying to be a little calmer.

The girl looks at me.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you,” I say, breathing hard, just like her. “You hear me? I ain’t gonna hurt you. As long as you don’t try to hit me with no more sticks, all right?”

She looks at my eyes. Then she looks at the knife.

Is she understanding?

I lower the knife away from my face and bring it down near the ground. I don’t let go of it, tho. With my free hand, I start looking thru the rucksack again till I find the medipak Ben threw in. I hold it up.

“Medipak,” I say. She doesn’t change. “Me-di-pak,” I say slowly. I point to my own upper arm, to where the cut is on her. “Yer bleeding.”

Nothing.

I sigh and I start to stand. She flinches and scoots back on her butt. I sigh again in an angry way.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you.”
I hold up the medipak. “It’s medicine. It’ll stop the bleeding.”

Still nothing. Maybe there ain’t nothing in her at all.

“Look,” I say and I snap open the medipak. I fumble with one hand and take out a styptic pad, tearing away the paper cover with my teeth. I’m probably bleeding from where first Aaron hit me and then the girl, so I take the pad and rub it over my eye and eyebrow. I pull it away and yep, there’s blood. I hold the pad out to the girl so she can see it. “See?” I point to my eye. “See? It stops things bleeding.”

I take a step forward, just the one. She flinches back but not as much. I take another step, then another and then I’m next to her. She keeps looking at the knife.

“I ain’t putting it down, so just forget it,” I say. I push the pad towards her arm. “Even if it’s deep, this stitches it up, okay? I’m trying to help you.”

“Todd?” Manchee barks, full of asking marks.

“In a minute,” I say. “Look, yer bleeding everywhere, okay? And I can fix it, all right? Just don’t get any ideas about any more ruddy sticks.”

She’s watching. And she’s watching. And she’s watching. I’m trying to be as calm as I really don’t feel. I don’t know why I’m helping her, not after she whacked me on the head, but I don’t know what to do about anything. Ben said there’d be answers in the swamp and there ain’t no answers, there’s just this girl who’s bleeding cuz I cut her even tho she deserved it and if I can stop the bleeding then maybe that’s doing something.

I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, so I just do this.

The girl’s still watching me, still breathing heavy. But she ain’t running and she ain’t flinching and then so you can hardly tell at all she’s turning her upper arm towards me a little bit so I can reach the cut.

“Todd?” Manchee barks again.

“Shush,” I say, not wanting to scare the girl any more. Being this close to her silence is like my heart breaking all over the place. I can feel it, like it’s pulling me down into a bottomless pit, like it’s calling for me to just fall and fall and fall.

But I keep my nerve, I do. I keep it and I press the styptic pad on her arm, rubbing the cut, which is pretty deep, till it closes a bit and stops bleeding.

“Ya gotta be careful,” I say. “That ain’t a permanent heal. You gotta be careful with it till yer body heals the rest, okay?”

And all she does is look at me.

“Okay,” I say, to myself as much as anyone cuz now that that’s done, what’s next?

“Todd?” Manchee barks. “Todd?”

“And no more sticks, all right?” I say to the girl. “No more hitting me.”

“Todd?” Manchee again.

“And obviously my name’s Todd.”

And there, just there, just there in the fading light, is there a little beginning of a start of a smile? Is there?

“Can you . . . ?” I say, looking as deep into her eyes as the pressure in my chest allows. “Can you understand me?”

“Todd,” Manchee’s barking picks up a notch.

I turn to him.
“What?”

“Todd! TODD!!!”

And then we can all hear it. Pounding thru the bushes and branches breaking and running footsteps and Noise and Noise and oh, crap, Noise.

“Get up,” I say to the girl. “Get up! Now!”

I grab my rucksack and put it on and the girl’s looking terrified but in a not-helpful paralysed way and I shout “Come on!” to her again and I grab her arm, not thinking about the cut now, and I try to lift her to her feet but all of a sudden it’s too late and there’s a yell and a roar and a sound like whole trees falling down and me and the girl can only both turn to look and it’s Aaron and he’s mad and he’s messed-up and he’s coming right for us.