I start shaking my head. “Ben–”
“I know, Todd,” he says, “but try yer best.”
“No, Ben–”
He catches my eyes again. He holds ’em with his own. “Do you trust me, Todd Hewitt?”
I scratch my side. I don’t know how to answer. “Course I do,” I say, “or at least I did before you started packing bags I didn’t know about for me.”
He looks at me harder, his Noise focused like a sun ray. “Do you trust me?” he asks again.
I look at him and yeah, I do, even now. “I trust you, Ben.”
“Then trust me when I say that the things you know right now, Todd, those things ain’t true.”
“Which things?” I ask, my voice rising a little. “Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Cuz knowledge is dangerous,” he says, as serious as I’ve ever seen him and when I look into his Noise to see what he’s hiding, it roars up and slaps me back. “If I told you now, it would buzz in you louder than a hive at honey-gathering time and Mayor Prentiss would find you fast as he could spit. And you have to get away from here. You have to, as far away as you can.”
“But where?” I say. “There ain’t nowhere else!”
Ben takes a deep breath. “There is,” he says. “There’s somewhere else.”
I don’t say nothing to that.
“Folded in the front of the book,” Ben says, “there’s a map. I made it myself but don’t look at it, not till yer well outta town, okay? Just go to the swamp. You’ll know what to do from there.”
But I can tell from his Noise that he’s not at all sure I’ll know what to do from there. “Or what I’m gonna find there, do you?”
He don’t say nothing to that.
And I’m thinking.
“How did you know to have a bag already packed?” I say, stepping back a little. “If this thing in the swamp is so unexpected, why are you so ready to chuck me out into the wilderness today?”
“It was the plan all along, ever since you were little.” I see him swallow, I hear his sadness everywhere. “As soon as you were old enough to make it on yer own–”
“You were just gonna throw me out so the crocs could eat me.” I’m stepping back further.
“No, Todd–” He moves forward, the book still in his hand. I step back again. He makes a gesture like, okay.
And he closes his eyes and opens up his Noise for me.
One month’s time is the first thing it says–
And here comes my birthday–
The day I’ll become a man–
And–
And–
And there it all is–
What happens–
What the other boys did who became men–
All alone–
All by themselves–
How every last bit of boyhood is killed off–
And–
And–
And what actually happened to the people who–
Holy crap–
And I don’t want to say no more about it.
And I can’t say at all how it makes me feel.
I look at Ben and he’s a different man than he always was, he’s a different man to the one I’ve always known.
Knowledge is dangerous.
“It’s why no one tells you,” he says. “To keep you from running.”
“You wouldn’t’ve protected me?” I say, mewing again (shut up).
“This is how we’re protecting you, Todd,” he says. “By getting you out. We had to be sure you could survive on yer own, that’s why we taught you all that stuff. Now, Todd, you have to go–”
“If that’s what’s happening in a month, why wait this long? Why not take me away sooner?”
“We can’t come with you. That’s the whole problem. And we couldn’t bear to send you off on yer own. To see you go. Not so young.” He rubs the cover of the book with his fingers again. “And we were hoping there might be a miracle. One where we wouldn’t have to–”
Lose you, says his Noise.
“But there ain’t been no miracle,” I say, after a second.
He shakes his head. He holds out the book. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry it has to be this way.”
And there’s so much true sorrow in his Noise, so much worry and edginess, I know he’s speaking true, I know he can’t help what’s happening and I hate it but I take the book from him and put it back in the plastic and into the rucksack. We don’t say nothing more. What else is there to say? Everything and nothing. You can’t say everything, so you don’t say nothing.
He pulls me to him again, hitting my lip on his collar just like Cillian but this time I don’t pull away. “Always remember,” he says, “when yer ma died, you became our son, and I love you and Cillian loves you, always have, always will.”
I start to say, “I don’t wanna go,” but it never comes out.
Cuz BANG!! goes the loudest thing I ever heard in Prentisstown, like something’s blowing right up, right on up to the sky.
And it can only be coming from our farm.
Ben lets me go right quick. He ain’t saying nothing but his Noise is screaming Cillian all over the place.
“I’ll come back with you,” I say. “I’ll help you fight.”
“No!” Ben shouts. “You have to get away. Promise me. Go thru the swamp and get away.”
I don’t say nothing for a second.
“Promise me,” Ben says again, demanding it this time.
“Promise!” Manchee barks and there’s fear even in that.
“I promise,” I say.
Ben reaches behind his back and unclasps something. He wriggles it for a second or two before it comes unlatched completely. He hands it to me. It’s his hunting knife, the big ratchety one with the bone handle and the serrated edge that cuts practically everything in the world, the knife I was hoping to get for the birthday when I became a man. It’s still in its belt, so I can wear it myself.
“Take it,” he says. “Take it with you to the swamp. You may need it.”
“I never fought a Spackle before, Ben.”
He still holds out the knife and so I take it.
There’s another BANG from the farm. Ben looks back towards it, then back to me. “Go. Follow the river down to the swamp and out. Run as fast as you can and you’d better damn well not turn back, Todd Hewitt.” He takes my arm and grips it hard. “If I can find you, I’ll find you, I swear it,” he says. “But you keep going, Todd. You keep yer promise.”
This is it. This is goodbye. A goodbye I wasn’t even looking for.
“Ben–”
“Go!” he shouts and takes off, looking back once as he runs and then racing off back to the farm, back to whatever’s happening at the end of the world.
“C’mon, Manchee,” I say, turning to run, tho every bit of me wants to follow Ben as he’s running across the fields a different way, just like he said, to confuse anyone out looking for Noise.
I stop for a second when I hear a bunch of smaller bangs from the direkshun of the house which gotta be rifle shots and I think of the rifle that Cillian took from Mr Prentiss Jr and all the rifles that Mayor Prentiss and his men have locked away in the town and how all those guns against Cillian’s stolen rifle and the few others we got in the house ain’t gonna be much of a fight for very long and it gets me to wondering what the bigger bangs were and I realize they were probably Cillian blowing up the generators to confuse the men and make everyone’s Noise so loud they can’t hear even the whisper of mine way out here.