“I said get off my property, Davy,” he says.
Mr Prentiss Jr looks at him, then looks at us, still holding his bloody mouth. Like I say, he ain’t barely two years older than me, barely able to even get a sentence out without his voice breaking, but he’s had his birthday to be a man so there he is, our sheriff.
The blood from his mouth is getting on the little brown hairs he calls a moustache and everyone else calls nothing.
“You know this answers the asking, doncha?” He spits some blood and a tooth onto our floor. “You know this ain’t the end.” He looks right at my eye. “You found something, dincha, boy?”
Cillian aims the rifle at his head. “Out,” he says.
“We got plans for you, boy.” Mr Prentiss Jr smiles bloodily at me and gets to his feet. “The boy who’s last. One more month, ain’t it?”
I look to Cillian but all he does is cock the rifle loudly, getting his point across.
Mr Prentiss Jr looks back at us, spits again, and says, “Be seeing you,” trying to sound tough but his voice squeaks and he takes off as fast he can back to the town.
Cillian slams the door behind him. “Todd’s gotta go now. Back thru the swamp.”
“I know,” Ben says. “I was hoping–”
“Me, too,” Cillian says.
“Whoa, whoa,” I say, “I ain’t going back to the swamp. There’s Spackle there!”
“Keep yer thoughts quiet,” Cillian says. “That’s more important than you know.”
“Well, since I don’t know nothing, that ain’t hard,” I say. “I ain’t going nowhere till someone tells me what’s going on!”
“Todd–” Ben starts.
“They’ll be coming back, Todd,” Cillian says. “Davy Prentiss will come back and he won’t be alone and we won’t be able to protect you from all of them at once.”
“But–”
“No arguing!” Cillian says.
“Come on, Todd,” Ben says. “Manchee’s gonna have to go with you.”
“Oh, man, this just gets better,” I say.
“Todd,” Cillian says and I look at him and he’s changed a little. There’s something new in his Noise, a sadness, a sadness like grief. “Todd,” he says again, then suddenly he grabs me and hugs me to him as hard as he can. It’s too rough and I bash my cut lip on his collar and say “Ow!” and push him away.
“You may hate us for this, Todd,” he says, “but try to believe it’s only cuz we love you, all right?”
“No,” I say, “it’s not all right. It’s not all right at all.”
But Cillian’s not listening, as usual. He stands up and says to Ben, “Go, run, I’ll hold ’em off as long as possible.”
“I’ll come back a different way,” Ben says, “see if I can throw ’em off the trail.”
They clasp hands for a long minute, then Ben looks at me, says “Come on” and as he’s dragging me outta the room to get to the back door, I see Cillian pick up the rifle again and he glances up at me and catches my eye and there’s a look to him, a look written all over him and his Noise that this is a bigger goodbye than it even seems, that this is it, the last time he ever expects to see me and I open my mouth to say something but then the door closes on him and he’s gone.
“I’ll get you to the river,” Ben says as we hurry across our fields for the second time this morning. “You can follow it down to where it meets the swamp.”
“There ain’t no path that way, Ben,” I say, “and there’s crocs everywhere. You trying to get me killed?”
He looks back at me, his eyes all level, but he keeps on hurrying. “There’s no other way, Todd.”
“Crocs! Swamp! Quiet! Poo!” Manchee barks.
I’ve stopped even asking what’s going on since nobody’s seeing fit to tell me nothing so we just keep on moving past the sheep, still not in their paddocks and now maybe never getting there. “Sheep!” they say, watching us pass. On we go, past the main barn, down one of the big irrigashun tracks, turning right on a smaller one, heading towards where the wilderness starts, which pretty much means the beginning of the rest of this whole empty planet.
Ben don’t start talking again till we get to the treeline. “There’s food in yer rucksack to last you for a bit but you should make it stretch as far as you can, eating what fruit you find and anything you can hunt.”
“How long do I gotta make it last?” I ask. “How long till I can come back?”
Ben stops. We’re just inside the trees. The river’s thirty metres away but you can hear it cuz this is where it starts rushing downhill to get to the swamp.
Suddenly it feels like just about the loneliest place in the whole wide world.
“You ain’t coming back, Todd,” Ben says, quietly. “You can’t.”
“Why not?” I say and my voice comes out all mewing like a kitten but I can’t help it. “What’d I do, Ben?”
Ben comes up to me. “You didn’t do anything, Todd. You didn’t do anything at all.” He hugs me real hard and I can feel my chest start to press again and I’m so confused and frightened and angry. Nothing was different in the world this morning when I got outta bed and now here I am being sent away and Ben and Cillian acting like I’m dying and it ain’t fair and I don’t know why it ain’t fair but it just ain’t fair.
“I know it ain’t fair,” Ben says, pulling himself away and looking me hard in the face. “But there is an explanashun.” He turns me round and opens my rucksack and I can feel him taking something out.
The book.
I look at him and look away. “You know I don’t read too good, Ben,” I say, embarrassed and stupid.
He crouches down a bit so we’re truly face to face. His Noise ain’t making me comfortable at all.
“I know,” he says, gentle-like. “I always meant to try and spend more time–” He stops. He holds out the book again. “It’s yer ma’s,” he says. “It’s her journal, starting from the day you were born, Todd.” He looks down at it. “Till the day she died.”
My Noise opens wide.
My ma. My ma’s own book.
Ben runs his hand over the cover. “We promised her we’d keep you safe,” he says. “We promised her and then we had to put it outta our minds so there was nothing in our Noise, nothing that would let anyone know what we were gonna do.”
“Including me,” I say.
“It had to be including you. If just a little bit got into yer Noise and then into the town . . .”
He don’t finish.
“Like the silence I found in the swamp today,” I say. “Like that getting into town and causing all this havoc.”
“No, that was a surprise.” He looks up at the sky, like he’s telling it just how completely a surprise it all was. “No one woulda guessed that happening.”
“It’s dangerous, Ben. I could feel it.”
But all he does is hold out the book again.