Chaos Walking

by Patrick Ness

“You get used to it,” I say. “But why so long? Why seven months?”

  “That’s how long it takes to set up first camp.” She covers her eyes with her hand in an exhausted way. “Me and my mother and father were supposed to find the best place for the ships to land and build the first encampment and then we’d start building the first things that would be needed for settlers just landing. A control tower, a food store, a clinic.” She looks at me twixt her fingers. “It’s standard procedure.”

  “I never seen no control tower on New World,” I say.

  This makes her sit up. “I know. I can’t believe you guys don’t even have communicators between settlements.”

  “So yer not church settlers then,” I say, sounding wise.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she says. “Why would any reasonable church want to be cut off from itself?”

  “Ben said that they came to this world for the simpler life, said that there was even a fight in the early days whether to destroy the fission generators.”

  Viola looks horrified. “You would have all died.”

  “That’s why they weren’t destroyed,” I shrug. “Not even after Mayor Prentiss decided to get rid of most everything else.”

  Viola rubs her shins and looks up into the stars coming out thru the hole in the roof. “My mother and father were so excited,” she says. “A whole new world, a whole new beginning, all these plans of peace and happiness.” She stops.

  “I’m sorry it ain’t that way,” I say.

  She looks down at her feet. “Would you mind waiting outside for a little while until I fall asleep?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “no problem.”

  I take my rucksack and go out the opening where the front door used to be. Manchee gets up from where he’s curled and follows me. When I sit down, he recurls by my legs and falls asleep, farting happily and giving a doggy sigh. Simple to be a dog.

  I watch the moons rise, the stars following ’em, the same moons and the same stars as were in Prentisstown, still out here past the end of the world. I take out the book again, the oil in the cover shining from the moonlight. I flip thru the pages.

  I wonder if my ma was excited to land here, if her head was full of peace and good hope and joy everlasting.

  I wonder if she found any before she died.

  This makes my chest heavy so I put the book back in the rucksack and lean my head against the boards of the mill. I listen to the river flow past and the leaves shushing to themselves in the few trees around us and I look at the shadows of far distant hills on the horizon and the rustling forests on them.

  I’ll wait for a few minutes, then go back inside and make sure Viola’s okay.

  The next thing I know she’s waking me up and it’s hours later and my head is completely confused till I hear her saying, “Noise, Todd, I can hear Noise.”

  I’m on my feet before I’m fully awake, quieting Viola and a groggy Manchee barking his complaints. They get quiet and I put my ear into the night.

  Whisper whisper whisper there, like a breeze whisper whisper whisper no words and far away but hovering, a storm cloud behind a mountain whisper whisper whisper.

  “We gotta go,” I say, already reaching for my rucksack.

  “Is it the army?” Viola calls, running thru the door of the mill as she grabs her own bag.

  “Army!” Manchee barks.

  “Don’t know,” I say. “Probably.”

  “Could it be the next settlement?” Viola comes back, bag round her shoulders. “We can’t be too far from it.”

  “Then why didn’t we hear it when we got here?”

  She bites her lip. “Damn.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Damn.”

  And so the second night after Farbranch passes like the first, running in darkness, using torches when we need them, trying not to think. Just before the sun comes up, the river moves outta the flats and into another small valley like the one by Farbranch and sure enough, there’s Blazing Beacons or whatever so maybe there really are people living out this way.

  They’ve got orchards, too, and fields of wheat, tho nothing looks near as well tended as Farbranch. Lucky for us, the main bit of town is on top of the hill with what looks like a bigger road going thru it, the left fork, maybe, and five or six buildings, most of which could use a lick of paint. Down on our dirt road by the river there are just boats and wormy-looking docks and dockhouses and whatever else you build on a flowing river.

  We can’t ask anyone for help. Even if we got it, the army’s coming, ain’t it? We should warn them but what if they’re Matthew Lyles rather than Hildys? And what if by warning them we draw the army right to them cuz then we’re in everyone’s Noise? And what if the settlement knows we’re the reason the army’s coming and they decide to turn us over to them?

  But they deserve to be warned, don’t they?

  But what if that endangers us?

  You see? What’s the right answer?

  And so we sneak thru the settlement like thieves, running from dockhouse to dockhouse, hiding from sight of the town up the hill, waiting as quiet as we can when we see a skinny woman taking a basket into a hen house up by some trees. It’s small enough that we get thru it before the sun even fully rises and we’re out the other side and back on the road like it never existed, like it never happened, even to us.

  “So that’s that settlement then,” Viola whispers as we take a look behind us and watch it disappear behind a bend. “We’ll never even know what it was properly called.”

  “And now we really don’t know what’s ahead of us,” I whisper back.

  “We keep going until we get to Haven.”

  “And then what?”

  She don’t say nothing to that.

  “That’s a lotta faith we’re putting in a word,” I say.

  “There’s got to be something, Todd,” she says, her face kinda grim. “There has to be something there.”

  I don’t say nothing for a second and then I say, “I guess we’ll see.”

  And so starts another morning. Twice on the road we see men with horse-drawn carts. Both times we hie off into the woods, Viola with her hand round Manchee’s snout and me trying to keep my Noise as Prentisstown-free as possible till they pass.

  Nothing much changes as the hours go by. We don’t hear no more whispers from the army, if that’s what it even was, but there ain’t no point in finding out for sure, is there? Morning’s turned into afternoon again when we see a settlement high up on a far hill. We’re coming up a little hill ourselves, the river dropping down a bit, tho we can see it spreading out in the distance, what looks like the start of a plain we’re gonna have to cross.

  Viola points her binos at the settlement for a minute, then hands them to me. It’s ten or fifteen buildings this time but even from a distance it looks scrubby and run down.

  “I don’t get it,” Viola says. “Going by a regular schedule of settlement, subsistence farming should be years over by now. And there’s obviously trade, so why is there still this much struggle?”

  “You don’t really know nothing about settler’s lives, do you?” I say, chafing just a little.

  She purses her lips. “It was required in school. I’ve been learning about how to set up a successful colony since I was five.”

  “Schooling ain’t life.”

  “Ain’t it?” she says, her eyebrows raising in a mock.

  “What did I say before?” I snap back. “Some of us were busy surviving and couldn’t learn about subdivided farming.”

  “Subsistence.”

  “Don’t care.” I get myself moving again on the road.

  Viola stomps after me. “We’re going to be teaching you lot a thing or two when my ship arrives,” she says. “You can be sure of that.”

  “Well, won’t we dumb hicks be queuing up to kiss yer behinds in thankfulness?” I say, my Noise buzzing and not saying “behinds”.

  “Yes, you will be.” She’s raising her voice. “Tryin
g to turn back the clock to the dark ages has really worked out for you, hasn’t it? When we get here, you’ll see how people are supposed to settle.”

  “That’s seven months from now,” I seethe at her. “You’ll have plenty of time to see how the other half live.”

  “Todd!” Manchee barks, making us jump again, and suddenly he takes off down the road ahead of us.

  “Manchee!” I yell after him. “Get back here!”

  And then we both hear it.

  It’s weird, Noise, but almost wordless, cresting the hill in front of us and rolling down, single-minded but talking in legions, like a thousand voices singing the same thing.

  Yeah.

  Singing.

  “What is it?” Viola asks, spooked as I am. “It’s not the army, is it? How could they be in front of us?”

  “Todd!” Manchee barks from the top of the small hill. “Cows, Todd! Giant cows!”

  Viola’s mouth twists. “Giant cows?”

  “No idea,” I say and I’m already heading up the little hill.

  Cuz the sound–

  How can I describe it?

  Like how stars might sound. Or moons. But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It’s a sound like one planet singing to another, high and stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but all weaving together in a rope of sound that’s sad but not sad and slow but not slow and all singing one word.

  One word.

  We reach the top of the hill and another plain unrolls below us, the river tumbling down to meet it and then running thru it like a vein of silver thru a rock and all over the plain, walking their way from one side of the river to the other, are creachers.

  Creachers I never seen the like of in my life.

  Massive, they are, four metres tall if they’re an inch, covered in a shaggy, silvery fur with a thick, fluffed tail at one end and a pair of curved white horns at the other reaching right outta their brows and long necks that stretch down from wide shoulders to the grass of the plain below and these wide lips that mow it up as they trudge on dry ground and drink water as they cross the river and there’s thousands of ’em, thousands stretching from the horizon on our right to the horizon on our left and the Noise of them all is singing one word, at different times in different notes, but one word binding ’em all together, knitting ’em as a group as they cross the plain.

  “Here,” Viola says from somewhere off to my side. “They’re singing here.”

  They’re singing Here. Calling it from one to another in their Noise.

  Here I am.

  Here we are.

  Here we go.

  Here is all that matters.

  Here.

  It’s–

  Can I say?

  It’s like the song of a family where everything’s always all right, it’s a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it’s a song that’ll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.

  It’s–

  Wow.

  I look at Viola and she has her hand over her mouth and her eyes are wet but I can see a smile thru her fingers and I open my mouth to speak.

  “Ya won’t get ver far on foot,” says a completely other voice to our left.

  We spin round to look, my hand going right to my knife. A man driving an empty cart pulled by a pair of oxes regards us from a little side path, his mouth left hanging open like he forgot to close it.

  There’s a shotgun on the seat next to him, like he just put it there.

  From a distance, Manchee barks “Cow!”

  “They’s all go round carts,” says the man, “but not safe on foot, no. They’s squish ya right up.”

  And again leaves his mouth open. His Noise, buried under all the Heres from the herd, seems to pretty much be saying exactly what his mouth is. I’m trying so hard not to think of certain words I’m already getting a headache.

  “Ah kin give y’all a ride thrus,” he says. “If ya want.”

  He raises an arm and points down the road, which disappears under the feet of the herd crossing it. I hadn’t even thought about how the creachers’d be blocking our way but you can see how you wouldn’t wanna try walking thru them.

  I turn and I start to say something, anything, that’ll be the fastest way to get away.

  But instead the most amazing thing happens.

  Viola looks at the man and says, “Ah’m Hildy.” She points at me. “At’s Ben.”

  “What?” I say, barking it almost like Manchee.

  “Wilf,” says the man to Viola and it takes a second to realize he’s saying his name.

  “Hiya, Wilf,” Viola says and her voice ain’t her own, ain’t her own at all, there’s a whole new voice coming outta her mouth, stretching and shortening itself, twisting and unravelling and the more she talks the more different she sounds.

  The more she sounds like Wilf.

  “We’re all fra Farbranch. Where yoo from?”

  Wilf hangs his thumb back over his shoulder. “Bar Vista,” he says. “I’m gone Brockley Falls, pick up s’plies.”

  “Well, at’s lucky,” Viola says. “We’re gone Brockley Falls, too.”

  This is making my headache worse. I put my hands up to my temples, like I’m trying to keep my Noise inside, trying to keep all the wrong things from spilling out into the world. Luckily, the song of Here has made it like we’re already swimming in sound.

  “Hop on,” Wilf says with a shrug.

  “C’mon, Ben,” Viola says, walking to the back of the cart and hoisting her bag on top. “Wilf’s gone give us a ride.”

  She jumps on the cart and Wilf snaps the reins on his oxes. They take off slowly and Wilf don’t even look at me as he passes. I’m still standing there in amazement when Viola goes by, waving her hand frantically to me to get on beside her. I don’t got no choice, do I? I catch up and pull myself up with my arms.

  I sit down next to her and stare at her with my jaw down around my ankles. “What are you doing?” I finally hiss in what’s sposed to be a whisper.

  “Shh!” she shushes, looking back over her shoulder at Wilf, but he could’ve already forgotten he picked us up for all that’s going on in his Noise. “I don’t know,” she whispers by my ear, “just play along.”

  “Play along with what?”

  “If we can get to the other side of the herd, then it’s between us and the army, isn’t it?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. “But what are you doing? What do Ben and Hildy gotta do with it?”

  “He has a gun,” she whispers, checking on Wilf again. “And you said yourself how people might react about you being from a certain place. So, it just sort of popped out.”

  “But you were talking in his voice.”

  “Not very well.”

  “Good enough!” I say, my voice going a little loud with amazement.

  “Shh,” she says a second time but with the combo of the herd of creachers getting closer by the second and Wilf’s obvious not-too-brightness, we might as well be having a normal conversayshun.

  “How do you do it?” I say, still pouring surprise out all over her.

  “It’s just lying, Todd,” she says, trying to shush me again with her hands. “Don’t you have lying here?”

  Well of course we have lying here. New World and the town where I’m from (avoiding saying the name, avoiding thinking the name) seem to be nothing but lies. But that’s different. I said it before, men lie all the time, to theirselves, to other men, to the world at large, but who can tell when it’s a strand in all the other lies and truths floating round outta yer head? Everyone knows yer lying but everyone else is lying, too, so how can it matter? What does it change? It’s just part of the river of a man, part of his Noise, and sometimes you can pick it out, sometimes you can’t.

  But he never stops being himself when he does it.

  Cuz all I know a
bout Viola is what she says. The only truth I got is what comes outta her mouth and so for a second back there, when she said she was Hildy and I was Ben and we were from Farbranch and she spoke just like Wilf (even tho he ain’t from Farbranch) it was like all those things became true, just for an instant the world changed, just for a second it became made of Viola’s voice and it wasn’t describing a thing, it was making a thing, it was making us different just by saying it.

  Oh, my head.

  “Todd! Todd!” Manchee barks, popping up at the end of the cart, looking up thru our feet. “Todd!”

  “Crap,” Viola says.

  I hop off the cart and sweep him up in my arms, putting one hand round his muzzle and using the other to get back on the cart. “Td?” he puffs thru closed lips.

  “Quiet, Manchee,” I say.

  “I’m not even sure it matters,” Viola says, her voice stretching out.

  I look up.

  “Cw,” Manchee says.

  A creacher is walking right past us.

  We’ve entered the herd.

  Entered the song.

  And for a little while, I forget all about any kinda lies.

  I’ve never seen the sea, only in vids. No lakes where I grew up neither, just the river and the swamp. There may have been boats once but not in my lifetime.

  But if I had to imagine being on the sea, this is what I’d imagine. The herd surrounds us and takes up everything, leaving just the sky and us. It cuts around us like a current, sometimes noticing us but more usually noticing only itself and the song of Here, which in the midst of it is so loud it’s like it’s taken over the running of yer body for a while, providing the energy to make yer heart beat and yer lungs breathe.

  After a while, I find myself forgetting all about Wilf and the – the other things I could think about and I’m just lying back on the cart, watching it all go by, individual creachers snuffling around, feeding, bumping each other now and again with their horns, and there’s baby ones, too, and old bulls and taller ones and shorter ones and some with scars and some with scruffier fur.

  Viola’s laying down next to me and Manchee’s little doggie brain is overwhelmed by it all and he’s just watching the herd go by with his tongue hanging out and for a while, for a little while, as Wilf drives us over the plain, this is all there is in the world.