Piper at the gates of du.., p.22
Piper at the Gates of Dusk, page 22
I pant for a second.
And you’re mine, I sign. I’m sorry. Asshole.
“I’m sorry, too, prickface.”
I grin and sign, Dicknose.
“Buttmouth.”
“Okay,” Mom says, “that’s quite enough. Let’s at least just get to the annex please.”
Then she stops.
Because out there, in the distance somewhere–
We hear a god begin to scream.
4
Run! I sign. I get myself immediately under Pop’s arm and help him forward. He leans on me, and we run, Mom by our side.
“Get to the annex!” Mom yells at Max, sending him on ahead. “Find the others!”
Max runs and opens some distance between us.
Then we hear a second screaming.
And a third.
“Oh, no,” I hear Pop mutter.
A fourth. And a fifth.
“Faster!” Mom says. “Must move faster!”
We rush, Pop going as fast as he can. I can see in his Noise he wants me to leave him behind, but I can also see in his Noise that he knows I would never, so he doesn’t even try it.
“Can you see them?” Mom shouts.
I look back. The town is mostly hidden through the trees, but we’re going up a hill towards the annex. We’re just about to break above the treetops to the flat part–
I point with the arm that isn’t supporting Pop.
A dozen giant gods are marching on the city.
And more are coming out of the woods in a line.
One after the other after the other after the other.
It’s the final invasion.
MAX
I burst through the doors of the annex, looking for Wilf and the others, but it’s full of way more people than that. They all turn to look at me and Pop and everyone coming in behind. They’re huddled together, their faces stunned, a lot of them dirty, many of them bleeding. Men and women and a lot of young people, too. I recognize a classmate from years ago, and there’s little kids as well. Whole families, coming up here to hide. None of them say a word as we bust through the door, just stare at us like shocked sheep. The screams of the gods in the distance still blare like sirens.
“Okay,” Mom says under her breath. She hands Pop over to me, and she and Ben go running past all the people into the labs. I get Pop onto a padded bench and lay him down.
“How you doing, Pop?” I ask, worried as all hell.
“Been better, kiddo,” he says, his face ashen, “but I’m hanging in there.”
“Are you?”
He just looks at me, his Noise rolling through a million things, including me as a kid, me growing up, me becoming who I am.
“Don’t start remembering me like you’re never gonna see me again,” I say. “We’re gonna get you fixed up.”
“I’m sure we will,” he says, but I can see he doesn’t believe me. The bandages at his wound haven’t bled any more, but there’s a bad, bad bruise stretching across his stomach that’s way bigger than it was before.
“Are there any doctors here?” I ask the group of people. There’s got to be thirty or forty of them. This can’t be what’s left of the city, can it? “Is Dr Wiklund in there?” That’s the name of our doctor, but she’s not in the crowd. “A nurse? Anybody?”
None of them answer me. All I can see are the whites of their eyes looking back at me in shock. I don’t see Wilf or Jane or Lee or Bessie Jaye, but there are lots of rooms in the annex, I guess. They gotta be here somewhere. Right? And–
“You need to get him out of here,” a voice says from the back of the group.
I feel my stomach clench. In anger. Burly.
He steps through the crowd of people, looking calm as anything, even though he’s got blood all the way down the front of his shirt. “His Noise is going to call them to us,” Burly says, meaning Pop. “They’ll hear him, and they’ll come to the annex, and they’ll kill all of us.”
The shocked people aren’t saying anything. Not yet. But I can see it burbling.
“If you take one more step towards us,” I say to Burly, “I will kill you.”
He actually stops in surprise. “What did you say to me?”
I get up. I’m shorter than him, slighter, too, and years younger, but I don’t feel it as I’m walking closer to him. “I said, if you take one more step or say one more stupid word, I will kill you.”
“You don’t know what you’re–”
“I looked in the face of gods, Burly.” I point outside to where the screaming has never stopped. “I saw what they did, and it has nothing to do with my pop’s Noise. You’re just a frightened little man who needs someone to hate, and if that brings harm to my family, I will kill you.”
He’s unnerved, I can see, probably by how calm I am. I’m surprised at how calm I am, but I also know I mean every word. He’s trying to weigh up my smallness against what is clearly a deeply serious threat. I’ve surprised him.
Good.
“Those things aren’t Land,” I say. “I watched one kill an entire party of Land like they were nothing. You’ve been focusing on the wrong enemy, you idiot. My brother thinks he’s got a way to stop them.”
This gets the attention of the shocked people. “He does?” a woman at the front asks.
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s why we’re here. And it could have been done a lot sooner if Burly hadn’t decided to lie to you all. Did you ever think of that, Burly?”
Ohhh, he’s mad now. “Now, you listen here, you little–”
“How can we stop them?” the woman asks me, interrupting him.
“They’re made of Noise,” I say. “My brother thinks the cure will … well, cure them, I guess.”
The shocked people start muttering. Burly turns to them. “Listen up–”
“Stop it, Burly,” the woman says. “You were a lousy mayor. We only voted you in to shut you up.”
More mutters, more stung looks from Burly, then his face sets as hard as one of the bricks he used to make. “I hope you all like dying here,” he says, and then, shocking us all, he heads to the front door and he leaves.
“Always was a wiener,” the woman says. “Can we help at all?”
“I’ll bet you can,” I say. “They’re looking for the tools right now.”
The woman nods, like yes, this plan she just heard of two seconds ago will definitely work. I go back to Pop, because Burly’s idiocy about the Noise has given me an idea.
“That was kind of amazing, Max,” Pop says.
“Thanks,” I say. “Could the Sky fix this?”
“Ben asked the same thing,” Pop says, putting his head back on a cushion and closing his eyes. “I don’t think that’s an asking we can do now.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You know why.”
“Yeah, and I still want to ask anyway. You’ve got Noise. You’re the link to him. Make him say no. Make him say that humans aren’t worth it any more and that includes the one human he’s known personally for a million years whose name is Todd and who set him free–”
“It wasn’t quite like that–”
“Make him say he won’t help you!” I’m really angry now, but I’m trying not to yell at Pop. “Send out something in your Noise, Pop. Tell him. We don’t know he’ll say no until he says no. If it’s our decisions that make us special, then make him make one.”
“Max–”
“Ask him!” And my voice breaks a little. Because he’s dying. I can see it. Faster than Mom even hinted at. He’s going to die here in the stupid annex building. He can’t die here. He can’t die period.
“Pop,” I say.
“Okay,” he says, his eyes still closed. “For you, Max. And for Ben.”
I see his Noise start to whir and spin. I see it reaching out into the world, into the Conversation, trying to find a stream of it to join. Then he goes quiet.
“Did you ask, Pop?” I shake him a little. “Pop?”
I hate that I have to do it, but I put two fingers to the veins on his neck. There’s still a pulse.
“Mom!” I call.
She and Ben come back with Wilf and the others and what looks like–
“Is that a bow and arrow?” the woman in the crowd asks. “We’re going to fight them with bows and arrows?”
Ben holds up a rack of vials that have got to be even more cure.
“Bows and arrows with a little something on the end,” Mom says.
“Can we help?”
Mom is surprised, but I can see she’s suddenly full of hope. “Yes! The bows are from the archery club. Everybody go back and get one. Jane and Bessie Jaye can show you where they are. Hurry!”
The woman doesn’t even ask for an explanation beyond that, she just rushes to the back with Jane and Bessie Jaye to get more bows and arrows. Others do, too.
“Everyone else,” Mom says, “start tying cure to the ends of the arrows. It’s medieval, but it’s what we’ve got.”
Then she looks at Pop. “Oh, Todd,” she whispers. She does the same thing with her fingers on his neck that I did, then says, “Todd? Todd! I need you to stay awake.”
“I am awake,” we hear him slur, but that’s clearly mostly not true. His Noise is sluggish and muddy.
“I told him to ask the Sky for help,” I say, “but I don’t know if we’re close enough to the Conversation for them to hear him.”
The screaming is still coming from outside, and now we can hear people screaming, too. The rest of the town, hiding wherever they can find, I guess.
A man looking out the front window of the annex says, “They’re coming!”
And I can’t help but look, too.
A line of gods is coming right for us.
Mom sends me to help Ben and Wilf tie vials to the ends of the arrows. They’re very small, and they’re made of glass, and I guess the hope is that they shatter when they hit the gods. It seems like a faint hope, but it’s all we’ve got now. We hand them out to a bunch of people who look like they’ve never shot a bow and arrow in their lives, and that includes me and Ben and Mom and Pop for all I know.
“Do you think this is going to work?” I ask Ben quietly as we tie the vials on with these little zip-tie things.
“At least we’re tryin’,” Wilf says. “We’re not just sittin’ here and takin’ it.”
“Are they ready?” Mom says, coming over to us.
“I think so,” I say, handing out the last of the arrows I’ve got. “How’s Pop?”
“He’s really tough,” is all she says.
“The toughest,” I say.
Is he going to die? Ben signs.
But he knows the answer, and I know the answer, and Mom knows the answer, so not one of us says anything.
“Let’s just beat these things,” Mom says, “and then we find the closest doctor we can.”
Ben and I nod. We pick up our own bows and arrows.
And we go out to meet the gods.
“Right!” Mom says to everyone. “We’ve all got one shot. I don’t know if this will work, but it’s our best chance.” She raises her own bow and arrow. “And those things are not taking my sons.”
The small crowd of people nod at this, raising their own bows, trying to look confident even though none of us are.
“Here they come,” I say.
The screaming has been non-stop, feeling like almost a physical thing racing up the annex hill towards us. We see god after god burning their way through the trees, all their wild, insane eyes on us up here. One man at the back of our crowd can’t take it, and he runs off, dropping his bow and arrow. I can see other people want to as well. I know the feeling. I try to steady myself.
“Stay with a young person!” Mom shouts. “We know running doesn’t help. We know they’ll take what they want anyway. Protect the young at all costs!”
Wow. She’s good at this. I take a last look over at Ben, who’s got his own bow and arrow ready. “I love you, bro,” I say.
He seems surprised, but then he moves his mouth, in a way that he never does, and he makes the shapes of “I love you too” and I don’t have time to take this in, because the first in the line of gods comes screaming through the trees in front of us.
A bunch of people in the crowd shoot their arrows in panic. Not a single one hits the 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 towards 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 further in. I get to a wall at the back which 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 any more.
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.
