Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness Read Free Book Online Page A

we gotta run and a soldier gets hit with a blast from a white stick right next to us and a spray of blood covers my face and I turn away not seeing where I’m going and I’m pulling Angharrad with me and all I can think, all I can think in the middle of so much Noise, all I can think as I hear men die and Spackle die and see them die in Noise even with my eyes shut, all I can think is–
    Is this what war is?
    Is this what men want so much?
    Is this sposed to make them men ?
    Death coming at you with a roar and a scream so fast you can’t do nothing about it–
    And then I hear the Mayor’s voice–
    “ FIGHT! ” he’s shouting–
    In his voice and his Noise–
    “ FIGHT! ”
    And I wipe away the blood and open my eyes and it’s plain as anything that fighting is all that’s ever gonna happen in the world till we die and I see the Mayor on Morpeth and both he and his horse are bloodied and he’s fighting so hard I can actually hear his Noise and it’s still cold as stone but it’s saying T O THE END, TO THE END –
    And he catches my eye–
    And I realize it really is the end–
    We’ve lost–
    There’s too many of ’em–
    We’ve lost–
    And I grab Angharrad’s mane with both my hands and I hold it tight and I think Viola–
    And then–

    The entire bottom section of the hill the Spackle are coming down explodes in a roar of fire and dirt and flesh–
    Rising up and over everything, pelting us with stones and soil and bits of Spackle–
    And Angharrad’s yelling and we’re both falling sideways to the ground and there’s men and Spackle screaming all round us and running this way and that way and my leg is pinned under Angharrad who’s trying to work her way back up to standing but I see the Mayor ride past–
    And I can hear him laughing–
    “What the hell was that?” I scream at him.
    “A GIFT!” he screams back as he rides thru the dirt and the smoke and he’s yelling to the men, “ATTACK! ATTACK NOW!”

{VIOLA}
    We snap our attention back to the projection. “What was that?” I say.
    There was a sudden
boom
but all the probe is showing is a solid block of smoke. Bradley dials the screen of the remote and the probe rises again, but smoke is covering everything.
    “Is it recording?” Simone says. “Can you rewind?”
    Bradley dials some more and suddenly the picture is going back on itself, back down into the cloud, the smoke rapidly gathering together and–
    “There,” Bradley stops it and runs it forward again in slow motion.
    The battle is as chaotic and terrible as it was, the men being overwhelmed by the Spackle army and then–
    BOOM!
    There’s an explosion at the base of the hill, a sudden violent eruption sending dirt and rock and the bodies of Spackle and their battlemores flying up and out, spinning into the cloud of smoke that rapidly covers everything–
    Bradley rewinds again and we watch it once more, a small flash and then a whole section of the hill is picked up and thrown into the air and right there on the screen we see Spackle die–
    Die and die and die–
    Dozens of them–
    And I remember the one on the riverbank–
    I remember his
fear–
    “Is this you?” Simone says to Mistress Coyle. “Has your army reached the fighting?”
    “We don’t have
missiles,
” Mistress Coyle says, not taking her eyes off the projection. “If we did, I wouldn’t be asking you to fire yours.”
    “Then where did it come from?” Simone says. Bradley’s fiddled with the controls and the picture is bigger and clearer and on the slowest setting you can see something flying into the base of the hill, see even more slowly the earth flying up, the Spackle bodies being torn, not caring what lives they had, who they loved, what their names are or were–
    Just bodies flying apart–
    Lives ending–
    We did this to them, we
made
them attack, we enslaved and killed them, or at least the Mayor did–
    And here we are killing them all over again–
    Simone and Mistress Coyle are