Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy Read Free Page A

racing after it and coming back to me but he finally comes back to me.
    “Crying, Todd?”
    “Shut up,” I say and aim a kick at him. It misses on purpose.

We get ourselves outta the swamp and head back towards town and the world feels all black and grey no matter what the sun is saying. Even Manchee barely says nothing as we make our way back up thru the fields. My Noise churns and bubbles like a stew on the boil till finally I have to stop for a minute to calm myself down a little.
    There’s just no such thing as silence. Not here, not nowhere. Not when yer asleep, not when yer by yerself, never.
    I am Todd Hewitt, I think to myself with my eyes closed. I am twelve years and twelve months old. I live in Prentisstown on New World. I will be a man in one month’s time exactly.
    It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.
    I am Todd Hewitt.
    “Todd Hewitt,” Manchee murmurs to himself beside me.
    I take a deep breath and open my eyes.
    That’s who I am. I’m Todd Hewitt.
    We walk on up away from the swamp and the river, up the slope of the wild fields to the small ridge at the south of town where the school used to be for the brief and useless time it existed. Before I was born, boys were taught by their ma at home and then when there were only boys and men left, we just got sat down in front of vids and learning modules till Mayor Prentiss outlawed such things as “detrimental to the discipline of our minds”.
    Mayor Prentiss, see, has a Point of View.
    And so for almost half a stupid year, all the boys were gathered up by sad-faced Mr Royal and plonked out here in an out-building away from the main Noise of the town. Not that it helped. It’s nearly impossible to teach anything in a classroom full of boys’ Noise and completely impossible to give out any sort of test. You cheat even if you don’t mean to and everybody means to.
    And then one day Mayor Prentiss decided to burn all the books, every single one of them, even the ones in men’s homes, cuz apparently books were detrimental as well and Mr Royal, a soft man who made himself a hard man by drinking whisky in the classroom, gave up and took a gun and put an end to himself and that was it for my classroom teaching.
    Ben taught me the rest at home. Mechanics and food prep and clothes repair and farming basics and things like that. Also a lot of survival stuff like hunting and which fruits you can eat and how to follow the moons for direkshuns and how to use a knife and a gun and snakebite remedies and how to calm yer Noise as best you can.
    He tried to teach me reading and writing, too, but Mayor Prentiss caught wind of it in my Noise one morning and locked Ben up for a week and that was the end of my book-learning and what with all that other stuff to learn and all the working on the farm that still has to be done every day and all the just plain surviving, I never ended up reading too good.
    Don’t matter. Ain’t nobody in Prentisstown ever gonna write a book.
    Manchee and me get past the school building and up on the little ridge and look north and there’s the town in question. Not that there’s all that much left of it no more. One shop, used to be two. One pub, used to be two. One clinic, one jail, one non-working petrol stayshun, one big house for the Mayor, one police stayshun. The Church. One short bit of road running thru the centre, paved back in the day, never upkept since, goes to gravel right quick. All the houses and such are out and about, outskirts like, farms, meant to be farms, some still are, some stand empty, some stand worse than empty.
    And that’s all there is of Prentisstown. Populayshun 147 and falling, falling, falling. 146 men and one almost-man.
    Ben says there used to be other settlements scattered around New World, that all the ships landed about the same time, ten years or so