The Sound

by James Sperl

  She turned her confused stare to Andrew. “What time is it?”

  “A little after three.”

  “What's going on?”

  “Not sure,” he said without looking at her. “But by the sounds of things, something didn't go as planned. There was a lot of commotion from the northwest gate before you woke up. Some shouting, yelling. One might argue even a bit of panic.”

  Clarissa craned her neck to see in the direction of the gate. Indeed, people gathered and shifted restlessly there, many trying like her to see what had happened, but she couldn't make out anything beyond their anxiety-ridden shuffling.

  Looking away, she caught sight of Rachel waving her arms from across the Sleep Zone. Clarissa waved back. Rachel lifted her shoulders and held out her hands, the gesture a universal mime: What's going on?

  Clarissa tried to return it, but her line-of-sight became obscured by a growing crowd of curious—and concerned—residents.

  “Come on,” Andrew said, standing.

  Clarissa frowned at him. “Come on where? Where're you going?”

  “We need to see what's happening.”

  “I'm not sure you're going to have much luck penetrating that crowd. Besides, don't you think they'll tell us?”

  Andrew leveled his gaze at her. “I think they'll tell us something, though I doubt it will be the whole truth. I need to see whatever's happening with my own eyes.” He collected his backpack but left his sleeping bag.

  Clarissa eyed the amassing crowd. “So how do you propose to do that?”

  Andrew turned his eyes to the rooftops. Many of the guards who patrolled them had abandoned their assigned posts for a better view of the commotion.

  “We need to get away from all this chaos and get to higher ground. Someplace with less security.”

  “Someplace with less security? If anything, security will increase because of what's going on.”

  Andrew nodded, the wheels in his brain churning at full speed. He cracked the tiniest of smiles.

  “That's what I'm counting on. Come on. Follow me.”

  Without waiting for a response, he charged into the crowd. She watched him swim upstream against a sea of bleary-eyed New Framingham residents until he was almost out of sight.

  With tremendous effort, Clarissa pushed herself up and followed.

  * * *

  Andrew had called it right.

  When he told Clarissa that he wanted to get to someplace higher, she thought he was crazy. No place would be unmanned, especially when such a fracas was taking place. Or so she thought.

  When they arrived at the edge of the AMC theater's surrounding treeline, Andrew pulled Clarissa to her knees. There the two crouched and waited for a solid five minutes so Andrew could assess the situation. During that time, no one appeared to patrol the grounds; no one peered down from the theater roof. His theory had proven to be accurate—everyone had been called away to provide support.

  When Clarissa thought about it, she saw the logic. The theater's only use was as a school, but since no one attended classes at 3 a.m., maintaining a security force wouldn't exactly be a top priority. Of all the locations in New Framingham, the theater seemed the most likely to spare some muscle.

  Creeping around back, Andrew sighted a folding ladder set up beneath one of the movie theater's roof access ladders. Within seconds, he and Clarissa had clambered up both.

  Scuttling to the western edge of the roof, Andrew dug into his backpack, produced a pair of binoculars, and pinned them to his eyes.

  “Well?” Clarissa said, eager. “What do you see?”

  “Whatever happened, my guess is it's the first time.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Andrew handed her the binoculars. Clarissa snatched them and thrust them to her eyes. The pandemonium appeared to be concentrated in front of what used to be Kohl's but was now the makeshift clinic. Security personnel swarmed smoking vehicles and offloaded bodies, some moving, others not so much.

  “Something happened out there,” Andrew said. “Something this place was unprepared for. And based on what I'm seeing, it looks like they were attacked.”

  Clarissa's eyes bulged, and her heart galloped. “Attacked?”

  “Sure looks like it to me. And it's caught this place by surprise.” Andrew nudged his chin toward the commotion. “Look at them. They're scurrying around like madmen down there. There's no organization. No system in place to deal with a crisis. This is a first.”

  Clarissa lowered the binoculars. “But who would've attacked them?”

  Andrew half-shrugged. “Could have been anyone. Those look like supply trucks. I count three, and two of them are in bad shape. My guess is that their scavenger mission butted heads with someone else's and these people lost, which means two things.”

  Clarissa raised her eyebrows in anticipation.

  “One, the people that did this have a large, formidable group of their own. One that this place didn't know about.”

  “And two?”

  “It's almost a guarantee there'll be more attacks.”

  Clarissa peered through the binoculars again and watched a pair of men lift a limp body off one of the trucks. Quite a few more bodies still remained. She swallowed with effort.

  If Andrew was right, and more attacks were inevitable, then that complicated matters. Not only could her and her friends' lives be at risk, but the attackers might become emboldened and decide to launch a strike on New Framingham itself. If they did that, then their already slim chance of finding Rosenstein would wither to nonexistent. Any assault on New Framingham would effectively scatter its residents to the wind, and if that happened, she foresaw no scenario in which Rosenstein stuck around. They would flee to protect their project.

  Lowering the binoculars, Clarissa stared past New Framingham into the night. Pinpricks of flickering firelight dotted the cityscape.

  “All those people out there,” she said. Andrew looked at her then followed her gaze. “There are so many. How many of them are groups like us? How many of them are families trying to survive? How many are alone, having to forage for food, water? It's so desperate.” She turned her eyes back to the chaos at the clinic. “Then something like this happens, and it makes you wonder who's actually better off.”

  “It doesn't make me wonder.”

  Clarissa pursed her lips into a flat line and whacked Andrew on the arm.

  “You know what I'm saying, wise guy. So many of us have been forced to live in a way we never thought we'd have to. Things like growing food and getting clean water. As far as most of us were concerned, those things came from a store, and I include myself in that ignorant way of thinking. This thing that's happened, this Sound, it's caught all of us with our pants down.” She looked at Andrew. “Well, most of us.”

  Andrew gave a wan smile. “Don't beat yourself up over it, Clarissa. It's just where we are as a society now. We've become so dependent on our gadgets and gizmos to do things for us, we forget that real, actual work has to be done to give us the things we want, that they don't just magically appear with a simple tap on our iPhones.”

  He sighed and peered into the distance. “Hell, if it weren't for what happened to Liv, I'd probably be right there with the rest of them. I had the phones and the tablets and the laptops and smart TVs and pretty much every other modern convenience a person could ask for. But her death brought me some much-needed clarity. Stuff and things just didn't matter anymore after she and our child died. In fact, living life the way I had before she was killed felt too painful to continue. Like I would just be resuming things after a pesky interruption or something. I couldn't go back to that way of living. The thought sickened me.”

  Clarissa handed the binoculars back to Andrew, who took them absently.

  “When I decided to live more simply, to be more self-reliant and eschew many of the conventional trappings of modern society, I found it made me feel better. It was what I needed to move forward. And in the process of moving forward, I dis
covered just how much I enjoyed independence. Of getting my hands dirty and seeing the results of hard work. Of doing whatever I could to reduce my dependency on technology and other unnecessary aspects of my life that I felt were robbing me of a truer existence.”

  He looked at Clarissa and leaned toward her. “It doesn't mean I don't miss certain things sometimes, or that I look down my nose at others who flock to buy the latest technological breakthrough. It just means I, personally, am better off for not having these things in my life.”

  A chilly wind swept over the rooftop. Clarissa hugged herself.

  “Well, I think most of the people out there wished they had even a fraction of your discipline.” She swept her arm over the darkened landscape. “Any one of them would kill to have a secret food stash let alone a big, powerful generator to give...them...light...” Clarissa's words petered to silence. She frowned into the darkness. “Andrew? What is that?”

  Andrew glanced at her then twisted to face in her direction, which was opposite New Framingham. It took him a moment to zero in on what she saw, but once he did, his face collapsed.

  He shot to his feet, Clarissa right behind him.

  “Could it be?” she said.

  Andrew stepped forward, his eyes glued to the building in the distance.

  It was hard to gauge just how far away it was, particularly when so much of the city lay cloaked in blackness, but it was definitely far enough that no one from New Framingham could see it unless they stepped out from under the community's perpetual blanket of light.

  Clarissa put the multi-story building about a mile away, but it could easily have been more. Charcoal silhouettes from other buildings surrounded it, their nondescript and oblique shapes standing in stark contrast to the one feature Clarissa's building had that the others did not:

  Light.

  And not campfire light—actual electric light that illuminated entire floors.

  From her vantage point, an attempt had been made to conceal the light behind some sort of covering, but in the dead of night's pitch, enough seeped through to be noticeable.

  Andrew said nothing as he proceeded to the opposite side of the roof. Clarissa followed him, each step she took away from the muted glow of New Framingham's Sleep Zone into smothering darkness further amplifying the building's presence.

  “I count two lit floors,” she said, calling out the obvious. Of the four or so stories, only the center two appeared to have light. “It's them, isn't it? It's Rosenstein.”

  The question was more rhetorical than anything else, but she had to hear it asked aloud. She didn't need Andrew to tell her she was right. She could see it in his face, just as she could feel the truth in the pit of her fluttering stomach. They were here, doing whatever it was they were doing, and all in plain sight of thousands of clueless people.

  “Come on,” Andrew said finally, his voice just above a croak. “We need to get back. We've got a lot to talk about.”

  As Clarissa followed him down the ladder, across the parking lot, and back into the trees, she was struck by the magnitude of what she had just seen.

  Holy shit! she thought to herself. I think we just found Rosenstein!

  The jubilation was short-lived.

  Holy shit, she repeated, this time, more somberly. We found Rosenstein.

  They had much to talk about indeed.

  CHAPTER 54

  “It was definitely an attack.”

  Jon adjusted the New Framingham security badge pinned to his belt loop. Instead of the traditional die-cast version, he had been issued a hand-pressed button, which utilized a blue and gold symbol depicting two hands shaking, both of which were encircled by a pair of curved olive branches.

  “I was supposed to report for training at eight o'clock, but the guard on duty told me to report back in a couple of hours because the person tasked with training me was out with the rest of the security force securing the perimeter.” He took a bite from a slab of jelly-smeared bread. “Said they got hit pretty bad last night.”

  “Did he say who did it?” asked Rachel, who sat as close to Cesare as humanly possible.

  Jon shook his head. “No. And I don't think they know. But based on what he told me, it sounded like an organized strike.”

  Andrew looked up from a steaming cup of tea. He hadn't said a word since the group gathered for breakfast on a grassy median near the Olive Garden. Clarissa found his silence odd considering the revelatory news she and he sat on. She figured he must have been waiting for the right moment to mention it. Everyone was too charged with anxious talk over the early morning events.

  “Why do they think it was organized?” he asked Jon.

  “The guy said dozens of people attacked the convoy,” Jon replied. “Dozens. They killed eleven people and got a truck. That doesn't just happen randomly. Whoever those people were, they were lying in wait. And they were prepared. From what this guy was telling me, the powers that be here are treating whoever did it as if they're an army.”

  Andrew sipped his tea ahead of saying, “Or it could just be an instance of the have-nots revolting against the haves.”

  “What do you mean?” Rachel said, frowning. “For this place? Why do you say that? This place isn't exclusionary. As long as people follow the rules, anyone can be a part of the community. Everyone gets a fair shot. There's no one percent anymore.”

  “Perhaps not,” Andrew said, setting down his cup. “But people will always do what's in their own best interests. Who knows how many folks have been cast out of here because of desperation or their unwillingness to comply. No place is ever all-inclusive. And if folks leave here bitter and hungry, places like this may as well have a neon target painted over them. As we've all seen, it doesn't take much to rile a populace.”

  Cesare, who had just finished eating an apple, wiped his mouth with a crumpled paper towel. “I'm inclined to agree. I was visiting my nonna earlier this morning, and you could see the uncertainty. People whispering in groups. Talking in corners. They think New Framingham might get attacked.”

  “And they may be right,” Jon said, as he leaned back onto his hands. “I passed by Lowe's earlier, and folks were already queuing up in a long line. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we saw a significant downturn in New Framingham's population before sundown.”

  “But why would people leave?” Evan said. He held a plastic bowl of milk-soaked cereal. “I would think it's safer in here. There are tons of people, and some of them have guns, not to mention all of the other guns that have been confiscated and stored wherever. They could arm this whole place.”

  The same thought had occurred to Clarissa. While New Framingham had an armed security presence, its greater potential existed in its unarmed citizenry, many of whom had their weapons confiscated upon entering. If firearms were returned, even temporarily, the residents of New Framingham could prove to be a formidable opponent against any outside invaders.

  Andrew was quick to shoot down the suggestion.

  “While smacking of common sense on the surface,” he began, “I believe returning weapons to everyone would be a colossal mistake.”

  Evan grimaced. “Why? I would think arming everyone to the hilt would help protect this place.”

  Andrew paused before answering. His tragic past had formed some complicated opinions about guns and their necessity. Clarissa suspected he chose his words thoughtfully.

  “Where would it stop?” he said after a brief moment.

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, let's say we return firearms to anyone who wants them. Then what? Do we give them back after an attack? Or do we clutch them to our chests worriedly until one happens? And if an attack does happen, do you think anyone will willingly surrender their weapon back to the community?” He looked at Evan, but Evan only searched the ground.

  “I was pretty opposed to giving up my rifle, as I'm sure most people are when they arrive, but after having had a day to think about it, I think collecting weapons and limiting
who has them—at least in here—is wise.”

  Cesare cocked his head. “Yeah? I never thought you'd be on board with something like that.”

  “Me either,” he chuckled. “But too many cooks spoil the broth. If everyone was suddenly allowed to be armed because of a potential threat, I'd be more fearful of the twitchy and itchy trigger fingers in here than any would-be attackers out there.”

  Clarissa cleared her throat. “So you think it would become lawless?”

  Andrew tossed his head. “Not lawless, necessarily, but I think you'd have your fair share of individuals who would question authority and take matters into their own hands when opinions differed. And when that happens, you end up with opposing sides within an already fractured community. No one stands to gain from that.”

  “Which is why,” Jon said, shooting forward, “we need to find Rosenstein as soon as possible and get the hell out of here. If things go down, this place will implode, and we'll lose our chance to find them.”

  Clarissa glanced at Andrew before returning to the group.

  “Yeah, about that...”

  Everyone locked on her.

  “What?” Rachel said, hopeful. “Do you know something?” She looked from Clarissa to Andrew, who straightened ahead of his response.

  “Up until yesterday, I thought we were just chasing our tails,” he began. “That Rosenstein was this myth we'd been led to believe existed. Or that it existed at one time, but it didn't anymore.”

  Jon leaned even farther forward, his eyes darting between Clarissa and Andrew. “But...”

  “But,” Clarissa said, taking over, “last night happened. And Andrew and I saw something.”

  Clarissa recounted to a rapt audience her and Andrew's covert mission to the movie theater and their subsequent discovery of the lighted building. When she finished, she laid out her and Andrew's claim: Rosenstein was here. No one spoke. Andrew decided to be the first.

  “Jon's right,” he said. “Donna is lying. Whether that building is Rosenstein's base of operations or a pared-down version of their main facility remains to be seen, but I'd wager on the affirmative it's one of them.”