The Sound

by James Sperl

  “It's me, Val,” Andrew said, tucking the gun into his waist. “It's Andrew.” Valentina cocked her head at this. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” He moved toward her, but she recoiled in fright. He held up a hand in a gesture of calm. “It's okay, Val. It's just me and Naomi.”

  Valentina trailed to the baby then found Andrew again. Flicks of recognition danced across her face. Then, as if a switch had been flipped on from somewhere inside her mind, her eyes blossomed with awareness. She lurched into Andrew's arms and hugged him fiercely. Her body shuddered with gratitude. Andrew peeled her away.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Valentina shook her head. Fresh tears created a pink trough on her bloody face. “No, I...” She regarded herself before continuing. “The blood's not mine. I just...used it.”

  Andrew understood her implicitly. Valentina may have had her troubles, but she wasn't immune to quick thinking. Playing dead among a morgue's worth of corpses had probably saved her life.

  Andrew quick-checked his surroundings: the firefight at the truck was winding down, mercifully, in New Framingham's favor. Other battles continued throughout the parking area, but nothing ventured in their direction. Yet. He looked at Valentina and placed a hand on her cheek.

  “Can you run?”

  Valentina nodded emphatically.

  “Good,” he said. Then as an afterthought, he handed her Naomi. “Hold her for a second.”

  Valentina cringed as Andrew placed the squirming, upset child in her arms. He immediately set to procuring weapons and ammunition from the dead. Valentina dabbed at the girl's eye with a rare section of her shirt not adorned with other people's blood.

  In thirty seconds, Andrew had all he needed.

  A burst of gunfire erupted from somewhere nearby. Both Andrew and Valentina ducked, Valentina leaning over instinctively to cover Naomi. Andrew reached for the baby.

  “I can take her back now,” he said.

  “I can hold her,” she replied. “You might need both hands.”

  She was right, of course, but that fact didn't make Andrew any more comfortable entrusting her with the welfare of the baby. Valentina had proven herself to be reckless, impetuous, and, worst of all, traitorous. These attributes did not instill trust. But Andrew was in no position to be choosy. New Framingham was on the verge of implosion. If he could improve his chances to get everyone out, then he needed to do it, regardless of the bitter taste it left in his mouth.

  “Okay,” he said. “But you stay right on my ass.”

  “All right,” Valentina mumbled.

  “I'm serious. Right on it.”

  “Okay.”

  A runaway shot shattered one of the Toys R Us plate glass front windows. Valentina once again shielded Naomi. Andrew scuttled in front of her.

  “You ready?”

  Valentina rolled the bottom half of her shirt up and over Naomi's body to create a makeshift carrier. She twisted her hand in the folds of the blood-drenched cloth for assurance then clamped her eyes shut for a two count.

  “Ready.”

  “Okay,” Andrew said. He looped the sling to the AR-15 he had recovered from someone who didn't need it anymore around his neck. The nylon rubbed against the raw, open rope wound, stoking the pain of his situation in both the literal and figurative sense. He swallowed a lungful of air before he popped to his feet and said, “Let's get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 73

  Clarissa's heart thumped. The walk over to the light felt like it took hours, though she knew only minutes had passed. The Nothing Place was up to its old tricks again.

  The portal was magnificent. Standing this close to it, she realized just how massive it was. Easily three stories tall, the light whipped and arced in beautiful fury, its core a shimmering blackness that defied description. But more was at play than just a light show. The light felt alive. Indescribable energy buzzed in the compressed air of the Nothing Place, and for the first time, Clarissa detected sound.

  It was nothing like the unearthly noise that screeched from horizon to horizon and raised the hairs on the backs of people's necks. This was different. A low, throbbing hum overlaid something uniquely more sinister—a composite of noises that sounded like the gathering of millions of screams.

  Clarissa could also hear the creatures that slithered and snaked in and out of the shadows as well. They made disquieting sounds, muddled clicks that accompanied unnerving wet smacking noises, the sounds akin to an overripe banana slowly forced from its peel. But why could she only hear them this close to the light? Were the laws of physics bleeding through from wherever the wormhole began?

  Clarissa's feet had stopped moving, but she couldn't quit now. Everything depended on her success. She had to get closer, but she saw too much activity directly in front of the light. Creatures materialized from seemingly all directions to pitch unfortunate, thrashing souls into its nefarious glowing void.

  Fear for her safety amplified. With so many actively engaged, the possibility of running into one had increased dramatically. She could only speculate as to how they would react if they came into contact with something—namely her—that wasn't supposed to be there. She turned and stared into the blackness behind her.

  “Come on, Dustin,” she thought. “Get me that distraction.” She had no idea if telepathy still worked so far apart from one another—Dustin's lack of a response sure seemed to indicate that it didn't—but if he couldn't hear her then he must have perceived her on a different wavelength. For no sooner did she implore him than the Nothing Place burst into a spectacle of colored light.

  Streamers of blue fire blazed brilliant trails that erupted into purple and yellow blossoms the size of small moons. Silvery sparkles detonated high overhead, the subsequent deluge of white dazzling rain drifting down like electric snow. Massive, silent explosions the color of a rainbow illuminated the cavernous space, the onslaught of strange light intense and unrelenting.

  Clarissa smiled at the display: Fireworks. What a perfect choice.

  She spun back around to gauge the reaction of the creatures. Just as she hoped, they turned their attention toward the fantastic light show. Without hesitation, they slithered off in its direction, some even still clutching the pathetic forms of weeping humans in their terrible claws.

  Now was Clarissa's chance.

  Gathering every ounce of courage she could summon, she strode forward. More monsters appeared in the aura of light in front of the portal but scurried away just as immediately. Clarissa had to dodge one as it stormed past her into the darkness, a second one having come dangerously close to clipping her head as it bounded for an elevated place behind her.

  She was nearly there. The portal light hummed now. Her body vibrated with its power. Another creature skittered past its gaping void of nothingness and startled Clarissa into a full stop. She was close enough. She would have to be. Any nearer and she feared it might suck her into its pitch-black vortex.

  It happened now.

  She concentrated on forming the bombs. She saw them in her mind, knew what she wanted them to look like, but a secondary idea temporarily derailed her from accomplishing the task. A tiny, satisfied smile tickled the corners of her mouth. Perhaps she could get revenge on two fronts.

  Funneling her thoughts, she created the perfect countermeasure to the deadly nuisance that had come to be known simply as the Sound. Clarissa opened her eyes.

  Travis stood in front of her. But it wasn't Travis. Not really. This Travis was an empty vessel that only resembled an actual person (much like the real thing?). He was naked save for the suit of explosives that covered his torso and trailed down his legs by way of a rigged harness, and where his mouth should have been was instead a red LCD timer that counted down from thirty seconds. He wasn't alone. Nine more Travises joined him, each a carbon copy of the original.

  Clarissa stepped back to watch what happened next.

  Within seconds, a creature lurched from someplace hidden and snatched up one of the blank-faced
Travises. It hurled him into the light then flitted back into the depths of the Nothing Place. Another followed not shortly after that, and in a matter of seconds, the ten Travises were reduced to eight.

  Clarissa's plan was working. At least it appeared so.

  Destroying the portal from her side was only half the battle. Even if she succeeded in blowing it up, she couldn't guarantee that it solved the problem—the wormhole could regenerate someplace else. If it did, the world would be right back to where it started. The only way to assure that didn't happen was if she could eradicate the wormhole at its source.

  That's where Travis—or the Travises—came in. Creating multi-versions of her high school rapist was only a self-satisfying flourish that belied their real purpose. Donned in head-to-toe explosives—hopefully of the nuclear variety—and a bright red timer in place of their offensive mouths, Clarissa gambled on their fate.

  The creatures' primary goal seemed to be as gatherers, beings whose job it was to seek out the humans that wandered blindly through the Nothing Place and deliver them to the portal light. To accomplish what she set out to do, Clarissa counted on their commitment to their job. With no less than two Travises en route to who knew where, their bodies primed for nuclear annihilation, Clarissa had just upped the ante in her—and humanity's—favor.

  An aggressive creature jettisoned a third Travis into the light and darted away once it completed its task. Seven Travises remained, each with twenty-three seconds ticking down on their timers.

  But Clarissa wasn't finished. She concentrated again, and this time, she could barely keep from grinning: a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons cluttered the space in front of the light. Piled high and deep, the sheer volume of explosives was so extensive that their numbers became lost in the devouring shadows.

  Here we go, Clarissa thought.

  Twenty seconds.

  She couldn't do anything more. Either it worked, or it didn't. Turning, she fled into the Nothing Place, but not before a black-limbed creature consumed another Travis and committed it to the light.

  All she wanted to do now was find Dustin, to spend her last remaining seconds with someone she cared about and who cared about her. But locating him would be next to impossible. They couldn't communicate with one another, and with each of them adopting the guise of invisibility, neither one would see the other.

  Clarissa knew what she had to do, but it terrified her down to her soul. Twenty seconds and counting didn't seem like very long, but so much could go wrong in that narrow window of time if the creatures weren't utterly preoccupied with the aberrations she had created in their world. Regardless, she had nothing to lose. She inhaled and blew out the breath.

  She imagined a light in each of her hands. The bright beams cut through the blackness, but the fireworks still taking place consumed them with their brilliance. Clarissa glanced down at her brightly lit legs, at her chest—the high-altitude bursts of color bathed her in their light. She acknowledged what she already knew: she was visible again.

  She waved her arms frantically in an attempt to draw Dustin's attention. He could be anywhere, and Clarissa didn't want to waste one precious second charging off in the wrong direction.

  The fireworks dwindled then died. Had he seen her? Clarissa scoured the darkness, glancing back to check a timer on one of the remaining Travises' mouths—seventeen seconds remained.

  Then he was there. Drenched in a self-imagined spotlight that left no question as to his location, Dustin waved at Clarissa. He was far. Too far. She would never reach him in time. Her already heavy heart sank to even lower depths. She would die alone in this unforgiving, dark world. She tried to assure herself in the fraction of a second it took to reach that conclusion that she at least got to see Dustin as she perished, to be in his presence no matter the space that divided them. But she couldn't bring herself to accept it. No, this was not how she chose to go.

  She took off at a full sprint. She didn't have to look back at the timer to know it had reached its halfway point. But standing around and waiting for the inevitable to happen was not an option—she had to try to do something. Her efforts didn't last long. Not four strides in, a creature dropped in front of her with spider-like grace and stopped her cold.

  Clarissa's steps petered until she stood motionless. The thing hovering over her sapped the last of her will. It was monstrous. The very sight of it—from its black, sinewy body to its overabundance of appendages that flicked with threatening menace—filled her with hopelessness. She screamed soundlessly. This is it, she thought.

  She could see Dustin beyond the monster's hideous shape. His mouth was agape in abject horror, his eyes bulging fearfully. Clarissa couldn't watch. She clamped her eyes shut ahead of the fate that awaited her.

  Then a hand was on her arm.

  Clarissa shrieked, her eyes exploding open at the touch. She reared back, readied for this final battle, but the monster was no longer in front of her.

  Dustin was there.

  Her mind reeled as he grabbed her hands in breathless fascination.

  “How did you do that?” he thought, his imagined words steeped in awe.

  Clarissa floated in a cloud of disorientation. A moment ago she stood in front of one of those things, a blip later and she was with Dustin. She sighted the gateway light and its profusion of bombs and armed Travises—all were much farther away than they were a second ago.

  “I don't know,” she said, returning to Dustin.

  “You just teleported over to me!”

  The revelation hit Clarissa like a rogue wave. Was it possible? Could she have really moved from one place to another using only her mind? The discovery sparked one hell of a wild idea, and it was one that just might save her and Dustin's life.

  Clarissa took Dustin's shoulders.

  “Concentrate on the daycare!” she commanded.

  Dustin frowned. “What? Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  Dustin nodded and closed his eyes, Clarissa immediately following him. After a second, she opened them: They were still in the Nothing Place.

  “Shit!”

  “What are you trying to do?” Dustin asked, but Clarissa didn't have time to explain. She zeroed in on one of the Travises and squinted to see his timer: nine seconds. Whirling around, she bore into Dustin.

  “Think harder! Imagine the reception area. The desk. The floor. Every detail you can remember. You have to concentrate!”

  Dustin bobbed his head, didn't question her. He closed his eyes once again.

  Clarissa pinched her eyes shut. She filtered everything from her mind and focused on the daycare reception area. She envisioned the worn and scratched desk and the papers that had accumulated on top of it. She remembered the black office chair and the power extension cords that snaked around it, which were duct taped to the floor. She saw the drawers in the desk and heard the sound they made when she pulled them out. She visualized the steel mesh pencil holder. The red Swingline stapler. The beat up Hewlett-Packard laptop with the sticker of some radio station she had never heard of plastered on the cover. A glass bowl half full of stale Skittles. A three-tier file organizer. Purple Post-Its. A clear clipboard and tethered pen.

  Her subconscious nudged her: five seconds...

  Clarissa reconstructed the entire scene with as much detail as she could dredge from her memory. She knew Dustin didn't understand why she had asked him to concentrate so deliberately and meticulously on such an uninspiring location, but for her the reason was simple: it was one of the few places she and Dustin not only both knew but knew well—an important detail in her tenuous theory.

  Something was happening. Clarissa felt a strange tingle in her arms and legs. Her body flooded with sensation, the feeling neither pleasant nor disagreeable, just there. She felt a mental pull, a shifting of consciousness. Then Dustin was in her mind.

  “Something weird's going on!”

  “Keep focusing!”

  The timer had to be moments away from counting
all the way down. Clarissa gripped Dustin's hands harder, channeled every last bit of energy into rebuilding a mental image of the reception area. But it wasn't enough. Though her eyes were closed, Clarissa's vision filled with an intense brightness.

  It didn't work, she imagined in the rising light. I'm so sorry, Dustin.

  It was her final thought before the world vanished.

  CHAPTER 74

  Pure madness. That this could be the way humans behaved, the way they reacted to crises, to fear...it made Andrew ashamed to be included as a member of the species.

  Violence raged all around him and Valentina. Scores of bodies fell, as men and women committed wanton acts of terrorism upon their fellow man. Men and women, whose previous lives had consisted of Saturday morning soccer games, mid-week visits to the grocery store, and latte Frappuccinos. Andrew didn't know how humanity could ever come back from this.

  Valentina did as instructed, sticking so tightly to Andrew she nearly tripped him up when she accidentally stepped on his heel. They were very close now. For the first time, Andrew could see onto the road beyond the checkpoint. Cars and trucks staggered haphazardly in the street, and muzzle blasts sparked in the darkness, but the activity fell far short of what he expected. He scurried behind a barricade and crouched, taking Valentina by her elbow and helping her onto her knees beside him.

  “We're almost there,” he said. “Just a little farther.”

  Valentina wiped her face with her palm, smearing the blood she had used as camouflage. “Are we going to make it?”

  Yes, was the answer Andrew wanted to give, but in his experience, overconfidence bred costly mistakes. He couldn't afford to make one now.

  “I'm going to do everything I can to get us out—”

  The sky erupted in a violent, nightmarish screech. The volume and intensity were unparalleled and accompanied by a single illuminating flash that briefly turned the night sky to day. The pitch was so piercing it caused physical pain, the air vibrating with body-shaking strength.