The Noise

by James Patterson

  “Not a who, a what.” Harbin paused a beat, then said, “I think she may be trying to say anahshim, not Anna Shim. I don’t think it’s a name at all.”

  “What is anahshim?” Fraser asked.

  “I only know the word because I studied the Tanakh years back, the Hebrew Bible. I studied the Torah as well, but I always found the Tanakh particularly fascinating because it was the foundation for so many of our modern religions. And, again, this is probably nothing, which is why I didn’t—”

  Martha cut him off. “—Harbin.”

  Harbin looked down at his hands. “Anahshim in ancient Aramaic means people.”

  “People,” Fraser repeated flatly. “If that little girl is receiving any type of education at all out here in the middle of nowhere, I seriously doubt it includes some long-dead language.”

  Harbin held his hands up. “Like I said, it’s probably nothing.”

  Over the communication system, the pilot said, “Sir, we’re approaching Barton. Two miles out. Taking us down to one thousand feet.”

  Fraser unbuckled his harness, braced himself on the frame of the helicopter, and crossed over to the door. He yanked up the release handle and pulled it open.

  Martha instinctively shrunk back in her seat as air blasted in from outside and rolled through the interior of the large cabin. She’d thrown on a jacket, but that did little to fight back the chill. There was an acrid scent in the air, too—burnt hair.

  They spotted the smoke around the same time. A large section of Barton was burning.

  As Fraser had said, the small town of Barton was positioned along the edge of the Columbia River and flanked by a thick forest leading back up into the mountains. Much like the anomaly, Martha quickly spotted several narrow paths within those trees—nearly straight lines through the brush and foliage, spread as far apart as nearly a mile. She counted seven in total, and all of them converged into one wide swath about a quarter mile west of Barton. That singular swath—a bare, smoking brown mass of utter devastation—led straight into town.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Martha

  “Find someplace to set down,” Fraser instructed the pilot. “Try to keep us clear of the fire.”

  They’d made several passes over the small town and found no movement, no signs of life. Flames had consumed several buildings on the west side of town—some warehouses along the water, something that looked like an old mill. All the houses appeared to be intact, although Martha had noticed several mailboxes lying on the ground, trees, even a swing set, all toppled and crushed. On their second pass, they’d circled a school with no playground—Martha assumed a high school—all the windows blown out. The cars in the parking lot looked steamrollered from some unknown pressure coming from above. The tires on most of the cars had burst, the rims buried in the cracked asphalt.

  Other than two fire trucks still in their bays at the station, they hadn’t spotted a single emergency vehicle. No ambulances, no police cars, nothing, neither stationary nor on their way to the town.

  The pilot took them back around and settled as far from the fire as he could, in a Wendy’s parking lot at the east end of Barton. When they touched down, he said, “We’ve got fairly high wind—twenty- to thirty-mile-per-hour gusts. Without anyone fighting it, the fire will spread fast.”

  “Understood,” Fraser replied, jumping out. “Keep the engines hot. Be prepared to move out.”

  The soldiers filed out behind him, Martha and Harbin after them.

  Everyone clustered around Fraser. “Spread out in pairs. Stay on comms at all times. Stay east of the flames. Use masks if the smoke gets heavy. No heroics. We’re here for recon only—no weapons unless in self-defense. You find anything of note, you radio me. You find any survivors, you radio me. Watch for security cameras—if you can safely collect the footage, do it. Be prepared to move out in one hour, maybe sooner if that fire gets too close.”

  They were off then, three teams of two.

  Martha found herself looking at an old Volkswagen Bug, yellow, covered in rust, at the drive-thru pickup window. Like the cars at the school, the vehicle had been flattened. She spotted what looked like an arm in a flannel shirt sticking out the driver-side window.

  When she started toward it, Harbin grabbed her by the shoulder. “Don’t. You can’t help him.”

  She shrugged him off. “It’s okay.”

  She needed a closer look.

  The driver was dead. That wasn’t what drew her in, though; it was his arm, his hand. Still pinched in his fingers, he was holding out a credit card toward the open window, something she’d done herself countless times. The name on the card was David something; his thumb covered the rest.

  “He didn’t even get a chance to react,” Martha pointed out. “Christ, he didn’t even drop his card as something crushed him inside his car.”

  The drive-thru window itself was intact, but the glass doors at the front of the fast-food restaurant had been shattered. The glass sparkled on the concrete sidewalk. Martha crossed the parking lot and knelt down to get a better look, a puzzled expression on her face.

  “What is it?” Harbin asked.

  She stood and turned toward the pharmacy next door. “Look at all the buildings. All this shattered glass, it’s on the outside. As if there was an explosion from the inside.”

  Before he could respond, she stepped through the ruined doorway into the restaurant. Inside, she found upended tables and chairs, food, packaging, condiments, purses, a flipped children’s stroller. Thankfully, the stroller was empty. There was only a single body—an elderly man on the floor next to a booth in the far corner, his head and face nearly flattened into bloody pulp. His mangled walker was just out of his reach. The power was still on, and an old Paul McCartney song came from the speakers in the ceiling. The unmistakable scent of burnt food drifted out from the kitchen.

  “Two of the windows are blown out, too,” Harbin pointed out. “But I don’t see any outward signs of an explosion. No burn marks, no central detonation point.”

  A chill passed through her, and Martha wrapped her arms around her chest. She felt like she was standing in a tomb.

  Outside, they found Fraser staring off into the distance through a pair of digital binoculars. “This is far worse than it looked from the air. Possibly countywide. Same as 45-121, but the devastation is more widespread.”

  “Maybe there’s a direct correlation to the number of people,” Harbin suggested. “Larger population may mean more damage.”

  Fraser considered this. Although he tried to hide it, as he had done back at the village, Martha could tell he was shaken. There was a man under that tough veneer.

  She wandered across the intersection; there were three more bodies on the sidewalk. Two women and a man, all older. Martha took out the laser thermometer and pointed the device at each of them. “Body temperatures are all in the low nineties, normal for people who died in the past few hours.”

  “Elderly again,” Harbin pointed out. “That’s consistent with what Dr. Fitch told you they found in the village. Whatever this is seems to take the healthy and leave the weak behind.”

  Martha pointed the thermometer back at the body in the Volkswagen and got 92.6. There was no way to tell how old he was.

  “All the cameras here are damaged.” Fraser lowered the binoculars. “There’s a strip mall about a quarter mile that way with a grocery store and a bank. There’s bound to be more. Maybe tougher quality.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he started off down the road.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Martha

  The wind gusted up, carrying with it the smell of smoke. When she looked back in the opposite direction, Martha couldn’t see flames, but the sky was thick and black, an angry churning cloud hanging over the small town growing larger with each passing second.

  Where were the first responders?

  She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Hello! Is there anyone here?”

&nb
sp; Martha sometimes had trouble sleeping, and before her divorce, she’d climb out of bed, careful not to wake her husband, and wander the house—check on the twins, walk through each room. The house always felt different at those late hours—smaller, like a bubble. Every noise carried. When she shouted down the streets of Barton, the town felt very much like that sleeping house.

  “We should stick together,” Harbin said beside her.

  Martha nodded, and the two of them followed after Fraser.

  Like all the other businesses, the glass doors and most of the grocery store’s windows had shattered outward; same with the bank next door, the dry cleaner, the comic book shop, and the beauty supply store at the far end. With the exception of a twentysomething woman in a wheelchair, all the bodies found were either older people or children.

  Fraser was kneeling on the sidewalk in front of the bank, running his fingers through a wide gouge in the concrete. The remains of a camera were on the ground next to him, nothing but a ruined pile of plastic and glass. He looked up, toward the corner above the door.

  Martha followed his gaze. The mounting bracket was still up there, but the metal was twisted with gleaming silver around the edges. Frayed wiring dangled from a hole in the brick behind the bracket. Someone, or something, had torn the camera out.

  “That’s at least eight or nine feet, right?” he said to her, his attention back on the gouge.

  “At least,” Martha agreed. “What do you think that is?”

  He slowly shook his head.

  “Even if someone destroyed the camera, it was recording up until the moment they pulled it down,” Harbin said.

  Fraser got to his feet and stepped over the broken glass into the bank. There were four other cameras in various positions around the interior, but on closer inspection, they realized the lenses were shattered. The anomaly had destroyed everything inside made of glass.

  They found the security system and recording equipment in an office near the back. The desk was upended. An ergonomic chair was lying on its side up against the wall, a hole punched through the backrest. The armrest had been torn off and was in the hallway. Half a bagel slathered in cream cheese sat on a credenza.

  Although the security monitor was spiderwebbed with cracks, it still worked. Fraser replaced the chair and sat in front of the equipment, studied the controls for a moment, then clicked through several screens on the attached computer. “Looks like they had eight cameras in total. The system is still recording, but there’s no signal coming in.”

  He brought up a menu, found a series of time-stamped files, and began clicking through them, working back from the most recent. He’d gone back more than two hours before the black boxes on the screen came alive.

  “There!” Harbin blurted out.

  “Two hours and twenty-three minutes ago,” Fraser said.

  The time stamp in the corner of the monitor read twelve minutes after eight in the morning. Most of the shots were of the bank’s interior, and other than a security guard crossing the frames, the bank was empty. Most likely, they didn’t open until nine. Using the mouse, Fraser clicked on the exterior camera above the door. The image zoomed in, filled the entire monitor, and sound came through the speakers. Several people walked by on the sidewalk. The far edge of the camera’s vision caught traffic on the road.

  Fraser clicked fast-forward, and the image sped up. At 8:24, the image blinked out and the screen went blank.

  “Too far,” Harbin said.

  “I can do without the play-by-play, Doctor.”

  Fraser slowly rewound the recording, stopped one minute before the picture cut out, and hit Play.

  A man and a woman approached the door.

  Fraser turned up the volume. They were talking about the football game that had aired the night before.

  The woman produced her keys, unlocked the door, and the pair slipped inside.

  A man jogged past the camera.

  An SUV drove by.

  Fraser turned up the volume a little more.

  A brunette in a white blouse and tan skirt appeared, tried the door, found it locked, checked her watch, then cupped her hands over the glass and knocked. She glanced back over her shoulder impatiently, then turned back to the door. She must have seen someone inside—she smiled and waved. Her face twisted, then the smile vanished, her mouth fell open, and she slowly turned, looking out toward the parking lot.

  “Do you hear that?” Martha asked.

  Fraser and Harbin both nodded.

  A hum, slowly getting louder.

  “What’s she looking at?”

  “We can’t see because of the angle of this camera,” Fraser replied.

  The hum grew louder.

  The woman on the screen took several steps away from the door, more of an unconscious shuffle.

  Someone screamed.

  The squeal of tires.

  A man’s voice shouted something incoherent.

  The hum grew louder.

  The security system’s speakers reverberated with it—this deep bass.

  More screams. More shouts.

  The woman covered her ears, her head swiveling back and forth, eyes wide with panic.

  Louder.

  “What the hell is that?” Martha said, her own voice rising to be heard.

  The bass mixed with a high-pitched shrill, a horrible keening—nails on a chalkboard multiplied by a thousand, the wail of an animal caught under car tires, the screech of a living thing caught in fire—none of these things compared to the sound, the abhorrent bedlam pouring from the speakers.

  Fraser reached over and lowered the volume. It did little good, though. The sound continued to grow louder.

  Martha found herself covering her ears, but the sound oozed through her fingers, crawled into her head, scratched at the interior of her skull like an icepick scraping at the soft tissue of her brain.

  On the screen, the woman dug her palms into her ears and fell to her knees.

  The image went black.

  “The lenses shattered!” Fraser shouted, his face registering shock at just how loud he had to speak to be heard.

  The sound grew louder.

  He turned the volume down even further, but it did little good. The sound mixed with the screams of people, desperate shouts and cries. All of it together.

  Louder.

  “Turn it off!” Martha screamed. “Just turn it off!”

  Harbin reached over Fraser, grabbed the speakers, and yanked them hard enough to sever the wires. He threw them across the room. They cracked against the far wall and fell.

  All went abruptly quiet.

  Fraser’s face was stone-white, frozen, locked on the blank screen. He had the computer’s mouse in his hand. Somehow he’d managed to crush the plastic, cutting his palm.

  Martha found herself trembling, unable to stop.

  She needed to move.

  Get out.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Martha

  “It’s the sound,” Martha said. She had an oxygen mask over her mouth, but that did little to keep her from coughing. The mask was too large and kept slipping down her face, obscuring her vision. Her eyes burned with the smoke. The attached tank was clipped to her belt.

  They were back inside the helicopter with four of the soldiers. Two more were still out there somewhere.

  “Sound can’t crush cars,” Fraser stated flatly. He was staring out the open door down the main road into the thick smoke, one finger on the button for his microphone. He tried to raise the other two soldiers again, but they didn’t respond. Fifth time now.

  The blades of the helicopter churned above, stirring the dark, soupy air with a heavy whoosh. Two-thirds of the town was burning now. They hadn’t realized the flames had reached the bank until they were back outside. Fraser had managed to dump the security system recordings to a micro SD card.

  “Sir, we need to go,” the pilot said over the communication system. “If the smoke gets much thicker, it could choke the
engine.”

  “We’ll give them another minute. If they don’t make it back, we’ll reposition a little farther down the road.”

  “Deaf, deaf,” Harbin muttered.

  Martha found herself looking at him. “What?”

  “Back at the village, remember? Someone wrote the words ‘deaf, deaf’ on that wall in blood, after the anomaly hit.”

  Martha didn’t follow. “So the sound made them deaf?”

  Harbin shook his head. “I think they were able to write it, I think they survived the anomaly, because they were deaf. They lost their hearing before it hit. They lived because they couldn’t hear the sound.”

  Fraser tried to radio the soldiers again but got nothing. He continued to stare into the fire, half-watching Harbin. “If someone was deaf, how would they know there was a sound at all?”

  “You saw the video, the way that woman covered her ears and reacted. They would have seen something similar, read the signs. Maybe they could read lips. They probably would have felt it—if not the vibration of the sound itself, then the chaos it was causing all around them. Who knows. Someone without the use of their ears is keenly aware of sound, but in a very different way than the rest of us.”

  Fraser got to his feet and scrambled to the door. “There!”

  At first, Martha didn’t see them. The smoke was like a living wall, a mix of black, white, and grays rolling over the cracked blacktop and around the sides of buildings, a tide rolling in over a desolate harbor. A sea of death.

  Three shadows, staggering along at a slow shuffle.

  “They found someone,” Harbin said.

  “Stay here.” Fraser jumped from the helicopter and ran toward them, one hand on his mask, the other holding the small oxygen tank clipped to his side. When he reached them, he handed his mask to one of the soldiers, who held it to his face for about twenty seconds, then handed it to the other soldier. They then pressed the mask to the face of the person between them.

  “It’s a woman,” Martha said. “She’s not moving. I think she’s unconscious.”

  Her arms were draped over the soldiers’ shoulders, her toes barely touching the ground, dragging.