The room had filled with haze, and Martha realized he was right. She looked around, spotted a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT in the far corner. “There.”
The body was on a gurney. They quickly kicked off the brakes and wheeled her toward the door. The metal was heating up, too, and Martha had to keep moving her fingers around to avoid getting burned. An alarm sounded as they pushed through the door and out onto the tarmac.
A soldier appeared from around the corner, and Martha shouted at her. “Get a fire extinguisher!”
They wheeled the gurney out into the open, about thirty feet from the side of the building, and had to let go. The metal had gotten too hot.
Harbin checked the temperature again. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the tiny display. He pulled the trigger again. Then a third time.
“What is it?”
He kept pulling the trigger, taking new readings. “Six twenty-two. Six forty-one. Seven oh-three…” he started to back up. “This is impossible…”
The body began to smolder.
When a soldier came back with a fire extinguisher, Martha snatched it from her. The hum was loud now, mixed with sizzles and pops. The body was visibly vibrating, the gurney, too, even with the brakes on.
Harbin shouted to be heard. “Nine twenty-six! Nine forty-three! One thousand and six!”
A flame burst from the woman’s chest, a spire of orange and red. Smaller flames shot from her eyes, mouth, ears.
“One thousand four hundred and twelve!”
The flames went from orange to white as the temperature continued to rise. A blanket of blue light cascaded over the length of her, so bright Martha found it hard to even look.
“The fire extinguisher!” Harbin screamed. “Put it out! Put it out!”
Martha yanked out the safety pin, pointed the nozzle, and squeezed the trigger. Unlike a typical home fire extinguisher, this was a Class B, designed to fight flammable liquids—oil, gas, fuel. The expelled foam contained a mix of monoammonium phosphate and sodium bicarbonate. When mixed together, the two created a chemical reaction that effectively ate all available oxygen and starved the flame. Martha only knew this from her time in a lab back in college. There was very little a Class B extinguisher couldn’t quench. As the foam came in contact with the burning body, she had no explanation for what occurred. The foam caught fire, and that flame trailed back over the arch of her spray, toward the nozzle, toward her—
Harbin slammed into her waist with enough force to jar the extinguisher loose. The two of them crashed against the blacktop and rolled off to the side as the body erupted into a geyser of white flame, a sudden burst reaching into the heavens. Even with her eyes pinched shut, her head turned away—the light was incredibly bright, this flash followed by the force and pressure of an explosion.
A moment later, it was over. The roar, the hum, all of it replaced by silence.
When Harbin sat up and Martha was able to turn her head, they both realized there was nothing left of the body. Half the gurney was gone, twisted metal and melted wheels, smoldering on the blacktop. And both of them had the same thought at once—the bodies of the two dead runners were still in the building behind them with Sophie, Tennant, and the others.
Chapter Eighty-One
Martha
Ten minutes later, as Fraser’s Jeep skidded to a stop, Martha barely had the energy to look up at him. The remains of three gurneys stood on the tarmac, half a dozen soldiers around them along with one of the emergency fire vehicles. Hoses snaked all around, and the asphalt was covered in blackened foam.
The door to their makeshift exam room was open, the remnants of thick, steamy mist curling from the opening toward the heavens. Someone had managed to disable the alarm. At least there was that.
“What the hell happened?”
She told him as best she could. Everything happened so fast.
“Why haven’t we seen evidence of this before?”
One of Harbin’s latex gloves had partially melted. He picked pieces from his skin as he spoke. “If the cellular friction is causing the noise, it’s present in all of them, both dead and alive. Something just accelerated the process here. I believe this will happen to all of them.”
“Could it be some kind of defensive reaction? Because we captured them?”
Harbin shrugged. “At this point, your guess is as good as mine. We don’t know how long these people have been infected. That could also be a factor.”
Fraser stared out at what was left of the gurneys. “I’m supposed to brief the president on progress again in less than fifteen minutes, and now I have to tell him every one of these people is a potential weapon. You know what his next question to me will be, right?”
Harbin fell silent for a moment, his eyes tired and heavy. “If he’s considering a military option, you need to tell him that may not be viable. Killing these people—”
“He can’t kill these people. That would be like killing someone who caught measles or chicken pox,” Martha interjected. “They’re sick. They’re not responsible.”
Harbin gave her a sidelong glance. “Killing these people, particularly on a large scale, could result in a far more devastating destructive reaction, almost retaliatory. What we just saw…I can’t imagine if that were multiplied by the thousands…hundreds of thousands. God forbid, a million. Aside from the initial damage, we have zero understanding of the residual left behind.” He gestured toward the smoldering ruins. “What will that do to the atmosphere? Both immediate and long term?”
Fraser walked in a slow circle. “We’ve got another problem.”
“What?”
“People are gathering outside the gates of the base, demanding to get inside. They think it’s safe here. Not just here at this base, but dozens of others around the country. Roads are starting to get congested, people fleeing major cities.”
“Where do they think they can go?”
Fraser shrugged. “Speculation is growing on the internet. Theories, too. They know population centers are a problem, so they’re seeking out isolation. Some people are trying to get to the caves in the Blue Ridge Mountains, go underground. Others are boarding boats and ships and heading out to sea. People are everywhere, though. They’re just tripping over one another.”
“We found those girls isolated up in the mountains. Their whole village was isolated. You can’t hide from this. They’re better off staying in their own homes,” Harbin pointed out.
“I saw photos of a man in Dover. He handcuffed himself to a water pipe in his basement. Two pairs of cuffs, behind his back.” Fraser held his arms behind himself, mimicked the position. “Must have done it right before the horde passed through. One of my teams found him. Looked like he tried to chew his arm off to get out. There were marks on the floor from him running in place. He bled out right there. There’s no place to hide from this thing.”
A soldier had appeared from inside the hangar and was standing off to the side looking nervously at Martha, apparently waiting for a moment to break in. She let out a frustrated breath. “Yes?”
“You asked us to secure the last one. We’ve got her ready for that machine.”
Fraser asked, “The machine?”
In all the craziness, Martha had nearly forgotten. “The fMRI. Fitch had theorized if we can isolate the parts of the brain impacted by the noise, we may find some way to block the specific receptors.”
“If there’s a chance at obtaining even a remnant of positive news I can communicate to the president, we need to get on it.”
Martha didn’t respond to him, didn’t know what to say. When she tested Sophie with the fMRI, she found nothing out of the ordinary. They were grasping at straws now. She pushed by both men and went back inside, doing her best to ignore the stench lingering in the air.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Martha
Martha felt Sophie’s eyes on her as she stepped back into the hangar. The girl stood at the side of her cage, her hair ruffled and partially cover
ing her face. Tennant had set up a folding chair on the opposite side of the chain link but was standing now. She looked up at all of them nervously.
Martha’s eyes jumped from Sophie to Tennant. “Did she say something?”
Sophie hadn’t spoken since they pulled off her headphones.
Tennant shook her head, but there was a hesitation there. She took a step back from the cage. The girl was lying.
Fraser saw it, too. “Now is not the time for—”
He started toward her, but Martha grabbed his shoulder and held him back. She told him softly to let her handle it, then went to Tennant.
Tennant stiffened as she approached, her eyes bouncing nervously over all of them.
“It’s okay, you can tell me,” Martha said.
Tennant glanced over at her sister, who was facing south again, as if none of them were in the room. When she turned back to Martha, her voice dropped low so nobody else could hear. “For a second there, it was like she was back. She even smiled at me. She asked if I wanted to see Momma and Poppa again, and I told her I did. She said she could hear them and they were so happy, happier than they’d ever been, and we’d all be together again soon. She said all of this would be over soon.”
Her eyes fell away, and Martha knew there was something else. Something the girl didn’t want to tell her.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Tennant…”
Again, she looked at her sister nervously. This time when she turned away, she faced the ground, unable to look Martha in the eyes. “She said she can’t wait to play with Emily and Michael. She said even though she’s never met them, they will still have sooo much fun.”
Martha felt a pang in her chest at the mention of her children’s names.
Emily and Michael will run with Anna Shim. You all will. We all will.
Sophie had said this back at Zigzag, and she still had no idea where the girl had picked up their names. She told herself she must have overheard her talking about them with one of the others. She was so quiet and still, it was easy to forget she was there when speaking, but after that first incident, Martha had wracked her brain trying to recall where she’d let the names slip and couldn’t remember a single incident.
Fraser had come up behind them.
“She’s just messing with you, Doctor. We don’t have time for this.”
Without facing them, Sophie said softly, “Ben and Eldridge have been running a long time, too.”
Martha didn’t recognize the names, but Fraser clearly did. His face went white.
“Who are Ben and Eldridge?”
Fraser quickly recovered and went to the gurney holding Rosalin Agar. “Doesn’t matter. She’s just trying to distract us. We need to focus.”
Sophie said in a low, scratchy voice, “Mark would rather screw that bitch Allison than watch those little brats. He can’t wait for Emily and Michael to run.”
“Enough of this.” Harbin joined Fraser on the opposite side of the gurney, and together they started wheeling her toward the fMRI.
Unlike the other gurneys, this one was made of plastic, designed to slide inside the large donut-shaped machine. Rosalin twisted and faced them, drool spilling out from her partially open mouth. The woman had wet herself. There was a dark stain on her torn jeans, and she reeked of urine. At some point, she tore her sweatshirt, and pasty skin was visible beneath, lined with blue and purple veins. Her eyes had the same yellow, jaundiced look like the others. Martha went to the LCD monitor and computer attached to the machine and began turning it on, prepping it for use.
Fraser was looking at his watch. “How long will this take?”
Martha didn’t answer, still flustered by what Sophie said.
“Doctor? Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. I can either take time to answer you, or I can focus on getting this done. Your call.” She didn’t stop moving. A neck brace was attached to the side of the machine with Velcro. She snatched it and tossed it to him. “Get this on her.”
Fraser flipped the plastic brace around in his hand, then nodded at two of the soldiers standing by. “Give me a hand.”
The soldiers gripped the woman’s head and held her still as Fraser got the brace under her, fastened the straps, and secured it to the gurney so she could no longer move her head.
With a triple chime of tones, the computer completed its boot-up cycle. The LCD display came to life, and Martha flipped through several screens, calibrating a baseline. When finished, she double-checked her entries, then turned to both men. “Okay, slide her in.”
Fraser and Harbin gripped the gurney and wheeled her inside. Her body jerked as the large device closed around her, but the various straps and braces held her still.
“What’s the difference between this and a regular MRI?” Fraser asked.
Martha cycled to another screen. “A regular MRI only provides static pictures. With this, we’ll be able to monitor her metabolic functions in real time.”
She pressed a button and the device whirred to life. “Here we go.”
A loud clicking filled the room, enhanced by the concrete on the ground and the metal of the hangar.
Sophie continued to face south but began rocking from her left foot to her right again, picking up speed in time with the steady clicking of the fMRI’s large magnet.
Inside the machine, Rosalin Agar began grunting, those grunts turning into short, gasping screams as the device got louder.
She handed Harbin an iPad. “We’re capturing all her vitals with the implant. Keep an eye on her temperature. We don’t want whatever happened outside to happen in here. You see anything out of the ordinary, let me know. We’ll abort if necessary.”
He nodded.
On the screen, Martha brought up an image of the woman’s brain and began speaking, pointing out sections to Fraser. “These are live shots of her neural pathways. You can see the various synapses as they fire. The colors indicate the intensity of the activity. Red is moderate, yellow is higher. Blue and white are the strongest.”
Even as she told him this, her mind flashed back to the colors of the burning bodies outside, and she tried to force the thought out of her head. “I don’t see anything irregular here. Her pain receptors appear to be elevated, but not much. That could easily be the stress of being in the machine.”
Fraser produced an iPod. “We need to wire this in.”
Martha knew exactly what this was and that made her think of Finch’s experiments on the girls, forcing them to listen to the noise. She also knew they didn’t have a choice anymore. What was happening went well beyond this one woman.
The fMRI came equipped with speakers meant to play music for the person inside as a distraction from the loud clicking. Many people got claustrophobic, and it helped with that as well. She took the iPod from him and plugged it into the audio jack under the LCD monitor with an existing cable. Then she looked over at Harbin. “How is she?”
“No different than the others. Highly elevated temperature and blood pressure but otherwise normal. No significant changes.”
She let out a breath and slipped her thumb over the Play button. “Okay, I’m switching on the sound.”
The woman’s legs stiffened. Her arms tugged at the plastic zip-ties, but the bindings held. The hum emanating from her body grew loud enough to hear over the fMRI’s clicking magnet.
“Harbin?”
“She was at 103 when we started. She’s at 106 right now.”
Martha looked up at the LCD screen, and her mouth fell open.
“What is it?” Fraser asked.
“This part here, lighting up in blue and white, is the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center. She’s experiencing an incredible sense of pleasure, a high. Her body must be pumping out record levels of dopamine and serotonin. But then when you look over here, we’ve got an equal reaction.”
“What’s that part of the brain?”
“Pain. Inconceivable levels.”<
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Harbin said, “Her temperature is still rising. One-oh-nine now. I’m more concerned with her heart rate. She’s at 168 beats per minute and climbing. This woman appears to be in her sixties—activity that high could trigger a cardiac episode.”
The hum emanating from the woman grew louder, mixed with the noise from the speakers. Martha felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She felt as if ants were crawling all over her skin.
“Turn it up,” Fraser said over the noise. “Unless you’ve learned something conclusive here, turn it up. Otherwise, this is pointless.”
Tennant tugged on Martha’s sleeve. She hadn’t noticed the girl come up beside her. When Martha looked at her, she pointed at a phone on the wall. She couldn’t hear it ringing over all the noise, but a red light was flashing on the handset.
“Sophie says that’s for him—” Tennant shouted out, pointing at Fraser.
Chapter Eighty-Three
Fraser
Fraser eyed the girl for a moment before snatching up the receiver, turning his back on the loud machine and covering his other ear. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Fraser!”
He had to shout—didn’t have much of a choice over all the noise.
There was nothing at first, only static. Then a distant voice. Barely audible.
“Speak up! I can’t hear you!”
“You…need to stop…this.”
He pressed his hand tighter over his ear. “Who is this?”
“Stop it…or I will.”
The voice was clearer now, louder. Fraser thought he recognized it, but it couldn’t be.
The Noise Page 27
