The Noise

by James Patterson

Harbin looked around for a microphone, and when he didn’t find one, he just spoke up. “Hoover knows me. Tell him it’s Doctor Sanford Harbin with NOAA. We worked on a project together for the Navy about six years ago. I imagine he recommended me for this team. Tell him I’m here.”

  Nothing for a moment, then—

  “Where is Holt?”

  “He’s dead,” Harbin said. “Died up near Zigzag.”

  “Doctor Fitch?”

  “Dead, too. Everyone’s dead.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  That question took Harbin by surprise, and at first he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure what to say. He held up the laptop. “We’ve got the only survivors from Mount Hood at Lewis–McChord. We’ve studied them. I’m sure I can access all the data from here. Maybe if we compare it to whatever you have—”

  A loud click came from the metal door, and it popped open, swinging slowly out toward them.

  “Get inside.”

  Harbin grabbed the edge of the door and tried to open it faster but realized he couldn’t. It was far heavier than it appeared, and the hinges were motorized. The moment it had opened wide enough, he slipped through and the motion of the door reversed. It closed behind him with the weight of a bank vault. There was no handle or lock, no manual means to open it again from this side.

  The hallway was stark white, lit by bare bulbs strung along the ceiling with no signage or markings of any kind.

  “Follow the hallway to the stairs. Take the stairs down to the lowest level.”

  Like outside, there were no visible speakers or cameras in the walls, yet he knew he was being watched. The voice seemed to come from all around him.

  “Hurry.”

  Harbin moved as fast as he dared, favoring his good arm.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Fraser

  Fraser hadn’t lied when he said he no longer heard the noise or Sophie. His mind had been quiet as he sat in the dead room, as he talked to Chan and Harbin. The moment he stepped out, though, as he made his way to the airfield to report for duty, to prepare for his mission, he heard it again.

  Not the little girl, he was sure of that, but something else. He was reluctant to call that something a someone because whatever she was, to compare her to humans would be no different than comparing a gnat to a supercomputer. She was something else, something…far more. He wasn’t even sure why his mind considered this thing to be female, he had no evidence of that. The idea of male and female seemed far beneath her, a trivial description left to those things that crawled out from the mud, yet that understanding was present, too. That knowing. This was a she, whatever this was.

  He stood on the western end of the Burnside Bridge, the near-midnight air swirling around him.

  While he couldn’t hear the cries of the horde from here, their hum was in the air, much like the vibrations of an approaching freight train, a heavy, unstoppable force felt long before it’s heard.

  The child in him wanted to put a penny down on the tracks. Something he could find in the aftermath.

  The fencing had gone up fast. Cement barriers beneath twelve-foot chain link topped with razor wire. He knew this barrier stood no chance of stopping the horde. He’d seen that with Zigzag, but it would keep the people of Portland off the bridge as they prepared to blow it. Similar blockades had gone up at Hawthorne Bridge, Tilikum Crossing, Sellwood, Fremont, even the various railroad crossings. His team hadn’t informed the media, the local government, or anyone, for that matter. There was no time and General Westin felt there was nothing that could be said that would quench the fear of those caught behind the opposite side of those fences. How do you tell someone they’re safer in a cage when their only instinct is to escape and flee?

  Above him, dozens of Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters filled the night sky. Some carried additional materials for blockades; others carried tanks and armored vehicles not only from Lewis–McChord, but every nearby base in the western continental United States. While each vehicle would be manned by soldiers outfitted with noise-canceling headphones, they could also be operated remotely if those soldiers were compromised. Because their cameras were housed behind thick ballistics glass, the hope was they could survive the vibrations created by the noise long enough to aid in stopping the horde. Fraser was under no such illusion. He’d seen the destructive power of that sound up close, but he was under orders and would follow those orders.

  His skin prickled.

  The air was electric.

  The hum.

  The noise.

  So close.

  The crowd on the other side of the fence had grown within moments of the barrier going up. First with the occupants of cars and trucks stopped dead, then with people on foot. As word spread of these fences surrounding Portland, more people came, their shouts and cries desperate and pleading. The ones in front pressed so tight against the chain link by the momentum of those behind, he was certain several were dead already, crushed. He wanted to tell them the Army had only blockaded the eastern side of the city, they could still get out from the west, but there was no point.

  “Sir?”

  Fraser was so lost in his own thoughts, at first he didn’t hear the soldier come up beside him. Didn’t see her holding the satellite phone.

  “I’ve got General Westin for you, sir,” she said.

  He took the phone from her and pressed it to his ear.

  Was that buzz on the line, in his head, or really just growing in the air?

  “General,” he said. Surprised by the distant sound of his own voice.

  “I’m getting reports back from our advance teams, and it’s not good. We’ve lost two scout planes and at least six Humvees. They get within a quarter mile of those people and our personnel succumb. Some abandon the vehicles altogether and join the horde on foot. It’s the ones left behind who become problematic. We’ve had several instances of soldiers turning and fighting us when we switch the vehicle to remote. You need to instruct your people to destroy the overrides before you deploy.”

  “Understood.”

  “Are your laser beacons in place?”

  Fraser turned to his right. He could see the one on Burnside Bridge. A small box laser, no more than four inches square, on a tripod at the center of the bridge. This was the last one to go up. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll have one of our pilots confirm visual.” The general cleared his throat. “One of our gunners managed to get close enough to fire some rounds before we lost them. With the kill shots, we still saw the spontaneous combustion you mentioned. Some faster than others, but each person we took out eventually lit up. The slow ones, the weak ones, near the back, they seem to go up fastest. I’ve got a secondary wave coming in. We’re going to focus efforts on those stragglers with distance shooters. We don’t want to risk someone moving slow and avoiding the blast radius. Best to take them out.”

  Fraser didn’t reply.

  “Operation Achilles will commence in twenty-four minutes. Four F-15s and three B-52s will be airborne momentarily, coming in from multiple directions. They’re all crewed but capable of going completely autonomous if compromised. I’m not leaving anything to chance. A full payload of laser-guided Maverick missiles in the F-15s, sixty thermobaric bombs between the three bombers. Each with a blast radius of thirty-three square meters. Enough to erase this mess three times over. There won’t be so much as a roach crawling around in the dirt after these things go off.”

  Fraser turned from the people behind the fence to all the armored vehicles in movement on the opposite end of the bridge, on land. Hundreds of soldiers, people under his command. Both his squads moving into position. How would he get them out in time? Then, he realized, maybe he was never meant to.

  Westin was still talking. “…the moment the full horde is in range, we’re a go. The F-15s will strike first. They’ll launch from five miles out and follow your lasers in, then they’ll make two visual passes and fire at will if any portion of those bridges are still s
tanding. Two flyovers—watch for them—then deploy your first squad. Sweep in from the north and south and the back end of the horde. I need you to bottleneck them, box them, and hold them in the pen, give our B-52s time to get into position and deploy. When I give the order to drop, you and your soldiers will have one minute to evacuate the hot zone.”

  That’s not enough time.

  “Understood.”

  “Post detonation, your second squad needs to move in. Ensure none of these things were missed. Not one. Execute with extreme prejudice. Come in from all sides and meet in the middle. Squeeze any remaining life from this monstrosity.”

  How am I supposed to get any of my people out of here?

  “Understood, sir.”

  The hair on Fraser’s arm was standing up. He felt it on the back of his neck, too.

  The hum had grown louder. He saw a number of people looking off into the distance. You could feel it coming, feel them.

  “…those two girls.”

  Fraser covered his other ear. “I’m sorry, sir. I missed that last part. Repeat?”

  “Have you made arrangements to deal with those two girls?” Westin said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  Westin’s voice dropped off again, but this time, it wasn’t because of the connection or all the noise in the air. He was choosing his words carefully. “The president’s orders are explicit. All carriers are to be eradicated. This infection dies today. Understood?”

  Even this second time, Fraser barely heard him over that growing hum.

  My God, is it getting loud. Strange, how it doesn’t hurt so much anymore.

  “Soldier, do you copy?”

  “Yes, sir. Understood.”

  Chapter Ninety

  Harbin

  The hallway ended with an emergency door at a stairwell—Harbin pushed through and followed the stairs down eighteen flights.

  His arm throbbed with each step, and he did the math in his head to try and distract himself from the pain—the building appeared to be six stories tall from the outside; eighteen flights would put him at least three stories underground. The odd thing was he hadn’t passed a single door or window. Not in that initial hallway on the top floor or as he reached each landing on the lower floors, nothing but concrete walls, as if the entire building were solid.

  At the base of the final flight of stairs, he came upon another steel door, identical to the one above. There was another loud click, and it began to swing open before he reached it. It was open about halfway when a woman appeared—fortyish with black hair pulled back in a ponytail, dark-rimmed glasses, gray slacks, and a navy blouse.

  The woman glared at him. “Get in here—hurry.”

  Harbin stepped past the woman and back in time.

  There was no other way to describe the space.

  The walls were concrete. Once painted a pale yellow, they were now streaked with old water stains and cracks. A crooked framed photograph of former president Lyndon B. Johnson hung on the wall, the glass tinged and colors faded, a tattered American flag on a pole beside it. In the far corner of the room stood an old cabinet stereo with a stack of records on the floor, similar to the one Harbin remembered at his grandparents’ house. Near a doorway leading into a hall lit by bare fluorescent bulbs was a cigarette machine advertising Lucky Strikes for forty cents a pack. A Coca-Cola machine with bottles for fifteen cents. An old rust-orange crushed velvet couch was off to his left. It stunk of mildew. A bank of ancient reel-to-reel computer cabinets lined another wall. One of them actually appeared to be working.

  “What is this place?” Harbin asked as he turned slowly, taking in the room.

  “Gimme that!” The woman snatched the laptop out from under his arm and tossed it back out the door. It hit the concrete with a crack and skidded to a stop in the far corner near the base of the stairs. “Do you have any other electronics? Anything? Phone, computer, tablet, hearing aid, pacemaker, smartwatch, anything? Anything that plugs in or charges?”

  “No, nothing,” he replied in a stunned voice. “They took all that from us at Zigzag.”

  “What about weapons? Do you have any weapons?”

  “One gun.”

  “You wanna stay, you gotta hand it over. Nobody gets a gun.”

  Harbin appeared to consider this, realized there wasn’t a choice, then reached behind his back, retrieved the gun, and handed it to her.

  She held it in her palm for a moment, as if testing the weight, then slipped it into her waistband. “Nobody gets a gun here,” she said again, more to herself this time.

  The woman’s mouth was open slightly, her eyes wide. She looked nervously out toward the stairs, at the shattered laptop, then hit several buttons on a keypad next to the door. The buttons were bulky and made a loud click with each push like an old television remote. The heavy door reversed direction and started to close.

  “I have an implant.”

  The woman turned on him. “What?”

  Harbin’s fingers went to the back of his neck. “They put it right here. To monitor my vitals after I was exposed to the—”

  “Goddamn, Fitch…” With a heavy frown, the woman slammed her palm down on a large red button under the keypad. A loud buzz erupted from a box speaker in the corner of the ceiling, and the door stopped moving. “It was Fitch, right?”

  Harbin nodded.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid…” The woman went to a long table, shuffled through a wooden box, and found an old pack of razor blades. She pointed at another table under a bank of black-and-white tube televisions. “There’s a lighter over there somewhere. Get it.”

  “You can’t be serious?”

  “The implant comes out right now, or you leave.”

  Again, he had no choice. He went to the table, found the lighter, and tossed it to the woman.

  Her eyes shot nervously back to the door. “We need to get that fucking thing closed.”

  She peeled open the ancient pack of razor blades and took one out, flicked the lighter, and held the blade over the flame. When hot enough, she said, “You know this will hurt, right?”

  Harbin nodded.

  The woman lifted her ponytail and pointed at a rough scar on the base of her neck. “Easier than getting my own, though.”

  She made the incision with a practiced hand. Fast. No hesitation. Then, with her thumbnail, she forced the implant out. No bigger than a grain of rice.

  Harbin watched it clatter across the concrete floor when she flicked it through the open doorway.

  She dropped the bloody razor blade on the floor and glanced down at her watch—an old wind-up with Minnie Mouse on the face. “I should have never opened the damn door. There are bandages in the end table next to the couch,” she told him hurriedly. “Antiseptic ointment, too.”

  Harbin watched as she returned to the door and entered the code again.

  The heavy door began moving, lazily swinging shut with a thud. When closed, she leaned her back against the steel, closed her eyes, and let out a long sigh.

  “Are you Anna Shim?” Harbin asked her.

  With the door closed, the windowless concrete room took on the feeling of a tomb, and his words echoed slightly, resonated, his voice sounding deeper.

  She looked back at him, her mouth open slightly again, then let out a nervous cackle, one she quickly stifled. “You don’t know shit, do you?”

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Fraser

  The new headphones were bulkier than the ones his team had worn when they captured those runners—Was that really only a handful of hours ago?—and Fraser felt the weight of them on the top of his head under his helmet as his Apache helicopter lifted off from the east end of Burnside Bridge and flew toward the horde. With all the bridges barricaded and laser guides in place, he’d instructed all his teams to pull back and move in to intercept positions.

  “This is strange, sir.”

  Apaches were configured similar to fighter jets—rather than sitting side by side, Fraser
was in the seat up front, in the copilot/gunner position, and the pilot sat behind him.

  Fraser turned his head slightly but he couldn’t see him. “Strange, how?”

  “I don’t hear the chopper at all. Not even a whisper.”

  “Will that compromise your ability to fly?”

  “It will just take a little getting used to, sir. Engine noise is useful when judging strain on the aircraft. Back in the desert, we had to listen for sand. It got in everything and had a distinct sound. Sound was the first tip-off of a potential problem. The alarms would eventually kick in, but we always heard the sand first, gumming up the equipment.”

  “No sand here.”

  “No, sir, I suppose not.”

  His voice dropped off for a moment as they banked around over the water of the Willamette River, then back east. They were flying low, only about a thousand feet off the ground.

  “You’ve flown in this before, haven’t you, sir? I was told you had.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can…you tell me what to expect?”

  The pilot had been prepping for takeoff when Fraser climbed in; he’d only caught a glimpse of him. Probably mid-thirties. Black guy. Shaved head. He had a slight southern accent, probably one of the Carolinas. “What’s your name?”

  “Dorset, sir.”

  Well, Dorset. Imagine the sound someone might make if they were filleted without anesthetic, cut maybe a thousand times, then dropped in a vat of hot salt water. It sounds a little something like that. Oh, and that pain they’d feel? It’s gonna feel like that’s between your ears. Then it gets worse as you get closer.

  “I’m sure we’ll be okay with these new headphones.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fraser spotted the horde a moment later and felt his chest tighten.

  How had it grown so much in only a few hours?

  This black stain on the earth the size of a lake or a river, that’s what it looked like from the air now, the bodies packed so tight they moved as one, a wall of dust above them. Autonomous military vehicles bounced alongside, floodlights reaching across the void, but even they seemed to peter out and vanish, as if the light turned back, unwilling to brush against the infected.