Sound Beyond Sound

Excerpt:

I feel like I’m getting sick. Or on the brink of having a migraine.

It’s that feeling of having woken up on the wrong side of the bed.

Part of me just wants to go back to bed, curl up in my blankets, and sleep and sleep until I feel less like everything is off kilter.

But if I do that, these people can’t take care of themselves. They are mess-makers and helpless in the face of it. Constantly crying out "Help me!" even if not through words. The scream of unoiled hinges purposely made to sound their noise. The thump of items being tossed onto the counter or floor. The heavy crack of porcelain being set down much too roughly.

I wouldn’t get much sleep anyway.

With a heavy sigh, I pull myself to my feet and head to the laundry room to move the clothes to the dryer.

I am just opening the dryer when I hear it.

Cr-THUMP.

There’s something about the sound that puts me instantly on edge. There feels like jolts of electricity flowing from the top of my head, down my arms, and into my fingers, causing them to twitch and tingle. I am afraid, and I don’t know why. It’s just terror, pure and uncut by reason.

In other circumstances, I would have called out, "Are you all right?" as the noise was likely my family.

But in this moment? In this time?

Something’s very wrong.

Tears burn in my eyes and I don’t know why. There’s a sense of impending doom.

Over the pounding of my heart, I strain to listen to the world beyond the laundry room door. I dread the window at my back, but whatever’s happening in the house–the kitchen? the living room?–is real.

Because I can hear other sounds now. Growing sounds. Thumps, bumps, what sounds like a moaning growl. The scuff of something being dragged across the hardwood floor.

And with it, there’s this sound that pierces to the soul of my every fear. Urine prickles, and subconsciously I squeeze to keep from peeing myself. It’s a comfort. Something I can semi-control in the face of whatever’s happening on the other side of the door.

Because something terrible is happening out there.

Something is very very wrong out there.

Dread is pressing down on me. Oppressive fear has turned my knees to water. I couldn’t move if I wanted to. And I didn’t want to.

Because whatever was happening to my family in the rest of the house? It already felt like it was too late.

In my mind, it was blatantly obvious: They’re all dead. Why else weren’t they screaming? Why else hadn’t I seen someone run past the laundry room window as they fled the house to safety? Why else could I still hear that sound.

Whatever it was, it was growing in power and intensity. Louder, stronger, a pulsing something almost recognizable building out of what had seemed a dull buzz before.

My bones were aching.

My eyes felt like they were being pressed into the back of my skull, the orbs being squished into the bone. I clenched my eyelids shut in pain. Nausea churned in my gut

I would have laid down on the floor if I had any control. But it felt like my tendons had stiffened into lines of fire stretching my limbs out in a clenching, quivering, uncontrollable shaking. My skin felt like it was going to split open from the pressure as my body juddered and jerked.

Consciousness was slipping out of my control, and I was glad of it.

I’d rather be unconscious when whatever that was killed me. That way I wouldn’t have to feel it.

My body slipped sideways against the washing machine and I slid down onto the floor, the back of my head knocking against an inconvenient shoe rack. My neck was bent at an uncomfortable angle, but I barely cared in the face of everything else.

Stiff as a board, my body shuddered and shook. I could feel my arms and legs shaking and twitching, my feet pointed so far down and so stiffly that I wondered if my toes were going to break off.

It was outside the door. A sweeping "wh-UM-um-UMmmMMmmMM b-muh-WUH-hmmmMMMhhMhmmm" of sound-deeper-than-sound walking the hallway outside.

It was a relief to lose consciousness. To get away from that growing horrible sound that had turned my bowels to liquid. To know that whatever happened next, I wouldn’t have to be awake for it.

(x_x ) ( x_x ) ( x_x)

They called themselves The Settlers. They were from some far off star they refused to name, and they’d come to Earth to make it their new home. Which meant clearing humans off the land they’d designated for their Pod Cities. Those peapod-shaped buildings reaching up for the sky as their roots and wires dug deep and deeper into the ground below, pumping out The Sludge, a bile yellow mystery that was likely doing something terrible.

Their alien telepathy didn’t interact well with the human brain. There were a lot of deaths. Hundreds of millions, burned to atoms in highly efficient alien kilns.

I woke up in the labor camp a sibling-less orphan. The human doctor–eyes showing startled fear that was gradually changing to a deeper, lasting terror–injected me with five syringes in the same arm and sent me on my way. No explanations of what were in the injections. No words spoken at all.

I put on the clothes I had been given–loose gray pants, a green tee shirt–and followed the signs to the largest of four buildings located within the miles of fence. Massive sprawling buildings that were eerily quiet.

People everywhere within the fence. Adults and children intermixed in masses of wide-eyed terror, the shock a palpable presence everywhere I looked.

And they were all so quiet. It was weird. And frightening.

Nobody spoke. Nobody vocalized a sound. There was touch, there was gesture, but nobody spoke. No babies screamed in their parents’ arms. It was just masses of people moving around each other, exploring the confines of our cage.

And as I opened the door of the big building and stepped past the threshold, I realized that I hadn’t spoken either.

I should have asked the doctor questions. I should have been demanding answers. But I hadn’t said anything.

The doctor had been silent. The nurses and other patients had been silent.

And I hadn’t felt a single need to speak.

I still didn’t.

Wait, what?

I thought about saying something, but there was no desire there. There was no need to speak. No purpose to it. No reason to make a single sound.

And when I forced my mouth open and air escaped my throat, I realized that I didn’t know how to speak. I remember having done it before, the sound of my own voice, the ease of it all, but it was… distant. Broken somehow.

Because when I tried to speak, my mouth moved, air flowed, but I didn’t know how to make my vocal cords work. They were dead things in my throat. Or maybe I had forgotten what they were.

/EXCERPT