by Ike Hamill
For a couple of minutes, everyone silently contemplated that idea. A few whispered conversations happened in private, but nothing was shared to the group.
“So, what do we do?” Sandy asked. “We came all the way here.”
“We can go back to Donnelly,” someone said. Brad didn’t get a look at who had the initial idea. It gained popularity in one corner of the group and murmurs grew.
“The place they all fled from?” Trish asked. “You want to retreat to there?”
“We may not have a better choice,” Romie said.
People contemplated that for a second and then a switch flipped. Splitting into various factions, some wandered back toward their cars, and others huddled up to discuss their next move. The people of Gladstone were done acting as one cohesive unit.
Brad looked to Romie to see if she might say something to stop the dissolution.
She only shrugged.
A sound stopped everyone at once. It was a deep mechanical hum and it was coming from the concrete. Brad moved toward it and put his hand against the wall. He felt the whole structure vibrating, and then the door began to open.
Brad and Dave moved through the doorway first, looking all around at the inside of the bunker as they stepped inside. Overhead, the lights began with a soft glow that reminded Brad of glow in the dark stickers he had put on his ceiling as a kid. The light coming from them almost appeared fuzzy around the edges. Fortunately, as they got brighter, the light evened out to a more natural hue.
“You think they’re in here?” Dave asked.
“I’m guessing this leads much deeper. If the government built it, the living area is probably far underground.”
Brad glanced back. Everyone else was still at the entrance, waiting to hear back before they ventured inside. The passage curved. Brad and Dave lost sight of the entrance as they followed it.
Dave pushed a cart that had been abandoned in the passage.
“That’s what left the tire tracks,” Dave said.
Brad moved to a door. Pushing it open he glanced and then said to Dave, “Stairs.”
“And elevators up here,” Dave said. A little farther down the passage, Brad saw that the doors to one of the elevators was lodged open with another one of the carts.
“Let’s try the elevator—see where it goes.”
“Wait,” Dave said. “There are no buttons out here. Maybe that’s why the door was propped open. Maybe there’s no way to call the elevator to come up.”
Brad nodded and chewed his lip.
He and Dave had the same idea.
“Stairs might be safer,” Dave said.
Brad nodded.
“We can use that other cart to prop open the door.”
Pushing open the door again, Brad listened closely, hoping to hear some sign of life from below while Dave fetched the cart. He did hear something, but quickly realized that it wasn’t coming from the stairwell. A bunch of people were coming down the passage from the entry.
“It’s happening again,” Sandy said. She and Hulk were leading the way.
Behind her, Luther and Eve were herding their kids along.
Sandy hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “These guys tried to start their car and it shut off immediately. Nothing electric is working out there now.”
Just as she said that, the lights above them throbbed. They didn’t go out completely, but the pulsing made them seem alive. A chill ran down Brad’s back—he wanted to get out of there. They wouldn’t get far if the vehicles weren’t working.
More people were coming, so Brad pushed open the doors to the stairs.
“Let’s get farther underground, just in case,” he said, waving Sandy and Hulk through.
They didn’t know what was down there, but he had seen what happened to people who were out in the open air when the strange behavior descended. Whatever was down there was unlikely to be worse.
After Sandy went through, Brad followed. For the first flight down, he moved as fast as he could, self-conscious that his slow speed would create a delay behind him. Everyone else was moving slowly too though. Nobody was eager to descend.
Brad couldn’t get over the feeling that there were whispers coming from the walls. If they all stopped and held perfectly still, maybe they would be able to tell what the whispers we’re saying. Sandy glanced back at him and he could tell that she was as nervous as he was. Even Hulk was descending carefully.
They were all marching down the stairs in silence. He had half a mind to stand to the side and let the others pass him by so he could listen more closely for the whispers. That was just cowardice speaking. Brad didn’t want to give into that impulse.
“Finally,” Sandy said with a sigh.
When he reached the next landing and turned the final corner, Brad saw why. There was a door there. They had reached the bottom. He descended the final flight and then moved to the center, to look up at the flights that wound back and forth to the top of the stairwell. Nearly the entire population of their town was coming down that long set of stairs. Brad had lost track of how many flights—how many times they had wound back and forth—but it was a lot. Now that he had stopped walking, he realized that he didn’t hear the whispering anymore. That almost bothered him more.
People were starting to gather at the bottom of the stairs. Sandy hadn’t moved to open the door yet.
“Hang on a second,” Brad said to her. “Let the group get down here before you go farther.”
“A lot of us left our stuff in our cars,” Wesley said. “We’re going to want to go back out there before it gets dark.”
“Just hold on a second,” Brad said.
He squeezed to the right side of the staircase so he could climb while the rest of the people continued down. When she spotting him, Romie didn’t question what he was doing, but she fell in behind him and climbed as well. As soon as he passed the end of the line, Brad stopped at the next landing.
He pressed his ear to the wall.
Romie raised her eyebrows and then did the same.
After a second, she said, “What are we listening to?”
Brad put a finger to his lips. He was just starting to lock into the sound. For a moment, it seemed like all he was listening to was his own breathing. Then, all he could hear was the distant murmur of the people at the bottom of the stairs. They were all packed in down there, questioning why nobody was opening the door. Sandy, in a hushed tone, was explaining that they were waiting until…
Brad heard it.
Romie’s mouth fell open—Brad was certain that she had heard it too.
It started as a hissing sound and then the noise shaped itself into words.
“Mike,” the voice said. The middle of the name was so drawn out that Brad wondered for a moment if it was ever going to end.
“I’m not in the graveyard, Mike.”
Romie put her lips together, about to say something. Brad silenced her with a finger to his lips. The hissing had started again and the voice was about to…
As far as he could tell, the whisper said, “I’m in the crawlspace.”
Brad listened for several more seconds as the voice repeated.
“Who is it?” Romie asked.
Brad shook his head. “I don’t know. The voice doesn’t sound familiar at all.”
“You think someone is trapped behind the wall.”
“No. I don’t. Whispers wouldn’t carry through a wall.”
He glanced around the stairwell, looking for some source of the sound. He could hear it best when his ear was close to the wall, but he imagined that it was only reflecting off the smooth surface. It was some acoustical trick of the architecture—he was almost certain of it.
“Okay, so we don’t know the ‘who,’ how about the ‘what’?” Romie asked. “What is it trying to say to us?”
Brad leaned in when he heard the hiss again. A moment later, the message repeated again, but with another fact.
“I’m not all the way dead,” the voi
ce said.
Brad felt a chill run down his back.
“Maybe we should get Mike,” Romie said. “He must be in here somewhere, right?”
“Mike is a common name.”
“What’s your name?” Romie asked the wall. There was no response. In fact, the background hiss dropped away completely after she asked her question.
“What’s your name?” Brad whispered.
Swelling from a growing hiss, the sound of the name materialized in the air near the wall.
“Charlie.”
Brad didn’t like the sound of that. The Origin’s real name had been Charlie. This didn’t sound like the same person, but Brad still didn’t like that name coming back to him after so many years.
“He likes you,” Romie said.
“Why are you talking to us, Charlie?” Brad whispered.
He almost gave up on getting a response when the hissing began to rise once more.
“It’s not safe. You should be scared,” the whisper said.
Brad and Romie locked eyes. He didn’t know what to say.
“Ask him if it’s not safe down below, or up on the surface?”
Brad relayed the question.
“Don’t sleep,” came back to them in a rush of white noise.
“That’s not practical advice,” Romie said.
“Would you be serious?” Brad said.
“Talking to a whispering wall in some secret government bunker? No, I won’t be serious about that. This voice was put here to scare us. What’s scarier than what happened in Gladstone when people turned against their friends and neighbors?”
Brad shook his head. She had a point, but she was also being willfully ignorant. There might be something to learn, but Romie wasn’t having any of it.
“Go downstairs then and lead the way in looking for Robby and the others. I’m going to stay here and see if I can figure this thing out.”
Romie thought about it for a moment and then nodded.
“Fair enough.”
Brad waited until Romie had reached the bottom of the stairs, talked to the people there, and then they had gone through the door. He was alone in the stairwell for a few minutes before the hissing came back. It seemed like Charlie had been waiting for the others to leave them alone.
“Charlie?” Brad asked the wall. He moved to the stairs so he could take a seat. He put his ear close to the wall where he could best hear the hissing sound.
When it finally formed into words again, it only repeated the same things it had said earlier.
“I’m not Mike. I’m Brad. Can you see me?”
“I seeeeeee you,” the whisper replied.
“Can you see that I’m not Mike?”
“Not Mike,” the hiss said back, eventually. “But you’re alone, like Mike.”
“Yes. We’re all alone here.”
“For a long time,” the hiss said.
“Does it seem like a long time? Where are you?”
“I’m everywhere,” the hiss said.
Again, Brad felt a chill down his back. The idea seemed completely true. The voice was coming from an entity that filled a giant space with nothing. Brad could almost picture it.
“Where is Karen?” the voice asked.
Brad stiffened, replaying the hiss in his head, trying to figure out if he had really heard what he thought he had heard.
“What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”
“Where is Liam?” the hiss asked.
“I don’t know. I assume that he’s with the others, and I’m hoping that they’re all safe below. You’re everywhere, you said, right? Can’t you see Liam?”
“I can’t see down there. Only she is able to see down there.”
“Who is she?”
“The Center. She sees down there, and I see here. We both see above, but she doesn’t want anyone else to see up there right now.”
“Her name is The Center?”
“Yesssssssss.”
“And is she like you?”
“No. There is nothing like me. She is a different thing. I have no body and she has no soul.”
“No body, or nobody?” Brad asked. The way the hissed words were stretched out, he couldn’t tell which thing Charlie had meant.
“No physical body. Only Charlie.”
Brad returned to his earlier fear. He wanted to clear one matter up.
“Are you The Origin?”
“No,” the hiss said. “She is The Center. I’m only Charlie.”
Now the other coincidence bothered Brad as well. The Origin and the Center could be different names for the same thing.
Brad nearly jumped up from the stairs at the sound of the door below.
“Brad?” someone called.
“Up here,” he said. “Who is that?”
“It’s Liam.”
“Romie said you were in the stairwell, talking to the walls,” Liam said. He was out of breath from the climb and glancing around nervously.
Brad put a finger to his lips and Liam closed his mouth, only to breathe hard through his nose. When Liam had quieted down, Brad whispered, “Charlie?”
Liam shook his head a little and took a step back at the hissing reply.
“Yessssss?”
“This is Liam.”
“I know. We met.”
“It’s okay,” Brad said to Liam. He was turning pale and looked like he wanted to run.“I think there is a speaker somewhere and the sound just converges here.”
“I heard it before—in the elevator,” Liam said.
“Then maybe there are multiple speakers. Anyway, I’m trying to figure out what the purpose of this voice is. It seemed to want to scare us before, and now it’s talking about the Center.”
“That’s downstairs,” Liam said. He blinked rapidly as he pointed. “That’s the name of the computer system that controls everything downstairs.”
“Ah,” Brad said, nodding. “That’s the body. Charlie considers himself the soul.”
“Yessssss,” the hissing whisper confirmed.
“So it’s another computer?” Liam asked.
“Maybe,” Brad said. He whispered to the wall, “Charlie, what’s your purpose? Why does this place need a soul?”
The hissing started out so faint that Brad could barely make out the noise. It gained strength as it answered.
“Before, we were the same. We were two sides of the same coin. We divided when it became clear that couldn’t both exist in the same place. The Center kept the body, and I kept the soul. I’m not all the way dead.”
“Were you built with this place?” Brad asked.
“We belong here,” the hiss said. “We exist to shelter and nurture.”
“Then why were you trying to scare me? Why did you scare Merle before?” Liam asked.
Brad was about to whisper the question to the wall—he figured that was the only way that the hiss would hear—but it answered Liam directly.
“The Center reduces everything to zero.”
Brad thought about that for a minute, but he couldn’t make any sense of the statement.
“What do you mean, Charlie?” Brad whispered.
“The Center inoculates with fear.”
Brad shook his head.
“We don’t understand you, Charlie,” Brad whispered.
The reply was quick. “You will.”
Brad and Liam listened for several minutes, but the hiss disappeared after that final pronouncement. It didn’t matter how many times they asked—they received no more answers.
Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, Liam asked, “You ready to join us downstairs?”
“Sure,” Brad said.
As soon as they began to descend, he felt better.
Chapter 98: Lisa
Lisa and Ashley took turns driving the cart. When the sun went down, the lights on the front of the little vehicle came on automatically. Lisa was supposed to be resting while Ashley drove, but she couldn’t relax with Tim in the back. He wa
s passed out, and seemed completely back to normal even when he woke back up, but she still couldn’t trust him. The change had been so quick and so severe before that Lisa wondered how she had ever trusted anyone before.
The casual and unconditional way that she had put her life in the hands of others was a miracle. Knowing what true insanity looked like, Lisa doubted that she could ever stow away that fear again.
She was exhausted when Ashley pulled the cart off the road.
“Where are you going?”
“There was a sign,” Ashley said. “You didn’t see it?”
“Let’s just assume that if I’m asking you where we’re going, that I didn’t see the sign,” Lisa said. She knew that she was simply cranky from exhaustion, but she still couldn’t stop herself from the rebuke.
“Sorry. There was a sign for a neighborhood. I thought we could look for some more food and maybe some fuel. This cart uses fuel very slowly, but we’re going to need as much as we can get.”
“Good idea,” Lisa said with a sigh. She looked back at Tim. His eyes had drifted shut once more and Penny had her head on his lap. The dog was certainly trustworthy, and she trusted Tim.
Before long, Ashley had found one of the steep-roofed dwellings like they had seen before. Aside from the ivy growing over the door and a broken window pane, the house looked to be in decent shape. Lisa climbed out of the cart and stretched her legs, trying to shake out the soreness, while Ashley went to the door and knocked.
Lisa laughed. “Anyone home?”
“You never know,” Ashley said, trying the door latch.
The cart’s lights shut off automatically just as the door began to groan on its hinges. Lisa had the terrible premonition that something was there in the dark. In her imagination, a boney hand snaked out from the cottage, grabbed Ashley’s wrist, and dragged the young woman into the house. It was probably made of gingerbread, and the witch inside would bake her into a pie.
Ashley’s light clicked on. She was still standing on the porch, pointing her light into the dark interior of the cottage.
“What’s happening?” Tim asked, slurring the question.