“Abernathy,” he growled. “Where’s my backup?”
“On the way,” Abernathy snapped. “But you need to buy us time. Get to the mixing desk and make sure that sound doesn’t play.”
“I’m on it.”
“I’ve got a helicopter on its way, an RAF Puma. Kill the music, Joe. Now!”
Ani tapped him on the arm and pointed up to the stage.
The technicians were gone.
The crowd roared.
The kid that used to be Harry Brewster was emerging from the side of the stage. Imogen Bell followed. Then the rest of the band.
Precision Image was onstage.
Time had just run out.
The first note of the song reverberated around the park, and the crowd screamed in fevered appreciation. It was a low, industrial sound that Joe could feel vibrating through his skeleton, and it made him feel anxious and more than a little scared.
Onstage, Null-A had his eyes turned up toward the sky as he struck a defiant, messianic pose, looking too much like the image of Jesus dying on the cross for it to be accidental. Flashes of light from a rig above the stage made a flip book of Harry’s posing.
Joe scanned the park quickly, noticing that Ani was doing the same, desperately searching for the location of the mixing desk. “There are thousands of people here,” he muttered. “Tens of thousands. This is bad.”
“Ignore them,” Abernathy told him. “Just concentrate on the job.”
“Easy for you to say. How about telling me where the sound engineer is hiding?”
“Find him! We’re trying to pull the plug from here, but I have nowhere near the options available to me that I would at HQ. We’re seconds away from killing the webcast, but that isn’t going to help the kids in the park. I’ve got multiple teams moving in on your location, but right now you’re our only hope of preventing a disaster.”
Joe felt a tug on his arm. It was Ani. She was pointing to a figure raised above the heads in the middle of the crowd. A man in a baseball cap, with a ponytail sticking out of the hole in the back, was working at a vast mixing desk about fifty yards from where Joe and Ani were standing.
They started pushing their way through the crowd, but it was like moving through molasses. People stubbornly stood their ground, not giving an inch as Joe and Ani tried to pass, their eyes fixed upon the stage. Joe tried shouting for people to get out of his way, but he was completely ignored. He realized that being polite wasn’t going to work. They’d have to force their way through. He aimed forward with his shoulder and kept moving at a brisk pace.
He bounced his way through a few rows of people and then the crowd seemed to draw in around him and he completely lost sight of Ani.
Joe experienced a moment of pure panic, which had more to do with the crowd pressing in on him than it did with what would happen if he didn’t stop the alien signal being transmitted. A primal, potent fear of the crowd just swallowing him up. But fear was useless unless he could channel it. So that’s what he decided to do: he’d convert the panic into fuel, diverting it into a force he could use.
Ani appeared out of a wall of people, pushing them aside with a determined look on her face, and Joe felt relief replace his fear. She was tough, that much was certain, and she seemed to have an ability to reformulate plans and procedures on the fly, adapting and evolving strategies as they were needed. If this was Abernathy’s idea of a field examination for Ani, and if they got out of this alive, intact, and sane, then Joe was going to give her a passing grade.
With honors.
But right now they had other things to concern themselves with.
Joe and Ani continued to barge their way through the static crowd, but when they were about ten yards from their target, the music suddenly changed.
Joe saw Ani stop and throw her hands up to cover her ears.
He knew then that time had really just run out.
Ani was following Joe through the crowd when it hit her.
Hard.
The .wav.
Amplified a millionfold.
Earsplitting.
Brain-crunching.
.wav.
She put her hands up to her ears to block it out, but it was like trying to block a tsunami with a cotton ball. The sound was just too loud, too powerful, too raw. She felt it move into her brain, full of its insidious information.
First, the deep bass sound, descending until it was like a physical pain. Then the mid-range sounds spreading through her body. Then the second type of soundforms trying to insinuate their way into her brain and body, all electric heat and crackling power.
She tried to fight it, tried to push the soundforms away before they could spread and multiply throughout her. Again, it was in vain. They were too loud, all-consuming, fierce and hungry, and there were far too many. At this volume the command for her to “OBEY! OBEY!” was impossible to resist.
She reached for something—anything—inside her brain with which to arm herself, and suddenly remembered the way she had banished the sound at the Warhouse gig. Just as she had been on the very edge of the musical precipice, when all the kids around her had been giving into it, she had broken free. It had taken the most horrible remembrance—her mother, arms sleeved with blood, hands gloved with it, that awful look in her eyes as she stared at Ani, pleading and lost.
The memory wasn’t strong enough this time.
Not against something this loud, this concentrated. Not when it was all around her, ten times louder than it had been at the Warhouse. A hundred times …
She felt the soundforms battering against her resolve, felt her defenses breaking under the onslaught.
With one last supreme effort she managed to let another memory out of her store.
A memory she never revisited.
A dark thing that she had always kept hidden away, caged and locked and hidden from view.
One she never brought to mind.
One she never dared let loose.
Still, in extreme circumstances, extreme measures were needed.
She took the lid off the box and let the demon loose.
She is thirteen years old and she and Dad are visiting her mother in the HOSPITAL. Dad capitalizes the whole thing every time he speaks its name, HOSPITAL, and the stress he puts into that single word shows all of the fear and horror and shame he feels about the place.
It’s a small but well-lit room with a bed and a couple of chairs and not much else. There’s a hospital smell that always makes Ani feel queasy.
Mom is distant, and that usually means she’s heavily medicated, so they just sit there for what seems like a long, long time and, at some point, her dad leaves for some fresh air and Ani says she’ll stay, even though it’s the last thing in the world she feels like doing. The full, blunt, brutal truth is that she never wants to come here, and as soon as she does she always wants to run away.
But that’s selfish thinking. That’s putting her wishes ahead of her mother’s needs.
A mother needs to see her child, Ani’s father usually says in the car over to the HOSPITAL, it’s the only thing she has left.
Sadly, it is true.
Ani’s mother has little remaining.
Her illness has subtracted so much from her that it’s like it’s only her shadow sitting there on the bed; or an impression that has been left behind in the air that her mom once inhabited. She is physically frailer—that’s undeniable—but it’s not just the measure of her physical mass that isn’t adding up for Ani: it is something else.
Something vital, but hard to describe.
Part of her mom’s essence—the brave, loyal, devoted Sandy Lee, who’d crossed Vietnam in search of a better life—has been siphoned off, taken away, replaced with blankness, void, coldness, distance, and inscrutability. It all leads to the overwhelming thing, the thing that she cannot tell Dad, that she cannot tell anyone.
Her mom scares her.
More than anything else in the world.
More than a
ny of the monsters and murderers from horror films put together. More than the crazy people she hears about on the news who kill and torture and eat their victims. More than the unspecific dread of the things that hide in darkness. More than she fears her own mortality.
Her.
Mom.
Terrifies.
Her.
She can hear her dad moving down the corridor, his rubber soles squeaking on the floor as he walks away, sounding like a manifestation of the screams and wails that he always manages to stop from escaping. Ani may only be thirteen years old but she could see the tears welling up in Dad’s eyes just before he left; and she could empathize with the pain that had put them there. She feels that same pain now, sitting in the visitor’s chair, looking over at the shadow sitting on the bed.
Seeing, but not being seen.
Her mom stares right through her.
Haunted, sunken eyes with a cold sparkle beneath, as if a chip of ice is buried under the surface of each.
Her mother never sees her when she visits; her eyes seem incapable of latching on to anything close, and faces don’t seem to hold the same fascination for her as they do for the rest of humanity. When Ani talks to people, they look at her face. They watch her mouth. They study her eyes.
Not her mother, though.
When Ani talks to her mom, her mom never sees her. She doesn’t know if her mom can even hear her voice.
This is how visits with Mom always go.
Sitting and trying to reconcile the person in front of her with the person who only exists now in Ani’s memory; trying to spot the overlaps between the two women. Searching for a sign, a trace, even a hint of the lively, lovely woman who had brought Ani into the world, and had brought her up.
Ani is suddenly aware that something in the room has changed, and it snaps her out of her thoughts.
Her mom is watching her now. Not looking through her, because her eyes seem focused on the near distance instead of the thousand yards removed she usually views the world at.
Ani feels that those eyes are actually seeing her.
“Mom?” she says, her voice barely more than a whisper.
Her mother does not answer, but there is a flicker of something—recognition?—in her eyes. The ice chips that smolder with cold fire seem to have melted.
Suddenly, the woman in front of Ani looks like her mother.
Not like a shell of her mother, not an imprint, nor a shadow.
“Mom,” Ani says again, and leans in toward her. And that’s when the mother-facade breaks. That’s when the woman in front of her screams at the top of her lungs and launches herself toward Ani. Suddenly, her mom’s face is feral, enraged, insane. Her lips are pulled back from yellow teeth and bloodied gums. Her eyes are wide and staring and demented. And her hands—usually so thin and delicate-looking—are like claws. The fingers seem twisted, knotted, the nails look long and sharp. And they are aimed, Ani is sure, for her throat.
The sheer, unexpected shock of it has frozen Ani to the spot for just a little bit too long, and she only manages to get her neck out of the way as those clawed hands come past her face, and one of the nails trails across her cheek, drawing blood. The quick movement unbalances Ani, and she falls from the chair. She hits the floor and then her mom’s body falls on to hers and that mad, twisted, feral face is just inches from Ani’s own.
Ani’s mind is reeling. It seems impossible that things can go so horribly wrong, so frighteningly quickly. In clock time, from Ani thinking that her mom was herself again to her ending up beneath the clawing rage of the same woman, it’s all taken less than ten seconds.
Less than ten seconds for her entire world to be turned on its head.
Her mom’s hands in her hair, pulling, twisting.
“Is she safe?” her mom asks in a maddening falsetto. “Is she safe? Is she safe? Keep away from her. Keep. Safe?”
Whatever memory path she’s locked on, it’s overwritten the present. Ani has no idea who her mom thinks she is, what character from her past Ani has been cast into, and the terror grows.
Her mom’s mouth moves silently next to Ani’s chin, and for a horrible minute she thinks that her mother is about to bite her neck. One of those twisted claws moves in front of Ani’s eye line. One of the fingernails moves toward her left eye. Ani tries to turn her head away, but finds she is trapped beneath her mom’s weight, with her face pressed against the side of the chair.
The fingernail moves closer.
The memory was sharp and jagged and profound enough to distract her from the soundform invasion. The image of her mom clambering over her—just before she was pulled away from Ani by Dad and an orderly—pushed the invaders away.
She thought about the way that music worked on the human brain, and that maybe the euphoria and joy that a person feels when listening to it must produce something in the brain—probably endorphins, the opiate-like chemicals the brain manufactures to create pleasure. Maybe they were the soundforms’ way into human consciousness. If music made people feel good, then perhaps that was the state the invaders needed to make their takeover possible. That would explain why music had become the perfect medium for their transmission.
By thinking of bad things, Ani had suppressed any good feelings. She had poisoned the ground that they had been trying to seed themselves into.
She looked around her. Joe was way ahead.
He’d left her, but then what choice had he had? When it looked like she was succumbing to the sound, he must have thought that he was on his own.
But he wasn’t.
She pulled out her phone and speed dialed a number.
Uncle Alex answered immediately.
“You got something for me?” Ani shouted to be heard over the noise in Hyde Park.
“You gave me an impossible mission and next to no time to complete it, so it’s rough as heck. And it will need to be exactly the same volume as the sound you’re trying to cancel out. It’s not exact, but then I wasn’t working with a sound, I was working from an image.”
“But it will work?” Ani asked urgently.
“It might. That’s the best I can offer.”
“Have you sent it yet?”
“I sent it.”
“Then wish us luck.”
She’d sent the screen grab of the Lennie sound over to Uncle Alex while she was in the cab, and then called and told him what she wanted him to do to it. He’d been skeptical at first—at the idea of scanning the image and then re-creating the .wav file from its visual representation, and by comparing it to the original, unmodified .wav file—but then he’d taken it onboard as a challenge. She’d also managed to impress upon him the urgency of the situation, and now—checking her tablet—she saw that the file had arrived.
She bounced and jostled through the crowd until she’d made it to the foot of the scaffolding that raised the mixing desk above the heads of the crowd. Joe was already there, and he was fighting with the technician. Ani climbed quickly, almost gracefully, and soon she was standing on the platform overlooking the crowd and stage.
“Unplug everything!” Joe shouted. “Stop it! Now!”
His fist hit the technician on the chin and the man went down hard.
Ani looked over the platform and saw the sea of people beneath her. She knew that this was her one shot at saving them all. And about time, because the shells of energy that encased every member of the crowd were the same as the one she had seen Lennie Palgrave encased in: the impossible sound spikes of the terrible alien notes, harnessed by Victor Palgrave in his greed for power.
She froze for a moment as the energy began to connect each member of the crowd into a shining web of force, and she saw the people trapped within it start to distort, to change, their bodies stretching like warm toffee, their limbs elongating, their heads swelling.
They are becoming something else, she thought, something neither alien nor human. Soldiers. For Palgrave’s new order. Slaves.
It pulled her out of her ina
ctivity.
“Time for Plan B.” Ani screamed to be heard above the noise, then she located the cables that fed into the mixing desk, wired her tablet in through its sound out port, opened up the file Uncle Alex had sent, closed her eyes, and shouted, “COME ON!”
Joe watched, openmouthed, as Ani plugged her tablet into the mixing desk. Rather than pulling out power cords and sound cables, she was doing something else entirely.
This had better work, he thought and then:
Suddenly there was quiet.
Complete quiet.
Only the dull thrum of an incoming helicopter disturbed the unnatural silence that had instantly descended on Hyde Park.
“What did you do?” he asked, and Ani turned and smiled.
“Antinoise. I called the best sound technician on the planet and he came up with the idea. He made me the exact opposite of the second version of the .wav file. My uncle Alex saves the day.”
Joe didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Antinoise,” Ani explained. “My uncle says it’s a sound with exactly the same amplitude, but its precise inverse phase.” She must have seen Joe’s blank look because she tried again. “Like heat can cancel out cold. I just played the opposite sound, and the two sound waves together made a single interference pattern. They canceled each other out.”
Joe looked around at the crowd and was just in time to see them fall, as one organism, to the ground.
“Are they going to be okay?” he asked.
Ani shrugged.
“I sure hope so.”
They unplugged the mixing desk from the power source, and shut it all down.
In all honesty, it was a bit anticlimactic.
Even the band onstage was unconscious. There was no movement anywhere in the park. In the sky but still distant, an RAF helicopter was coming in. Soon, it would need to find a clear space to land. Ani wondered who it was carrying.
That mystery would have to wait, though.
The park wasn’t quite still.
Someone was moving through the crowd, flanked by bodyguards, aiming for the exit, and Ani thought she knew who it was.
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