The Sound

by James Sperl

“Everybody okay?” Jon said, out of breath. “We heard a shot.”

  “We're fine,” Clarissa said. It didn't feel appropriate to smile, yet she couldn't help herself. “We're all just fine.”

  The baby's penetrating cries cut through the silence.

  Jon lowered his gun.

  CHAPTER 44

  Jon finished hanging the last of the quilts he found in the house over the living room windows. With only two front-facing picture windows and one casement window that looked into a forest, he effortlessly blocked the inside light from outside eyes.

  It's the way things had to be now.

  Clarissa didn't know what to expect anymore. She didn't think anyone did. They were in a different part of the country, where new rules for survival seemed to apply. The further east they traveled, the more unpredictable things became. The events at the market earlier in the day were proof of that.

  Maybe she was just naive. Maybe it was like this all over the country—hell, maybe it was like this all over the world—and only now was she getting a front-row seat to the deplorable lengths to which people were willing to lower themselves to survive. She didn't think she would ever understand how someone could bring himself to shoot a defenseless child in the back of the head. But at least some goodness had been salvaged from the day.

  Clarissa had watched Elenora fuss with the baby all afternoon. She fed her, changed her, played games of peek-a-boo, and read short stories to her from old Highlights magazines she found stuffed into a bookshelf in a child's room. In every regard, she was a different woman. Purpose had a funny way of doing that, Clarissa thought.

  Though it was wonderful to see Elenora so cheerful and animated, Clarissa couldn't help feeling a sliver of envy. She wanted to be the one who cared for the little girl. She wanted to snuggle and coo and make silly faces at her. They were petty and immature, these feelings, particularly where Elenora was concerned, but she couldn't help them. The discovery of the baby propelled her long-gestating maternal cravings into overdrive in a way she hadn't expected.

  After the baby, plans changed. They drove down the road another hour or so before pulling off and seeking shelter. They avoided populated areas and eventually happened upon a remote one-story nestled among a thicket of white oaks. Cutting the day short hadn't been part of the agenda, but no one had anticipated the addition of a ninth person to the group.

  Valentina still had trouble believing it. She had barely taken her eyes off the baby since she woke. Clarissa tried to put herself in her friend's shoes: before she went to sleep, no baby; when she woke up, there it was. The shift in reality would jar anyone, let alone someone with an already tenuous hold on sanity.

  Valentina looked horrible.

  Clarissa thought she appeared worse today than yesterday. Her eyes seemed bigger, the circles surrounding them even darker than they had been. Her skin was pallid in a way Clarissa had never seen before, and her leg jiggled up and down nonstop as if servo driven. She hadn't moved from the easy chair—one of two in the room—since collapsing into it an hour ago and only held herself as she hunched over her legs. Her eyes flitted between Elenora and the baby in confused wonderment as if her troubled brain couldn't make sense of what it saw.

  Clarissa, who opened cans of beans with Rachel, studied her friend in the subdued light.

  “We're going to have to come up with a name for her, huh, Val?” she said, hoping to engage Valentina. “Maybe pick a few and put it to a vote or something?”

  Valentina looked at her. Her face was empty of humor or interest.

  “Didn't her mother give her a name?”

  Clarissa and Rachel swapped worrisome glances.

  “I'm sure she did, but, you know...the baby's mom is dead. Remember?”

  Valentina turned back to the baby suddenly, as if this news had escaped her.

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  It was pointless to try to involve her, Clarissa decided. She was too preoccupied with the grinding gears in her mind to participate in any meaningful conversation. Clarissa sighed, but the mention of the baby's mother prompted another thought.

  “Andrew?” she said.

  “Yeah?” he replied from the doorway that led to a foyer. He set down the last of the lit candles he and Evan had placed around the room then shut off the electric lantern he had been using for light.

  “I hope you don't mind me asking,” Clarissa began, “but at the market, what did you say to that woman before...you know...”

  The question caught Andrew off guard. He didn't notice that everyone stared at him.

  “Nothing really,” he said, hesitantly. “I just told her that she was going to be reunited with her family. That they were all at peace and soon she would be too.”

  Clarissa's heart flooded with emotion. “Andrew...what a beautiful thing to say.”

  Rachel nodded, and Elenora looked up from the baby, adding, “Indeed.”

  Andrew came the closest to blushing Clarissa had seen.

  “I don't know about that,” he said, clearing his throat. “I just didn't think a gunshot should've been the last thing she heard.”

  The poignancy of Andrew's words notwithstanding, what he revealed he said to the woman in her final moments raised a disturbing question relevant to the baby: who was its family?

  The consensus was that she belonged to the murdered people, which likely consisted of a mother, father, brother, and an uncle or friend. What no one could answer to any level of satisfaction was why had whoever killed them allowed the baby to live? If a person could bring himself to massacre innocent people—innocent children—what prevented their conscience from murdering an infant?

  They reached two possible, yet equally unsettling reasons. The first was that the killers so lacked compassion or a soul they thought it more prudent to let the baby die on its own through natural—albeit exceptionally cruel—means rather than waste a bullet. The second was that a sliver of humanity remained and that even they couldn't bring themselves to slaughter a baby.

  Clarissa recalled Travis's parting words from that first night he came to Andrew's home. He had described the Sound as something more than just a noise in the sky but rather a metaphorical beginning to man's undoing. Clarissa had never understood the need for violence, but as much as it confused and disgusted her, she just couldn't bring herself to believe that at the core of man's existence lay a desire for bloodshed, that man as a species had waited for a mutually approved moment to snuff out one another.

  The actions of the people who executed the family in the market supported Travis's theory. Clarissa, though, clung to the latter of the two scenarios. However slight the killers' empathy may have been, it was still enough to preempt them from further homicide. Whether real or imagined, she convinced herself this was how it played out. The baby wasn't hurt, and she had been securely fastened and kept out of reach from anything she might pull on top of her to hurt herself. She was also several aisles away from the victims, almost as if the attackers, despite their savagery, couldn't allow a five-month-old to witness the death of her family. In the end, Clarissa supposed she believed in humanity's greater instinct toward decency. She didn't just believe that—she had to believe that.

  Cesare tossed minced garlic into a camp pot situated over a propane burner. It sizzled loudly, the heavenly aroma permeating the air and eliciting a grumble from Clarissa's stomach. The baby, however, didn't appear to be a fan. She bellowed at the crackle of the oil. Her cries put everyone on alert. Clarissa caught the looks of concern Andrew shot Jon with each of her ear-piercing wails.

  “Can you quiet her, Elenora?” Andrew said.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “She's probably hungry again. Who knows how long she went in that store without food.”

  Clarissa delivered opened cans of beans to Cesare. “I can make a bottle for her if you'd like.”

  Elenora waved her off. “Please. For the first time in months, I actually feel useful. But thank you.”

  “No problem.” C
larissa smiled, but it faded when she looked at Valentina. Her friend gaped at the baby with an intensity that made Clarissa uncomfortable. After a clutch of focused seconds, she broke from looking at the child to shake her head vigorously as if coming out of a momentary trance.

  “Val, everything all right?”

  Valentina snapped her head to Clarissa “What? No, yeah. I'm good.” She tried to force a smile but gave up. “So a baby, huh? That's just...Wow. So much has changed so fast. I must've been out earlier.”

  Rachel sneaked a glance from Clarissa's peripheral vision.

  “You were pretty wiped. But since you were up most of the night last night, I guess that was to be expected. Did you have bad dreams or something?” The question was less a question than it was an acknowledgment: I know you were up all night, it implied, because I saw you.

  But if Clarissa's intention had been to call out her friend for engaging in all night, frayed-nerve activity—something for which she knew Road Rage was responsible—Valentina missed the point. Instead, she glared at Clarissa with large, haunted eyes.

  “Bad dreams?” She considered her next words with chewed-lip deliberation. “No,” she said. “Not last night.”

  Clarissa cocked her head curiously. “What does that mean? Have you had nightmares?”

  Valentina sat stock still and gazed blankly into space.

  “Val? What is it? Did you see something?”

  Eyes shifted to Valentina, who became acutely aware that she had become the temporary center of attention. Clarissa moved to her side. Valentina could barely look at her as she confessed her upsetting truth.

  “Today,” she said. “At the market.” Clarissa frowned. “I had a dream. A...a really bad, horrible, frightening dream. But it wasn't that it was just scary. It was that...it just...it felt so real.”

  The hairs on Clarissa's neck stood up. “Do you remember the dream?” she said, her voice nearly a whisper.

  Valentina narrowed her eyes. “Remember it? I don't think I'll ever forget it. I've never...I've never had a dream like that before.”

  “Seems like bad dreams are par for the course nowadays,” Elenora said. She shook a baby bottle filled with formula. The baby gawked at her, fascinated. “Seems like I get one every other day.”

  “Yeah, but not like this. This was...something else.”

  Rachel joined Valentina and Clarissa. “Can you tell us about it?”

  Valentina inhaled. “I can try. The weird thing is that it wasn't the place that freaked me out. It was the feeling I had while I was there. And the place, it wasn't even really a place at all. It was just sort of like...a darkness, you know? Just blackness everywhere except for these weird buildings or structures or something. I don't know how to explain them. I've never seen anything like them before, but they just kept on going, like they were taller than the darkness.”

  “Sounds like quite a place,” Cesare said, his attention divided equally between Valentina and the bubbling pot of beans he tended.

  “It sounds terrifying,” Rachel said through an involuntary wince.

  “It definitely was. But...but that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the things that were there. The things in the shadows...”

  “The monsters,” Clarissa finished.

  Valentina shot her eyes to her. So did everyone else.

  “Clarissa?” Andrew said. “Do you know what Valentina's talking about?”

  The spotlight had shifted. Now Clarissa felt the heat from its intense light. She had withheld telling everyone she'd had a similar dream for fear of getting Valentina into trouble. At the time, Clarissa thought the nightmare was just an anomaly, a horrifying, realistic jaunt through her dreams brought about by intense stress. Since then, though, she'd heard one too many similarities—and they were beginning to stack up.

  First, it was her, then Julia in Orion, and now Valentina. Three people—three—had shared the same dream. That couldn't be a coincidence. It had to mean something, but what it meant most at the moment was that Clarissa couldn't protect Valentina any longer.

  She inhaled and slowly let out the breath: “I had the same dream.”

  Everyone stopped what he or she was doing.

  “What?” Andrew said. “What're you talking about?”

  “Just what I said. The darkness, the structures, the...the things in the shadows—everything. I dreamed about them all.”

  “And you didn't say anything?”

  “What was there to say? At the time, I thought it was just a nightmare. But now...Now I'm starting to think it's something more.”

  Jon stepped toward her, arms crossed. “To say the least.”

  She went on to tell Julia's story and how what she had seen and drawn aligned perfectly with Clarissa's dream. She mentioned the moment each of their nightmares had occurred—when both she and Julia had slept alone. To no one's surprise, Andrew was the first to ask the questions.

  “When were you alone? Who left you alone?”

  Clarissa couldn't bring herself to answer, but it didn't matter. She didn't have to.

  “I did, okay?” Valentina said. She met the gaze of each person who looked at her. “I...I had to go to the bathroom, all right? Like really bad. I was only gone for a minute. I even apologized! Tell them, Clar!”

  Clarissa opened her mouth to offer support, but she never got the chance.

  “You left her alone while she was sleeping?” Andrew seethed. “Despite knowing that this is how people vanish? You actually did that?”

  “I said I was sorry!” Tears pooled in Valentina's eyes. “Don't make me feel more like shit than I already do. It was a mistake, okay? I've never done it again.”

  Incensed, Andrew charged up to Valentina in two purposeful strides and leveled a finger in her face.

  “You could've gotten Clarissa killed, do you know that? Do you know how lucky you are? How lucky she is? If you were gone even thirty, fifteen, perhaps even ten seconds longer, she might not be here. And this is your friend?” Andrew peeled away, disgusted. He shook his head and stepped to the far side of the room, where he glared at her unmercifully.

  Rachel bounded to her feet from kneeling. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” she began, her eyes clamped shut and her shoulders hunched in bewilderment, “what are we saying here? That all of you dreamed the same thing? How is that even possible?”

  Clarissa shrugged. “Normally, I'd say it's not. But nothing about what's been happening is normal. I think there's a definite connection, and if you asked me right now what I thought that was, I'd say this place each of us saw, whatever it is, has something to do with how and why people are disappearing. But more than that, I think we were all able to dream it because we were sleeping alone when it happened.”

  Daggers flew at Valentina, and Clarissa was sure she felt each one.

  “You may be on to something,” Jon said, a contemplative hand poised in the air, “but it's not entirely jibing. You said that both you and the girl in Orion were sleeping alone when the dream happened, right?”

  “That's right.”

  “Well, we were with Valentina the entire time. She was never alone. The theory has holes.”

  “Are you sure she wasn't left alone?” Andrew said.

  Jon frowned at him. “What do you mean, am I sure? Of course, I'm sure. We were all there. Ev, Elenora. Val was never away from us.”

  “That's true...” Elenora said as she slipped the bottle into the baby's mouth. She didn't say another word, but everyone registered the implied “but” that hovered in the air like a ghost.

  Andrew stepped into the room. “Elenora?”

  Elenora scrunched her face into a look of dissatisfaction as if suddenly aware she came across as contradictory.

  “Well, what I mean to say is that, yes, we were all there. We just weren't always sitting right next to Valentina.”

  Cesare killed the flame to the burner and stepped around his makeshift kitchen. Andrew pressed further.

  “Okay. So if
you weren't sitting beside Valentina, where were you?”

  “She was taking a walk,” Jon jumped in.

  “She was talking a walk?”

  “Yes,” Elenora said. “These old bones can't handle lengthy periods of inactivity the way they used to. Long car rides are death. So, while you all were inside, I stretched my legs. Jon was kind enough to escort me so I wouldn't fall, but we were right outside the truck.”

  “That's right,” said Jon. “Couldn't have been more than twenty, thirty yards, tops.”

  Andrew cradled his chin thoughtfully. “So you two were away from the vehicle?”

  “Yes. But Ev was still inside.”

  Evan looked up from a Rolling Stone magazine he had found.

  “Huh? Yeah, totally. I was sitting right next to her.”

  A troubling light went on in Clarissa's mind. She saw where Andrew's line of questioning was going. The implication behind what it could mean chilled her.

  “So, Evan was in the car,” she started, “and Jon and Elenora, you two were walking away from it?”

  “That's right,” Jon said.

  “Okay, but...Where was everyone after you heard the gunshot?”

  The look of stark realization hit Jon so hard and so fast, it was as if something invisible had smacked him.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  Evan scowled and dropped the magazine into his lap. “What 'shit'?” he said. “I don't get it.”

  “I must admit, I don't get it either,” Elenora said.

  “The gunshot,” said Jon. “As soon as we heard it, what did we do?”

  Evan's frown softened. “You called me over to help Elenora so you could run inside and check things out.”

  “Right.”

  Evan's confusion slowly dissolved until complete comprehension overtook it. Elenora searched the air in troubled contemplation.

  “Oh my,” she said.

  “What?” cried Rachel, who failed to grasp the startling revelation. “What are you saying? What does that mean?”

  “It means...” Clarissa began, but she shifted from responding to ask Evan another question.

  “When you went to assist Elenora, could you still see Valentina?”