The Noise

by James Patterson

  Martha stepped closer to the photograph and frowned. “I didn’t see any of those things when we flew in, did you?”

  Fravel shook his head. “That’s because they’re not there anymore.”

  “Did the people leave? On the ATVs?”

  “I don’t think so. I only count four vehicles in this image. It’s possible they had others parked somewhere else, but by all accounts, this was a fairly large settlement, at least a hundred people. No way they all got out at once.”

  “Then where did they go?”

  Fravel shrugged. “Maybe they left on foot?” He drew an imaginary circle around their current location on the topography map. “Plenty of places to hide out here. Maybe they’re watching us right now. No way they survived if they didn’t hide.”

  He went back to the satellite image. “Look at this.” With his fingertip, he indicated something round near the center. “That’s a well.”

  Stepping to the mouth of the tent, he said, “That well.”

  Martha followed his finger to a hole near the center of the clearing. There were stones scattered around the edges, but otherwise, it was gone. She turned back to the photograph, then back to the clearing. There were several buildings near the well in the photograph, but she didn’t see them anymore. “Where did these go?”

  “They’ve been completely leveled,” Fravel said. He indicated one of the buildings. “I found this one. The boards are still there, but they’ve been crushed, embedded down into the dirt, as if someone plowed through this place with a heavy steamroller. From the chopper, I saw additional debris in the woods, along the length of the anomaly. At first glance, it appears something rolled into this village, carried everything away, and crushed the disintegrating pieces. To me, this looks like flood damage without the water. Pressure and force. Something with substantial momentum.”

  “Think of our chicken,” Harbin muttered. “It might have been a balloon stomped under the foot of a giant. Organic matter nearly gone, only the hard bits left.”

  Fravel turned back to the photograph and indicated the well again. “The amount of force necessary to dismantle concrete and stone is thousands of pounds of crushing power, possibly millions. A human body is composed of sixty percent water. No way a person could ever survive a force like that.”

  Martha shivered. “Are you saying that’s why we can’t find anyone? The force that did this was strong enough to obliterate them?”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “You were told not to share your theories until after your debrief back at Zigzag.”

  This came from Holt. He was standing at the mouth of the tent.

  Martha turned to him. She’d had enough. “We’re civilian contractors. We don’t fall under your hierarchy.” She gestured at Fravel, Harbin, and Reiber, then back to herself. “If you want answers, we need to talk these ideas out. If we try to work this problem in a vacuum or if you or whoever it is you answer to attempts to filter our data or control the flow of information, you’ll slow us down. We may not solve this at all.”

  “One theory spoken aloud infects all others,” Holt replied. “It’s now impossible for you to consider anything without your subconscious weighing your thought against what Dr. Fravel said.” He shifted his weight to his left foot. “I need each of you at the top of your game. If you get stuck on one idea and narrow-mindedly chase it down the rabbit hole, we’ll lose valuable time.”

  Martha took a step closer. “Are we in danger? At least tell us that much. Is there residual radiation?”

  “We haven’t found any radiation.”

  “But you’re obviously concerned, or you wouldn’t be checking.”

  “We’re checking everything,” Holt countered. He eyed everyone for a moment, then stepped back out into the clearing. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Martha

  The extensive testing going on, the diversity of it, told Martha one simple fact—they had no idea what they were looking for. Whoever was running this operation was casting a wide net to see what they caught.

  As they walked past what was once the village well, Martha watched someone in a hazmat suit lower a collection tube to retrieve a water sample. The team with the Geiger counters had moved on to the far end of the clearing. At least a dozen people, including Reiber, were documenting the scene with both still cameras and videos. Another pair were standing about twenty feet away, holding what Martha recognized as PCG meters—these measured air quality. Everything from relative humidity to barometric pressure to air content was being measured. The Earth’s breathable atmosphere is typically comprised of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, a little less than 1 percent argon, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide, neon, helium, methane, krypton, and hydrogen. Martha knew these particular meters were designed to look for anything outside the normal scope down to the microbial level. She’d seen them used at crash sites in the past. They had also been used extensively in Kuwait and Iraq when it was thought chemical weapons were at play.

  The stink of death in the air came in ebbs and flows, and as they followed Holt across what was once the village center, it grew worse. She couldn’t help but think about what Fravel had said. Was it physically possible for a human body to disintegrate from pressure?

  Harbin tapped Martha on the shoulder and pointed off to their left—a mound in the dirt. It took a moment before Martha realized this was once a horse. Flattened and crushed, several gray ribs reached up toward the sky, others were snapped in half. A blanket of flies writhed over the exposed muscle, tendons, and tissue.

  Her stomach lurched again, and when she saw Harbin’s pale face, she knew she wasn’t alone. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand, took several steps closer, then knelt near the corpse, careful not to get too close. The stomach was exposed; it had burst, the contents pooled out around it. She leaned over, tried not to breathe, and waved her hand to scare away the flies.

  “What do you see?”

  “Eggs, from the flies. Several hours old. By this time tomorrow, they’ll hatch into maggots.”

  Harbin understood. “That confirms your theory. They put our team together before this happened.”

  “This way, Dr. Chan. Dr. Harbin,” Holt called out from up ahead.

  A few paces behind Holt, Reiber was recording everything. She lowered the video camera, glanced back at them worriedly, then continued on.

  Holt led them beyond the edge of the village to a secondary clearing. Several chimneys still stood; others had toppled over. Another leaned precariously to one side, ready to fall at any moment. Debris covered the ground—logs, boards, the remains of furniture and clothing. At least two dozen people clambered around the scene. They wore white jumpsuits with no distinguishable markings indicating who they worked for.

  Holt stopped and turned back to them, gesturing around. “You saw this from the air, and I’ve confirmed with sat photos—several hours ago, these were crudely constructed single-family dwellings.”

  “You mean homes,” Harbin replied. “This is where the people of this place lived, laughed, and cried. Until very recently, someone was very happy here. Do we know how many ‘someones’?”

  Holt shrugged. “At best guess, just shy of two hundred.”

  “Have you searched the surrounding woods?”

  “They’re not in the woods.”

  “Is what Fravel said correct? Were these people somehow vaporized? A group of this size can’t simply vanish.”

  Holt pursed his lips but didn’t answer.

  “Was there some sort of crash here, or do you suspect some kind of weapon?” Harbin pushed.

  “I have orders. I’ll be able to disclose more when we return to Zigzag.”

  Martha was ready to punch this guy. If she wasn’t half his size, she’d lift him off his feet and shake him.

  “Listen,” Reiber said. She was standing several feet off to the left, her eyes closed. The camera was dangling from her hand but
still recording.

  The group fell silent for a moment, then Holt said, “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly. No birds, no wildlife at all. Only insects.”

  “They got spooked, ran off. Understandable, under the circumstances.”

  “Yes,” Reiber agreed. “But they haven’t come back. Animals are quick to return to their homes once the danger has passed.”

  “I need all of you to focus,” Holt interrupted. “We have forty-three minutes left before we need to head back.” He pointed off toward a smaller path coming out of the woods on the far side of the clearing. The ground was flat, the small trees and branches were cracked. “We saw that from the air. We’re calling them ‘feeders.’ There are several—smaller anomalies coming in from the woods and converging at this point. Upon convergence, the anomaly appears to grow exponentially in size and continue on from here, destroying these dwell—homes, and moving on to the village where the destruction intensifies. From there, it appears to continue back into the woods, growing in size, until it reaches the crevasse where it ends.”

  Martha took several steps toward the “feeder,” various pieces of timber and glass crunching under her feet. The cracked branches were green, fresh.

  Harbin asked, “Could this be some type of seismic activity?”

  “We ruled that out early on,” Holt replied. “We’ve got small fault lines all around this area, but they don’t coincide with the feeders or the main line of the anomaly.”

  Reiber panned the camera from where they stood, to the feeder, then traced the path as far back as she could, expertly working the digital zoom button. “I think all of us keep going back to natural events, understandable, but there’s nothing natural about any of this. This is either man-made—some kind of weapon—or something else.”

  Harbin stifled a chuckle. “Your little green men?”

  Reiber ignored him and continued to record.

  “This is what I wanted you to see,” Holt said.

  Martha glanced over at him. He was standing next to the remains of a wall; splintered siding, lying flat on the ground, cracked down the center. At one point, it had been white, but the paint was faded and chipped, half peeled away. Written across, spanning nearly the entire piece, were two words in large, blocky letters—

  DEAF! DEAF!

  Harbin cleared his throat. “Is that blood? Someone wrote it with blood.”

  Holt took a pen from his back pocket, knelt down, and used the tip to point at the first word. “See how the dirt has been brushed away?”

  “Someone brushed the dirt away, then wrote the words,” Harbin finished his thought. “This was written after the anomaly struck. After the wall was on the ground.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So we have at least one survivor, somewhere.”

  Reiber gasped, nearly dropped the camera, and pointed.

  There was a human nail embedded in the wood on the bottom of the second exclamation mark.

  Martha stepped closer. Her right foot caught on something, and when she looked down, she realized it was a hand sticking up from beneath several layers of clapboard.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Martha

  Martha fell to her knees and began pulling away the boards. “Help me!”

  Holt didn’t move.

  Harbin grabbed at the splintered wood, took a large piece about six feet long, and tossed it aside, then tugged at another. “Watch for nails.”

  Reiber stood frozen, a hand clasped over her mouth.

  Martha hoped for a survivor, but as they uncovered the body, that hope quickly faded. They found not one but two people. When she spotted the gray clumps of hair and what was left of their heads embedded in the ground, Martha rose to her feet and had to step away. She watched as Harbin reluctantly uncovered the rest. Her eyes welled up.

  This elderly couple had been holding hands, Martha could determine that much, but otherwise she found it impossible to determine where one body ended and the other began. Their ruined clothing, sopped with dark, pulpy blood, twisted with the crushed remains of their flesh. She’d seen bodies at crash sights, she’d witnessed the life leave someone while working in the ER back at Hopkins, but this was an image Martha didn’t want in her head.

  “My God, they’re still warm,” Harbin said softly, tentatively touching what might have been a forearm.

  Reiber, who hadn’t moved, slowly raised the camera and pointed it at the bodies, spoke in a timid voice, “Switching to thermal.” She studied the screen for a moment, then turned to Martha. “89.8 Fahrenheit. Surrounding air temp is 58.”

  Martha chewed the inside of her cheek, did the math. “The human body drops about one and a half degrees every hour after death until it reaches air temperature. Accounting for the low air temp, I’d put time of death around four hours.”

  Harbin stood back up and looked out over all the fallen homes. “Reiber, what is the distance on that camera?”

  “For thermal?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m not sure,” Reiber said. “I’d guess about fifty feet.”

  He waved a hand toward the clearing. “Can you…”

  She was already raising the camera. Moving slowly, she panned from left to right, then back again. She went rigid. Her eyes grew wide as she repeated the motion again, staring at the small screen. “I’ve got heat sources…everywhere. At least two dozen, maybe more.” She looked up. “Under the debris. Nothing over ninety degrees.”

  Dead. Everyone.

  Holt put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Two men in white jumpsuits stepped out from the remains of a house about forty feet away and looked at him. When he pointed down toward the bodies at their feet, they both nodded. The one on the left reached down, pulled a black bag from a nearby pallet, and unfolded it.

  A body bag.

  An entire pallet of body bags.

  He didn’t approach them, though. Instead, he laid the bag out flat near his feet while the other man produced a small shovel and began to scoop—

  Martha’s stomach lurched.

  She turned swiftly, away from the others, took several steps, and tripped over a pipe. She fell hard to the ground, landing awkwardly on her left arm, her head smacking against the damp earth. Her vision went white for a moment, and as it cleared, she spotted the remains of a cradle lying on its side a few feet away. A swaddled blue blanket had fallen out. From within the folds, two icy-blue eyes stared back at her.

  A baby, lifeless.

  Martha shuffled backward, scrambled to her feet.

  Holt’s eyes went from her to the swaddled blanket, lingered there a moment. “I’ll have someone…”

  Martha didn’t hear the rest. She turned her back on him, staggered to about twenty feet away, and sucked in several deep breaths. “Get your shit together, Martha,” she told herself.

  She didn’t, though. At the thought of a baby out here, she lost it. She buried her face in her hands and tried to hold back the tears, but there was no stopping them. She sobbed. Martha wanted nothing more than to get back on a plane, get to her twins, and hug Emily and Michael for the next week, not let them out of her sight.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and realized it was Joy Reiber.

  “I’m…sorry. I don’t usually…” Martha stammered.

  Reiber shushed her. “It’s okay. I get it. I’ve got a little girl back home.”

  It wasn’t okay, though. As a trauma surgeon, she’d seen much worse. Emotions had no place in an operating room, no place in a disaster, certainly no place here.

  Several more minutes passed before she was able to pull herself together.

  When Reiber led her back to Harbin and Holt, the blue swaddled blanket was gone.

  Harbin gave her a soft nod before turning back to the words written in blood on the cracked wall.

  DEAF! DEAF!

  “I’m at a loss,” he said more to himself than the others. Looking to Holt, he asked, “Anything else like this?”
/>   Holt shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

  Kneeling down, Harbin’s finger hovering above the words, he slowly traced each letter. “The desperation…fright…certainty they would die…these are the last two words this person or persons chose to communicate. The fact that they had time to write the message, and to write it in blood, tells us something, that’s possibly more meaningful than the words themselves.”

  Holt frowned. “I don’t follow.”

  Martha understood. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “If you’re standing in the middle of a tornado, you don’t have time to stop and write a message. By the time you realize you’re in danger, it’s too late to react.”

  “We know this wasn’t a tornado.”

  Martha rolled her eyes. “Tornado, flood, missile attack…whatever the anomaly was, it’s obvious it struck hard and fast.” She gestured out over the flattened houses, then turned back to Harbin. “To your point, the person who wrote this, stood in the middle of it, while it was happening, and left this message.”

  Harbin’s eyes lit up. “A sonic weapon of some sort?”

  The doctors all looked at Holt.

  Holt shook his head. “We ruled that out. Sonic weapons don’t produce the power necessary to create physical damage on this level. At their strongest, they burst eardrums, cause pain, disorientation, bring on nausea or discomfort. They might shatter glass, but they’re not capable of punching a hole through a piece of plywood, let alone down a tree or a building.”

  Harbin said, “You’re speaking to US technology. What about the Chinese or the Russians? Some foreign actor? Is that why Frederick Hoover is mixed up in this with his cohorts at DARPA? Is this something experimental? Maybe satellite-based?”