The Noise

by James Patterson

  The F-15s raced overhead, back in the direction of Portland, and he watched as they deployed their missiles for a second time.

  Fraser could see one of the bridges from here. Hawthorne, maybe? He wasn’t sure, but the first wave of missiles had done a number on it, and as the second wave cracked into the remaining metal and concrete, several of the large support struts crumbled and two large spans of steel and blacktop collapsed down into the water. He imagined the other bridges had fared the same. Nobody would be crossing this one anytime soon, and off in the distance, he could see the F-15s circling back for their final pass.

  No doubt, the first of the runners had reached the water’s edge and were either tumbling in or stopped there. He couldn’t see the front of the group from here, but he could see enough of them to know they were backing up at those bridges, at the water, unable to move forward.

  Something wet dripped down the side of his head, and when Fraser touched it, expecting blood, he realized it was only sweat. He had no idea what happened to his headphones—maybe still in the Apache or maybe a thousand feet away in the dirt, he only knew they weren’t on his head.

  The noise screamed so loud on the night air he could taste it. Every molecule was alive and riding the wave of that sound, vibrating with it. He wondered if the sound was coming from him. What would Dr. Chan see if she held up her iPad again?

  Unlike the others, he felt no need to run.

  He was curious. He wanted to go after them to see what was happening, but that undeterred urge to run? He didn’t feel that at all. Not anymore. Part of him wanted to feel it, and that frightened him a little. Not feeling it, and standing out here in the middle of the noise without any protection, no longer feeling the pain, no longer wanting to run, that frightened him a lot. Because it meant he was something different. No longer normal—not one of them, either, but different. He wondered if this is what that little girl felt.

  Yes.

  He didn’t know where the single word came from. This wasn’t a conscious thought on his part, certainly wasn’t something he heard, but there it was. An answer to his question, and he’d be damned if it hadn’t popped into his head with that little girl’s voice.

  Beside him, a Humvee rolled up and skidded to a stop.

  Fraser walked over to it and peered inside.

  In the driver’s seat, a soldier’s lifeless body lay slumped over the steering wheel, his fingers coiled around a 9mm. There was a black burn mark under his chin where the bullet had entered and a much larger hole in the top of his head where it had come back out. The ceiling above him glistened with the man’s last thought.

  There was nobody in the passenger seat. Nobody in the back.

  Like the other vehicles, this one had cameras mounted all around under thick ballistic glass and several automated machine guns on turrets attached to the roof. One on Fraser’s left was still clicking, out of ammunition but still firing in the direction of the horde.

  Also like the other vehicles, this one had been modified to operate remotely. There was a bulky contraption attached to the steering wheel and another one at the pedals. The dead soldier’s limbs were still entwined in these things, but that didn’t seem to keep them from working.

  In the center of the dashboard was a small LED screen. Two words blinked on the screen:

  GET IN.

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  Martha

  “Run away from what, Sophie?”

  Tennant nearly screamed the words in order to be heard.

  Martha didn’t need a camera to tell her Sophie was vibrating; she could see it with her naked eye. What should have been sharp lines—the girl’s nose, her arms, her legs, the creases of her clothing—were all blurry, as if Martha were watching her through a veil of water. Sophie’s cage was rattling, too. The discarded restraints on the floor inched along with the vibration, moving toward the opposite wall. The hangar shook. The tables. The computer monitors and LCD screens flickered. One cracked—a tiny break in the topmost left corner crept and grew across the screen in a web, distorting the image of the horde more than a hundred miles away. Before it flicked out completely, Martha caught a glimpse of an enormous black mass building at the edge of the Willamette River, Portland on the opposite side, and what seemed to be a giant fireball between where the bridges had stood earlier. Then the cracked screen went black and shimmied across the concrete.

  Martha’s legs shook beneath her, and she reached for a steel support beam to steady herself. That did little good. The beam was vibrating, too.

  “Sophie! Run away from what?!” Tennant shouted again.

  Sophie didn’t answer but instead shuffled to the back wall of her cage and ran again for the door, slamming into it with enough force to stress the steel hinges and lock, but not enough to break it.

  She took several steps back, pinched her eyes shut, and clenched her fists. “Run from all, but no place to go! It’s everywhere!”

  The words came out muddled, nearly incomprehensible.

  “She’s at 136!” Tennant called out.

  Martha glanced frantically from the little girl to him. “We need to get her out of that cage! Maybe if we let her run, she’ll burn off some of the energy, keep from…”

  She didn’t finish the thought—she didn’t have to. They all knew what would happen.

  Behind them both, two soldiers near the hangar door raised their weapons. They didn’t point the guns at Sophie, but they made it clear they could get them there if they needed to. The one closest to Martha yelled out, “We’re under orders—she doesn’t leave the cage, and she doesn’t leave this hangar! Don’t make us shoot a child, ma’am!”

  “She’ll die if we leave her in there!”

  “She can’t leave this hangar!” the soldier repeated.

  With that, his eyes shifted over to Tennant for a second, and Martha read something there. Something worse. He wasn’t talking about only Sophie. They’d all been exposed. The military action taking place wasn’t just to wipe out the horde but to wipe out the infection. All traces of the infection. That included the two sisters, Harbin, herself…hell, General Westin might not stop there. Martha inadvertently looked up at the ceiling of the hangar, the heavy lights swaying back and forth above her, and imagined what might be flying above them right now.

  Her fingers tightened on the support beam. “If you kill these girls, if you kill all of us, that won’t stop this thing. Everyone on this base has been exposed on some level. How far do you think the general will go? How do you know one of those B-52s isn’t circling around right now? Or maybe one from another airstrip? They could target us from space or a ship or detonate something already here on base, make it look like an accident if they want to.” She pointed at the cameras all around them, several lying on their sides. “They’re watching us. They see this girl implode, they’ll use that as an excuse to take out everyone here, including you, and they’ll find some way to cover their tracks!”

  The soldiers shuffled nervously but said nothing.

  “One forty-eight!” someone called out.

  Sophie was running in place. Her fists clenching and releasing. Her head bobbing as she sucked in air and let it back out in labored gasps.

  “We have orders, ma’am! I’m sorry! Don’t open that door!”

  Tennant was back at the cage door, but without the key, she couldn’t open it. “Sophie! Listen to me. You need to fight this! Focus on my voice! Ignore everything else. Tune everything else out like we do with the rabbits. Don’t listen to any of it! Whatever they’re telling you to do, they’re lying!”

  Sophie stumbled forward, her eyes still closed, and gripped the metal door near the lock—one hand above, the other below, her legs pumping.

  The noise grew louder.

  Under her touch, the cage joined the blur that was Sophie. This violent vibration cracked the metal frame against the brackets and bolts that held it to the ground. The welded corners and seams shook with an incredible force coming no
t only from the girl but from the air around her.

  The noise became deafening, raining down from the heavens, growing up from the ground, riding the air as if every living thing had joined this devil’s chorus.

  Martha tried to cover her ears, but it did no good. She was vibrating now, too. Her, the others, everyone. The noise was screaming at them. It continued to cry out as the lock snapped and fell away, as the cage came apart. As Sophie stood there, finally free.

  Chapter Ninety-Six

  Fraser

  When Fraser climbed into the passenger seat of the remote-controlled Humvee, he made several assumptions. He assumed the powers that be, watching from their far-off place, had seen him scramble out of the fallen Apache and away from the wreckage on one of the many cameras, or maybe a satellite, and had ordered some freckle-faced kid, also in a far-off place, to redirect the remote vehicle to Fraser’s location. He had also assumed, when he fell into the seat and tugged the door closed behind him, that the vehicle would quickly turn and rush him away from the current theater of operation and the soon-to-be bomb zone. Instead, the Humvee shot forward, not away from Portland but toward it—toward the blown bridges and the growing horde at the river’s shore.

  Fraser grabbed the keyboard dangling under the small monitor and quickly typed: GET ME OUT OF HERE! YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!

  The response came impossibly fast, within a millisecond of him hitting Send.

  NO.

  Then, CONNECTED. YOU MUST SEE. STAND BY…

  These words lingered on the screen.

  See what? He keyed that in too, but there was no reply. The Humvee only picked up speed, sliding on some muddy grass, then finding traction.

  Should he jump out?

  Even as the thought entered his head, the Humvee veered to the right, toward the horde. The desperate faces didn’t turn to look at vehicles, not even a glance, but somehow, the runners opened up a gap, and the Humvee eased into it. Then the horde closed in around him, swallowed him, absorbed him.

  The faces surrounding him were both blank and horror-struck, forced into movement against their will, without the ability to stop. A teenager tripped directly in front of the Humvee and vanished under the hood. Fraser felt the vehicle bounce with a sickening thump.

  Overhead, the F-15s made their final pass. The last of their missiles swooped down out of the sky and crashed into the earth ahead. The ground shook as the bombs tore through the last remnants of the bridges. Others pummeled the earth along the shore, and others still slipped beneath the surface of the Willamette River and erupted in geysers spouting at the heavens.

  Fraser knew the sounds of war intimately. He waited for those sounds to come, but they never did, not over the sound of the horde. There was nothing louder than the scream of the horde.

  Not hundreds of thousands of individual voices anymore, but one singular voice containing the pain of all—the pain of life and death, disease and infection, pollution, suffocation, and suffering in a chorus of only crescendo. If this were a wave, it would be a tsunami a thousand feet tall.

  Fraser knew it was wrong to listen to it. He reached over and plucked the headphones from around the dead soldier’s neck. He tried not to think about the sticky mess on the band as he pulled them on his head, down over his ears.

  The outside world went silent, and for one brief second he heard the military’s radio chatter—“F-15s clear. Bridges gone. Bombers inbound. And—”

  The pain started right behind his eyes, quickly wrapped around to the sides of his head to his neck, his chest, his arms and legs. It was worst at his ears, though, as if someone had set the headphones on fire. He smacked at them, knocked them off his head, and watched them fall into the footwell through blurry vision.

  On the monitor: DISCONNECTED. RECONNECTING. STAND BY…

  The runners were packed so tight around him, there was nothing but a wall of bodies. Torn flesh and open wounds covered in dust pressed against the windows, smeared the glass. The air was hot with the stink of them, seeping into the Humvee.

  He couldn’t see a damn thing.

  With the keyboard, Fraser quickly typed: STOP THIS VEHICLE!

  No response.

  The Humvee lurched and picked up speed instead. Two more runners fell beneath the wheels and vanished.

  Fraser reached up, pushed open the top hatch, and stood.

  He nearly fell back down into his seat.

  The sky was crimson and thick with smoke, and so hot. Where one of the bridges had once stood—he had no idea which—the waters of the Willamette were burning. Directly ahead of him, less than a hundred yards away, many of the horde followed the torn blacktop and tumbled over the edge, but more still had stopped. Those coming from behind ran directly into those already there, and a wall of bodies had begun to form, this human traffic jam—tripping, falling, and pushing over and around each other trying to get by with no place to go as the noise caused the air to shimmer.

  Fraser’s Humvee raced directly toward them, toward that water, with no means to stop, knowing the bombers were not far behind.

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  Harbin

  The noise stopped almost as quickly as it began, but even that brief exposure felt like an icepick in Harbin’s ear and he found himself doubled over, both hands pressed to the sides of his head, when it ended.

  Dr. Cushman threw up her hands. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. My bad. I meant to play this one.”

  Before he could react, she flipped another switch and the noise again poured out of the speakers, only this time it brought no pain. There was none of the discomfort Harbin had come to expect, only the ugly sound.

  “This recording has gone through a series of filters. It’s harmless. I’m going to slow it down for you. I want you to tell me what you hear.”

  She reached for a dial and began slowly twisting it counterclockwise. The pitch of the noise shifted, dropped lower, became less of a constant tone and more of a series of sounds.

  When Harbin recognized it, he almost didn’t say anything, because he couldn’t possibly be right. But it could be nothing else. He finally said, “That sounds like an old fax machine. The sound they would make when they connected. Or an old modem. Dial-up.”

  Dr. Cushman was nodding. “Acoustic exchange protocol. The sound was used to establish speed and exchange identification. Binary tones represented as varying pitches.” She turned back to him. What was it you called me?”

  “Anna Shim. Sophie said the sound was Anna Shim.”

  This seemed to amuse her. “We never used that phrase outside of the group, but if she’s connected I imagine she had no trouble finding it. Children appear to be the most adaptive.”

  Tugging open a metal drawer, she pulled out a thick sheaf of papers bound together with a clip and dropped it on the table between them:

  DARPA INITIATIVE 769021473

  ANALOG SYMBIOTIC HUMAN INTERFACE MECHANISM

  She underlined the first three letters of analog and the first letter of each additional word:

  ANALOG SYMBIOTIC HUMAN INTERFACE MECHANISM

  ANA SHIM

  Anna Shim.

  “I don’t think anyone expected it to work, until it did,” Cushman said, running the dirty nail of her index finger over the pages. “We were tasked with finding an efficient way to connect people and computers without the need for an implant or intrusive surgery of any kind. That seemed like a tall order, until we broke down the problem.” She tapped the side of her head. “Our brains are organic computers, and our five senses—touch, smell, sight, sound, and taste—are forms of input. We spent years working with light, following the same principles as fiber-optic lines but using the visual cortex of the brain to decipher the signal. In many ways it worked, but it wasn’t very forgiving. The test subject had to look dead-on, and something as simple as blinking disrupted the message. Sound, though—sound was a different animal. When we switched to sound, everything changed. Low volume, high volume, close, far…none of th
at mattered. There was nearly zero signal loss. We had it. The possibilities were endless—imagine learning to play the piano in a millisecond or learning a foreign language. Learning every language. Reading a book instantly with perfect retention. Controlling artificial limbs. Controlling vehicles or other hardware. We were so close. We were right there.”

  Dr. Cushman slumped back in her chair and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “That wasn’t enough. They wanted the internet. They wanted soldiers to be able to communicate directly with satellites, they wanted a connection without any special headphones or speakers. To do that, we needed two things—a carrier signal and a viable transmitter/receiver. The signal was easy. The internet is everywhere—cellular data networks, Bluetooth, wi-fi—everything is connected now, transmitting and receiving. You step out that door, and you’re bombarded with it. You may not see it, but it’s there. That left the human aspect. How do we teach the brain to talk to that signal? If a telephone rings next to you, and you don’t know what a telephone is, you just let it ring. But if someone shows you how to pick it up, how to answer and use it…” She tapped the side of her head again. “Once you know, it’s there forever. It practically becomes an involuntary action.”

  Her eyes drifted back down to the stack of pages, and she fell silent for a moment as the memories came back. “It was Hoover who came up with the idea of treating it like malware. Just like our experiments with language, he wrote a snippet of code that taught the brain how to connect, how to interpret the signal, how to transmit, how to receive…He converted it to analog audio, and using what we learned, he played it for our Patient Zero, this homeless man from Oregon. The damn thing worked. He connected, but he ran hot. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t control the speed of the data exchange—the human brain is hungry, starving for knowledge, but the man’s body couldn’t keep up. You’ve seen what happens—perpetual energy created and burned until poof, they blaze.”