Harmonic: Resonance

by Laeser, Nico

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Title Page

  01 | Red light

  02 | Just us

  03 | EVP

  04 | Orphan

  05 | In the smoke

  06 | Mass hysteria

  07 | The meek

  08 | Scavengers

  09 | Sign language

  10 | Survey

  11 | A flock of wolves

  12 | ... to the converted

  13 | New world ordinance

  14 | Conflict

  15 | This is my rifle ...

  16 | Capacitor

  17 | Conduit

  18 | Standoff

  19 | Grounding

  20 | Signs of life

  21 | Revival tour

  22 | Broadcast

  23 | Ghost town

  24 | Community

  25 | Resettlement and registration

  26 | Let the chips fall ...

  27 | Mandatory compliance

  28 | The four horsemen ...

  29 | Following the exodus

  30 | The column

  31 | The next wave

  32 | Jack and Jill ...

  33 | back together

  34 | The way back

  35 | A way out

  36 | PRESS

  37 | Held together by sticks and string

  38 | Purge

  39 | Preparation

  40 | Revelation 19:11

  41 | Oversight

  42 | Superimposition

  43 | Bait and switch

  44 | Present/arm

  45 | Last stand and deliverance

  46 | Survivors

  HARMONIC

  R E S O N A N C E

  Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Laeser

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except the use of brief quotations in a book review

  ASIN:

  Cover design by Nico Laeser

  Edited by Kelly Hartigan (XterraWeb)

  Editing.xterraweb.com

  Contact: Nicolaeser@gmail.com

  Visit: www.NicoLaeser.com

  For Jennifer

  Special thanks to:

  Thomas

  The I.A.S.D. group

  The Cheesecake Five

  &

  You, the reader

  Thank you for taking the time to read my work. A novel requires the imagination of its reader as much as the imagination of its author and its success rests on the shoulders of this collaboration.

  ***

  Also by Nico Laeser

  Skin Cage

  Infinity: An Anonymous Biography

  HARMONIC

  R E S O N A N C E

  Nico Laeser

  01 | Red light

  The whole world waits for the gates of Hell to open; at least half of them wait on their knees, praying for it to be quick, praying to a god not even the dead can say exists.

  I have done all I can to prepare. All I can do now is wait with the rest. I don’t know if anyone will make it through, or if anyone will ever listen to this recording. I’m sure everyone’s version of events will be different, but the end will most likely be the same for us all. They are everywhere now, strange variations of the basic demonic form—horns, talons, and teeth. They too are waiting for the transition, the next convergence.

  My name is Emily. I am twenty-three years old, and I will probably not make it to twenty-four. I don’t know what I’m hoping to achieve with this recording, if anything, but I have no one left to talk to, so you’ll have to do.

  02 | Just us

  I’ve always been a tomboy. That’s what happens when you grow up in a house with only men. A drunk driver hit my mother when I was just six years old. She was killed outright, leaving my dad, my older brother, Sam, and me to fend for ourselves. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what had happened, or what death meant, only that Mom was gone, and she was never coming back. I remember asking if we could visit her, and I remember my father’s reply—how it had broken his heart and mine.

  The three of us cried together at Mom’s funeral. Beyond that, the only time I saw my father cry was years later when Sam’s regiment shipped out to join the war. After that, it was just my dad and me in our little farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere.

  My dad was an electrician and part owner of T. H. Electrical, a small company run by him and his business partner, Robert Harris. Over the sixteen years in business together, they had worked on almost every residential and commercial property in town, although few of those properties are anything more than charred ruins now.

  When I was not in school, my dad would take me to work with him—have me run wire or steady his ladder. I rarely helped with any of the live work, mostly just the labor, and always under my father’s supervision. When I left school, I stayed working with my dad. If it hadn’t been just us, I might have gone to university, but with my brother away at war, Dad would have been all alone. He never remarried, or even dated. He was too busy looking after Sam and me. In turn, when it was just us two, I felt like it was my job to look after my dad. Despite weekly offers for me to take the weekend off to go and socialize like everyone else my age, my time was split between helping him at work and taking care of our home. It wasn’t a bad thing; I loved my life, and I loved working with my dad. I miss him.

  03 | EVP

  Seeing this old tape recorder again brings back memories. Sam found it in Dad’s junk drawer and asked if he could have it. He spent the next few weeks playing my preteen tantrums and overly enthusiastic pop song sing-alongs back to me, recorded without my knowledge with the tape recorder inside his shirt pocket or positioned at the gap under my bedroom door. When the novelty wore off, or at least, when he no longer got the desired shrieking response from me, he returned the recorder to the junk drawer, and it remained there for months.

  Friday was family movie night, and Sam would always beg Dad to let us watch one of the B-movies listed for the Friday-Night-Fright Marathon. Dad would always give in, and the three of us would sit together on the couch, eating popcorn and laughing at the gratuitous use of red-dyed corn syrup. Very few of the movies were actually scary, and during the ones that were, I would lie, shrug, or roll my eyes when asked if it was too scary, not wanting to ruin movie night.

  Often, Dad would fall asleep on the couch, and we would stay up late to watch the next movie. On one such occasion, it had not been a movie, but a documentary about a haunted house. Sam left the room ten minutes into the program after saying it was boring and nothing was happening, but I continued to watch. About halfway through, the team of supernatural investigators set up a tape recorder on the kitchen table, hit record, and began asking questions directed to the haunting spirit. When they played back the tape, there was only white noise, but they explained that the process was called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon, and sometimes a spirit’s voice can be caught on tape. That night, I had a hard time sleeping, but for once, it wasn’t for fear of B-movie nightmares. I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of catching a spirit’s voice on tape, and the possibility of hearing my mom’s voice again.

  The next day, I retrieved the tape recorder from the junk drawer and sat with it in my room, trying to think what questions to ask. There had been many things I had wanted to know about my mom, but I had been too afraid to ask Dad, thinking it would upset him or make him think he wasn’t enough. When I finished recording and listened to the tape, there was only a single shaky, high-pitched preteen female voice. Hi, Mom, it’s me, Emily … can you hear me? ... are you in Heaven? ...

&nbs
p; For a week, I recorded and played back my nightly questions and scrutinized the white noise for anything, but there was no voice between my questions, just static. Eventually I stopped listening for messages from the other side and stopped addressing the tapes to my mom; I’d just talk. The tape recorder became my diary, and I filled tape after tape with everything and nothing. There were boxes full of cassette tapes in the attic, each one a sixty-minute excerpt from the daily trials and tribulations of little Emily Tanner.

  In more recent years, I recorded on my phone and uploaded the files to my computer, locked in a folder behind a three-letter password. Although I no longer talked directly to my mom, I would think about her when I made my daily entry. I never stopped wondering if Mom could see us from where she was, if she had followed us when we moved to the farmhouse after she died, and if we met again in this life or the next, if she would recognize me. I don’t know, or remember, what she looked like, but I know I look enough like her, that it had caused my dad both joy and pain.

  04 | Orphan

  My Dad’s been gone for the better part of a year now, or the worst part. When he didn’t come home, I called his phone. It went straight to voicemail. By noon the next day, my father’s voicemail was full, and he still hadn’t come home. I paced back and forth, working myself into a panic and eventually dialed the non-emergency number for the police. The line was busy. I redialed over and again to hear the same busy signal, even the emergency number was busy, and it remained so until the line went dead, along with all the power in the house. It was the third time in two weeks the power had gone out following a brief surge, and my dad had asked me to stay home because he didn’t trust the old wiring in our house. Whenever there had been power issues, my dad had talked about running new wire throughout the house, but it was a big job and would have to be done all in one go, which meant having to strip all the interior drywall and us having to stay elsewhere for the duration of the job.

  The power surges weren’t just at our house. They were happening all over town. The whole grid had gone down each time, and everyone working for Harris and my dad had been on call, working with the power company, trying to fix or replace blown transformers or trying to install back-up systems. Even after the power came back on, the crew was spread thin, and I was left at home with a flashlight and fire extinguisher, on fire-watch, just in case. There were no fires, only temporary darkness.

  When the power returned, I tried the police again, but the line was still busy. I charged my cell phone enough to turn on and searched through my contacts. I called Harris and asked if he knew where my dad was, explaining he hadn’t come home. He said my dad had gone to do the power testing at the Davis place, and he should have been in and out in a couple hours. He offered to drive out there to look and promised to call back as soon as he knew anything. An hour later, Harris called back and told me how sorry he was, and there had been an accident.

  ***

  Harris arrived in the early morning driving my dad’s truck with my dad’s body in the back, wrapped in a drop sheet. He had tried to call the emergency services for hours, but had not gotten through. Harris held me and I cried into his shoulder for what felt like forever. Harris seemed half-crazed, and in shock. He said he didn’t know what else to do; the emergency services were busy, and he couldn’t just leave him there.

  We buried my dad that afternoon, no priest, no service, just the two of us in the backyard, in silence. I broke the silence with my offer to drive him back to the Davis place to pick up his car, but he asked me to take him home instead, adding that he would pick up his car in the next few days. On our way to his house, we realized why the emergency services had been busy. From the high roads overlooking the town, we could see the flames and the thick black smoke filling the yellow sky. Around the outskirts of town, the blue and red lights from emergency vehicles strobed the underside of the rolling black canopy of smoke. We stared at the scene, now aware of why no one had answered our calls for help—the whole town was on fire, and the people in it were fighting a losing battle against the flames and dealing with their own dead.

  05 | In the smoke

  I didn’t know how to reach Sam, or how I would tell him about our father. The power had gone out again, and I had sat in the dark, crying uncontrollably ever since returning to the house. I should have started the generator, but all I could think about was my father. The smell finally pulled me back to reality. All of the food in the freezer and the refrigerator had turned, or was turning, rotten. The milk, meat, fruit, and vegetables were in varying stages of decay, and with the fridge door open, the smell quickly filled the house. I took a garbage bag from under the sink, returned to the fridge with the neckline of my shirt pulled up over my mouth and nose, and began removing the various containers and lumps of blackening pulp.

  I tied up the bag and carried it outside, feeling the slap of its soupy contents against my leg as I moved. With the front door left wide open, letting the clean air in and hopefully dissipating the rotten-food smell, I dropped the bag into the garbage can and fastened the lid with the attached bungee strap. My dad had used the strap ever since our garbage had been torn apart by scavenging animals during the first few weeks after we moved into the farmhouse. The black smoke was still visible in the direction of town, still pouring upward in a continuous stream; evidently, the emergency services were losing the fight, if they were still in it. I wondered what, if anything, had survived—if I would need to drive an extra three hours to the next town over to replace the food I had thrown out. I didn’t want to leave the house. I wasn’t ready to deal with anything other than the loss of my father, but there would be no chance of avoiding it; the fridge, freezer, and cabinets were bare, and I hadn’t eaten in days.

  The drive with Harris had been surreal, both of us seemingly in shock and unable to process what had happened to my dad or what was happening in town. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Harris or driving home after I dropped him off. Without the numbing effect of shock, the further use of my father’s truck had transformed into an emotional obstacle course; every step of the process became a trigger for previously trivial, but now precious, memories.

  I took his truck key from the loop that held a year’s worth of jobsite keys, a year’s worth of memories, and placed the rest back in the kitchen drawer. As I made my way to the truck, I stared at the embossed lettering on the tailgate. In my mind, the tailgate was pulled down, and we were sitting together, sharing coffee from his thermos, the way we had almost every day. I climbed into the truck and took a deep breath, inhaling the musky smell of his work jacket, tucked behind the passenger seat—I pushed the key into the ignition. A glimpse of the truck bed in the rear-view mirror triggered the memory of his return home, wrapped in a drop sheet. I collapsed forward into a heap against the steering wheel and wept.

  ***

  My dad was never one to bury his head in the sand; instead, he would bury himself in his work. He used to say idle hands led to an overactive mind. You had to keep yourself occupied or life would drive you crazy. I guess that was what he’d done since my mom died, staying so busy there was never a spare moment to think about it. He sold what had been their home together and bought the farmhouse for cheap, leaving enough money to keep us going while he figured out how to raise two kids alone and work full-time to pay the bills. He took on small jobs that could work around our school schedule and brought us along when we weren’t in school, giving us easy jobs to keep us occupied, so we didn’t drive him crazy.

  I pulled myself up from the steering wheel, wiped my face, and tried to pull myself together. I turned the mirror to reflect only the passenger seat, and turned the key in the ignition. The vibration through the steering wheel overruled the trembling of my hands as I drove along the dirt road, away from the house, and toward the smoking town.

  ***

  The roads leading into town were blocked off by emergency vehicles and abandoned cars. Even the signposted detours eventually led to road closures.
I circled the outskirts of town, driving slowly around debris and various obstructions. Thick black smoke filled the alleyways, backlit by the orange glow of flame. Yellow sparks traveled through the smoke, drifting out over the road and down over the hood of the truck like the burning embers of paper moths, hypnotizing and strangely beautiful. Even with the windows rolled up and the air vents closed, my eyes began to sting, and the acrid smell of toxic smoke started filling the truck cab. I veered away from the buildings, swerving across the road and up onto the grass embankment, no longer able to see or discern if I was moving into or away from the smoke, and I started to panic.

  The ground leveled off then dropped away leaving my stomach on the crest of the hill as the truck tipped forward. The truck dipped below the smoke, and gray pavement flashed into view, followed by the front end of a car. I pulled the wheel but only succeeded in reducing the collision to a full-length scrape of the truck’s front fender along the driver side of the car. I pulled the truck to a stop, and took a minute to stop myself from shaking, before getting out to check on the driver of the car.

  The car was unoccupied, parked, although now angled outside of the yellow lines delineating each stall of the hardware store’s parking lot. The ground flashed red and blue under the smoke, and with my arm over my mouth and nose, I made my way toward the lights. I could vaguely make out figures in the thick of the smoke, but as I moved closer, the smoke was too thick to breathe. My eyes began to sting, filling with what felt like boiling tears. I tried to circle around the smoke, dropping to a crawl between parked cars to catch my breath where the smoke was dense. When I passed through the worst of it, I stood and ran—at one point clipping my hip on a car’s wing mirror, which sent me sprawling on the pavement and returning to a crawl. Beyond the smoke, the flashing lights were blinding.