WolfsZone

Chapter 1: Pt 4.

The blackout has eaten the skyline, but the city still has one way left to speak. Screens. Billboards. Windows of glass wired to pulse with someone else’s money. Tonight they are not selling shoes or soda. Tonight they blink awake in unison, and for three seconds the whole city sees the same thing: an eye that does not belong to any man.

Mara is mid-breath when it happens. She has just leaned over the boy, pressing the Ambu bag with her whole weight, when every surface in the ER flares white. Not just the walls. The glass of the observation room, the darkened monitors, even the stainless carts, they all catch the glow. Nurses cry out, blinded. The boy beneath her seizes, back arching like a bowstring. And then she sees it: ember red, slit-pupiled, watching her through every screen at once.

The glow cuts off. Dead black again. Only the hum remains.

She jerks back. Her knuckles are bleeding. She doesn’t remember hitting anything. The boy exhales a thin hiss and murmurs one word not his own: ...eye...

Jace sees it from the cab. The hospital is a dying ember on the hill, its orange bulbs shivering. He’s gripping the wheel, trying not to vomit from the taste of copper in his mouth, when the billboard across the street wakes.

It should be blank. It hasn’t run an ad in months. Rain-streaked vinyl peels at the edges. But it blazes white, brighter than any emergency flood. For three seconds the whole board is filled with one image: an eye, wide and red, slit-pupil glinting like molten glass. It stares at him. Not the road. Not the hospital. Him.

Jace swears, jerks the wheel, nearly smashes into the curb. The eye vanishes, replaced by thick snow. Static falls down the screen like ashes drifting through air. His cab is full of the hum. Every wire sings it, every bolt. He grips the keys on his chain until they cut his palm. He doesn’t bleed. The hum has stolen even that.

The radio hisses. A voice seeps through, low and fractured: ...you see us now...

He rips the mic out of the mount and hurls it to the floor. It still hisses.

Bishop’s candle gutters when the window flares. His room is small, spare, but every surface pulses with light as though a searchlight has passed overhead. He lurches to the window.

Across the street, the old electric billboard that is half-collapsed, unused for years burns alive. It should be an ad for cheap beer, its vinyl torn and waterlogged. Instead, for three slow beats, it shows the eye. A wolf’s eye, but not flesh. Cracked stone lit from beneath by fire. It opens wider, impossibly wide, slit running ember-red.

Bishop staggers back. His mouth shapes a prayer, but his throat betrays him. The words come out wrong, falling into cadence with the hum. The candle wax overflows the table, white rivers hardened into ash.

When the eye fades, the windowpane still glows faintly, afterimage burned into the glass. He sees himself reflected inside it gaunt, hollow-eyed, but smiling. And the smile isn’t his.

He claws the curtain closed and whispers, “Not again. Not here.” But the hum swells, as though laughing.

The city itself bears witness.

In Times Square’s lesser cousin, every screen lights at once. Tourists scream. Some laugh nervously, pointing phones that refuse to record. The lenses haze, images burning out. For three seconds, the wolf-eye stares down over the emptying streets.

On a commuter train stalled in the tunnel, every darkened phone flashes the same eye. Commuters huddle together, gasping. A boy drops his toy, a wolf figurine cracked and worn. It clatters to the floor. For a moment its plastic eyes glow ember-red, then fade.

In a stadium bar, televisions switch from a dead feed to the eye. Dozens of them. The patrons fall silent, drinks halfway raised. One glass slips, shatters, and no one reacts. They all stare, caught in that unblinking slit. When the eye vanishes, they start screaming.

Everywhere, people taste iron. Everywhere, the hum folds tighter around their ribs.

...we see you, we see you, see...

Mara clutches the boy’s shoulders. His skin burns against her palms. He whispers again, “Eye,” then stiffens, teeth chattering. For a moment his pupils glow faintly red, slitted. She snaps her gaze away, heart hammering. She cannot, will not, see her patient wearing that face.

“Help me,” she gasps to the other nurse. But the woman has backed against the wall, both hands pressed to her ears, sobbing.

Mara forces another breath into the boy. His chest rises. Falls. The hum presses harder. Every breath sounds like a voice trying to crawl out of him.

Jace throws the truck into gear and rumbles down the hill. He doesn’t look back at the billboard. He knows the eye is still there in the static, watching. His hands are shaking. He presses them flat to the wheel.

He remembers nights as a kid, his old man telling stories about wolves in the wires. “Never whistle under a live line,” his father used to say. “They’ll hear you.” Jace always laughed. Pain proves you’re alive. Wolves were just shadows. But tonight the hum is the whistle, and he knows the pack is listening.

The radio spits one more word, drawn out, full of ember heat: ...name...

Jace slams it off. The static keeps whispering anyway.

Bishop grips the cassette tight. The hum has thickened into chords now, harmonics rising and falling like the breath of something enormous. He remembers the Choir’s diagrams, their notes scribbled in red ink: When the Eye burns, the mouths will open.

He thought it was metaphor. He was wrong.

The lighter flicks open in his hand. He hadn’t picked it up. He doesn’t remember reaching. The flame bends toward the cassette, drawn like iron to a magnet.

He whispers, “Not yet. Please, not yet.”

The window glass trembles, and the reflection smiles back, eyes glowing ember-bright.

The city goes dark again. All screens dead. The eye is gone. But the hum remains, louder now, pressing against every throat, every tooth, every bone.

For three seconds the city saw. And was seen.

The blackout no longer feels like chance. The hum no longer feels like noise.

Mara kneels over a boy whose breath no longer belongs to him.
  Jace drives with every wire above him trembling like a snared bowstring.
  Bishop watches his own reflection smile with a stranger’s ember eyes.

And across the skyline, dead screens glow faintly in afterimage. A slit-pupiled eye that lingers even when closed.

To be continued in Part Five  “Sealed-Room Wounds.”