WolfsZone

Chpt 1: Pt 5.

The blackout has tightened its grip. The hum has a voice now. But the city is more than light and sound it is bodies, fragile and full of blood. And when the current worms its way inside, flesh begins to answer.

Mara thinks the boy is bleeding from the inside. His lips are cracked, red froth flecking the corner of his mouth. She squeezes the Ambu bag again, but the breath that rattles out isn’t his. It is too deep, too layered, too wrong.

The lights gutter, flare. She sees streaks on the walls, faint at first, then darker lines like veins traced in red. She blinks and they are gone. The nurse beside her has collapsed into a corner, rocking, both hands pressed against her ears. “Too loud,” the woman moans. “It’s inside me.”

Mara doesn’t answer. She feels it too. The hum isn’t just in her ears anymore. It’s in her chest, her gut, her spine. And with it comes a pressure, as though her skin can’t quite hold what’s trying to swell beneath it.

The boy spasms. A thin red line opens across his forearm, no blade near him. Blood wells and drips onto the sheets. Not a cut more like a seam splitting open.

Mara stares, horrified. “No,” she whispers. “That’s not real.” But the line grows longer, flesh parting as though invisible hands are unzipping him from the inside.

She clamps her palm over the wound, but the skin pulses against her touch, twitching like lips trying to form a word.

Jace parks his truck outside a shuttered supermarket. The neon sign above the doors is dead, but the glass glows faintly from within, as though embers smolder on the floor. He grips his keys tight in one fist.

The hum is everywhere, thrumming through the truck frame, the sidewalk, the air itself. His teeth ache from it. He climbs down and steps toward the glass.

Something moves inside. He squints. At first it looks like shoppers left behind silhouettes shuffling between aisles. Then one stops and presses against the window.

It’s a man, or was. His face is cut with long, thin seams, each one leaking dark trails. His mouth opens, but no sound comes out. Instead, the seams on his chest split wider, and red light pulses from within like a furnace.

The glass between them trembles, as though it wants to open like skin.

Jace staggers back. The hum presses harder, vibrating through his boots. He clutches the black key on his ring, and for a moment he swears the seams on the man’s body shift, arranging themselves into the shape of a wolf’s eye.

The figure slams both hands against the glass. The sound is muffled, but Jace feels it in his bones. The seams flare brighter. Then the figure collapses, twitching, light seeping out like dying embers.

Jace runs back to the truck, slams the door, and drives blind into the dark.

Bishop’s candle has gone out. He didn’t blow it. The flame folded in on itself, leaving a black wick curled like a tongue. His room smells of wax and copper.

He grips the cassette so hard the edges cut his palm. He doesn’t care. The hum is worse now, layering itself into cadences, a rhythm so familiar he wants to vomit. Sing the city still. That line has haunted him for years, scratched in red ink in the Choir’s books. He thought it meant silence. Now he understands: it means submission.

The window glass bulges inward, faint but real, as though the outside air is pressing against it. He staggers forward and sees his reflection again but his double is bleeding. Long seams cut across its skin, glowing faintly red. The reflection smiles, blood dribbling from the corners of its mouth.

Bishop claws the curtain closed, heart hammering. He drops the cassette. It lands with a wet smack, as though the floor itself is softening.

He whispers, “Not again. Not again.”

The hum answers with a sharp pulse, and he feels a hot sting across his own forearm. He looks down. A thin line is opening in his flesh, bleeding in rhythm with the note.

He presses his sleeve against it, trembling. The cut does not stop. It is not his. It belongs to the song.

The city groans. In sealed rooms, wounds open on the living.

In the subway, trapped commuters scream as thin red seams snake across their arms, their faces. Some fight it, clawing at the marks, but the flesh opens wider. Others sit very still, rocking and humming along with the note as though that will keep the splitting at bay.

In a nursing home, a nurse finds every patient in one ward bleeding from identical lines along their wrists, none of them deep enough to kill, all of them arranged in perfect parallel.

On the river, the passengers of the blind boat press their palms to the rails and find their hands bleeding without cut or cause.

The city bleeds in chorus.

...every vessel opens, every mouth made ready...

Mara screams for help, but no one answers. The boy’s arm pulses under her palm, blood seeping through her fingers. His lips move again, whispering words that do not belong to him: ...hush, hush, we open...

She wants to run. She wants to rip her hands away. But she stays, because if she lets go, she knows the wound will widen until he is nothing but a mouth of blood singing the hum’s name.

Jace drives fast and blind, teeth clenched, hands white on the wheel. He doesn’t look in the mirrors. He knows if he does, he’ll see the seams crawling across his own reflection, splitting his skin to let the song out.

Bishop wraps his arm tight, breath shuddering. He knows now. The blackout isn’t a failure. It’s a ritual. The city is the altar, the people the sacrifices.

And the wolf-eye has already opened one lid.

Mara’s patient bleeds words.
  Jace flees the glow of bleeding bodies.
  Bishop binds his arm but cannot bind the truth.

The blackout is no accident. The hum is no accident. The wounds are offerings.

And the city is learning to sing.

To be continued in Part Six  “Name of the Song.”