WolfsZone

Chapter 1: Pt 2.

The blackout is not silence. It is a mouth waiting to speak.

At first the city holds its breath, as if some giant hand pressed pause. But then, beneath the ordinary clatter of fear, doors slamming, tires screeching, a few scattered shouts another sound begins. Not a shout. Not even a noise in the air. It is lower than that, a pressure felt in the blood. A frequency no one asked to hear. A patient, bottomless hum.

It begins in the walls. In the bones. In the teeth.

Mara hears it between heartbeats. At first she thinks it is her own pulse, rattled and slowed by the adrenaline hammering through her. The boy on the stretcher wheezes against her hand as she squeezes the Ambu bag again. The plastic sighs. His chest rises. His lips twitch. She tastes metal in the back of her throat.

“Do you smell that?” a nurse mutters, pale face slicked with sweat. “Like pennies.”

“It’s the vents,” someone answers, though the vents are dead. “Old ductwork.” Their voice breaks, as though speaking the lie costs them something.

Mara’s rubber band snaps against her wrist again. She doesn’t even remember pulling it. The sound is sharp as a spark, but the hum swallows it instantly, leaving only the vibration in her bones. She wonders if she has gone faint, if her hearing has turned inward, the way it does right before you collapse. But no. She sees the nurse next to her stiffen, head cocked. They hear it too.

The orange emergency lights dim, flare, then settle into that ember glow again. Each bulb buzzes faintly, but not with electricity. The sound underneath them is too steady, too deliberate. A bass line that never falters.

Mara leans down over the boy. His breath rasps out, but layered under it is a whisper that does not belong to him. A hiss stretched into syllables, impossible but there, curling into her ear: ...count them, count them, every breath a coin...

Her skin prickles. She squeezes the bag harder, as if her grip could force the foreign whisper out of his lungs.

Far across the city, Jace kills the truck’s engine. He shouldn’t. He knows better. Outages can be chaos, and a running engine is a promise. But he wants to hear. The quiet is worse than the growl.

And there it is, laid bare. Not the normal buzz of high-voltage lines. Not the tremor of a live transformer. This is different. It’s lower, deeper, vibrating the marrow of the poles themselves. A note without source. A choir of one.

He steps down from the cab. Gravel crunches under his boots. The night tastes metallic. He runs his hand over the nearest pole like a man feeling for a heartbeat. The wood is cold. Colder than it should be. He presses his ear against it.

The hum pours through him, steady as tidewater. He hears faint rattling in the bolts. He swears they are singing. The line above shivers without wind, wires moving as though plucked by an unseen bow. The sound they make isn’t discord. It’s harmony. A chord building under the city, gathering weight.

His radio spits a burst of static. For half a second it isn’t static at all. It is words, slow, backward, as if wound into the noise itself: ...name it, name it...

Jace tears the radio from his belt and slams it back against the seat. The cab light flickers, dead, alive, dead.

He spits copper-tasting saliva onto the gravel and mutters, “Hell no. Not touching you.” His hand lingers near his ring of old keys anyway. They rattle faintly, though the truck is still.

Bishop lights another candle. The last one guttered fast, as though something sucked the oxygen away. His lighter clicks open and shut, open and shut. The rhythm doesn’t comfort him tonight. It sounds too much like the pulse hiding inside the hum.

The cassette lies on the table, black belly-up. He should burn it now. He doesn’t. Instead he watches the smoke of the candle bend toward the wall as though pulled by breath.

The hum is everywhere in the room now. It has settled into the radiator, the pipes, the glass of the window. The glass trembles minutely, a vibration like a throat readying to sing. He remembers long nights in Choir safehouses, the walls pulsing with just this sound. He remembers the way the youngest initiates would cry blood from their noses after hours of listening. He remembers how the older ones smiled when that happened.

He closes his eyes. The hum is still there, and worse it’s forming intervals. Not random, not noise. Notes, placed with purpose. He can almost see the staff paper in his mind, black marks blooming where the sound lands.

His throat tightens. He swallows and tastes rust.

“No,” he whispers. His voice quavers. “Not this city. Not again.”

The hum answers with a rise, subtle but undeniable, as though it heard his refusal and took offense.

The animals know before the people admit it. Dogs curl their bodies flat against the dirt, whining. Cats slink to high corners, ears flat, eyes wide. On the river, flocks of geese scatter from the water all at once, beating the air with frantic wings.

In the zoo, the wolves pace. Back and forth, back and forth, shoulders brushing the chain-link until sparks crackle. Their eyes catch the faint ember-glow of the failing emergency lights. For a moment, each iris burns red.

A zookeeper drops his keys. He bends to pick them up and hears the hum pulsing in the metal before his hand touches it. His heart seizes. He leaves the keys where they fell.

In the subway tunnels, where people huddle in cars that have stopped between stations, the sound grows worse. The steel rails ring softly, as though a bow is drawn across them. The car windows fog, then clear, then fog again without breath touching them. One commuter whispers, “Hear that? Sounds like it’s breathing.”

No one answers. They all hear it. None will say so.

...breathe with me, breathe with me...

Mara staggers back from the boy’s bed. Her ears roar with it. The charge nurse has both hands over her mouth, eyes brimming. The man in gray stares at the dark switchboard panel as if it were a coffin nailed shut.

The hum is louder now. Not volume, presence. Like it is filling the negative space between all other sounds. Every cough, every gasp, every footstep lands inside it, swallowed whole.

Mara hears monitors that should be dead clicking faintly, trying to keep time with the note. One screen flashes a red line. Not a heartbeat. A waveform, jagged and slow. She swears it twists for a moment into an eye, glowing ember-red, before flattening again.

The boy exhales another word not his own: ...hush...

She almost drops the Ambu bag. Her hands freeze. Her knuckles ache white.

Jace climbs into the truck and slams the door. The cab rattles. The keys on his chain clink together. The black one, the one stamped with the city’s old crest glows faintly in the dark. He doesn’t want to touch it. He does anyway.

The hum leaps up through his fingertips like an eager animal. For a moment, just a moment, he hears voices riding it. Too many to count, layered, whispering the same word over and over. He doesn’t know if it’s his name or not. He drops the keys. They fall silent, but the hum keeps going.

He grips the steering wheel. It vibrates under his palms, faint but steady. He feels as if the entire frame of the truck is nothing more than a tuning fork, and the city has plucked it.

Bishop sits back in his chair, chest heaving. He has heard this cadence before. Not exactly, but close enough. A fragment of the forbidden hymn, wound into the fabric of the city.

He remembers a line from one of the Bone Choir’s codices: Sing the city still. Let the six mouths open, and the seventh will breathe.

He never knew what it meant. He knows now. The hum is only the first mouth opening. The others will follow.

He leans forward and presses his forehead against the table. His skin burns against the wood, though the surface is cool. The candle flares, then gutters.

In the flame’s last shudder he sees it again: the wolf-eye. Ember slit, glowing in the wax. Watching.

He knocks the candle over. Hot wax splashes his hand. He doesn’t care.

The hum goes on.

...one mouth open, one mouth closed... the circle waits...

The city does not sleep. The blackout holds, and in its place the hum spreads, steady, patient, filling every wire, every bone, every breath. People whisper to each other in low voices, afraid of being overheard though no one is near. Every voice trembles against the note, sliding in and out of key.

It is only a sound. Only a vibration in the air. Yet it feels like a command.

Somewhere, something listens for an answer.

And deep below the streets, stone shifts against stone.

The hum does not stop. It will not.

In the ER, the boy’s next exhale carries not a word, but a chorus. For a heartbeat Mara hears dozens of voices rise from his throat, braided and wrong. She screams and clamps her hand over his mouth as if she can keep them in.

Jace jerks the wheel of his truck away from the hospital as the billboard across the street blazes white again. Not an advertisement this time, just static snowing thick as ash, falling toward him.

And Bishop, trembling in candlelight, forces himself to whisper a truth he has not spoken in years:

“It’s not power. It’s the hymn.”

The hum deepens, as if pleased to be recognized.

To be continued in Part Three  “The Trio.”