WolfsZone

The blackout and the hum have already chosen their audience. Three lives, three threads pulled tight in the dark. Each one hears it differently, but the song is the same. None of them knows yet that they have been placed on the circle, that their names are already written into its teeth.

Mara Kline is drowning in breath. Every squeeze of the Ambu bag feels heavier than the last, as if the boy’s lungs are filling with wet cement. His chest rises sluggishly, falls too quickly, and all the while that low vibration presses inside her skull. The monitors are dead, but she swears she hears them ticking anyway, keeping time with something buried under the tile.

The charge nurse staggers past, eyes glassy. A woman screams in another room raw, high, animal. Mara glances up. The emergency lights waver. For a moment she thinks she sees smoke drifting through the vents, though they are cold. No smell of fire. Only that taste of iron.

She closes her eyes. For an instant she’s back with a different child, a little girl who never woke from anesthesia, her skin gray against the white sheets. The hum swells, and Mara realizes with horror that it’s that rhythm. The same desperate beeping, translated into one long, merciless note. The boy beneath her breathes out another whisper, and though she cannot catch the word, it makes her teeth ache.

She whispers back, “Not you, not you.” And she keeps squeezing, as if her hands alone could hold back the dark.

Jace Rourke drives into streets that no longer look like streets. Every block is another dead organ in a body too large to comprehend. Houses huddle in shadows, their windows turned to dull mirrors. Streetlamps lean without glow. The only lights are the ember-orange emergency bulbs burning in hospital windows, and even they look sick.

The radio on his dash hisses again. “Feeder three,” a voice crackles, then dissolves into static. Another voice pushes through, soft and stretched, not anyone from Dispatch. ...stay off the lines, stay off the lines, the pack walks them now...

Jace grips the wheel hard enough to hurt. He has never believed in warnings. Pain proves you’re alive. That’s what he tells himself, over and over. But this, this doesn’t feel like pain. It feels like the world is trying to vibrate itself apart.

He parks beneath a transformer that should be silent but isn’t. The metal sings with the hum, vibrating like a struck bell. He lays his hand on the casing. For one heartbeat he swears he feels fur. Coarse, stone-cold fur. He jerks his hand away and spits again, the copper taste pooling thick in his mouth.

“You want me, come get me,” he mutters into the dark. The hum answers with a shiver that runs through the wires overhead, a ripple down the whole block.

Bishop Harlan rocks forward on his chair. The candle has burned low, wax spilling in white rivers over the table’s edge. The cassette lies in his lap, heavy as stone. His throat is tight, his breath shallow. He can hear the hum layering itself now, harmonics rising like hidden staircases.

Once, long ago, he taught frightened families how to drag their children out of the Choir’s grip. He broke locks, burned hymn sheets, held mothers while they wept. Now he feels the same corruption he once fought moving through his own chest, wrapping around his lungs like wire.

He fumbles for the lighter. Click. Click. The spark flashes in rhythm with the hum. Not against it. With it. He drops the lighter. It clatters across the floor and spins to a stop. The sound dies instantly, swallowed whole by the vibration that owns the room.

The window glass pulses, once, twice, like the slow beat of a heart. His reflection stares back: gaunt face, eyes wide, mouth trembling open. For a fraction of a second the reflection isn’t his at all. The eyes are ember-red, slit and sharp. The mouth is smiling.

Bishop staggers back. The chair tips. He crashes against the wall. The hum does not falter. It thickens, as though pleased to be recognized.

The city is caught in it. Every block hums like a string. On the river, the water trembles in low ripples though the wind is still. Pigeons roosting under the bridge launch into the night as one, scattering in panic.

In apartments, parents hush crying children without knowing why their own hands shake. Phones glow faintly though their batteries are dead, faint gray light pulsing in sync with the vibration. A few brave souls press them to their ears. They hear only one thing: breathing. Slow, patient breathing that does not belong to them.

...three names, three mouths, three hands on the wire...

Mara braces her forehead against the boy’s. His skin is hot. She can feel the hum in his skull, as though his head is a drum tuned to a frequency she cannot ignore. She whispers his name though she doesn’t know if he can hear it. It feels like defiance just to say it.

Jace pulls his key ring from his pocket. One key black, scarred, stamped with the city crest buzzes faintly in his palm. He closes his fist around it. The hum climbs into his bones. For a moment he hears something like a howl riding the current.

Bishop lifts the cassette, hands shaking. The label has peeled, and beneath it red plastic gleams like fresh meat. He doesn’t want to put it in the deck. He knows he will. His mouth moves before he can stop it. “The hymn,” he whispers. His voice sounds wrong, like half his, half something older.

Three strangers, scattered across the city. Each one chosen, though none of them know why. The blackout was the call. The hum is the answer.

And somewhere deep below, something vast stirs, opening ember eyes in the dark.

The hum sharpens. Not louder, just clearer. It threads itself into words, into syllables no throat should shape.

Mara hears the boy’s lungs exhale a chorus not his own.
  Jace hears the transformer moan like an animal in heat.
  Bishop hears his own voice echo back from the window, speaking in perfect time with the hum: “We begin.”

The circle is closing.

To be continued in Part Four   “Billboard Eye.”