Chapter 2: The Weight of Silence
The morning sun through the car windows felt like a reproach. Jake had barely slept, every small sound—the settling of the car's metal, a distant bird call, the whisper of wind through empty streets—jerking him back to full alertness. The dead might not sleep, but they didn't make much noise while wandering, and that silence was almost worse than screaming would have been.
His backpack had refilled during the night. Five portions now instead of three—apparently his subconscious had counted the pharmacy family as "his people" for those few hours when he'd tried to save them. The guilt sat in his stomach like a stone. They were probably dead now, torn apart because he couldn't string together a coherent warning.
Jake forced himself to eat one of the cans of beans, though it tasted like ash. The food was real enough, substantial and filling, but every bite reminded him of his fundamental wrongness in this world. He was an alien thing, equipped with impossible abilities and terrible knowledge.
The city stretched out before him like an open wound. Smoke still rose from a dozen points on the skyline, but it was thin now, dissipating. The fires were burning themselves out with no one left to feed them. Cars sat abandoned at crazy angles where their drivers had tried to flee the initial chaos. A school bus had crashed into a storefront, its yellow paint bright and cheerful against the broken glass.
Jake checked his abilities like a pilot running through a pre-flight checklist. The death sense was passive but constant—a low-level awareness that prickled at the edge of his consciousness. Within about fifteen feet, he could feel the hollow voids where walkers shambled through the world. Right now, he detected three of them: one in the hospital lobby, one near the parking garage, and one shambling down the street about fifty yards away.
He concentrated on the distant walker, trying to push his awareness further. The strain felt like trying to force his eyes to see around a corner, but gradually his range expanded. Twenty feet. Twenty-five. Thirty. At the edge of his ability, he could sense more voids—the hospital was full of them, easily twenty or thirty walkers trapped inside.
Blood trickled from his nose. He wiped it away and tried not to think about what kind of damage he might be doing to his brain. The powers had a cost, and he was already learning to pay it.
Jake gathered his courage and slipped out of the car. The morning air was warm and humid, carrying scents that didn't belong in a city: decay, yes, but also the green smell of plants already beginning to reclaim abandoned spaces. Weeds were pushing through cracks in the sidewalk. Nature was patient, but it was also relentless.
He needed to get out of Atlanta, but first he had to try once more to save someone. Anyone. The weight of his foreknowledge was crushing him—all those deaths that could be prevented, all that suffering that could be avoided, if only he could speak the words.
Three blocks from the hospital, Jake found what he was looking for: a pharmacy with its metal security gate pulled halfway down. Behind it, he could see faces peering out through the gap—a man, a woman, two small children. The same family he'd tried to warn yesterday. They were still alive.
Relief flooded through him, followed immediately by desperate determination. He approached slowly, hands visible, trying to look as non-threatening as possible.
"Please," he called softly. "I need to talk to you. It's important."
The man appeared at the gate—middle-aged, wearing a mechanic's uniform with "Dave" embroidered on the pocket. His face was gaunt with stress and sleepless nights. "Stay back, man. We don't know if you're sick."
"I'm not sick. I'm trying to help." Jake stopped about ten feet away, just outside his death sense range. He couldn't feel any walkers nearby, which meant they had maybe minutes before some wandered close enough to hear this conversation. "You need to be very quiet. No music, no loud talking. They're attracted to sound."
Dave's expression shifted from suspicion to confusion. "What're you talking about? Who's attracted to sound?"
Jake tried to say 'the walkers' but what came out was "Vee talkers." He clenched his fists and tried again, speaking each word separately and clearly: "The. Dead. People."
"Vee. Ed. Purple."
The woman appeared beside Dave, fear stark in her eyes. "He's having some kind of breakdown, Dave. Brain damage or something."
"No, listen to me!" Jake's voice cracked with desperation. He tried again, slower: "People die, they come back wrong. They bite—"
"Purple tie, spray aim pack long. Spray light—"
A child started crying behind them, and Dave's face hardened. "Look, buddy, I don't know what's wrong with you, but you need to move along. We've got kids to protect."
Jake pressed his hands against his head, feeling like his skull might crack from the pressure. The speech block was absolute. He couldn't say walker, zombie, outbreak, CDC, anything that would give them the information they needed. The entity had made sure of that.
In desperation, he tried a different approach. He pointed at his mouth and shook his head, then pointed at his ears and nodded. He made biting motions with his hands, tried to act out people falling down and getting back up.
The woman whispered something to Dave, and he nodded grimly. "You need help, son, but we can't help you. We're barely holding it together ourselves."
Behind them, one of the children had found a battery-powered radio and was fiddling with the dial. Static filled the air, punctuated by bursts of music. Jake's death sense suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree—walkers were converging on the noise from every direction.
"Turn that off!" he screamed, pointing at the radio. But the words came out as "Gurn bat golf!" and the family recoiled from him like he was dangerous.
Dave started pulling the security gate down the rest of the way. "Get out of here! Leave us alone!"
"Please!" Jake threw himself against the gate, gripping the metal bars. He could feel them now—six walkers, then eight, then twelve, all shuffling toward the music. They'd be here in minutes. "They're coming! Turn off the music and hide!"
But all the family heard was gibberish, the ravings of someone they thought was mentally ill. The gate clanged shut, and Jake heard the scrape of heavy objects being dragged against it from the inside.
He stood there in the empty street, watching the pharmacy with its bright windows and its doomed family, and felt something break inside his chest. The first walker rounded the corner three minutes later—a teenage girl in a prom dress, her makeup smeared with blood and worse things. She was drawn to the radio's cheerful music like a moth to flame.
Jake could have stopped her. Could have commanded her to turn around, to go away, to leave the family alone. But what was the point? She was just the first. Behind her came more: a businessman missing half his face, an elderly woman whose hospital gown trailed behind her like a wedding dress, a construction worker still wearing his hard hat.
The radio kept playing, a golden-oldies station that some computer was still running somewhere. The Temptations sang about sunshine on a cloudy day while the dead gathered outside the pharmacy like carolers from hell.
Jake turned and walked away.
He couldn't watch it happen, couldn't stand there and see his failure unfold in real time. The sounds followed him for two blocks: the scraping of fingernails against metal, the increasingly frantic voices from inside the pharmacy, the radio still playing its incongruously cheerful music.
When the screaming started, Jake broke into a run.
He ran until his lungs burned and his legs wobbled, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the sound of his first real failure. The city blurred past him—empty cars, broken windows, scattered belongings that spoke of panic and flight. Everything was wrong here, tilted into nightmare, but the wrongest thing of all was him.
He was the anomaly. He was the one with impossible knowledge and supernatural powers walking through a world that operated by different rules. He could save people, but only if he could find a way around the cosmic gag order that prevented him from sharing what he knew.
Finally, exhaustion forced him to stop. He found himself in a residential area where small houses sat behind chain-link fences. Some had been abandoned in haste—front doors hanging open, cars in driveways with keys still in the ignition. Others showed signs of desperate last stands: boarded windows, furniture piled against doors, messages spray-painted on walls. "GONE TO MACON." "SARAH - WE'RE AT MOM'S." "GOD HELP US ALL."
Jake chose a house at random and slipped through the backyard gate. The kitchen window was broken, making entry easy. Inside, everything was covered with a fine layer of dust that spoke of abandonment, but the house felt empty rather than dangerous. His death sense detected nothing within its range.
He went through the motions of securing the space—checking doors, closing curtains, barricading the entrances. But his heart wasn't in it. The family at the pharmacy was dead by now, torn apart because he couldn't make himself understood. How many more would die because of his limitations?
That evening, Jake sat in the dark kitchen and practiced his abilities like a student cramming for finals. He found a dead rat in the yard—natural death, probably poison—and brought it inside. The necromancy was easier with something this small. He could make it twitch, even make it drag itself forward a few inches. But the effort left him nauseous and brought back the nosebleeds.
When he concentrated, he could feel other dead things in his range. A bird that had flown into a window. A cat that had starved when its owners fled. With enormous effort, he managed to make the cat stand up and take two stumbling steps before collapsing again. The victory felt hollow.
His backpack had refilled again while he practiced. Five meals, same as before. His subconscious had apparently decided that the pharmacy family counted as his people until the moment they died, then adjusted the count downward. The efficiency of it made him sick.
Jake curled up on a couch that smelled like someone else's life—fabric softener and dog hair and the lingering scent of coffee—and stared at the ceiling. Tomorrow he would try to find other survivors, people he could actually help without having to speak forbidden words. Tonight, he would lie awake replaying the sound of that cheerful music and the screaming that followed it.
Outside, Atlanta died a little more with each passing hour. And somewhere in the silence, Jake began to understand the true price of his power: it wasn't the nosebleeds or the exhaustion or even the mysterious costs yet to be revealed.
It was the weight of knowing exactly how much good he could do, and exactly how much the universe would allow him to accomplish. He was a god with duct tape over his mouth, a prophet whose words turned to gibberish the moment he tried to share his visions.
He had all the answers, and none of them mattered. That was his real curse, worse than death, worse than becoming one of the shambling hungry dead outside his windows.
Jake closed his eyes and tried not to think about tomorrow's failures.
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