Chapter Two:-
The silence that rushed back in after the wrench hit the concrete was different than before. It wasn't the empty silence of the dead; it was a charged, electric quiet. It was the silence of two predators—or two prey—deciding whether to bolt or embrace.
The man in the garage didn't move. He was thin, wearing a flannel shirt that hung off his bony frame, and his hair was a nest of unwashed tangles. He looked like he had been living in the shadows of that garage for a century rather than a week.
"Arthur," the man repeated, testing the name as if words were a currency that had recently been devalued. "I'm Ben. I think. I haven't said it out loud in a while."
Arthur took a tentative step onto the oil-stained concrete. The smell of gasoline and old cardboard was suffocatingly human. It was a relief. "What were you doing, Ben? The clanging... I heard it from my porch."
Ben looked down at a disassembled bicycle on the floor. He had been trying to beat a bent rim back into shape. "I needed to move," Ben whispered. "I have a car, but the roads... they aren't right. And the noise. The engines are too loud now. Don't you feel it? Like every sound is a bruise?"
Arthur nodded. He understood. In a world of absolute zero, even a whisper felt like a scream. "I was heading out, too. I don't know where. Just... away from the empty houses."
"You shouldn't," Ben said sharply, his eyes darting to the open garage door. "The sun. It's getting louder, isn't it?"
Arthur felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Ohio spring. "You hear it too? The hum?"
Ben's face contorted. He walked to the edge of the light, peering up at the sky with a mixture of reverence and pure, unadulterated dread. "It's not just heat, Arthur. It's a frequency. When the power went out, I thought I'd finally get some peace. No more hum of the fridge or the streetlights. But then this started. It's like the earth is a bell and the sun is the hammer."
He turned back to Arthur, his grip tightening on the frame of the bike. "It's getting higher. Every day, the pitch goes up. What happens when it reaches a note we can't handle?"
Arthur looked back at the street. The golden retriever was gone. The suburbs looked like a high-resolution photograph—too still, too perfect, and utterly devoid of soul. He realized then that Ben wasn't just a survivor; he was a man vibrating on the edge of a total breakdown.
"We can't stay in a garage, Ben," Arthur said, his voice regaining some of its old authority. "If the 'sound' is bothering you, we need to find somewhere deep. A basement. A bunker. Somewhere with enough earth between us and the sky to muffle the world."
Ben looked at the bike, then at Arthur's rucksack. The terror in his eyes shifted slightly, replaced by the desperate, pathetic need for a leader.
"I have a map," Ben muttered, reaching into a workbench drawer. "The Millers... they had a cabin marked in the Hocking Hills. Caves. Lots of caves."
Arthur looked at the map, then back at the sun, which sat like a bloated, glowing eye in the center of the sky. He could feel it now—a localized throbbing in his temples that matched the shimmer of the heat waves on the road.
"Pack what you can," Arthur said. "We leave in ten minutes."
As Ben began to frantically shove canned peaches and bottled water into a duffel bag, Arthur stood at the threshold of the garage. He closed his eyes and listened.
The hum was no longer a low drone. It was a shimmering, metallic whistle, vibrating the very marrow of his bones. Ben was right. The volume was turning up. And Arthur wondered, with a sudden, sickening clarity, if they weren't the last men on earth, but merely the last ones whose ears hadn't yet burst from the pressure of the universe finally finding its voice