Can you hear me? it begins. Look up…
She stands at the edge of the forest, listening to the indefensible beauty of the singer’s flat, tuneless tenor, and whispers the melody into the shadows.
The tall man watches the girl. He stands absolutely still, staring at her through a gap in the bushes, and although she is so close he can see the freckles on her ears, she does not notice him.
What is she?
She is different from him. Smaller, softer, yes—he knows what a female is—but also something else. A fundamental contrast that has nothing to do with her physical shape. Something ephemeral that he can’t explain.
The brute knows what it is. The brute is ecstatic about it. Its cloud of hands swarms around the girl, caressing her face, hissing into the man’s mind:
This. This. This.
The man doesn’t understand. He feels his hollowness lurching toward her, an angry prisoner flinging itself against the walls of his belly, but he doesn’t move. What? he asks. What do you want?
THIS.
His foot lifts off the ground. Left leg up, forward—
“Look up… Look up…”
He halts. An incredible sound is coming out of the girl’s mouth. He has heard similar sounds inside his head—words—but they are always short and blunt, devoid of tone, like the thud of heavy boots on asphalt. This is wondrously different.
“The clouds are parting…the window’s open…and don’t you own a pair of wings…?”
These are not just words. They bend and stretch and toy with pitch in a way that somehow elevates their meaning, infusing them with something beyond information. He feels the hairs on his neck stand up.
TAKE! the brute insists, growing furious. FILL!
Not yet, the man snaps back. I want to see if…
He opens his mouth and forces air through it. A harsh, phlegmy note honks out of him like an old bicycle horn. He wants to blush, but his blood is too congealed.
The girl’s mouth clamps shut. She pulls out her earbuds and scans the trees with wide eyes.
“Dad…?” she says, backing away.
The tall man starts to move toward her, but another person suddenly appears by her side, this one holding a gun.
“What’s wrong?” this much bigger person says in a much different voice, harsher and less tonal, closer to the boot stomp of the tall man’s thoughts.
“Nothing,” the girl says. “I thought I heard something.”
The sound of her special words—singing—rings in the tall man’s head, gently teasing the tone-deaf idiot that lives there. Come on, they seem to say. Try a little harder. The idiot in his head backs away from the girl’s voice as he backs away from her father’s gun.
He is glad he has information in his head instead of feelings. He is proud of himself for knowing what to do. The brute screams in protest as he creeps back into the forest, but he shoves it down. When he is a safe distance away, back in the smothering darkness of the woods, it finally surrenders. The cloud of hands goes limp, dejected, then slowly gathers itself and floats off in a new direction.
Soon, it growls at him, and although the man still isn’t sure what he’s agreeing to, he nods.
Soon.
Nora is in Washington D.C., at the community center, doing practice volleys with her teammates.
Bump. Set. Spike. vstr w/spap>
She has managed to reduce everything to this. When a cult burns down her school, when a soldier corners her in a dark room, when she finds her parents on the floor with a pipe and powder, laughing and screaming like things born in Hell, she comes here. She puts on shorts. She hits the shiny white ball again and again and as long as she’s here, the ball is all she has to think about. Keeping it aloft.
The community center is the one place that hasn’t changed much in the upheaval. Its ping-pong table, its stained furniture, its snack machines and painfully earnest free condom dispensers—everything is still familiar, even the tired faces behind the help counter. Not because the place is somehow safe from the decline, but because it was already at the bottom before things fell. Nothing here will change until the bottom drops out. Until the president appears on TV to give the final goodnight and good luck, to cut everyone loose to scavenge in the dark.
“Girls!” a staff lady shouts over the sound of their squeaking sneakers. They all stop and look at her. The ball hits the floor. “You should come watch this.”
They file into the lobby. All the staff people are crowded around the small TV in the corner of the room. Someone raises the volume until the speakers rattle, and Nora strains to make out the words through all the digital distortion and static.
“Logic is no longer enough,” says a man being interviewed in what appears to be a bomb shelter. “We have moved past the point where science alone can offer answers to our predicament. It’s grown too large for that.”
“What’s he talking about?” Nora whispers to the staff lady. The lady doesn’t respond or move her eyes from the screen.
“My question for you, Doctor,” the host says, “is whether you felt this way yesterday, or if this is simply a reaction to today’s news.”
“Today’s news?” The doctor chuckles bitterly. “This is not today’s news. This is us finally acknowledging what’s been happening all over the world for years.”
“And when did you learn about it?”
“Last summer. A few days after my wife died in a car crash, when I woke up and looked out my bedroom window and saw her standing in the front yard, gnawing on a human head.”