I watched, terrified, as the characters started to twist and flex through the air towards her, the hooks extending to reach her with something that looked like hunger.
"ANNETTE!" I screamed, but she didn’t appear to hear me.
Instead, she threw her arms apart and made a cross shape of her body—like a sacrifice—and then the hooks and eyes and squiggles and lines closed in around her, superimposing their alien message over her. At first they fizzed and skated across her skin, and then they stopped moving and seemed to sink into her flesh.
There was a smile on her face as her body absorbed the letters of that terrible language, and I think that scared me more than anything else I was seeing.
Her smile.
I turned and ran, back the way Lilly and I had come.
Chapter 34
Lilly caught up with me before I made it back to the road. She wasn’t even out of breath.
"Where’s Annette?" she asked.
I shook my head.
"She wouldn’t come," I said. "She actually wanted to become one of them."
I thought Lilly would be angry that I couldn’t persuade Annette, but instead she just nodded.
"I guess she finally found a way to fit in…"
I looked at her blankly.
"A few years ago me and Annette were at camp together. Girl Guides, if you must know, but tell anyone else and you’re dead.
"Anyway, long story short and all that, we kind of paired up while we were there. We were talking one night, out under the stars, and it was probably because we weren’t really friends that she confided in me.
"She told me about how she had never felt like she fitted in, that there was this huge weight of expectation that everyone put on her, but that no matter how hard she tried she always felt like an outsider, an impostor, a fake. She’d even thought about killing herself because she couldn’t bear the idea of going through life alone.
"Nothing I said helped, and after camp she never spoke to me again. She showed me a part of herself that was secret, and it would have got in the way if I’d been the one to approach her."
Lilly took a deep breath and continued.
"You did your best, Kyle. You’re a nice guy, you know that?"
She gave me a smile, but I didn’t feel like a nice guy.
A nice guy would have found a way to save Annette.
"So the silo can turn us into one of them?" Lilly said. "Are you tempted?"
I shook my head.
"Not even hardly," I said.
Lilly raised an eyebrow.
"My parents were barely getting along," I explained. "Now it’s like nothing ever happened to disturb their happiness."
"Is that so bad?"
"Not if you like lies so much you want to live one," I snapped. "My dad ran off, and I don’t see why we should forget it. Forgive it? Sure, we could do that. But forget? Forget the sadness he caused? That would be plain wrong."
"You think that sadness is better than happiness?"
"No. But it is important."
"Because we learn from it?" Lilly asked.
I nodded.
"The real question is do we tell the others?" I said.
"Tell them what?"
"That they just have to go to Naylor’s farm and the nightmare’s over for them."
"There are few enough of us around as it is," Lilly said. "Why on earth would we want to tell them that?"
A secret then.
Shared between Lilly and me.
I liked that.
We walked down the road to meet the other two.
Chapter 35
We joined up with the others and we told our lie.
Nothing happened, we said.
It almost made me want to retract the lie when Kate O’Donnell gave us a triumphant I told you so look, but Lilly and I had made our pact of silence, so we just fell into step with her and Mr Peterson and carried on down the road.
My stomach felt empty and hollow and I wished one of us had had the foresight to bring some kind of provisions along. It had been a long time since I had last eaten.
That made me think of the second can of Red Bull, and I put my hand in my pocket to pull it out. There was a dull, metallic sound as if the can had hit against something in my pocket, but I didn’t think about it at the time, because I was already greedily pulling the ring pull and taking a couple of sips. I handed the can to Lilly and she smiled, drank a bit, handed it back.
I offered the can to the adults—Mr Peterson took a drink, Kate just frowned at the can and shook her head—and we kept on walking.
It was Mr Peterson who heard it first.
I turned around and saw that he had stopped in the middle of the road behind us. He had his head cocked to the left and was cupping his ear with his hand. I motioned to Lilly and Kate and walked back to where he was standing.
"You OK there, Mr P?" I asked.
He looked exhausted, his face red and blotchy, dark shadows under his eyes, and his graying hair was sticking out at strange angles.
"Can you hear it?" He asked in a breathless voice and he sounded so earnest and . . . and afraid, I guess, and it contrasted with the silly cupped ear thing so that I almost burst out laughing.
Almost.
But then I heard it too.
Lilly and Kate had joined us but I hardly noticed them arrive.
I was listening to the sound.
That is if "sound" is the right word for it. Because it seemed like it was made up of a lot of sounds: a high-pitched hiss like gas escaping at pressure from a ruptured pipe; an insectile chitter like a locust swarm; that deep, bass vibration we’d heard in the village; a high, keening wail.
It sounded distant.
But not that distant.
Certainly not distant enough.
And I realized that I had heard the sound before, back at Kate O’Donnell’s house, just before she shut her computer down.
"What is that?" Kate asked.
"Nothing good," I said.
The noise drew closer.
I’m not exaggerating, my skin bristled with gooseflesh.
There was something about the sound that hit me at a primal level. A bit like how the sound of a Tyrannosaur would have affected a tiny mammal that stumbled into its killing grounds.
Closer, the sound was terrifying.
It sounded like something was out there in the half-light, getting closer and closer to us with every passing second. Something awful, something dangerous, something that we could not even begin to imagine the shape or size of.
We started walking, moving away from the sound. It was the only thing to do. Whatever was out there was coming after us, I was certain.
Lilly’s walking pace speeded up, and we all matched her speed.
Everyone’s face reflected their fear.
Fear of whatever was making that sound.
Getting closer with every second.
Chapter 36
We ran.
A jog became a run became a sprint and still that sound was close on our heels.
My eyes were squeezed shut and I had stopped thinking of anything except that noise behind us.
Suddenly I realized: the noise was no longer behind us.
It was to the side of us.
Running parallel to the road, across the fields, shadowing us.
Running parallel to us.
Running to overtake us.
Except, of course, running isn’t the right word for it at all. Sure, I could hear it crashing through the undergrowth at great speed, but there were no footsteps. Just this weird phasing static that was more like some stereo-panning effect from a video game than an actual sound in the real world.