Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

“Sister mine. Be underneath with me now, now and forever. Breathe. Touch me as only father ever touched me. Oh, love me…”

And Sophie woke screaming.

Screaming, stumbling. By the time she was fully awake, she had run, tripped over the treadmill, fallen over Lacie’s cot, crawled out through the corridor and the door seal, and she was sobbing in a fetal embrace by the Great Room’s black-ringed floor drain.

She was going mad, mad all alone and her reality was crumbling away. Monoliths of impossible horror were rumbling out of fissures and they were rising, causing earthquake and tidal surge, blotting out the sun. And all of this horror was so, so welcome, because the only thing more unbearable than Sophie’s nightmare was the truth.

What had happened, what would never happen. What all they had done to the world.

Oh God, this is real. They burned it all.

She needed another voice. Another someone. The Valium, the guns, the morphine, it was all too close, all too deliciously tempting. She could not survive much longer without speaking to another, sharing secrets with someone else.

Knowing that someone else was out there, one who would not want to butcher her. Someone listening, someone understanding. Someone whose suffering would make her seem real again.

And she went to the work table, and she readied the radio.

If she could not speak to Mitch, she could still speak to someone . Perhaps even only listen. She just needed to be gravely, imperiously careful.

She put on the headphones, powered up, opened her notebook, and went through all of the intricate steps to listen in on the Fort Morgan survivor’s signal.

He was there.

It was the same voice Sophie had heard long before, the panicked voice when she had first learned how to scan on the Grundig radio. But that voice was lingering now, broken, and it was dying. The young man sounded exhausted, his voice hoarse and emotionless as he was obviously reading from a transcript. Reading, perhaps, for the hundredth time.

“—rict Justice Center. Nor, nor the Plains Medical —”

A burst of static sent his droning voice into oblivion. Sophie took her fingers off the broad scanner dial, and used the fine-tune scanner to move through the signal and return to it with more precision.

When she found him once again, the young man was almost whispering:

“—ot, I repeat do not turn off Platte Thirty-Four or approach to within one hundred meters, either on foot or in vehicles, without raising your hands behind your head and kneeling, to wait. To. To wait for weapons search. Triage measures are in extreme effect. Skills are — required skills in order of emergency priority are…”

The signal began to fade away. Sophie took her hands off of her headphones and shifted the heavy radio around on the metal table, wondering if this had any effect on the transmission or its clarity. Most likely not. But she wanted to hear this man, to apologize for not letting him know that she had been out there listening through all the terror just after the impacts, to—

The hoarse whisper faded in again.

“—or if your fam-… your group… is unwilling to be divided, do not, I repeat do not approach. All materiel is subject to seizure. Citizens, citizens of Asian descent, up to and including purported Air Force or Army personnel, can no longer be admitted.”

Sophie frowned. Had she heard that right? It didn’t make any sense. She had believed with all her heart that the Russians or Ukrainians had started the war. Perhaps the Iranians. But what if she was wrong? Had there been anyone left alive long enough to actually invade the continental United States? Asian? Did he mean the Chinese?

And as she struggled to puzzle through this, the voice droned on without her:

“You must, must immediately answer all questions in English. Silence, regardless of trauma or injury, will be interp-… interpreted as hostility. Ah.” The man sounded delirious, tormented. “Ah, God.” It was several seconds before the broadcast continued. “Hostile. Hostility. If you make eye contact with anyone on our premises, you kneel. Do not approach dead bodies. Do not attempt looting, do not force doors, or, or investigate barricades. Attempts to use rubble as cover will be regarded as enemy incursion and met with immediate and lethal force. All, all weapons will be confiscated. That’s all. I… I know there’s no one else, no one else going to come, but if you —”

Sophie could not stand it any longer. She adjusted her microphone and pressed her transmittal key.

“Fort Morgan,” she said, “NOAA Fort Morgan, this is Rogue. Please respond.”

She released the key and waited. She was met with silence. Had she somehow broken the connection? Was her outgoing volume on? She was still far less than confident with the radio and all its technicalities. She took in a breath to speak again, but the young man — far more alert, his voice quavering with emotion — was broadcasting again before she could transmit a second time.

“Repeat?” The young man swallowed. “Can you r-repeat that?”

“This is Rogue,” Sophie sent again. “I hear you.”

The effect was immediate. The man said, “Oh my God.” There was a clack and rustle as he must have dropped his headphones or his microphone onto a papered surface. Then, whether he intended to send or simply did not realize he had left his channel open, he was speaking to someone else in a distant and ghostly voice. “Frank! I have another one! Thirteen days. She’s…” More rustling. The voice grew indeterminate. And when it returned, coming nearer: “No, no Morse. Voice. Far? I don’t know, I don’t know. Go. Go get the Commander.”

Then the voice was in her ears again, much louder. Too loud. Sophie turned her volume down. The young man spoke strangely, as if he was inhaling a shuddering breath at the same time. He said, “Rogue? Rogue, are you there? Can you identify yourself on white?”

On white? She didn’t know what that meant. She transmitted. “I don’t think I can.”

“I, ah. I understand.” The young man did not seem to know what to say. “Take… take your time.”

Sophie said nothing. She waited.

Some seconds later, the man sent, “Rogue, listen. I’m being recorded. Okay?”

His voice broke open. Sophie was not certain she could fathom the implications of this exceedingly strange thing to say. The man sounded more than exhausted, he sounded hurt and terrified. Was he dying?

Regarding her silence as something unsurprising, the young man rustled his papers. He cleared his throat and asked her in that odd, dead tone she had first heard from him: “Are there any, any other female survivors with you, Rogue?”

What?

Blinking away her confusion, she replied, “I’ll answer that if you answer me first.”

Silence. She could almost feel the doubt coming down the line, the electric uncertainty. But when the young man spoke again, he sounded relieved. “All…” Static took the rest. He tried again. “All right.”

“Good.”

All right, Sophie. She rubbed her left eye, she bit the inside of one of her cheeks. This may be your only chance to get some answers.

Sophie made her voice gentle, serene. It was almost as if she were talking to Lacie in deep of night, trying to coax her back into sleep. “What is your name?”

The man responded at once, but he stammered and then tried again. “I don’t… I don’t think I’m authorized to —”

Sophie spoke gently over him. “I see.” She let ice creep into her voice. It was one of the talents she despised in herself, but her tone was perfect to lure the young man into speaking in a different timbre, his own, something closer to the truth. “In that case, I cannot answer any of your questions. Godspeed. Signing off.”