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They say the fall of man would come in fire or flood—judgment passed down by gods we barely believe in. But they were wrong.
The end came quietly.
Not with a bang or a blaze, but like a whisper in the back of your skull. A soft frequency slipping beneath the surface of your thoughts. The kind of thing you'd never notice until it was too late. Not a roar. A hum. Gentle. Insistent. The kind of sound you almost forget is there. The kind that burrows under the skin and waits.
It traveled through the tools we trusted most—screens, satellites, signal towers. In the beginning, it was just static. A little distortion in the air. A flicker on your TV. A pause in your song. A shiver crawling up your spine during a phone call. Unremarkable. Easy to ignore.
Then the blackouts started.
It wasn't just the lights going out. It was everything. Entire cities, dark and dead. Skyscrapers vanished into shadow. Highways choked with stalled cars and frozen bodies. Emergency broadcasts that never came. Phones that rang and rang with no one on the other end. Hospitals without power. Planes falling from the sky. Satellites blinking out one by one, like stars being snuffed.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
And then came the storms.
No warning. No logic. Just violence. Rain that fell sideways. Thunder that shattered glass. Nights without a sky—clouds so thick they swallowed even the moon. Winds that tore roofs from houses and left them miles away, twisted in the trees. The ocean surged, swallowing coastlines and dragging entire towns into its mouth. No one could explain it. No one was left who could try.
And when the storms passed… things changed.
The animals came back first.
At first, we thought it was nature reclaiming the ruins. Crows lined the power lines. Coyotes roamed the streets. Packs of wild dogs appeared where people used to gather. But they weren't right. They moved wrong. Too smooth. Too in sync. Like a single organism with a thousand bodies.
We told ourselves it was adaptation. Mutation. Rabies, maybe.
But then we saw their eyes.
They weren't wild. They weren't feral.
They were aware.
And they were watching us.
When the first human turned, we thought it was a fluke. A man in downtown Chicago tore his family apart with his bare hands. Surveillance footage showed him walking calmly out of the building, head cocked like he was listening to something only he could hear.
Then more followed.
People changed. Fast. Not sick—transformed. One moment, they were arguing with a neighbor. The next, they were ripping out throats, moving with terrifying precision. No hesitation. No fear. And when they finished, they didn't run. They stood still. Listening. Waiting. Like they were receiving instructions.
We started calling it the Rot. It sounded poetic. Safe. Like decay. Like something slow.
But this wasn't slow.
And it wasn't dumb.
These weren't the stumbling corpses we grew up fearing. No dragging limbs. No vacant stares. They sprinted. Climbed. Hid. Planned. They worked in formation. Took down patrols like military units. I once saw a group of them flank a convoy, block off the exit, and force the survivors into a dead end they'd prepared ahead of time.
That wasn't instinct.
That was war.
And it didn't stop with people.
The infection crossed species with terrifying ease. Dogs, rats, birds. Even whales washed ashore with eyes that seemed to know us. Wolves came down from the mountains in formation. Silent. Watching. Biding time. The infection didn't consume—it repurposed. It hollowed out the host and filled it with something else.
It wasn't rage. It wasn't hunger.
It was control.
And the scariest part? We couldn't see how it worked.
We couldn't trace the infection. Couldn't isolate it. Blood tests came back normal. CT scans showed nothing but healthy brains. But the behavior changed. The eyes changed. People who'd been infected stopped being people—but not all at once. First came the disorientation. Then the silence. Then the stillness—like they were listening to something only they could hear.
That's when the whispers started.
About the signal.
They said it was in the air. In the power lines. In the white noise. A frequency too low to hear, but not too low to feel. Survivors talked about buzzing in their bones. A pressure behind their eyes. Dreams that weren't theirs. One man walked into a fire because a voice told him to. Another sat in a bathtub for three days, eyes wide open, just… smiling.
They said the signal was alive.
And that it was recruiting.
Some people are more vulnerable than others. No one knows why. Maybe genetics. Maybe exposure. Maybe luck. But once it finds you, it doesn't let go. You stop dreaming your own dreams. Your thoughts echo. Your hands move without permission. Your skin starts to crawl when you hear static. You don't know what's you and what's it.
I've seen survivors rip out their own eardrums to make it stop.
The ones who resist the longest… they suffer the most.
And the ones who've been infected the longest? They start to speak again.
That's the worst part.
They talk.
Not like zombies, not in groans or growls. They speak. With voices you remember. With smiles that look too real. They tell you things only your loved ones could've known. Childhood secrets. Inside jokes. Regrets whispered through tears. I saw a woman fall to her knees when her infected husband sang the lullaby he used to hum to their baby. She didn't even try to run.
The infected wear our faces. They wear our memories. They don't kill you.
They convert you.
And they want us to join them.
They say it's peace. Unity. Evolution.
We say it's obliteration.
Because once the signal has you, you're no longer you. You're a relay tower. A walking transmitter. A node in the network. And it keeps growing. Every new infected is a new antenna. Every new voice a stronger signal.
This isn't about survival anymore.
This is a war for the mind.
And me?
My name's Sky.
I don't remember my last name. Or maybe I've just chosen to forget it. I was sixteen when the first city went dark. Twenty-one now. Maybe. We stopped counting birthdays when the calendars stopped printing.
I'm one of the last who can still think without the static. I don't know why. Maybe something in me's broken. Maybe that's the only reason I'm still here.
I'm writing this from what's left of a lighthouse.
It used to be a beacon for ships. Now it's a beacon for us—a resistance tower broadcasting on analog waves, patched together with ancient tech and scavenged parts. Everything here is hardwired. Nothing wireless. Nothing digital. Just wires and copper and hope.
We call it the Black Tower.
There are thirteen of us here. Engineers. Runaways. Former soldiers. Ghosts who refused to fade. We take shifts guarding the perimeter. One of us reads old books to keep from forgetting how stories sound. Another bakes bread in an oven powered by solar panels and spit. We have three kids, two dogs, and a pigeon that likes to steal buttons.
We're not heroes. We're just free.
At least for now.
Every few weeks, we pick up a signal. Not the signal—theirs. But someone else. A pocket of survivors whispering through analog static. A woman singing to a baby. A man reading Shakespeare into the void. A teenager listing the names of everyone he's lost. Sometimes they cut off mid-sentence. Sometimes they never return.
But sometimes… they answer.
There are others like us. Not many. But enough.
We call ourselves The Untouched. And we're trying to build something. A network. A map. A chance.
But time is running out.
The infected are evolving. Learning. They've started using our words. Our tactics. Our tools. One of them mimicked our distress code. Lured an entire group into a trap. Only two made it out.
We can't keep hiding forever.
So we've started pushing back.
Shortwave raids. Sabotage missions. Small wins. We're not fighting to win. Not yet. We're fighting to remember who we are. To remind the world that we're still here.
That we haven't given up.
I don't know if this message will reach you. I don't know if you're real. But if you're reading this… you're still free.
Or at least, you think you are.
Be careful with the screens.
Be careful with the voices.
And if you hear the hum…
Run.