Re Deadly Silence Novels & Stories

Desperately. And everything goes silent.

Then reaches for the wrapper, licks a smear of chocolate from the inside, and looks away like she hasn’t seen him do it before. She says nothing. That is becoming a skill. Outside, the city has changed voices. The first day was sirens and screaming. The second was breaking glass, car alarms, distant gunshots. Now there is a quieter sound underneath everything. Shuffling. Waiting. The dead aren’t fast. That’s the one mercy. They gather where noise happens and stay there, patient as unpaid debt.

And oh my God, you don’t understand how insane that was, because one second I was lying here, choking on the wet slap-slap-slap of bodies colliding and her screaming his name like she was being baptized in fire, and the next it just vanished. Like someone ripped the plug out of the universe. And you’d think silence would be a relief after what I just heard, but no, it was worse, because silence means something is waiting, silence means someone is watching, silence means something is about to crawl out of the dark and eat me alive.

He's building a server. Silas threw an image onto the main screen. It was a frequency analysis of the Gray Zone. Usually, static looks like random noise a messy scribble of lines. This static was patterned. It looked like a barcode. Repeating. Infinite. "The Silence isn't empty," Silas whispered. "It's full of data. Petabytes of it. Streaming directly into the minds of the people trapped in the Dead Zone." "What kind of data?" I asked. "Noise," Silas said. "Short, looping bursts of sensory input. Colors. Sounds. Dopamine

The silence was a physical weight, pressing down on the three of us in the oppressive gloom of the dying world. The Astropheles was a dark, bronze tomb behind us. Lyra was gone. The void-predator was gone. The only sound was the wind, which wasn't wind at all, but the whisper of a planet's consciousness dissolving into static. It was the sound of a story ending.

I knew what it was like to want to tell someone something desperately, and not being able to make a sound. My muteness cost me my voice. Fear cost Nora hers. But we were safe now. Kyle was gone. Wasn’t he?

The sweet air was shattered by a recording and photos that no one expected, splashing across the screen for all to see. Whispers and gasps swirled around me, growing louder by the second. "The Wallace family sure knows how to put on a spectacle!" "He's marrying his brother's widow?" "Doesn't Emily see what's happening?" "Perhaps they've joined forces to kill Jeffrey so that there's more inheritance to go around." Chaos reigned on the stage. Emily's screams pierced the air, begging for the screen to be shut off, her earlier joy wiped away in an instant. Margaret, catching sight of the screen's contents, collapsed. This time, it was not for show.

And so, my heart beat on, slowly and faintly. - One day, an unwelcome guest came to our little sanctuary. Roanna knelt beside my legs, sobbing and pleading, "Miss Palmer, please… Please tell Scott to talk to me again! I really love him, and I can't live without him!" Mary burst out from the kitchen, waving a kitchen knife. "You shameless b*tch! How dare you show your face?" Roanna raised her chin in defiance, shouted, "Kill me then! I can't live without Scott, so kill me!"

Everything turned dark and silent. *********

“I am sorry, I was just trying to keep you from murdering someone in public.” His expression shifted - dark, unreadable. His eyes trailed across my face, lingering on my lips. Then his hand reached up, fingertips grazing my cheek. He always wore the same damn expression. Blank, unmoved, like nothing in this world could touch him. But somehow, in the silence and the stillness, he made sure I and everyone else felt it all - the cold, the control, the darkness wrapped beneath his skin.