Her Voice: Chapter Two

Dedicated to Sarah. May your voice always guide me home.

Table of Contents:

• Chapter One
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five

Day 385:

No one really remembers how it started, but I remember how it ended. Not with a roar, but with a whimper, as the last vestiges of humanity wandered the Earth with their tongues cut out.

It spread through language. Words became a pathogen. Communication was a death sentence. At one point, in a final act of desperation, people started cutting out the tongues of the infected. As if that would do anything. That’s when people started to refer to the infected as Hushed. Just like the disease itself, it caught on quickly.

Before long, everything went quiet.

As the sun set on another day, I climbed out onto the rickety, rusted metal of the radio tower I had chosen as my safe haven for the night. The only things I owned in the world were laid out on the metal platform, high above the ground.

A musty bedroll, a canteen for water, scraps of food wrapped in cloth, and an old solar-powered radio with a pair of wired noise-cancelling headphones. I unrolled a cloth, revealing a piece of stale bread. As I took a bite, I looked over the edge of the tower to the ground below.

A wandering pack of Hushed moved below me. I set down my bread and picked up the radio, checking that my headphones were plugged in. It was an old habit. Truthfully, it wouldn’t matter if the headphones ever came unplugged. I wouldn’t survive long enough to realize it.

I tuned the radio to 110.24FM. Static crackled through my ears.

My eyes wandered to the horizon. The sun was dipping beneath the threshold, bleeding hues of orange and red across the sky.

Any minute now.

"Hey there, world. It's me, Summer," a voice said.

A smile crawled across my face as my heart skipped a beat. Hers was the only voice I had heard in years. It was the only one I needed.

"This is day 385 of me shouting into the void. I've got a new poem for all you silenced souls out there. If anyone is listening to this by chance, this one goes out to you."

I laid down on my bedroll and stared up at the evening sky.

"This one's called Cracked Smiles," she said.

---

Cracked Smiles

Long ago, there was a time,

When I thought love was mine,

Two hearts set ablaze with fire,

Two souls, the object of our desire.

*

Behind your eyes, a secret resides,

All your promises, nothing but lies,

You built me up, only to let me down,

In this ocean of tears, now I drown.

*

Hollow words, filled with venomous spite,

Your voice hushed in a single night,

I let the darkness take you from me,

Opened my eyes so I could finally see.

*

For so long, I thought myself broken,

Cast adrift in a world unspoken,

I look in the mirror, and back at me,

Cracked smiles are all that I see.

*

I am fractured down to my soul,

Loneliness has come to take its toll,

I hold out hope in this barren sea,

One day, love will find its way to me.

---

A tear rolled down my cheek as she finished her poem. I could feel the pain in her voice. I shared in her cold loneliness.

"If you're out there, thanks for listening. I hope you liked tonight's poem. Don't forget, if you want to find me, just follow the numbers. Good night, world; this is Summer, signing off."

An audible click came through my headphones, followed by a robotic voice reading off a string of numbers.

35, 39, 29, 139, 44, 21. They were the same numbers every night, and I had spent countless nights studying them. They were latitude and Longitude. Coordinates.

I picked up the paper map organized among my possessions and unfurled it under the last light of the day. A location was already circled, along with a line of marks showing my path.

Two more days, and then I'd finally be there. After so many nights listening to her voice, I'd finally meet her.

I rolled the map back up and fell asleep thinking only of her.

Click Here to Read Chapter Three.