“What does that mean?” Joe asks quietly.
“Like, radio signals. There’s plenty going right by us all the time. I don’t know what happened with this one, why it’s displaying like this in the program, but anyway, it’s really broken up.” His hands fly over the keyboard. “But I pieced it together.” He gives Joe a meaningful look, which could be interpreted as a warning.
“Do you want me to play it for you?” he asks.
“Yes,” Kennedy answers before Joe can get a word in.
Isaac takes a deep breath and turns back to the computer. A second later, the sound fills the room.
There’s some static first, and then we hear a voice. “Is anyone there?”
My head jerks up. The air chills. It’s Kennedy. It’s her voice, except faster, higher-pitched. Panicked.
All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The whole room narrows to a point, and that point is Kennedy. She tenses, becomes a statue, her eyes empty.
The static cuts in and out. “Can anyone hear me?” Then it’s just the sound of her breathing, like her mouth is pressed too close to a microphone. Then movement, like things are being slid across a table, or a floor. More static, and then her voice again. “Something’s happening in my house. Something terrible. Help us. Please—” The transmission cuts off, and the sound of static fills the room, until a robotic voice gives the time stamp in stilted syllables. “December fourth. One-oh-three a.m.” And then it starts back up again, on a loop. “Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?”
“Turn it off,” Joe says, his tone furious.
Isaac presses a button, and the room falls silent. We remain silent. Isaac turns in the chair, looking at the floor. “Did your…uh, was the setup, did it have, like, a radio transmitter?”
“I don’t know,” Kennedy says, speaking in a whisper. She’s practically out the door already. I think she’s going to be sick. I wonder if this is what I looked like when Abby told me about the email.
Isaac continues, like it’s not a big deal. Not enormous, the size of the universe. “Was there, like, you know, an antenna…?”
No one answers him. I’ve seen the antenna on the top of the shed, though. I’m guessing the answer is yes.
Isaac takes a deep breath, moving the gum to the side of his mouth. “What I’m guessing is that you transmitted a signal. And this is the bounce back, playing.”
Joe steps toward her. “Is this some sort of joke?”
Isaac frowns. “Depending where it was transmitted, it could bounce back off the moon. Or off something closer. A satellite, even, the atmosphere…I don’t think this was intentional….”
Her eyes are wide, panicked. She shakes her head, but she doesn’t speak. There’s something familiar, like a sense of déjà vu, itching at the back of my head.
“December fourth?” I ask. “Are you sure?”
“That’s why I called you in,” Isaac says to Joe quietly. “It must’ve been transmitting on some sort of loop.”
Joe whips his head from Kennedy to Isaac. “Is this the nine-one-one call? She made it at one-eighteen a.m.”
Isaac presses a button, to start replaying the message. But we’ve already heard it once. Kennedy is moving back, like she can’t possibly sit through it once more. I reach an arm for her, but she doesn’t notice me there. “One-oh-three a.m.,” the recording tells us again, at the end.
Fifteen minutes before the call to 911. We all turn to look at Kennedy, but she’s gone.
“Dammit,” Joe mumbles under his breath. And then he takes off after her, and it’s suddenly just me and this dude in the room. I hear her words again. So familiar. I close my eyes, and I see my brother, as I saw him in the fever dream, standing across the room, moving his mouth: Help us. Please.
“Play it again,” I say.
No.
That’s the only thought in my head. No.
That cannot be all that’s out there. Nothing but my echo, reflecting back.
Standing outside Elliot’s window that night, I peered into the shadow house. And then I ran. Soaking wet, under the storm, I took shelter in the shed.
And that’s all this is: my shout into the abyss, when I hid in the shed, when I tried to get help, when I had no phone but saw the microphone. I knew Elliot had added an antenna to the shed over the summer, when he was out here working. I hoped it would work like a radio transmitter, like those things truck drivers use. That someone would pick up the signal and call for help.
A shout into the abyss, and no one answered. Is anyone there?
The answer is the same as it’s always been: No.
* * *
—
I’ve run clear across campus. I have no idea where I am. The trees cover the ground in overlapping shadows. I want to sink into the earth.
And then I’m back, with the smell of dirt and dust, inside the shed with the computers running over the top, the wires trailing under the ground, my back pressed against the wall while I’m sitting under the desk, shouting those words. Help us. Please.
I said them to myself even after I stopped broadcasting. I said them over and over, in case anyone, anywhere, was listening.
* * *
—
Joe has called me four times in the minutes it has taken me to sprint across the campus. I look around me, but it’s only more of the same. The ground curving away, in every direction, at the horizon.
There’s no place to go. The earth is finite, I can’t escape my existence here. Or the things I did, and the things I didn’t do.
Eventually, I stand, brushing the grass from my shorts, and I circle back. There’s nowhere else to go. Run forever, and the earth curves back around.
On and on it goes. The same thing over and over.
I head back to the parking lot and see a shape waiting for me there. When I get closer, I see it’s not Joe, but Nolan. He pushes off his car, standing there, looking at me like he doesn’t recognize me.
I stop in my tracks, halfway across the lot. “I didn’t know,” I say. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I know,” he says.
He opens his mouth to say more, but we’re cut off by a booming voice in the distance.
“Kennedy!” It’s Joe, jogging down the path from the other direction.
I turn back to Nolan. “You should go,” I tell him.
“No, I want—”
“Please, Nolan.” Because I don’t want him to hear this, the things Joe is about to ask me. I don’t want him to know what really happened that night.
* * *
—
At first, Joe doesn’t say anything. He just gestures to his car, and we drive in silence, except we’re not heading toward his house, or mine. We’re just on a highway, signs designating east.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “You know, the first week you were at my house? I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d see you sleeping, and I just…I didn’t know what to do. I would get in the car and just drive. For hours.”
I twist in my seat. “You snuck out?”
He presses his lips together, but it’s almost a smile. “It’s not sneaking out when it’s your own house. I even left you a note on the kitchen table in case you woke up.” He cuts his eyes to me. “A courtesy you might want to take into consideration next time.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lets out a slow breath and merges onto some other road, less traveled, nothing but trees surrounding us. “Me too, Kennedy. Truth is, I didn’t know what to say to you.” He grips the wheel tighter. “I still don’t. Right now, I want to ask you what happened, but I don’t even know where to start.”
“I tried to get help,” I say to Joe again, and this time, he understands. He pulls the car over onto the shoulder, in what feels at that moment like the middle of nowhere.
He takes a deep breath, then turns to face me. His voice low, and calm. “It’s just us, Kennedy. Just me and you, for real this time. Anything you say to me, it stays right here. And we’re nowhere. Okay?”
He’s right; it feels like nowhere. I didn’t think I’d be able to find this exact spot ever again. There were no mile markers. Just road and trees and a sun dipping lower on the horizon.
I stare out the front windshield, my eyes watering from the glare.
It had been dark and raining that night, and I was waiting for the distance between the lightning and thunder to spread out so it was safe to race across the open field, to my house. And then I ran, sprinting through the storm.
“When I was coming back home,” I tell Joe, “I could see, from a distance, a light was on. In Elliot’s room. I was all the way across the field still, though.”
I heard a loud boom, and then, a little while later, a second one. The first I could explain away, as a trick of thunder, and the distance. But at the second sound, I jumped. The noise felt closer than the storm. Sharper, something that gripped my heart, turning everything still.