chapter 32
Alex lay in the bunk, thinking about the night he had spent with his father in the Munich train station as he began to drift to sleep. He shifted his head. He didn’t really need anything more than a light pillow, but the one on the bunk was less than ideal. It seemed hardly there.
The words of Ultravox were still looping in his head, repeating in multiple threads of sound, urging him to rest, to sleep, to give up, to let it go.
The words seemed quiet and yet they were so constant that they blocked out everything, even blotting out the thought of the train station in Munich, the thoughts of his family. Every thought that was not still echoing the voice of Ultravox seemed dulled and distant, and it made him tired to think.
Far in the back of Alex’s brain, a lion was moaning, quiet and far-off, muffled and blanketed.
Alex felt himself drifting to sleep but his head wasn’t perfectly comfortable, the pillow was too thin. Ultravox had picked up some extra bedding and moved it away. Had there been another pillow?
The moaning was rumbling, far-off, like a jackhammer a mile away, a jackhammer he couldn’t hear because the millions of whispers of Ultravox drowned out those troublesome sounds.
Jackhammers and lions . . . all the noise . . . Alex’s life was made up of noise and conflict and constant movement. But Ultravox had explained to him that there was a better path: sleep. Don’t listen to the jackhammer, to the lion.
His head was miserably uncomfortable. He couldn’t even accomplish sleeping right. Alex opened his eyes slightly, looking for the stack of bedding Ultravox had set aside.
It sat there on a small table, the stack of blankets and pillows Ultravox had pulled out.
No one can overcome it, Alex. His voice threads the brain with his will, until you can’t hear anything else.
In the distance, he heard trees falling and roots being pulled aside. Giant paws slapping earth. Faraway trees in the back of the woods, where the lion growled, barely audible.
The stack of bedding seemed strange and dull. Alex looked at it.
There’s something special about you, and it has them worried.
The whispering of Ultravox, the echoes in his head, increased, and for a moment he lost the sound of the falling trees. But suddenly the distant noise was there again, growling and pounding.
The bedding stacked on the table looked strange and shimmering. For a second it changed and Alex saw a block of aluminum cans, pressed by thousands of pounds of force into a perfect and portable block.
Now the sound of the pounding was growing, and Alex saw the bedding and then he blinked on purpose and saw the block, and tried to think.
There was a clicking sound, a machine, and Alex started to feel the bunk vibrating.
The lion—his own brain, his own Alex Van Helsing static—was running desperately toward him, wake up, the trees falling with wrenching and tearing sounds, and now Alex did something he had never done before.
He saw the static. He was aware of it, he reached out to it and beckoned to it, and like a lion of legend it burst through and uprooted trees and roared.
The lion roared and Ultravox whispered in his brain until the lion opened its jaws and sucked the whispering wind away.
The bedding was compacted aluminum cans. The bunk was a recycling compactor. He was about to be crushed.
Alex rolled, kicking and falling to the floor as the sides of the compactor began to vibrate louder. In a moment a heavy glass door, like an oven door, dropped over the compactor, and he watched as the two sides slammed together with incredible force, reducing absolutely nothing to jelly.
He nodded to himself, shaken but satisfied. So that was it. Ultravox was a one-man superweapon but Alex had the capacity to resist. That power in his brain that he called the static—it was more powerful than a magic voice. Alex heard footsteps and spun around to see Minhi, running into the hold.
“Alex!”
She leapt into his arms and hugged him for a long moment before pulling away.
“Minhi, what’s going on up above?” He was looking around. He could barely remember the walk down here.
“Nothing,” she said. “I found your pin; I thought you were in trouble.”
Alex looked at the compactor. “It’s all right now. I think I figured some things out.”
“Are you all right?” She came closer, looking at him. He realized he was still shaking his head, trying to sift away the last vestiges of the voice of Ultravox.
“I’m fine, sincerely, I’m fine.” Then Alex smacked his forehead. “We gotta go. He’s gonna kill someone. Come on.” He started to run for the stairs.
“Sometimes I can’t believe you,” Minhi said, running after him.
“I told you I’d catch up,” Alex answered as they bounded up the stairs together.