Chapter 10: The Last Transmission

Chapter 10: The Last Transmission

The scream was failing.

Leo could feel it, a subtle shift in the storm raging within the Silent Clearing. The raw, sonic agony blasting from his emitter was no longer a clean, piercing blade. The entity, a being of pure signal, was adapting. It was learning the frequency, harmonizing with the pain. The static silhouette in the center of the clearing, while still convulsing, was beginning to cohere, its edges sharpening. The internal static in Leo's own mind, which had vanished upon entering the clearing, was now bleeding back in, a faint, warbling echo of his own recorded terror. The Whisperer was learning to sing his song.

“It’s not working!” Silas yelled, his voice barely audible over the din. He had to cup his hands around his mouth, shouting to be heard over a sound that was drilling directly into their skulls. “It’s absorbing it! It’s getting stronger!”

He was right. The attack was becoming food. They hadn't brought a weapon; they’d brought a seasoning for the main course. The desperate hope Leo had felt moments before curdled into ice in his stomach. They had one shot, and it was glancing off the monster’s hide.

A desperate, insane clarity cut through Leo’s panic. He looked from the writhing static to the overloaded amplifier to the shotgun in Silas’s hands. They were fighting a ghost with bullets and noise. A spider in its web. But they were only attacking the web. To kill it, they had to crush the spider. They had to make it solid, make it present, force it to coalesce into one single, vulnerable point.

And he was the only bait that would work. He was the repeater, the walking antenna. He had to be more than a broadcast point. He had to become the destination.

“Silas!” Leo shouted, his voice cracking. “We have to lure it! All of it! It’s too spread out!”

“Lure it with what?” Silas roared back, fumbling to reload his shotgun with trembling hands, a futile gesture against a formless enemy. “We’ve got nothing left!”

“Yes, we do,” Leo said, his eyes locking with the old ranger’s. In that moment, Silas saw the terrible, sacrificial resolve solidifying on the younger man’s face. He saw the same look David had worn before he’d walked into the dark for the last time. “You were right. I’m a feast. It’s time to ring the dinner bell.”

“No,” Silas said instantly, the word a flat, hard denial. “Absolutely not. I’m not losing another one.”

“You won’t,” Leo promised, his voice now eerily calm amidst the chaos. “When I call it, it will come for me. All of it. It won’t be able to resist. It will have to focus, to manifest fully to… to absorb me. When it’s on me, you turn everything up. Everything you’ve got. Don’t hesitate. Don’t wait. Do you understand?”

Silas stared at him, the decades of grief and guilt warring with the pragmatism of a survivor. He saw Leo’s acceptance, the finality of a man who had finally found a way to make his own private horrors mean something. To let his guilt become his strength. Swallowing hard, the old ranger gave a single, jerky nod.

Leo took a deep, shuddering breath and turned to face the monster. He closed his eyes. For the first time since this nightmare began, he didn’t try to build walls in his mind. He didn’t try to hide. He did the opposite. He tore them all down.

He stopped broadcasting the scream from the laptop and started broadcasting the one from his soul.

The thumping bass of the music. The smell of the cheap air freshener. Lily’s bright, laughing face. He opened the floodgates of his memory, not as a flickering illusion, but as a raw, concentrated signal of pure emotional energy. He offered it all up: the joy of the moment, the crushing weight of the steering wheel in his hands, the love for his sister that was so profound it was a physical ache.

Then, he gave it the crash. The screech of tires. The impossible, explosive sound of shattering glass. The sickening crunch of metal. Lily’s scream of pain. Not a recording. The real thing, perfectly preserved in the amber of his guilt. He broadcasted his failure, his shame, his unending, bottomless grief. He poured every dark, secret piece of himself into the static, transforming his consciousness into a beacon.

He felt the entity react. The background noise of the clearing, the very fabric of the sonic assault, fell away. All that existed was the immense, ancient, and suddenly ravenous attention of the Whisperer. The two faint red embers in the static silhouette flared, becoming raging crimson suns.

The entity surged.

It was not a movement through space, but a collapse of it. The swirling cloud of static across the clearing ceased its writhing and contracted, pulling itself from the trees, the ground, the very air, and hurtling towards Leo. It was a tidal wave of corrupted data and stolen voices, a million whispers converging on a single point. He could hear them all now, the fragmented thoughts of the lost campers, of David, of countless others, a chorus of terror and confusion. He felt the crushing weight of their final moments, the cold, dispassionate act of being recorded and erased.

The red eyes filled his vision. The static wasn't just in front of him; it was on him, passing through him, a hurricane of icy needles digging into his mind. His own identity began to fray, his memories dissolving into the collective. He was becoming a signal. He was being archived.

He managed one last, desperate thought, a final, silent command to the only other human in this hell. Now, Silas. Now!

As if he’d heard him speak aloud, Silas roared and slammed his hand down on the amplifier. He cranked the master gain dial past the redline, forcing every last watt of power from the groaning battery into the emitter.

The world went white.

It was not a sound. It was the end of sound. A scream of pure, silent light erupted from the horn of the emitter, engulfing Leo and the coalesced entity in a wave of total sensory overload. The universe buckled, and then, with a deafening CRACK that sounded like the sky itself splitting open, everything went black.

…

Slowly, sensation returned to Silas Croft. The first was the smell of ozone and burnt electronics. The second was the gentle, almost forgotten sound of a breeze rustling the leaves of a redwood tree.

He pushed himself up, his ears ringing with a profound, echoing silence. The clearing was… just a clearing. The oppressive, sound-dampening quality was gone. The air was light. The world felt normal again, the wound healed.

The equipment was a wreck. The laptop was a melted slab of plastic, the amplifier was a smoking ruin, and the car battery had cracked open, leaking acid onto the moss.

And Leo was gone.

“Leo!” Silas yelled, his voice raw. He scrambled to his feet, his heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. “Leo, answer me!”

There was no trace. No body, no scorch marks, nothing. Just an unnerving sense of peace where a nightmare had just been. He searched the clearing, his hope dwindling with every empty footstep. Then he saw it.

Lying on a patch of undisturbed moss, almost perfectly placed in the center of where the entity had converged, was Leo’s walkie-talkie.

Silas snatched it up, his hands shaking. He thumbed the transmit button. “Leo? Son, can you hear me? It’s over. We did it. Leo, come in.”

He released the button, greeted by the soft, comforting hiss of normal, empty-channel static. He waited, his breath held tight in his chest.

The speaker crackled.

For a moment, it was just the hiss. Then, a voice emerged from it. It was Leo’s voice, but it was profoundly different. It was perfectly clear, with no distortion, no hiss, no sense of distance. It was calm and resonant, as if it wasn't coming from the small, cheap speaker, but from the air itself, from the trees, from the very ground beneath his feet.

It spoke only seven words, a final, impossible transmission from the heart of the woods.

“It’s quiet now, Silas. I can hear everything.”