Chapter 7: A Voice from the Old World

Chapter 7: A Voice from the Old World

The world had become a television screen playing a show he was forced to watch from the inside. Alex lived in his car now, a cramped metal shell that offered the illusion of a barrier against the Un-people. He parked in forgotten lots and on the top levels of parking garages, anywhere he could observe the city without being a part of its silent, hollow pageant. Sleep was a series of jarring, thirty-minute naps, punctuated by the frantic need to check his surroundings, to ensure no blank-faced figures were standing silently by his window.

He was wasting away. A constant, low-grade fever of terror had burned off what little extra weight he had. His diet consisted of protein bars and bottled water, scavenged during lightning-fast, head-down raids on gas station convenience stores in the dead of night. His phone was his tormentor and his only tool. He kept it on airplane mode most of the time, terrified of receiving another cheerful, scripted text from his "mother" or "grandfather," another digital phantom limb from a life that wasn't his. The postcard from Prague was a permanent fixture in his mind’s eye, a glossy, full-color lie.

He was scrolling through his photo gallery, a masochistic ritual of looking at pictures from the before time. A photo of him, Max, and Chloe at a concert, all grinning and sweaty. Max's eyes were a lively hazel, Chloe’s a brilliant green. Real eyes. Human eyes. A profound, soul-crushing loneliness washed over him, so potent it felt like drowning. He wasn’t just alone; he was a species of one. He was the last real man on a planet of puppets. The thought was no longer a panicked suspicion; it was a cold, hard fact. He wasn't crazy. He was just extinct.

It was in this moment of absolute despair that his phone, plugged into the car’s charger, buzzed to life.

He flinched, nearly dropping it. The screen lit up, and his blood turned to ice water. It wasn’t a text from his fake family. It was an incoming call. The number was blocked. UNKNOWN CALLER.

His first instinct was to kill the call, to throw the phone out the window. It had to be a trick. A new level of the game. Maybe the system had finally decided to engage with him directly, to lure him into a trap. His thumb hovered over the red decline button, a bead of sweat tracing a path down his temple.

But what if it wasn't?

What if it was a mistake? A glitch in their system, not his? In a world where he had nothing, the sliver of a chance, no matter how slim or dangerous, was impossible to ignore. His isolation was a physical weight, and the hope of hearing a real, unscripted voice—any voice—was a temptation too powerful to resist.

With a trembling hand, he swiped to accept. He didn't speak. He just held the phone to his ear, his breath held tight, listening to the static.

It wasn't the clean silence of a normal call. It was a faint, crackling hiss, like a radio tuned between stations, with distant, echoing whispers buried deep in the noise. For a terrifying second, he thought he’d made a mistake, that he had opened a line to… something else.

Then, a voice cut through the static, distorted and faint, but achingly familiar.

“...Alex? A-Alex, can you hear me? Is that… is that really you?”

Alex’s entire world seized. He knew that voice better than his own. He knew the slight hesitation, the way it pitched up when worried. It was a voice he had been mourning for weeks, a voice he had seen coming from a face with black, empty eyes in a nightmare elevator.

“Max?” The name came out as a strangled whisper. He couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be. “Max, what the hell? Where are you? You’re… you’re supposed to be in Europe.” He was testing him, throwing out the bait of the fake reality, praying Max wouldn't take it.

The static hissed. Max’s laugh was a sharp, bitter bark of sound, devoid of any humor. “Europe? What are you talking about? Alex, where have you been? We’ve been going out of our minds!”

The relief was so sudden and so absolute that Alex felt his knees go weak. He slumped forward, his forehead resting against the cold plastic of the steering wheel. He wasn't part of the script. He was real. Tears welled in Alex’s eyes, the first he’d shed not from terror, but from a desperate, shattering relief.

“I… I don’t know, Max,” he stammered, his voice thick. “It’s a long story. I saw you. I saw you and Chloe in the elevator… your eyes…”

“The elevator?” Max’s voice was a knot of confusion. “Alex, what elevator? We never went in the building. You did.”

The words hit Alex like a physical blow. He sat bolt upright, the phone clamped to his ear. “What? No. You and Chloe were right behind me. You disappeared. I went in to find you.”

“No, Alex, that’s not what happened,” Max insisted, his voice growing more frantic, the static swelling around his words. “We were all there, at the construction site. You were the one who got weird about that old building. You said you had to check something out. Chloe and I tried to stop you, told you it was creepy, but you wouldn’t listen. You said you’d be right back.”

A terrifying, impossible symmetry began to form in Alex’s mind. He remembered standing outside the bronze doors, turning back to an empty, rain-swept street. He remembered the feeling of his friends vanishing. But Max was painting a mirror image of that same moment.

“You walked into that building, Alex,” Max’s voice cracked, the sound raw with a pain that mirrored his own. “You walked in, and you never came back out. We waited for an hour. We called your name until we were hoarse. We called the cops. Alex… you’ve been missing for two weeks.”

The two realities slammed together in Alex’s head. His search for his missing friends. Their search for him. The missing person flyers he’d put up for his grandfather. The flyers they had undoubtedly put up for him. It wasn’t just a one-way glitch. The tear in the world had a another side. He hadn’t just fallen into a wrong reality; he had fallen out of the right one.

“Max,” he said, his mind racing, trying to piece it all together. “The people here… most of them… their eyes are black. All black. Do you see them there?”

“Black eyes? Alex, you’re not making any sense! There’s no one with black eyes here. There’s just… you’re just gone. Your parents are a wreck. The police think you ran away.”

So the Un-people were a feature of this reality only. He was a human trapped in a world of constructs, while his friends and family were trapped in a world where he had simply ceased to exist. Both were prisons. Both were a kind of hell. But they were connected. This call was proof.

“Max, listen to me,” Alex said, a new, desperate energy surging through him. This was no longer just about his own survival. It was about rescue. “We’re on opposite sides of the same thing. Something happened in that building. It split us apart. But we can fix this. We have to be able to fix this!”

“Fix it how?” Max cried, his voice frayed with desperation. “We don’t even know what ‘it’ is!”

“I don’t know yet, but this call…”

Before he could finish, the static on the line intensified, erupting into a deafening roar of white noise, like a jet engine firing up next to his ear. It was a violent, angry sound.

“Max?!” Alex shouted over the noise. “Max, can you hear me?!”

A distorted fragment of Max’s voice screamed through the static, “...thing… saw a… sha…”

Then, with a final, sharp click, the line went dead.

Alex stared at his phone’s screen. CALL ENDED. He tried to call back, hammering the redial button for the unknown number, but it was useless. The connection was gone. Severed.

But it didn’t matter. The crushing weight of his isolation had been shattered. He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t alone. Max was out there. Chloe was out there. They were trapped, just as he was.

A fierce, burning purpose ignited in the hollow space where his fear had lived. He was no longer just a survivor hiding in the shadows. He was a prisoner with a map to another cell. The Shadow Figure from the gas station flashed in his mind—the guardian of the seam. It hadn't been hunting him. It had been moderating the boundary he now knew existed. It knew the rules of this place.

He had to find it. He had to understand what it was. Because for the first time in two weeks, Alex Thorne had something more powerful than fear. He had a reason to fight back.