Chapter 4: The Chorus of Rupture

Chapter 4: The Chorus of Rupture

The cold did not leave. It settled deep in Leo’s marrow, a permanent, internal winter. He was wrapped in two blankets on the sofa, a mug of now-lukewarm coffee trembling in his hands, but the shivering was coming from the inside out. It was the memory of that unnatural chill, the lingering touch of the Oculus’s light, a hollowing sensation that made the apartment’s oppressive heat feel like a distant rumor.

Alice hovered over him, her own fear momentarily eclipsed by concern. “You’re white as a sheet, Leo. What did you feel out there?”

He couldn’t answer. How could he explain the feeling of being called, of being chosen for something other than Henderson’s frenzied worship? How could he describe the sensation of having his soul scoured clean by ice? The chasm between them had widened. He had touched the new world in a way she hadn't, and it had left a frostbitten mark on him. The hollow space inside him was where his raw panic used to be; now, there was just a cold, sharp dread, like a shard of glass in his gut.

He was saved from having to find the words by a new sound from outside.

Through the cacophony of alien screeches and distant sirens, a different cry cut through. It was human. Utterly, achingly human.

“Help! Please, somebody help me!”

It was a woman’s voice, raw with a pure, undiluted terror that belonged to the world of yesterday. It wasn’t the ecstatic shrieking of the Touched, or the reality-bending calls of… whatever else was out there. It was the sound of someone who still believed help was possible. The sound was coming from their floor, just down the hall.

Leo’s head snapped up. The cold inside him didn’t vanish, but it sharpened his focus. That sound—it was an anchor to the world he recognized.

Alice froze, her face paling further. “Don’t,” she breathed, her eyes locking on the front door. “Leo, don’t you dare.”

“She needs help,” Leo said, his voice raspy. The old, pre-Oculus instincts were trying to claw their way through the ice.

“It’s a trap,” Alice insisted, her voice rising with frantic intensity. She grabbed his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. “Like before. The thing that made you go outside—it’s doing it again. It’s a lure.”

“That was a feeling,” Leo argued, standing up and shedding the blankets. “A pull. This is a person, Alice. A real person.”

“Help me! Oh god, it’s inside! It’s coming out!” The woman’s scream escalated into a pained, guttural shriek that was no longer just fear, but agony.

He knew Alice was probably right. His analyst’s brain, the part of him that was now encased in that cold, logical shell, agreed with her. But the sound was too real. He had to know. He couldn’t live with not knowing.

He moved towards the door, Alice trailing him, pleading. “Leo, no! After what you saw with Henderson? We can’t open the door. We can’t!”

“I’m not opening it,” he promised, his gaze fixed on the small brass circle of the peephole. It was becoming his cursed oracle, his tiny, distorted window into hell. “I’m just going to look.”

His hand was steady this time as he slid the cover aside. The coldness inside him was a strange sort of ballast against the storm of fear. He pressed his eye to the lens, the metal cold against his skin, and peered into the blood-red diorama of the hallway.

He saw her. A young woman, maybe a student from the apartment at the end of the hall, was clawing desperately at the door opposite theirs, her fingernails splintering against the wood. Her face was a mask of sheer agony, her back arched at an impossible angle. She wasn't being attacked from the outside. There was no one else there.

Leo watched, paralyzed in frozen terror, as the skin on her back began to ripple. It wasn’t muscle. It was something moving beneath the surface, something large and angular. The fabric of her sweater stretched, then tore with a sickening riiiip. Her spine bowed further, and her scream dissolved into a wet, choked gurgle as a dark, glistening point pushed through the flesh between her shoulder blades.

It was a seam ripping open. She was a doll being torn apart from the inside.

Her body convulsed violently, a marionette whose strings were being pulled by a monstrous puppeteer within. More points pushed through her skin, sharp and obsidian-black, like the tips of freshly broken bones. Blood, dark and thick in the crimson light, poured down her back, soaking her clothes and pooling on the cheap hallway carpet.

Leo wanted to recoil, to scream, to slam the peephole shut and scrub the image from his brain. But he couldn’t move. The cold inside him held him fast, turning him into a perfect, horrified observer. He was watching a birth.

With a final, explosive blossoming of red, the woman’s torso burst open. Her body collapsed like a discarded shell, and from the gaping, ruined cavity of her chest, a creature began to uncurl.

It was a knot of glistening, obsidian flesh and slick, membranous tissue, coated in a thick layer of gore. It wasn't large, no bigger than a dog, but its anatomy was a blasphemy against nature. It had too many joints. Limbs that bent at impossible, insectoid angles. It pushed itself out of the bloody ruin of its host, its movements jerky and uncertain, less like a newborn animal and more like a complex piece of machinery being uncrated. It shook itself, flinging droplets of blood against the walls, and then, it stood on four razor-sharp legs. It had no face, no eyes, only a smooth, featureless head that tilted towards the ceiling.

Then, it opened a slit in that featureless head and it shrieked.

The sound was a razor blade against the fabric of reality. It wasn't just loud; it was a frequency that bypassed Leo’s ears and drilled straight into the base of his skull, making his teeth ache and the cold inside him vibrate like a tuning fork. It was a sound that didn't belong in the known physical world, a piercing cry that bent the air around it. It was a declaration. I am here. I am born.

For a moment, there was silence. The creature stood perfectly still over the remains of its mother, its birth-cry echoing in the hallway.

And then, the city answered.

From a block away, an identical, reality-bending shriek replied. Then another, from further downtown. Soon, the air was filled with them. An antiphonal chorus of monstrous births, a back-and-forth call that spread across the entire city. The random, inhuman noises Leo had been hearing all morning suddenly made a terrifying kind of sense. They weren’t random at all. They were a network. A symphony.

Leo stumbled back from the door, his hand falling from the peephole. He stared at Alice, whose face was a mask of utter devastation. She had heard it. The shriek, and the city-wide response.

The last vestiges of hope, the desperate belief that they could just wait for the madness to burn itself out, crumbled into dust. This wasn’t chaos. This was colonization. The maddened people were just the first wave, tilling the soil. Now, the new inhabitants were hatching. The soundscape of their world had just been rewritten. The sounds of humanity were being drowned out by a unified, alien consciousness, a chorus of rupture heralding the true dawn of the Oculus.