Chapter 5: Her Crimson Tears

Chapter 5: Her Crimson Tears

The unholy chorus of the city’s newborns faded, but the sound was seared into Leo’s mind. He stumbled back from the peephole, a strangled noise caught in his throat. The cold that had taken root in his marrow seemed to deepen, a core of absolute zero in the center of his being. The world outside wasn't just descending into madness; it was being terraformed, repopulated. The screams of terror were being replaced by the birth cries of monsters.

He turned, a desperate, primal need to see Alice, to confirm the presence of one other sane person in this collapsing reality. “Alice, you heard that, didn’t you? They’re… they’re hatching.”

But Alice wasn’t cowering. She wasn’t looking at the door. She was waiting for him.

She stood in the center of the living room, perfectly still. Her posture, once hunched in on itself with fear, was now erect and poised, as if listening to some distant, beautiful music. A serene, beatific smile graced her lips. It was a smile of such profound peace that it was the most terrifying thing Leo had ever seen.

And then he saw her eyes.

They were raw, swollen, and bloodshot, the whites webbed with a dense network of broken capillaries. They weren't the eyes of someone who had been crying from fear. They were the eyes of someone who had been staring, unblinking, for a very long time.

He followed her gaze and his blood froze. The television was on.

He knew, with an absolute certainty that defied all logic, that he had not only turned it off but had ripped the power cord from the wall socket. Yet the screen glowed, casting its unholy red-and-blue light on Alice’s transformed face. It wasn't broadcasting a news channel anymore. There were no anchors, no shaky camera footage. The screen was filled with a single, crystal-clear image: the crimson sun. The Oculus. It hung there in the void of the screen, its molten surface churning slowly, its electric blue halo pulsing in a slow, hypnotic rhythm that matched the lingering thrum in Leo’s bones.

“Alice?” His voice was a fragile thing, easily broken.

She turned her head slowly to look at him, her smile never faltering. And Leo saw the tears.

They were not tears of water and salt. Thick, dark rivulets of blood streamed from the corners of her ruined eyes, tracing paths down her pale cheeks. They didn’t fall like tears of sorrow; they welled up and overflowed, a viscous, crimson offering. They were the color of the light outside, the color of the malevolent eye on the television screen.

“It’s so quiet now, Leo,” she whispered, and her voice was a stranger’s. The frantic edge of anxiety was gone, replaced by a calm, melodic reverence. It was the same tone he’d heard in the news anchor’s final, horrifying prayer. “All the little noises are gone. The fear. The worrying. It’s all been washed away.”

Leo took a step back, his hand instinctively reaching for the wall to steady himself. The cold inside him was a sharp, clarifying pain. It kept him from screaming. It kept him from running. It forced him to stand there and witness this, to analyze the horror that had consumed the woman he loved. The memory of her frantic, failed calls to her parents felt like an artifact from another civilization. That person was gone.

“The TV…” he managed to choke out. “Alice, you were staring at the TV.”

“It’s not a screen anymore,” she said, taking a soft, gliding step towards him. “It’s a window. He wanted to show me.”

Her gaze was locked on him, but it felt as though she were looking through him, at the hollowed-out space the cold light had made inside him. “He showed me everything. The futility of running. The noise of being just… one person. And he showed me the great silence that’s coming. The beautiful, perfect symphony.”

The chorus of rupture. She called it a symphony.

The ice shard in Leo’s gut twisted. He remembered Henderson’s plea: Not me! He remembered the desperate woman in the hall, consumed from within. There were different paths in this new world. One of sacrifice, one of incubation. And this… this was the path of conversion. The path of the blessed, the Touched.

“The suns are calling, Leo,” Alice continued, her voice dropping to an intimate, conspiratorial whisper. She was closer now, close enough that he could smell the coppery scent of the blood on her cheeks. “They’re calling for us.” She raised a hand, her fingers slender and pale, and reached for his face. “Especially for you. They’ve been calling for you all morning.”

His flight out the door. The cold that had filled him instead of madness. The Oculus wasn’t just a mindless force. It had seen him. It had tested him.

As her cool fingers brushed against his cheek, his gaze was inexorably drawn past her, back to the television screen. Back to the window. He looked into the impossible object that had stolen his world, that had stolen Alice. He saw the churning, molten crimson surface, like a sphere of cooling blood. He saw the violent, pulsing halo of electric blue, a cosmic heartbeat.

He stared into the darker point at its center, the pupil of the universe. He was an analyst, staring at the ultimate, incomprehensible data point. He was a man, watching the entity that had just unmade his life.

And as he watched, paralyzed by the cold inside him and the horror before him, the thing on the screen did something impossible.

The crimson surface tightened. The darker point in the center narrowed into a slit, like the pupil of a cat. A fold of celestial matter slid down from the top and rose from the bottom.

For one silent, sanity-shattering moment, the Oculus closed.

Then, it opened again.

It had blinked.