Chapter 1: The Screaming in the Station

The silence was wrong.

Alex Vance pressed his back against the cold brick wall of the abandoned police station, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. The fire axe in his hands felt heavier than it should, its red handle slick with sweat from his white-knuckled grip. Through the grimy windows, the city sprawled before him like a corpse—no traffic, no voices, no signs of life. Just the occasional flicker of a streetlight and the distant wail of a car alarm that had been crying for hours.

"Jesus Christ," whispered the young man huddled in the corner. Matt something—Alex hadn't caught his last name when they'd stumbled into each other twenty minutes ago. The kid looked like he'd aged ten years in a single night. His university sweatshirt was torn, blood—not his own—splattered across the front. "This can't be real. This can't be fucking real."

Alex wanted to agree, but the crumpled hood of his Honda outside told a different story. The crash had been his fault—blind panic sending him careening off the main road and straight into a light pole. The impact had knocked him senseless for precious minutes, minutes where they could have found him. When he'd finally crawled from the wreckage, the nearest building had been this police station, its front doors hanging open like a mouth screaming into the void.

That's where he'd found Matt, catatonic and mumbling about strings.

"Hey." Alex kept his voice low but firm. "Kid. Matt. Look at me."

Matt's wild eyes focused on Alex's face. Up close, Alex could see he was younger than he'd first appeared—maybe twenty-one, twenty-two at most. College age. The kind of guy who should be worrying about finals and weekend parties, not... whatever this was.

"We need to get out of the city," Alex said. "My car's fucked, but there might be patrol cars here with keys still in them. Or we could—"

The scream cut through the night like a blade.

Both men froze. The sound was coming from outside, maybe two blocks away. It was human—definitely human—but wrong somehow. Too high, too desperate, stretching on far longer than any human throat should manage.

"Help me! Please, somebody help me!"

Matt whimpered, pressing his hands against his ears. "Don't listen to it. Don't—that's not real. That's not a real person."

"What are you talking about?" Alex moved toward the window, raising the axe defensively. "Someone's out there. Someone needs help."

"No!" Matt lunged forward, grabbing Alex's arm with surprising strength. "You don't understand. They sound like us. They sound exactly like us, but they're not. They're—"

The voice came again, closer now. Alex could make out words between the sobs.

"The strings! Oh God, the strings are in me! Someone cut them out! Please!"

Through the window, Alex saw him.

A man in a business suit stumbled down the middle of the street, arms windmilling wildly as if he was fighting off invisible attackers. His briefcase lay forgotten twenty feet behind him, its contents scattered across the asphalt. The man's movements were all wrong—too fluid, too precise, like a dancer following choreography he didn't understand.

"Something's pulling me!" the man screamed, his voice cracking. "I can't—I can't stop moving! Cut the strings! CUT THE STRINGS!"

Alex squinted into the darkness. At first, he saw nothing. Then the streetlight caught them—gossamer threads so thin they were nearly invisible, extending from the man's wrists, ankles, and neck up into the black sky. They pulsed with an oily iridescence, like oil on water, and as Alex watched in horror, the man's limbs jerked in perfect synchronization with their movement.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Alex breathed.

The man's head snapped up, his eyes locking onto the police station windows with unnatural precision. When he smiled, his teeth were stained with blood.

"Help me!" he called, but his voice was different now—younger, higher, terrified. A perfect imitation of Matt's voice. "Please, I'm so scared! Don't leave me out here alone!"

Matt made a choking sound behind him. "That's—that's exactly what I said. In the bathroom. When David was..." He couldn't finish the sentence.

The puppet-man began walking toward the station with mechanical, measured steps. His arms swayed at his sides like a pendulum, and with each step, Alex could hear the wet slap of his dress shoes against the pavement. The strings above him pulsed brighter, and somewhere in the darkness above, something vast and patient pulled the threads.

"We need to move," Alex said, backing away from the window. "Right now."

"Where?" Matt's voice was barely a whisper. "Where can we go? They're everywhere. They took everyone at the bar. David, Sarah, Marcus—all of them. And they're still walking around, still talking, but they're not..." He shuddered. "They're not them anymore."

The puppet-man reached the front entrance of the station. Through the glass doors, Alex could see him standing perfectly still, head tilted at an unnatural angle, that horrible smile never wavering.

"Hello in there," he called in a voice that was now a perfect mimicry of Alex's own. "I know you're scared. I was scared too. But it doesn't hurt. The strings don't hurt once you stop fighting them."

Alex gripped the fire axe tighter. "There's got to be a back exit. Emergency exit. Something."

"Come outside," the puppet continued in Alex's voice. "Come outside and join the dance. Everyone's dancing now. The whole city is dancing."

As if summoned by his words, more figures began emerging from the shadows. A woman in a nurse's uniform, her scrubs pristine despite the blood on her hands. A teenager in a letterman jacket, his school bag still slung over one shoulder. An elderly man with a walker that he no longer seemed to need, his steps as fluid and precise as the others.

All of them had strings. All of them were smiling.

"The back," Alex hissed, grabbing Matt's arm. "Now."

They ran through the darkened station, their footsteps echoing off empty cells and abandoned desks. Alex's mind raced as they moved—he was an architect, used to blueprints and building codes. Every public building had multiple exits. They just had to find them.

Behind them, the sound of breaking glass suggested their visitors had grown impatient.

"This way," Matt gasped, pointing toward a door marked 'AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.' "I used to... I had a friend who was a cop. The back exit should be—"

The door was locked.

Alex didn't hesitate. He raised the fire axe and brought it down on the handle with all his strength. The metal shrieked and sparks flew, but the door held. Behind them, the sound of measured footsteps grew closer.

"Come back," called the nurse in a sing-song voice that belonged to a child. "We have so much to show you. So many friends to meet."

Another swing. Another. On the third strike, the lock finally gave way.

The back alley was empty, but Alex didn't trust it. The darkness felt different here—thicker, more alive. As they stepped outside, he noticed something that made his blood run cold. The streetlights were going out one by one, as if something was moving through the city, swallowing light as it went.

"My sister," Matt said suddenly. "She lives outside the city. About twenty miles north. If we can get to her—"

"Twenty miles," Alex repeated. "On foot."

"She's all I have left," Matt's voice broke. "Everyone else is... they're all dancing now."

Alex looked back at the station, where shapes moved behind the windows like shadows in a funhouse. He thought about his empty apartment, his job, his carefully ordered life that had been shattered in the span of a few hours. None of it mattered now. Nothing mattered except the simple, desperate mathematics of survival.

"Okay," he said. "Twenty miles. We can do twenty miles."

Above them, the sky began to change. What Alex had first taken for clouds were something else entirely—a vast network of strings, so numerous they blotted out the stars. And somewhere up there, in the space between spaces, something immense and patient pulled the threads that danced through the city below.

The puppet-man appeared at the mouth of the alley, his suit torn now from his journey through the broken glass. When he spoke, it was in the voice of every person Alex had ever loved.

"You can't run forever," he said with Alex's mother's voice. "You can't hide," in his sister's tone. "Come dance with us," in the voice of Jenny, his ex-girlfriend who'd left him six months ago.

Alex raised the fire axe and took a step forward. For the first time in his adult life, his careful, logical world had collapsed entirely. But in its place, something simpler had emerged: the crystal-clear understanding that some things were worth fighting for, even when fighting was hopeless.

Especially when fighting was hopeless.

"Run," he told Matt. "Find us a way out of the city. I'll hold them off."

"You can't—"

"I said run!"

As Matt disappeared into the maze of back streets, Alex stood alone in the alley, fire axe in hand, facing down the impossible. The strings above him pulsed with hungry light, and in the distance, he could hear the city beginning to sing—a chorus of stolen voices, all moving to the same inhuman rhythm.

The dance was just beginning.