The thing that wore my father's face reached for the jammer. Its fingers weren't solid; they felt like a swarm of needles pricking my skin.
"Just let go, Leo," it whispered. The voice wasn't just in my ears anymore—it was vibrating inside my skull, humming against my teeth. "The static is peaceful. No more grief. No more missing me. Just the hum."
I looked down at the jammer in my hands. The little green light was flickering, dying. I looked down at the base of the tower, where Arthur was disappearing under a sea of grey, swaying bodies. The violet light from the transmitter was blinding now, a pillar of energy shooting straight into the clouds, turning the sky into a bruised, pulsing wound.
"You aren't my father," I growled, my voice barely a rasp. "My father would have told me to run."
I didn't try to plug the jammer into the port. My hands were shaking too hard for that. Instead, I remembered what Arthur had said about a "Perfect Silence"—a frequency that cancels out all others.
I smashed the jammer against the transmitter's casing, breaking the plastic shell to expose the raw circuitry. I grabbed the two main wires—the ones carrying the pulse of the Dead Air—and held them against the jammer's oscillating crystal.
The shock was instant. My vision went white.
A sound erupted from the tower that wasn't a scream or a hiss. It was a vacuum—a sudden, violent absence of sound. It was the frequency of absolute zero.
The figure of my father shrieked, its body fragmenting into a million jagged pixels before dissolving into the wind. The violet light turned a brilliant, pure white and then snapped shut like a closing eye.
I felt myself falling. The metal platform vanished beneath me as the energy surge threw me backward into the dark.
I woke up on the grass at the base of the tower.
The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, painting the valley in soft pinks and golds. The air didn't taste like pennies anymore; it tasted like damp earth and pine needles.
I sat up, my head throbbing. Around me, the neighbors were waking up. They were lying on the ground, confused and shivering, but their eyes were clear. The Millers were holding each other, crying softly. The grey tint was gone from their skin.
I found Arthur a few yards away. He was breathing, his eyes open, staring at the sky.
"It's quiet," he whispered, a small smile on his face. "The birds... can you hear the birds, Leo?"
I listened. Far off in the trees, a robin was singing. It was a simple, messy, beautiful sound.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked, but it turned on. There were no purple lines. No static. Just a notification for a missed call from a week ago.
I stood up and looked back at the radio tower. It was just a hunk of rusted steel now, silent against the morning sky. But as I turned to walk away, a faint sound caught my ear. I froze, my heart skipping a beat.
It was a tiny, microscopic hiss coming from a nearby car radio that had been left on.
"...Leo..."
It was a whisper, so faint it might have been my imagination. Or maybe it was just the wind.
I didn't stop to find out. I walked toward the sunrise, leaving the dead air behind.
The End.