Abandoned

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Dana Hollister listens to a loud hum that never goes away. It’s as if someone picked a single note and is singing it with forty mouths. It’s taken over her world, that hum.

Most of the time it runs over her like water, and she is submerged. There is light and there is the hum and there is no thought.

But every now and then, the hum stutters.

These are millisecond flashes. Once, the hum stuttered and she thought a single word: I, she thought.

Then the hum returned, drowning out even the idea of the rest. A stutter comes now, longer than the others. She swims up inside herself, from the bottom of a lake filled with syrup. The man, she thinks.

The man bending over, a needle in my eye. Something is seen.

The humming is coming, a roar in the distance.

Something is seen that’s important. Something about the man.

I should tell them.

Who is them?

Who am I?

I—

The hum covers her, and she is nothing again.