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The Tube: Part III

Good morning.

If you’re new here, welcome! This is Sleep Tight, the section of Kindling where I publish original short fiction. If you’re just joining in, this is the third installment of a short story called, “The Tube.” To start at the beginning, click here.

Last week, on “The Tube”:

David, a lonely 12-year-old boy, was just looking to make friends with a neighbor. But he got more than he bargained for when he broke The Tube, an invention created by Jamie Lewis’ father. We left him sprinting home in nothing but his socks, away from the sound of Jamie’s returning parents. But he soon finds out, trouble followed him home. Closer than home.

This is an attack warning

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

---

There was only a little blood at first. It must have happened when we crashed to the floor. Probably when I pushed myself up. My hands were speckled, dark burgundy lakes rising in the little craters made by invisible shards of glass. It hurt when my hand flexed, my thumb and index finger coming together to try and pinch what I couldn’t see. But it did no good.

“David?” 

My mother’s voice was on the other side of the bathroom door. The last syllable of my name was a little higher than usual. She was worried. 

“I’ll be out in a minute mom!” 

I waited there on the toilet seat, completely still until I heard her footsteps shuffle down the hallway and then disappear completely. Then I turned my attention back to my hands. The blood was really pooling now. Little droplets were starting to gather. I grabbed at the toilet paper and swiped it down hard. The little bunches hurt when I clasped them in my hands, but the warm sensation of dripping blood was quelled. 

It was an early bedtime that night. When my mom came in I held the covers to my chin, my injured hands beneath the sheets so she couldn’t see. 

“Are you okay sweetie? You came in awfully fast.”

I nodded my head vigorously.

“Did everything go alright over there?”

She reached out and stroked my head, something she hadn’t done in a couple of years except when I was sick. 

“Yeah.”

“Why did you run in like that?”

My hands felt hot and electric. The stinging was getting to me.

“I just didn’t feel good.”

Her hand flipped, and she held the back of it to my forehead, feeling for fever.

“You feel okay to me.”

I shrugged and she smiled and walked to the door.

“Goodnight honey.”

“Goodnight.”

I wish it had been.

---

When I awoke in the middle of the night, my room was dimly lit. A blue dome of light spread out from the center of the ceiling to the four corners of my room and halfway down my walls. The light on my nightstand and the ceiling lamp was off. My curtains were drawn tight. I was on my back, and my arms were stretched above my head.

I lay there looking for a minute, then pushed myself up to see where the light was coming from. As soon as my hands planted at my side, the light went out. The sudden darkness shocked me. I sat that way for a minute, the sleep wearing off, and looked down at where my hands were. The bed sheets were glowing around the outline of my fingers and palms.

I flipped them over immediately to examine the skin there. Glowing blue light was coming from each and every pock mark left by the glass. I could see the bones of each finger in that dim glow, an eerie X-ray through my flesh. I watched as blood pulsed through my veins, then clasped my hands together tightly until they hurt. The pain was almost unbearable. The stinging pulsed and buzzed with electricity just beneath the skin. 

I closed my eyes tight, wishing the light away, tucked my hands beneath my legs, hiding the glow from view. But the buzzing kept coming in waves. And there was something else too. With every pulse, my ears tuned in to the far-away sound of radio voices through static.

---

I woke up the next morning to the sound of my mother’s voice echoing across the bannister and into my room. She was making pancakes, a kind of balm for the wounds she perceived I had incurred at the Lewis house. The smell came wafting under the crack of my door.

My head ached. A low and persistent pitch was ringing in my ears. The events from the night before seemed like a dream to me. I lifted my hands up. There were some scabs, but no light emanated from the speckled wounds. I sat up and made my way to the kitchen. I could hear singing, and the low beat of drums coming from somewhere. The sound was quiet, beneath the surface of my footsteps, but the voice came clear. A woman’s voice.

“Mom?” 

There wasn’t any answer. When I turned the corner into the kitchen, I found the place empty, a stack of pancakes piled on a plate sitting in the center of the dining table. A piece of paper was folded next to it. I opened it and read the words scribbled in my mother’s neat cursive. 

Gone on an errand. Be back by lunch. - Mom

The music was still playing, but the signal wasn’t coming in clear. A high pitched squeal pierced my ears as the woman’s voice sang a doo-wop tune in time with the drums. I turned to try and escape the sound, and a layer of static came over the top of her voice. Others joined in. A radio ad for Tide waved in and then out. It was replaced by a man’s voice. At first I couldn’t understand it, but when I sat down in the chair with my hands cupped over my ears, his words came in clear.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

There were cheers and claps, and then, the high-pitched drone, almost imperceptible, of a television when it turns to a pinhole and clicks off. My headache was worse. The pain radiated down the nape of my neck and into my shoulders. In the silence, I realized the sound was not coming from somewhere in the house. It was coming from inside of me. 

---

It came to me mostly between sleep after that, in that strange plane of half wakefulness, the voices always changing, clicking in and out like radio phantoms. I stayed in bed for three days with a pounding headache, and in that time, Jamie did not come to visit. On the morning of the fourth day, I awoke to silence. For the first time since the TV glass got inside me, I was alone in my own head.

Sitting up in bed, the whole thing felt like a bad dream, a plot from one of the comic books Jamie kept on his shelf. Thinking about him made me feel lonelier than ever, and I was determined to go see him that day after I ate and dressed. I knew that I had done something that made our fragile, blooming friendship irreparable, but I had to try anyway.

The neighborhood was unusually quiet. Most of the men had gone to work, and the houses stood like the abandoned ancient cities we had learned about in school, artifacts from a different time, empty of everything but ghosts and rot. I crossed the street. His house stood just as dead quiet as the others. It wasn’t until I got to the front door that I heard the murmur of voices inside, and realized someone must be home. 

My palms were healed over. There wasn’t any sign of what had happened only a few nights before. I wiped them against my jeans before knocking. A woman opened right away, slender, her mouth parted a little, like she was surprised to see me there.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes ma’am. I was just looking for Jamie.”

“For who?”

I glanced around at the brick exterior, the black house number next to the door, then nodded.

“Jamie Lewis?”

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry. You must be mistaken.”

“But he was here just a few days ago.”

I craned my neck to stare in past her, trying to look in and see those red walls, the shag carpet. Her brow creased in concern. She shook her head again. 

“No one by that name lives here.”

---

“Who is that woman across the street?”

I was sitting at our kitchen table, looking out the window at her as she walked to the mailbox, found it empty, and went back inside.  

My mother looked up from her soapy dishes for a minute and stared out the window. 

“Ms. Mitchell?”

“I guess.”

“Her mother owned that house. She died a couple of years ago and left it to her. Poor thing hasn’t been back since the funeral.”

There was some memory there. A tingling recognition. Plates of food set out on tables, the neighbors and relatives David had never met lined up and offering condolences. 

“But Jamie lived there! Jamie Lewis! The kid that just moved in!”

“Jamie?” 

How could she say that? She had seen him, answered the door when he came for me. I backed out of the kitchen and ran to my room, away from the sound of my mother’s confused voice calling after me. A strange panic ran through me like rushing water, an electric, pulsing river just beneath the skin. 

That was when I learned that stress made it worse, triggered the sounds and images that no one else could see or hear. That night a flood of static roared in my ears, and the pulsing headache returned. I woke up to the now familiar click of channels switching in my head. 

My head hurt too bad to sleep. I got up and went to the window. I watched as a white van rolled up silently, and parked in front of Jamie’s house. Men came in their white protective suits, and silently loaded up what was left of The Tube, but Jamie was nowhere in sight. I sat there as they drove away, the engine noiseless on our quiet neighborhood street. It was just past three when I laid in my bed and heard the report come in that changed everything. 

---

It was a news anchor, a man talking as I stared at my ceiling and waited for the noise to quiet, for the pain in my head to go away. 

“This just in,” I heard him say, after the beep that usually accompanied the emergency tests on the radio, “this is a message from the White House.”

Another voice took over, official and without inflection, he read the statement.

“We interrupt this program. The office of Civil Defense has issued the following message. This is an attack warning. Repeat, this is an attack warning. Attack warning means that an actual attack against this country has been detected, and that protective action should be taken. Important instructions will follow in thirty seconds.”

I closed my eyes and pulled the covers up over my head. The images flashed, the channels clicking one after the other. Voices spoke in other languages. French, German and Spanish. My school, now a pile of rubble. Rescuers in hazmat suits pointed to shadows on the ground, the blackened images of crouched children, their heads tucked, arms wrapped like shields, just like Mrs. French had taught us. 

“New York and San Francisco are in ruins, after a surprise attack by the Soviets left hundreds of thousands—”

The news anchor’s voice cut off early as the channel clicked. The high pitch of a signal tuning whined in the background broken by rustling static. Then, silence, before police sirens started to wail. I covered my ears, but couldn’t stop it. After all, the sound was coming from inside of me. 

“Tonight, on the 5 o’clock news. A man was murdered today, after what police suspect was an armed robbery turned violent. Mr. Kelvin Newsom was leaving the local bar after a night out with friends, when a masked man approached and shot him before jumping into a white van. Police are asking anyone with information to come forward.”

I sat up, and the sounds finally began to subside. Tears filled my eyes, and I stood despite my headache and made my way down the hall to my parent’s room. I hadn’t gone in at night that way since I was seven years old, when my nightmares were so vivid and real, that the only thing way to get me back to bed was for my mother to lay with me. 

The old hinges squeaked, and I squeezed my way in to avoid making the noise again. I walked softly to my dad’s side of the bed, and found to my relief, he was still there, sleeping. I watched his chest rise and fall for a little while, and smiled when he snorted and turned away. It was the same as The Tube, I decided, just like Jamie had told me. I wasn’t seeing real stuff. Just some strange channel, a signal that my TV didn’t pick up on. But not the truth. My dad asleep in his bed was proof. 

I went to sleep that night with no further interruption. A real peace had come over me, like when a fever breaks and the air, once furied with the wild places of diseased imagination, rests still and cold against your sweaty head. Restful sleep came to me for the last time that night.

---

It was only the next week when I learned my fate. Jamie was already far from my mind. I had put away the discrepancies of his existence, relegated the whole thing to a bad dream in the way only children can do. I was back to my old routine, eating peanut butter sandwiches and cruising the neighborhood on my bike alone, watching others play from a distance, and avoiding the house to put off mowing the lawn as long as I could. 

I came back as the street lights were coming on. From a little ways down the road, I could see the patrol cars. Two of them parked, one in the driveway. My dad usually parked there when he got home from work. A sick feeling made it’s way from my stomach to my limbs, and I pedaled harder, working against it. The old buzzing was returning, and I breathed in to try and calm myself. 

When I walked in, I could hear my mother sobbing. I moved without feeling, walking as if outside of my body into the living room where I could hear the soft voices of men and the stifled cries of my poor mother. I rounded a corner and saw her on the couch, her body folded, a tissue in her limp hand. A deputy stood with his hands clutched, another sat in the chair across from her. She looked alone in a way I have never seen, before or since.

They clapped me on the back and told me to take a seat. The only thing I remember them saying was that I needed to take care of my mother. I was the man of the house now. When they left, the younger one turned and looked at me earnestly.

“We’ll get the son of a bitch who did this. Mark my words.”

I did, but they never found my father’s murderer, and my mother never talked about it again. The trouble I brought her was enough to make her forget it most days. I grew nervous after his death. My headaches worsened. I went to clinics and hospitals. I got X-rays and later CT scans. When I was 15 I took up cigarettes, and then weed. The latter kept me hazy. It stopped the buzzing electric waves during the day. 

I dropped out of school and got a job at the local grocery store. The money helped my mom, who had gone back to work as a secretary at the same school Jamie Lewis would have gone to with me, had he not disappeared that summer when the TV glass got inside me, and everything changed.

Not everything I see comes true. I know that now. The Soviet attack never came to fruition, though there were close calls. Dr. King’s assassination and Gorbachev’s wall did. And of course, my old man. He really was murdered in the way that I heard he would be, when that devilish news anchor spoke in my mind, days before the police showed up at my door.

Still, the message of Armageddon and all the lookalikes crop up all these years later. The two towers was the last big one I saw, before last night. It’s usually when I’m nervous or can’t sleep. I take pills to keep my moods in check.

My wife thinks I’m just crazy. I keep it that way. I haven’t told her about the real things, the true things I’ve seen before they ever happened. It’s easier for her to understand that way, if she thinks I experience psychosis instead of one of the many possible endings to life as we know it. 

Still, last night was the worst one. That same buzzing electricity woke me just as I was drifting, and I saw the bombs falling from the sky. Thousands of them, turning cities to dust, leaving charcoal people plastered on concrete buildings and sidewalks. The big one. The one we thought we had escaped after the wall fell. After Chernobyl and Fukushima and all the god damned diplomacy and treaties. 

It could be like last time. A warning that never comes true. But my phone is buzzing as I type this. It’s the Emergency Alert. The screen is smaller, but it’s the same as always.

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. 

I already took the pills, the same ones I gave Joanne at dinner time. She didn’t know, but I think she would have wanted it this way. She’s a DNR type of gal. And I’ve seen what comes next. I won’t stick around and find out.

But if one of you reading this makes it, do me a favor? Throw the fucking screens away. It’s all a game to these people, flying this close to the sun. We get a new device every year. But that glass—it gets inside you? 

Game over.