It was a very sad room. All four walls, as seemed to be customary throughout the building, were cold, dark grey concrete, barely covered over with a thin layer of that same color, and the floor was covered by a rather thick carpet of dust. The bed was metal, as was the desk, lockers for clothes, and single folding chair, set up in a corner. The only light sources were a single, free-swinging bulb that hung from the ceiling, and a skinny, smudgy window, with a heavy screen across the glass inside and two thick metal bars, outside.
He touched the cold wall, and sat down on the bed with a SHLOOMPH of dust, causing a few cockroaches to scurry from beneath the bed, disappearing in the space under the desk. He gazed around at the room, entirely lost.
He had never had his own room. Eighteen years, and he'd always shared with at least two of his brothers at a time. Now, sitting alone in a room that was all his, he hardly knew what to think. It was so... quiet.
He looked around, taking in everything. If he listened very hard, he could hear some sort of piping working away in the floor below him, and the occasional creak or groan as the building practically fell apart around him. Somewhere not too far away, someone was walking with a rather heavy step. But nowhere could he hear the sounds he was used to; the blare of a TV tuned to Gilligan's Island, the thud-thud-thud of a basketball outside, a gangly boy hip-checking the wall by the back door for the thousandth time, or sneakered feet taking the stairs three at a time. Where were the shouts, the laughs, the sounds?
It was all so strange. How could it be that he had his own room, now, in the middle of a war? It was a terrible room, but a room all the same, and as he sat there, staring at the wall, letting it all sink in, he felt suddenly very cold.
Usually, at home, whenever things got too quiet, he would wander off to find one of his brothers or a neighborhood kid, and it was always easy to start up a game, a fight, a competition, until the whole neighborhood was laughing, shouting, playing, running, bright and happy and loud. Now, however, he was an adult, and one with a job to do, at that.
All the same, he was cold. It wasn't the temperature that bothered him, so much as the near-silence. Somewhere distant, a man sneezed. Something solid thudded against something else. A cough. A muffled mutter. A few scuffling steps, and a few sudden, echoing, distant clangs.
But where was the life? Where was the blasting music from next door, the cheering, giggling girls on the street, the mocking laughtracks and squeal of bikes and splashing of waves at the beach? Slamming doors and dancing feet and friendly banter and busy traffic and clatter of dishes, where was all that? How could a person survive in a place so deathly still, quiet, cold?
He hummed a quiet, catchy showtune, scuffing his shoes in the gritty dust underfoot, just for some sound. Something jingled somewhere, and a single, distant, whistled note rang out. But even these simple, small sounds seemed eclipsed by the utter silence. It was so loud, so deafening, so blinding, that he felt as though he were choking on it, and it was closing in on him from all sides, crushing his lungs. It rang in his ears and stuck to his hands and swirled through his hair, and even the smallest sounds-the scraping of his skin as he pushed at his hair, the rumble of his muscles as he nervously shifted, the heavy beats of his heart as he held his breath, seemed magnified in the tiny room.
A crack, a splinter, a crumble. Suddenly, it all became too much, and he found himself leaping up, darting out the door, and dashing through the base, yelling and whooping and hollering. He slammed doors, jumped down entire flights of stairs, pounded his feet on the hard cement floors as he ran, leaving curious, confused and annoyed mercenaries in his wake.
Some of them, too, had been feeling the silence, and those of them eagerly joined them, hooting and screeching and yowling, attempting to raise the dead. They didn't know, however, that it would work.