Silent Screams

“Crap, I’m gonna be late...” I mutter to myself throwing my shoulder through the front exit of the Psychology building.

As the door flings open, the murmurs of the world begin their usual assault on my senses. It used to drive me nuts—static without a mute button—but at least the chatter is around the same level this time around. This way, I don’t have to actually understand any of it - aside from the ones I walk by directly anyway. Campus life is always like this. A herd of students hurrying past one another with heads buried in their textbooks and smartphones.

It’s the norm.

I, on the other hand, a seemingly ordinary 20-year-old, am anything but.

“Man…I completely failed that exam…” A low breeze brushes past me as I walk by a student with his head fixed to the ground.

A girl holding her books close to her chest absentmindedly walks past in the opposite direction from me. Another breeze greets me, though this one is a little higher. “If that professor wasn’t such a jerk, he’d be kind of cute.”

Normal college students don’t experience these things as they walk the quad.

“Who just drops 20 dollars and doesn’t notice? NICE!” Bingo. I like the sound of this one. It’s a breeze I don’t mind brushing against me. There’s a guy standing in the middle of the walkway in front of me, looking down with excitement at what is soon to be mine.

I stroll past him, patting my pockets as if I’m worried.

“I can’t believe I lost it. She’s gonna have my head.” I project my voice at a volume that is just loud enough that I’m sure he can hear me.

“No way he’s talking about this. I gotta go before he notices.” He’s gonna need a little more of a push before he caves. Figures…

I pull out my phone and fake a call, flopping to the ground with a dramatic sigh. “Yeah… I can’t find it, babe…” I say, making sure my voice cracks with just the right amount of desperation. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him trip over himself as I drop the pet name. Nice. He’s close. “I know... I’ll get your medicine... I’ll just skip lunch!”

A hand taps my shoulder. I glance up, feigning surprise, and there it is: twenty dollars, practically glowing in his outstretched hand. “You looking for this?”

Maybe I should get a Minor in theater?

“Oh!” I snap back to my phone. “Nevermind, I just found it... Yeah, I’ll see you soon, baby.” I hang up and turn back to him, being sure to plaster on a grateful smile. “Thanks, man! I appreciate it.”

“Yeah… I figured it was too good to be true.” He hangs his head in resignation.

Pocketing the cash, I give him a friendly wave. “Nice guy...” I walk away, glancing down at the money. “But he could’ve been nicer...” He took a little longer to crack than he should have

“Only I could have lost 20 dollars like that…” There’s a girl searching through the grass for something. She frantically walks back and forth.

Our eyes meet for a moment and I make it a point to give her a head nod before melting into the part of the crowd where the chatter is the thickest.

Yes, I am blessed - or cursed depending on how you look at it - with the ability to read the thoughts of those around me. Reading is a weird way to put it though, I think. It’s like looking at a written word and trying not to read what it says. You can’t. It just happens. My ability works similar to that, except I don’t have to see the word to be forced to read it.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. There was a time when I was a normal person like everyone else. Then one day, in high school, I heard my girlfriend’s thoughts between passing periods. She was so excited yelling out of her mind about how thrilling it was to cheat on me and not get caught. Well, I guess yelling in her mind is more accurate…

Learning this ability has been a bit of a process.

I pull my earphones out of my hoodie and pair them with my phone. It isn’t perfect, but it drowns out enough that I can just be with the music—which is as close as I can get to being alone with my own thoughts anymore.

One foot in front of another, I continue my stroll down the familiar path to my next class.

This ability of mine has been a goldmine in college. I can literally take my pick as to who I want to collaborate with on exams and as for the professors - let’s just say I always know exactly what they want to hear. It’s not cheating or anything like that. A teacher’s job is to assess the students mind, not their paper. I’m just making use of my mind and learning psychology to make use of the minds of others. You know, applying what I learn. What can I say?

I’m a scholar.

“HELP ME!”

A wind shoves me backwards with so much force I practically fall over myself. It sliced right through the melodies and drum beats playing through my earphones in a scary way.

“OH GOD! SOMEONE PLEASE!”

I would almost think the scream was verbal had anyone around me reacted in any way to it.

“That’s... a loud thought.” Probably the loudest I heard in a while. Maybe if I take off now I’ll be far enough away to not hear it anymore.

It’d be someone else’s responsibility.

As I start to speed up my pace, that gust of wind slamming into me starts to weaken… slowly… until it’s practically nothing.

Great. If I keep it up, I can be out of the area before anything real starts to—

SKREEEEEE!

It strikes deep inside me, vibrating in my bones. A discordant, agonizing melody—a violin drawn too tight, its strings screeching as they’re scraped raw.

“IT HURTS!”

My heart pounds in my chest. This is different. This thought… It’s breathless… The voice in it is twisting into the pulled strings, matted into the melody like lyrics sung too late for the beat, thrumming through my ribs like the bassline of a song stuck on repeat. I don’t know why… but my legs won’t move forward anymore.

Whoever that is isn’t letting me ignore them.

The song is agonizingly loud, a desperate note that claws at the edges of my mind and etches its location into the back of my eyelids. It’s not just noise—it’s hands, cold and relentless, gripping me from the inside, dragging me forward with every discordant beat. My legs are now moving but not because I gave the command. My senses are locked onto the source of the distress signals. Stumble, half-dazed, I am forced behind the undergraduate library, the strain winding tighter with every step.

There, in the dim light, sits a hunched over ragged woman, her body contorting in violent spasms. Her thoughts reverberate throughout my skull, a discord of terror and despair.

“Stop making me eat it! My body... it’s betraying me! OH GOD, please—PLEASE HELP!”

She’s not just thinking those words. She’s feeling them, and I can feel it too. The music grates inside me—violins stretched to their limits, screeching with every bite, underscored by a relentless, broken rhythm, like a heartbeat that can’t decide whether to stop or keep going. I attempt to look past her and am greeted to the sight of a lifeless man, his flesh torn and mangled.

My stomach flips.

I want to throw up. But I can’t. It doesn’t… come up… I can’t even gag… Her remorse hums beneath the screeching notes—soft, steady, yet drowned.

“I’m so sorry…” CRUNCH! “I’m so sorry...” CRUNCH!

The panic, the helplessness, the grotesque satisfaction as her teeth tear into flesh.

That… violin. God… it’s haunting.

She is apologizing... but she isn’t stopping - tearing each muscle fiber apart from the bone and diving in like it was a buffet without so much of a sign of hesitation.

My stomach churns as my body, like it’s trying to somehow reject the information it just received.

“URK—”

Her head snaps toward me, her bloodshot eyes locking onto mine as the violin’s screech rises to a violent crescendo, bouncing around inside my skull like an out-of-tune string snapping all at once.

Her eyes, filled with madness, are locked onto mine. Her face was a grotesque mask, skin peeling away to reveal raw, crimson flesh and bone like someone clawed her face out. If I didn’t know any better, I’d question if this was even human.

“NO! Run! I can’t stop myself. PLEASE! DON’T LET ME KILL YOU TOO!” Her mental cries are desperate, and I feel something primal grip my heart.

She rises in a slow, unnatural motion, as if strings are pulling her upright, limbs jerking and twisting with an eerie grace. Her red-stained hands twitch, fingers curling unnervingly as they stretch toward me, her eyes locked in a vacant, hollow stare.

In an action of neither fight or flight, I trip over backwards and land on the concrete beneath me. It’s almost as if the air itself is a physical obstacle right now. I can’t get my mind and body to agree on what I should do next.

The word zombie flickers in my mind, a term from horror stories, movies, and comic books. I thought zombies were a work of fiction... then again... I guess you could say the same about my ability.

So, this is real. Terrifyingly real.

“My mouth... it’s… still watering...” Blood drips out of her mouth, staining the concrete she hovers over.

I’m paralyzed, my mind trying its best to finish processing what even is in front of me.

“Z-Zom... Zombie...?” My voice is reduced to a stuttering whisper and in a split second her body is in a full arc, crashing towards me as if meaning to pin me to the ground.

The world seemed to slow down at that exact moment.

Am I really in the midst of an apocalypse? Does it start with her, or has it already brewed and she’s just the herald for things to come? I want to scream, but nothing comes out. My throat is tight, my muscles locked in place. This can’t be it, right? This can’t be how I go out. Not in some grand scheme I’ve manipulated, not because the government found out about my ability? But here? Alone, at the hands of a cannibalistic monster I couldn’t even gather enough courage to run away from?

“I’ll tear you apart if you hesitate! GET OUT OF HERE!”

A powerful gust of wind slams into me, like a right hook meant to knock someone out in the first round of a boxing match. The air feels so different than anything I have felt before this—too sharp, too strong—like it’s trying to rip me out of the moment and throw me somewhere else.

Someone just pressed play.

My body rolls away from her lunge and with adrenaline-fueled speed, I turn and sprint away. I feel the rush as my legs pump furiously beneath me. I don’t look back—won’t let myself. The world around me blurs as I race toward safety, the woman’s anguished full thoughts fading into the distance.

“OH GOD! There’s someone else!”

I had never believed in monsters, but in that moment, I have come face-to-face with one.

And as I run, I become more aware of the world around me. More and more thoughts force their way into my head as I barrel through the campus, desperate to outrun the screeching violin still echoing in my mind.

A piercing wail of sirens joins the cacophony around me, their shrill cries intertwining with the desperate pleas of the terrified. As I sprint through the chaos, the world begins to blend into streaks of color and sound.

I hear it in the frantic thoughts of those around me—pain, confusion, and terror. If I were to use my earphones right now, I bet I would be lucky to even hear a drum over the beating heart of chaos around me.

But there is something more, something infinitely darker lurking beneath the surface of their fear. As I listen, I realize with a gut-wrenching clarity that these people, these victims, aren’t really dying. No, they are becoming something else entirely, something far worse than death itself. Their bodies are being hijacked by an insidious force, their minds still conscious, trapped in a nightmare they will never be able to awake from.

There’s… hot tears spilling down my face as I run. The agony of these people, the sheer terror they experience as they witness their own bodies turn against them, is… overwhelming.

The gnashing of their own teeth, the taste of the raw flesh of each of their victims, the sound of them screaming out in agony before they too turn to join them in the horror; they are awake for it all, forced to bear witness to the nightmare of their own transformation into monsters...

... and then live the reality that is after.

I run, unable to stop the tears from streaming, the weight of the situation crushes my chest. Each step I force myself to take is heavy. The world around me is shifting into a nightmare. Every gasping breath, every pounding heartbeat, is a reminder of this sudden new inescapable reality.

“There!” I catch sight of a fire escape, blotting for it as if nothing else mattered. My hands are trembling as I grip the cold metal rungs. I climb, higher and higher, until my muscles scream and my lungs burn. But that fucking violin is getting quieter…

SO I KEEP CLIMBING.

When the sickening notes of agony fade into a mere whisper, my body collapses and begin to convulse with dry heaves.

I retch, my stomach empty but the nausea lingers, a bitter taste in my mouth that won’t leave no matter how much my body tries to force it out. Everything is crashing over me like a tidal wave.

The world just fell.

I am just a witness to it, haunted by the screams of the damned and the privileged knowledge of what’s waiting for humanity just on the other side of a bite.