Ajax groans. The nonsense words are now getting loud enough to make his head ache. Christa Rowfield turns from the student she’s helping to see Ajax hold his forehead in pain. Shaula is looking at him in worry; has she ever seen her worry? He is also sweating buckets.
Oh no… It looks like he has the flu. Christa thinks to herself. That’s unlucky.
Some of the other students turn briefly towards Ajax after hearing him groan. They notice that he’s sweating a lot. They can see that Ms. Rowfield is aware of his current condition as well, so they turn back to their own test papers. Whatever is going on with Ajax, she will deal with him.
Christa walks discreetly towards Ajax’s desk. He is one of her brightest students, he wouldn’t make up excuses or try to weasel his way out of a difficult test. She assumes that he would want to be taken to the nurse’s station.
Although it’s a shame to stop now while there’s still a little over a half hour left, he can still do a make-up exam at a later date. Ajax looks up to see that Ms. Rowfield has approached him.
…What? Doesn’t she hear it?
Ms. Rowfield isn’t reacting at all to the voice that is currently drowning out everything else in the room; she is only looking towards him with concern for his well-being. His eyes dart quickly to the other students and sees that none of them are reacting either.
Why doesn’t anyone hear it!?
Whatever he’s hearing, it isn’t something that anyone else can hear. If it were just a weird noise, he might have assumed it was something like tinnitus. But, he can clearly hear sentences and words being spoken through the voice, though gibberish. The voice itself feels familiar to him as well, even though he doesn’t exactly know why.
As the voice continues to grow louder, Ms. Rowfield starts to speak.
“Ajax, don’t worry about the test, you can leave the classroom for the nurse’s station. I’ll come and check in on you after I’m done here. Do you need Shaula to take you? You can hand in your test, Shaula, I can tell you’re already done with it anyways.”
Christa speaks to Ajax with understanding, and looks towards Shaula. However, Shaula also has a poor expression on her face. Christa can see beads of sweat dripping down her forehead onto the test paper she’s holding. Shaula is clearly in some sort of distress or pain as well.
Shaula slowly hands over the test to Christa while continuing to stare directly at Ajax. Her eyes are trembling. She holds the test in her hand, looking at the sweat drop stains on Shaula’s paper.
“Shaula–” As Christa tries to ask Shaula what’s wrong, Ajax interrupts her in a halting manner.
“Ms. Rowfield… uh… do– do you not…”
Ajax doesn’t finish his sentence however, he instead quickly closes his eyes as the headache he is feeling starts to get worse. Until now, the voice while loud and blaring in Ajax’s ear had a whisper quality to it. However, the voice isn’t whispering anymore.
The fact that it is now even clearer for him to hear only increases his pain. It is loud enough to make Ajax think that his ears should be bleeding and its clarity as a true voice adds an incomprehensible psychic damage. He cannot hear anything around him anymore.
“Ah. Ahhh… AAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”
Ajax starts screaming at the immense pressure on his mind. All of the students in the class turn away from their test papers to see what’s going on. They see Ajax leaning hard against his table while desperately clutching his ears, trying in vain to muffle what he is hearing.
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He opens his eyes, and they’re bloodshot. He is currently in the middle of some kind of panic attack or seizure or something, the students cannot make any guesses. Dumbfounded, Christa backs away from the two of them, while Shaula reaches out her hand to see if there’s anything she can do to help Ajax.
However, she’s hearing the same intense voice and feels the same amount of pain accompanying it. Shaula grits her teeth and holds in her screams as she sees Ajax in deep distress. Tears stream down her cheeks at the intensity of the voice.
She continues to reach out to him, but realizes that it is futile to try and calm him down when she herself cannot remain calm. So instead, while unable to hear her own voice, Shaula shouts to Christa.
“M– MISS… MISS ROWFIELD, CALL… AAHHHH… CALL AN AMBULANCE! HOW… CAN YOU NOT HEA–”
Christa, finally snapping out of her daze, runs towards the landline attached to the nearby wall of the classroom, but stops as she looks towards Ajax and Shaula. Something has changed in Ajax and Shaula’s area of the classroom. Christa doesn’t understand what she is seeing.
Oh my God…
As the two of them continue to scream in intense pain, the air around them starts to shimmer. The sight is very similar to the shimmer of heat that can be seen around the exhaust pipe of a bus on a hot summer day. It obscures them slightly but clearly. The sound of their screams starts to grow more muffled, more distant…
Christa reaches the phone and tries to call for an ambulance. She starts inputting numbers when all of a sudden the lights in the classroom shut off.
“Hello? Hello!?” She doesn’t even hear the dial tone, the phone is completely dead.
It should be connected to an emergency power source in the event of a blackout, but still it’s not working.
Some of the students watching the mirage around Ajax and Shaula scream at the sudden power outage. Others who are a little more prepared immediately run towards their backpacks containing their phones, placed at the front of the class during the exam.
Some want to call emergency services or while others wish to take video of what’s happening to Ajax and Shaula. Christa also runs towards her desk where she kept her own phone, but finds that her phone is turned off. She tries hard to turn it on, but she cannot.
It should have been at 90% in the morning, it doesn’t make sense. Shit!
“M-My phone won’t turn on! What the hell is happening?”
“Mine too! What about you, Kate?”
“Fuck! It should be at least 60%, how can it not turn on? I only bought it last month! Did all our phones fucking break!?”
Christa looks towards the students holding their phones right now. They can’t turn their phones on either. All she can think right now is that whatever caused the sudden blackout wiped out their devices too. She looks back towards Ajax and Shaula.
The two of them are the center of all this.
She wonders if the blackout actually had something to do with them as well. It is unbelievable, she wouldn’t have believed it if she wasn’t in the room right now with them. The shimmering air is harder to see at this point because of the sudden darkness in the room and the curtains being closed.
However, the air that was shimmering has also changed. It now starts to glow in a somewhat sickly looking rainbow. It looks a bit like the refractive rainbow patterns that form in puddles of industrial runoff, manifesting on the surface of the shimmering air.
Some of the students head out the door in order to escape this unknown and potentially dangerous scene. Christa and a few of the students move to open the curtains so they can have a clearer view of what’s happening to Ajax and Shaula.
The moment new light enters the classroom the rainbow pattern is dispelled and the class can see Ajax and Shaula clearly once again.
“Ms. Rowfield, what’s… what’s happening to them?”
“I don’t know, Jonathan, I seriously have no idea. I-I just thought they were sick, but all of this freaky nonsense starts happening too? We need to get them to a hos–”
“Wait, look! T-They’re…!”
Ajax and Shaula stop screaming. They slowly open their eyes and raise their heads. The voice is gone now; the sound increased to an ear bleeding intensity, then stopped suddenly. Both of them feel weak and their heads still ache, but they aren’t in the intense pain they were in earlier.
The two of them notice for the first time that the curtains are open, the lights have gone out for the first time and their classmates are all standing while looking at them. Neither Ajax nor Shaula know what to make of this situation.
At least, they feel better. The voice is gone. It’s over; whatever this is, it’s over. The voice has indeed stopped and something else begins.