Be Careful What You Wish For: A Zombie Apocalypse-Chapter 506: The Sound Of Silence

"She’s going to shatter."

Dante’s voice was low and calm, but each word hit like a blade. He stood near the window in one of the deeper rooms of Hallow, arms folded, posture tight. Behind him, the wind howled through the jungle outside, and Tink and Snowflake let out chirps and growls of unease. But inside the house, the room held its breath.

Eric was seated at the long table, his back to the windows as his fingers tapped restlessly against a mug of untouched tea. Across from him, near the archway, Chang Xuefeng stood, arms crossed in front of him, gaze fixed on the flickering wall sconce as if he were watching memories in the flame.

"You’ve seen it," Dante said. "You’ve both seen what’s happening to her. The only problem is that what we’ve seen isn’t nearly one tenth of what is going on inside of her head."

"She’s holding on to too much," Eric replied, finally stilling his fingers. "Her system wasn’t made to carry the full spectrum of demonic emotion. Even with all of us here for her... she’s cracking."

"She doesn’t need us to be beside her, wringing our hands," Dante snapped. "She needs relief. She needs a space inside her mind to breathe."

Chang’s voice was calm, as always. "Hattie was never built for emotions," he said, remembering the girl he had met in Camp Hell. "She could barely hold on to her own. You’ve touched her mind. What did you see?"

Dante nodded once. "She let me in. And it’s worse than any of us thought. She’s not just hearing voices. She’s feeling everything. Fear, lust, hunger, pain... all of it. Constantly. There’s no barrier. No filter. It’s like she’s walking around in the middle of a crowd, being attacked on all sides. I tried to build her a glasshouse to keep the voices and feelings away from her, but the screams and pain from a demon miles away are like a stone hitting a window. Eventually, the house is going to break."

Eric leaned forward. "You were able to build her a shield?" he demanded.

"A temporary one," sighed Dante. "But it’s already cracking."

Chang Xuefeng turned toward them, his expression unreadable. "Then we make her a new one. Together."

"She won’t ask," Dante warned. "She wants to be strong enough to carry everything on her own. She has a lot of Pride in her, that girl."

Chang Xuefeng snorted at that statement. "She doesn’t have to ask, and she doesn’t have to be that strong. The most perfect Hattie in any world is the one who is free to do whatever she wants. Let’s give her everything that she wants."

Eric nodded. "If we can anchor her—give her a structure inside her mind, something sealed, sacred... a mental temple, maybe. Something that holds the noise back—we might be able to give her a fighting chance."

"She needs silence," Dante muttered. "But not isolation. If she’s left alone inside her own head, the silence will consume her just as much as the voices will."

"I’ll help her build it," Chang Xuefeng said. "A place she can escape to. A sanctuary only she can open."

Already, Eric was shaking his head. "No," he announced. "We aren’t going to build a place where she can go to inside her own head. That is doing nothing more than making her a prisoner inside her own mind. Instead, we need to create a place for all the voices and outside feelings to go. A place to trap them, not her. She’s done nothing wrong; she doesn’t deserve to be punished."

"You’re right," sighed Dante.

"You hated saying that, didn’t you?" chuckled Eric. "But that’s fine. I’ll design the mental structure to hold all the demons. You and Xuefeng just need to keep her anchored while it is being built."

"Can the God of Destruction really build something like this?" demanded Dante, his eyebrow raised as he looked at Eric.

"For my woman? My other half? I can do a lot of fucking things," assured Eric, coming to his feet. "Whatever Hattie wants, she gets. If she needs to trap all the voices inside her head, then that’s damn well what I will make." freewebnøvel.com

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They came to me later that day.

I was curled in the corner of a velvet couch that Hallow had moved into my room sometime when I wasn’t paying attention. My eyes burned. My thoughts raced in a hundred voices that weren’t mine.

But when I saw the three of them—Dante, Eric, and Daddy—I didn’t move. I didn’t have the energy to fight. I barely had enough energy to breathe.

Eric knelt beside me first. "We want to help," he announced, not touching me. "We’re going to create a place inside your head where you can stuff all the voices and emotions that you want. How does that sound?"

Daddy sat on the floor near my legs, folding his hands calmly. "You don’t deserve to bear the weight of everyone and everything in the Devil’s Playground, and we are going to do everything that we can to make it so that only you are in your head."

Dante didn’t speak. He just sat at my side and let his presence do what words couldn’t.

I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say anything, even within the glasshouse, it was becoming too much. So, I just nodded.

Eric’s fingers brushed my temple. "This might feel strange," he announced just as I felt him slipping inside.

Strange was an understatement. The moment their energies touched mine, it felt like my skull opened.

But not in a painful way. More like... a shaken can of pop being cracked open to release the pressure.

Suddenly, I could see a new place inside my head, a place that didn’t exist in the outside world.

The sky above me was black, swirling with galaxies and stars, but they were quiet. Peaceful. Below me, the ground was cool marble, etched with runes I didn’t understand.

Eric stood at one end of a long corridor, Daddy at the other, and Dante behind me like a shadow made real.

"This is your space now," Eric’s voice echoed calmly. "You control what enters. I need you to think about all the feelings and voices. Can you hear them?"

When I nodded my head, Eric smiled at me like he was proud of me. "Then grab those feelings and voices with both hands and pull them inside."

It was like a tidal wave. The second I pulled all the tethers into this room, it was a powerful rush. Daddy gripped my arm, and suddenly, the four of us were outside the ancient temple.

"Now, any time you hear a new voice or feel a new emotion, you can put them in that chamber," smiled Daddy, stroking a piece of hair away from my face.

Nodding my head, I realized that I was back in my own mind. And except for the three guys, there was no one else inside of it.

"I don’t know if I like the silence," I admitted after a moment. "But it is definitely better than the alternative. Thank you," I breathed.

Daddy smiled, nodding his head. "Now, let’s go home."