The Pulse Read online

  The Pulse: EMP Post Apocalyptic Fiction

  Skylar Finn

  Copyright 2019 All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  The class was in varying stages of boredom. I looked out over the half-full lecture hall with dismay. Half of them were on their phones; the other half had their laptops open in front of them. They could have been taking notes, but I knew they were staring at their social media, eyes glazed, occasionally commenting on various posts. Liking or disliking a status, video, or picture.

  I dreaded teaching this particular section. I had only done it as a favor to the dean when the previous teacher went on sabbatical. It was an undergrad class, filled a general education requirement, and therefore consisted largely of sleeping and indifferent freshmen.

  It was an introductory course to sociology, which I tried to make interesting by tailoring it to specific scenarios that might excite their hung-over minds. For instance, in light of the many global catastrophes presently challenging the species, I did an entire segment on the sociology of survival—how does our culture react in the event of a large-scale, life-threatening, life-altering circumstance? How quickly will we de-evolve when confronted with a threat to our survival?

  “We might maintain a pretense of decorum,” I said to the slumbering class, “but the moment our lives are on the line, we rapidly descend into a state of primitive behavior: survival of the fittest. We cease to exercise moral judgments and traits such as selflessness, thoughtfulness, and empathy. We resort to fight or flight. We become, in short, animals.”

  “When you say animals, do you mean that we descend to the level of dumb beasts?” asked Mary, who sat in the front and was the only one who took notes with an actual notebook and a pen. She was the sole student I could be certain was paying attention on any given day. (I assumed she wasn’t merely composing future status updates in her notebook rather than her thoughts on the class.)

  “I mean that we’ve been dumb beasts all along,” I said. “It takes very little to cause us to regress. We are bipedal, carbon-based organisms. We might be obsessed with the concept of identity and the individual due to the evolutionary side effect of having attained sentience, which, in my opinion, was an accident of nature—either a happy or an unhappy one, depending on your view of it—but we are very much programmed to survive. In such a situation, the self-proclaimed pacifist might kill without a second thought.”

  “I don’t think everyone sacrifices their humanity just because they feel afraid,” said Mary. “Otherwise, what would be the point of exhibiting courage? Courage means acting in spite of your fears, contrary to them. If we all regress to fight-or-flight, there would be no need for bravery.”

  “That’s an excellent point,” I said. “Does anyone have a counterpoint?”

  I looked around the room. My expectations were low. But I didn’t get a chance to see their faces as the room went dark.

  The power went out. The darkness was not complete; there was a row of windows along the back wall and for a moment I thought how real they all looked, washed out by natural light, free from the institutional fluorescence.

  There was nothing atypical about a power outage: the school was old, the wiring was poor, and wherever the money from their staggering tuition was going, it wasn’t into building repairs. This was probably the third or fourth time the power had gone out since I started teaching at the school.

  The students were annoyed, grumbling and groaning. I would have liked to pretend it was because they were so dismayed that my lecture was interrupted, but I knew they had merely been startled from whatever social media bubble they were ensconced within, now having to deal with the outside world.

  “Guys, we’re clearly having some kind of issue,” I said. “There’s no point in continuing class in the dark.”

  The students stared at me blankly. It was then that I noticed that they weren’t even illuminated by the glow of their screens. Which was odd, because they all had laptops and phones in front of them.

  “My phone just died,” said Amber, who sat in the back row and had never once looked up in the last two months of class. She was always either glued to her phone or her laptop screen. “My laptop, too,” she added.

  “So did mine,” said Ravi, who was seated in front of her.

  “So did mine,” said Ping, who was seated in front of Ravi.

  “Are all your laptops and phones dead?” I asked the class doubtfully. It was one thing for the power to go out, but quite another for all their devices to simultaneously stop working. A tendril of something that felt like fear had already started creeping through my mind, but I quickly repressed it before it could spread any further. Best to get to the bottom of this before I jumped to any conclusions.

  “My screen’s black and it won’t come back on,” said Becky, pounding at her computer repetitively and without consequence. I was reminded of a cavewoman senselessly pounding a bone on the ground.

  It was odd, because a simple power outage wouldn’t have affected their battery-operated devices. Typical for the power to cut out; atypical for their devices to stop working.

  “Class, please make your way home safely and quickly,” I said. “I need to find out what’s going on.”

  They all jumped to their feet and filed out of the room, muttering worriedly about their devices. It was the one thing that got their attention.

  Mary stopped by my desk on her way out as I gathered my things to leave.

  “What do you think this is, Professor?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, zipping up my bag and slinging it over my shoulder. “But Mary…”

  I paused as she watched me, alert and attentive.

  “I would strongly suggest,” I said carefully, “that you go back to your dorm immediately and remain there until it becomes clear what’s going on. Don’t go out and wander about the city now that you have what seems like a free day. Go somewhere safe and stay there.”

  Mary’s eyes widened. “Professor, do you think there’s something bad happening?”

  “I think that whatever this is,” I said, “it’s nothing good.”

  Outside, students and faculty were pouring from the building like confused ants in a colony. Some were looking around, asking others if they knew what was happening. There was shouting in the parking lot, cars stopped at random, at a complete and total standstill. Still others yelled that their cars wouldn’t start. It was as if everyone had frozen in the middle of their actions in an elaborate game of freeze tag, stopped at the most inconvenient time possible.

  People were glued to their phones in various stages of distress. As I walked by them, it appeared that numerous people had tried to call for help after the first series of fender benders, but none of their phones were working. I pulled out my own. The screen was black. I jabbed at the po
wer button, my tension mounting. Nothing happened.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a man in a suit, whom I was relatively certain worked in the English department. The departments were all fairly tribal and the faculty in each tended to stick to our own kind. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Nobody’s phones are working,” he said, frustrated. Sweat had formed on his balding pate, and he was heavy enough that his apparent stress made me concerned for his health. “Nobody’s phones, or cars. I can’t start my car. It’s like some sick cosmic joke.”

  I thanked him and continued walking, surveying the scene at hand. Two students argued and looked on the brink of coming to blows. A nearby janitor intervened. Tensions were high and would only get worse. Of this I was certain.

  Cosmic joke it was not. If the theory forming in my mind was correct, this was the side effect of a massive event, the result of a coordinated attack which had likely affected a large geographic area—the country, possibly the continent.

  The only thing—save some alien takeover, which I considered extremely unlikely—with the capacity to simultaneously knock out the power and wipe out communication instantaneously was an EMP.

  2

  A catastrophic event: a nuclear event, the actual site of which must be very far from us indeed for us to only be experiencing these outer rings from where the pebble dropped and upset the delicate balance of our shared pond. Nonetheless, the effects would inevitably reach us, and whatever chaos and violence was already happening elsewhere would soon be here.

  I went behind the social sciences building and unlocked my bike from the rack. I lived only a few blocks from the college and was an advocate for sustainability, so I always bike to school. I thought of how glad I was that I did as I strapped my helmet on and I made my way carefully to the nature trail that ran behind the school, leading back to my neighborhood.

  As I rode home, I passed two joggers stopped in the middle of the trail, exclaiming over their respective iPhones and Fitbits. I didn’t pause to hear what they were saying. I had a feeling that I knew already.

  I couldn’t call my husband, Ethan, who was across town shopping for Halloween costumes with his daughter Grace. I didn’t like saying “my stepdaughter” because it made me feel like a wicked character in a fairy tale, but we had only been married for a year and it felt presumptuous to call her my daughter.

  It was because of Ethan that I suspected what was happening: Ethan and his infinite knowledge of impending disasters. This, combined with the inexplicable feeling you get in the seconds before a tornado--the pressure in the air, the anticipation, the complete silence, the calm before the storm.

  I arrived at our quaint Cape Cod-style house, a mile from the college. I wheeled my bike under the white rose trellis and brought it inside. I went straight to the hallway closet and flung it open to reveal the veritable stockpile within.

  Ethan. At first, I thought he was a bit of a nut. He was a writer and neurotic to begin with; compounding this was the fact that he wrote doomsday fiction under the name H.R. Sheldon that was wildly popular among the end-of-the-world set. He was raised on a homestead of preppers before running away at the age of sixteen and joining the more mainstream sect of civilization, but I suspect nothing he witnessed since then had served to entirely dissuade him of a possible end to our lives as we knew them.

  When we first started dating, I thought of Ethan’s idiosyncrasies as an adorable eccentricity: the way you think everything someone does is an adorable eccentricity when you first start dating. As we grew more serious, I realized how serious he was about it all. I shrugged and accepted it. He could have been an alcoholic, like my ex-husband: unreliable, negligent, indifferent.

  But Ethan wasn’t like that. We all have our baggage. Ethan’s seemed to result in an obsessive need to keep his family safe from any conceivable scenario.

  I thought maybe he’d had some childhood incident that made him that way, but had no idea the scope of the true story. When I found out, I understood why it was so ingrained in him. Again, I accepted it, the way you accept the people you love regardless of whether or not you understand everything about them.

  But for the first time, I finally understood that this strange thing about him represented a larger and more frightening truth than I ever could have imagined about how unstable and fragile the world was. And I had never felt so grateful for anything in my life. Was it fate that I met Ethan when I did? Some good karma I’d stored up somewhere? I didn’t usually think in those terms, but in a moment like this one, it was difficult not to.

  I assumed the greatest threat to humanity at present was global environmental change, but Ethan was convinced it would be something much more abrupt. He insisted that we stockpile supplies and perform monthly drills in the event that anything should happen.

  He was quite stern with Grace about this, practicing not only how we would flee in the event of an apocalyptic emergency, but what she should do if there was ever a school shooting, an electrical fire, or a stranger attempting to convince her to go to a second location. Grace seemed to handle this all in stride, as a matter of course, which I thought was a testimony to her fortitude.

  It sometimes put me on edge, but I knew only too well how quickly chaos follows disaster, and on this particular afternoon, I was never more glad of it. I felt grateful that I had met Ethan, out of anyone I could have chosen to sit next to at the library that day.

  We had three backpacks in a hallway closet. I took them out and stored them in the garage. We had a Prius, which Ethan had taken to the costume store with Grace, and which I was certain had most likely stopped working. Ideally it hadn’t happened while they were on the road. I could only hope the car was sitting useless in a parking lot while they remained safely inside the store. Or at least safe enough for the time being.

  Our second vehicle was more of a novelty: Ethan was obsessed with old cars, fuel inefficient though they were. He liked the aesthetic of them; a relic from a previous time. His pride and joy was an old Army Jeep. I knew that it would start because in addition to his aesthetic preferences, he’d gotten it specifically for this reason: just in case. He’d told me so on multiple occasions. At the time, I took it as one of his post-apocalyptic rants; that curious eccentricity I’d always liked about him. Now I could see how prescient his doomsday prophesying had turned out to be.

  I took the keys in the garage, lined the backpacks up against the wall, and turned the ignition. The engine rumbled and roared to life. I immediately cut it. I didn’t want the neighbors to hear and realize I still had a functioning vehicle. It would become a coveted object almost instantaneously.

  I would have to go to them. They were almost certainly stranded on the other side of the city and it would take him hours to walk back with Grace. Although we’d only been married for a year, we’d been together for five, both of us somewhat disillusioned about marriage at that point in our lives. We’d both gone through messy divorces and hadn’t planned to marry again. But it was clear from our connection, the way we barely had to speak to know what the other was thinking, that we belonged together. I knew him very well, as he did me, and I knew without our having to speak that he wouldn’t take such a foolhardy and uncalculated risk to venture into the streets with Grace, unprotected and vulnerable. I knew that he would know I took his warnings and plans to heart, and that I would come to them. I just had to get there.

  As I ascended the stairs, a map formed in my mind: from the garage to the pharmacy to the costume store across town. This would be my route. The one thing we couldn’t stockpile was Grace’s medication, and this would have to be my first stop: ideally before things got bad, but after the looting had started. I didn’t exactly have a prescription.

  I opened the nightstand drawer on the left side, Ethan’s side, revealing a handgun. The Governor, as Ethan referred to it fondly. I took his holster and his ammunition from the locked box under the bed.

  Once I was fully armed, I descended the stairs at a
run. I ducked through the doorway of the garage, throwing the backpacks in the back of the Jeep. I opened the garage door manually, realizing the opener wouldn’t work after I habitually flipped the light switch when I walked into the garage, only to remain in near darkness. I got behind the wheel and backed down the driveway, pulling out into a world I knew even then would rapidly spiral into chaos.

  When I pulled out into the street, the scene before me was a strange one. It was Halloween, and people appeared conflicted about whether to fully acknowledge what was happening: to assume it was merely a routine power outage that mysteriously eliminated the use of their cars and computers, or to form the beginnings of panic.

  The first group was strolling around the neighborhood getting an early start on trick-or-treating. I was amazed at their blithe optimism. Dusk was following, and jack-o-lanterns lit the windows of the houses I drove by. They were the only light source aside from the rapidly sinking sun.

  The second group was also outside, clustered on sidewalks and front porches in tense-looking knots, discussing the day’s events with troubled looks on their faces. I saw one of our neighbors glance up as I drove by. His mouth opened in a shout and I promptly accelerated. I felt certain his question would center on my working vehicle and would include an immediate follow-up of, could I take him somewhere to get this?

  I passed a grocery store on the way to the pharmacy and was immediately thankful that our bags were already filled with canned goods, dried goods, and bottled water. I saw a fight break out in the parking lot as someone threw the back door of a truck open, revealing a pallet of water. A crowd around the front doors turned simultaneously and descended on it like a pack of hungry zombies.