The Forever Man: PULSE

by Craig Zerf

  Now it was their time to learn that the devil truly is in the small print.

  Hogan started to walk again, when he heard someone calling him.

  ‘Hey, buddy.’

  He turned to see a large, crew cut man in a tight black suit standing the other side of the gate.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Asked the marine.

  The crew cut man smiled. ‘Semper Fi, master sergeant. Private first class, Thomas Kowalski, retired from the corp and living the dream, sir.’

  Hogan smiled. ‘Oorah, pfc. Once a marine always a marine. What can I do you for?

  ‘Could you come inside, sir?’ Asked Kowalski. ‘We spotted you coming down the road and my boss would like to have a chat with you.’

  Hogan shrugged. ‘Why not, pfc. Lead the way.’

  The pfc took out a bunch of keys, unlocked the gate and opened it just enough for Hogan to squeeze through, closing it behind him.

  They walked up the long sweeping driveway towards the house. The drive was covered in white marble chips and bordered by oak trees. Old fashioned lamps and water features also abound but neither worked. The fountains were not natural and the gas lamps were electrical replicas.

  ‘What puts you in these parts of the woods, master sergeant?’ Asked Kowalski.

  Hogan gave the pfc a quick rundown that was full of marine acronyms like ASAP and CQC and OFP.

  Kowalski’s story was simpler. He had resigned from the corps after Gulf War One, gone into private security and ended up as bodyguard and head of security for mister Hollywood.

  They arrived at the entrance to the house. Hogan could see the tail rotor of a helicopter to the right of the sprawling mansion. In the near distance were horses. Peacocks roamed the gardens braying loudly, like donkeys.

  The two marines mounted the sweeping marble steps to the massive front door. Kowalski let them in. The master of the house was standing in the entrance hall and he walked straight up to Hogan, his hand out, multi-million dollar smile lighting up his face. It was a strange feeling for the master sergeant. He had seen the man’s image so many times, it felt as if he knew him. The man shook his hand warmly and then put his arm around him, leading him from the entrance through to a sitting room.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said to Hogan. ‘We saw you coming down the road and I told Kowalski to extend my invitation to you. Us Americans must stick together.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Hogan. ‘How did you know that I was American?’

  ‘Kowalski knew. The uniform. The weapons.’ He went to a sideboard and gestured to an array of bottles. ‘A drink? No ice I’m afraid but I have twenty year old scotch, Russian vodka, French cognac.’ He poured himself a whisky. And walked to the window.

  Hogan shook his head. The man was starting to irritate him a little. He talked without pause, never waiting for an answer or even expecting one.

  ‘Right, gunny…’

  Kowalski visibly flinched.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ interjected Hogan. ‘Were you ever in the Marine Corps?’

  ‘No. But I did play a marine once. Sergeant Major Tellman. DSC. Got an Oscar for that one. Best supporting. Man I was good.’

  ‘Regardless, sir,’ continued Hogan. ‘You were never an actual marine, only a pretend one. And pretend marines don’t get to call me gunny. No way. You, sir, may call me Hogan or Nathaniel or Sergeant or even Marine. Just not, gunny. Ever.’

  The actor nodded, unaffected. ‘Fair enough, Nathaniel. Now, I’m not sure why you’re in the area but I do know one thing. This is your lucky day. Nathaniel, none of us are sure what has happened out there,’ he swept his hand across the landscape as he talked. ‘We may never know. But one thing…’

  ‘Sir,’ interjected Hogan. ‘We have a pretty good idea what has happened. There has been some sort of electromagnetic pulse, either man made or natural, we aren’t one hundred percent sure, but it has knocked out all of our electronic and electrical capabilities. Over the last few days complete anarchy has taken over. People are dying in their hundreds of thousands and I see no immediate end to this. To all intents and purpose we have been reduced to the dark ages and things will get worse.’

  ‘Well, rather a bleak outlook, Nathaniel,’ said mister Hollywood. ‘Nevertheless it brings me to my point. I would like you to stay here, with my family, until things get sorted out. I believe that the more Americans and the more weaponry that we have here the safer we will be. We have enough food to last a substantial time. Maybe as long as ten days. By then the government, US or other, will have sorted this mess and I can promise you, you will be substantially rewarded. Not only in monetary terms but also socially. You will become part of my inner circle. Hollywood premiers. A certain degree of fame. Maybe even get the odd role in the movies. All the good things, Nathaniel. So, can I show you your room?’ He smiled at Hogan once again. A full one thousand megawatt Hollywood blinder.

  Hogan shook his head, more to himself than anyone in the room.

  He held his hand out to Kowalski. ‘It’s been a pleasure, marine.’

  Kowalski shook it. ‘Oorah, gunny.’

  Hogan turned to Hollywood. ‘Sir, for once in your life listen up and listen good. It’s all over. Your ten days food, you better ration it to last at least a month. Now, use Kowalski here, the American taxpayer has paid almost one million dollars to train him to this point, so utilize his expertise. Send out some recons in force, fact-finding and food acquirement. Set up watches. Be aware. But, this is the most important thing; you have to accept that there will be no miraculous governmental intervention. No cavalry, no column of hummers with MRE’s and Coke and gum to chew. This is it, Hollywood man. Lights out, curtain down. It’s reality time.’

  There was a long pause while the actor stared at Hogan. And then he clapped. ‘Brilliant. Man that was intense. “It’s reality time”. Man,’ he continued. ‘You have got it. You know, Nathaniel, you could play yourself when they do the movie about this. Perfect man, perfect.’

  Hogan snorted in disgust, turned on his heel and walked to the entrance. Behind him he could hear the actor running through his speech. ‘It’s reality time. Lights out, curtain down…it’s goddamn reality time.’

  Kowalski walked with Hogan.

  ‘Look, sergeant,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that. These actor dudes don’t deal well with reality.’

  Hogan shook his head. ‘What the hell? Is he simple or something?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Kowalski. ‘He’s famous. Comes down to the same thing. Guy earned millions and got world recognition for doing sod all, where’s you and I spent the last ten years of our lives getting shot at for minimum wage. Still, he hired me and where he goes, I go.’

  ‘Semper Fidelis,’ said Hogan, repeating the Marine Corp logo in Latin. ‘Always Loyal,’ he translated.

  ‘To a fault, gunny,’ said Kowalski. ‘To a bloody fault.’

  Her unlocked the gate and Hogan walked through. He didn’t look back and Kowalski said no more.

  Chapter 7

  Ayoka Falana was born in the small rural village of Nakanda some thirty-five miles outside of Lagos in Nigeria. They had no running water save a hand operated pump in the middle of the village, courtesy of UNICEF and their water for Africa project. Their only electricity was an old petrol driven Yamaha generator given to the village by the Help Africa Foundation. After it had run out of gas there was no money to get any more, so it simply stood outside the headman’s hut and rotted away.

  But now Ayoka was in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world. London. And more specifically, in the Royal Chelsea Hospital in Chelsea, London. And the major difference between London and her home village, was that in the hospital in London there was no hand pump for water. So she, and hundreds of others around her, were slowly dying of dehydration.

  The irony of the situation did not strike Ayoka. She was not a person who had ever thought in terms of irony or sarcasm or paradox. She thought in more simple terms, she worked hard and she usually got what she wanted.


  Although she had never formally attended school her mother had taught her to read and write to a rudimentary level and, from the age of fourteen, she had helped out in the district’s local clinic. Rolling bandages, sterilizing instruments and cleaning up. By the age of fifteen she had decided that she wanted to be a nurse. A real one with a nice white uniform and a hat and sensible shoes and a watch that hung from a chain on your breast.

  Both her mother and father had approved of her ambition so, the two of them had saved every spare cent that they earned. By the time Ayoka was nineteen years old, they had saved enough to bribe one of the corrupt officials at the Babalola State University to issue her with a fake nurse’s degree.

  Her proudest moment of her life was when her father returned home from the university and presented her with the certificate.

  Ayoka Felana BSc (Hons) Nursing.

  She had immediately applied for a nursing post in London, England and had been accepted by all three hospitals that she had applied to.

  The entire extended family had banded together to buy her airplane ticket and she had been promised a room in Earls Court with a distant relative for the first month.

  She had arrived in London on a Saturday morning; spent the rest of the weekend acclimatizing and started work on the Monday.

  That was the day of the first pulse.

  It was now 72 hours later.

  When the pulse had struck and the entire building was plunged into powerless darkness, the first effects were felt in the operating theaters. All of the theaters were internal rooms with no access to natural lighting. All operations are carried out under HD-LED lighting and the air is controlled through a pressurized laminar flow system. So when the power went and the backup generators were unable to kick in, the operating theaters were plunged into utter pitch black. This, combined with the fact that the anesthetic machines could no longer operate meant that patients were waking up in the middle of their operations in the stygian darkness of hell.

  Open heart surgery, stomach surgery, lung surgery. Patients screaming in agony, thrashing around, falling off the operating tables while surgeons and nurses stumbled around in the dark, stepping on the patient’s exposed insides. Crushing and maiming. Scalpels cutting into fumbling hands and contaminated needles puncturing groping fingers.

  In the neonatal ward thirty-two babies in incubators died within eight minutes.

  All patients on life support died within minutes.

  By that evening over ninety percent of the patients in the intensive care unit had died.

  The next day was far worse. The nine elevators were inaccessible and seven of them had patients prepped for surgery. By that stage, seven out of the nine lifts contained at least one dead body. Water also ran out that morning.

  And then the fires started. Doctors were attempting to provide primary care via candle and firelight and it was only a matter of time before a bottle of surgical spirits came into contact with a naked flame. The resulting explosion burned two doctors and a mother in labor to death. The child survived until the next day when it succumbed to burns and infection. The fire was contained via the use of fire extinguishers, one of the few things that still worked.

  By that evening the dead and dying lay everywhere. The toilets didn’t work and the corridors ran with raw sewage. The stench of death and decay filled the stagnant building like a miasma. Rioting and full scale looting started at around six that evening as people, desperate for diabetic insulin, antibiotics and pain relief stormed the hospital and ransacked it in a frantic search.

  The looters started more fires that spread quickly.

  And, almost 72 hours to the minute after the pulse Ayoka Falana, dehydrated and exhausted after three days without sleep, succumbed to smoke inhalation.

  Her last thoughts were that her family, with their lack of modern amenities, would most probably never even know that the pulse had ever occurred.

  Chapter 8

  Hogan had continued walking for five days. He was heading due north, for no other reason than he reckoned that the areas that would be the least effected by the pulse would be the most rural ones. And he figured that the Highlands of Scotland were about as rural as it ever got. So he was heading there.

  Sticking to the side roads, paths and fields as much as possible he made about twenty miles a day. He slept rough, always in the open as opposed to in a building. Under bushes, hedges, copses of trees. Buildings would either already contain people or they would attract people. And now the word, ‘people’, could just as easily read, ‘predator’. Hogan wasn’t afraid of anyone but there is little that one can do if someone smacks you in the head with a shovel while you are asleep. So at night he went under cover and hid.

  And all the while the sky above him churned in silent colorful beauty as the gamma rays from the massive solar activity painted the heavens with its Auroral display.

  The first couple of days had been the worst. The initial trek out of London. Roads packed with people leaving. Shambling along, shoulder to shoulder. Some pushing shopping trolleys, piled high with worthless goods. Paintings, books, ball gowns. He had even seen one person pushing a wheelbarrow with a grandfather clock in it. Hogan knew, within days, that same person would give everything that he owned for a simple plastic bucket to carry water in. Fools.

  After the first few miles he started to notice the dead bodies. Every hundred yards or so. Next to the road. Sometimes alone. Sometimes surrounded by family members. Or friends. Heart attacks, strokes, exhaustion. Old and young dying together as the rigors of the new world took their toll on the sedentary lifestyle of the modern man.

  A body left out in the open begins to mortify in two to three hours. After twelve hours the smell, a mixture of decayed cheese and rotten eggs, can be detected at five hundred yards. The fact that there seemed to be a dead body every hundred yards or so meant that there was no way of escaping the putrid smell of death if you continued to stick to the roads. And for most, they had little choice but to do so.

  As well as the odor of rotting flesh there was also the gut-churning stench of the body-wastes of the hundreds of thousands of people. Some would veer twenty yards or so off the road to defecate, others, exhausted already, would simply evacuate where they stood. The verges on the sides of the motorways were already running slick with tons of human waste.

  A country sized petri dish of disease cultures waiting to mature into typhoid, cholera and salmonellosis.

  So Hogan pulled off the main roads and struck out across the countryside instead. Even in the countryside he came across bands of wandering people. Families, groups of strangers. Gangs.

  All took one look at the marine and gave him a wide birth.

  He left greater London, crossed Herefordshire and into Bedfordshire. Although he had been living in England for over six months before the pulse, Hogan had not traveled outside of London and he marveled at the countryside as he walked. It was a land built in miniature. Small fields, hedges and low stonewalls. Cottages with ceilings a foot lower than the marines six foot four. Roads so narrow that they wouldn’t even constitute a footpath in America.

  It was a land of history and quiet dignity. A land that seemed more suited to its current devolution back to the dark ages than it was with the crass modernity that had swamped it a mere week before.

  Near the end of the sixth day he breeched a small hill and found himself looking at a twenty-foot high stonewall. In front of the wall was a dry moat, perhaps six feet deep. The wall curved away from him on both sides.

  He turned left. At various points along the wall there were arrow slits and a few low towers. The wall was obviously ancient but, just as obviously, was still in very good condition. An impenetrable fortress.

  He continued moving, looking for an entrance.

  He heard it before he saw it. A crowd of people. A low level of talking with the odd shout thrown in. He walked around the curve and saw, perhaps sixty people standing in front of a massive set of wooden gates. The
gates were closed.

  The crowd carried a mixture of weapons, cricket bats, metal pokers, garden forks. A couple of double-barreled shotguns. One even carried a six-foot long pike, its metal head dull with rust.

  A man stood on the allure, behind the battlement, above the gate. He wore the full-length black academic gown of a Professor, complete with red hood. In his right hand he held a .22 target rifle. He was not pointing it at anyone.

  ‘I am sorry, people, but I cannot let you in. The students here are my responsibility and I could not ensure their safety if I let a crowd of strangers in. I am very sorry.’

  ‘What about me, Professor?’ Shouted a man at the front, his arms raised beseechingly. ‘You know me; I’m not a stranger. I run the local post office. Ronnie. Ronnie Bagstone.’

  The master shook his head. ‘Sorry, Ronnie. No outsiders. Now please disperse. It will do you no good standing out there, my mind is made up.’

  ‘Up yours,’ shouted a longhaired man in blue overalls. ‘You’ve got food and water. Let us in or we’ll burn the gates down.’

  A few others in the crowd shouted their agreement.

  Then someone started a chant. ‘Burn. Burn. Burn.’

  It was quickly taken up by the others. ‘BURN. BURN. BURN.’

  One of the shotgun wielders took a bead on the master and fired. Fortunately he was loaded with birdshot and the tiny pellets rattled harmlessly off the battlements.

  There was a whirring sound as a lighted Molotov cocktail, a glass milk bottle filled with gasoline and topped with a burning rag, sailed over the crowd and burst on the wooden gates. The explosion of gas a dull crump. The master threw a bucket of water over the wall and most of the fire went out.