The Pulse Effex Series: Box Set

by L. R. Burkard

  Tex then began moving from one area to another, pressing small panels that opened to the touch. They held controls of some sort. At one he stopped and did something. “Let’s see what’s going on up there,” he said. Suddenly we could hear voices clearly…Tex had some sort of system rigged so he could eavesdrop!

  “Another walkie-talkie?” Richard whispered. He jumped to his feet and headed to the speaker, just like Angel and I. We congregated around it, staring up at this little black speaker built into the ceiling as though it were a television screen.

  Tex shook his head. “Oh, this is higher tech than a two-way,” he said. “This cost me a bundle.”

  “Let’s listen!” Angel cried.

  Silence fell as we focused on hearing what was being said above. A man’s voice came across louder than the rest: “There’s no one here. I told you, they ran.”

  Tex had thoughtfully opened up the front metal shade and unlocked the front door before we closed the secret panel that led to our new refuge. It helped give the illusion that we had escaped from the house.

  A new voice came through the speaker: “I want you three—” A pause. He was probably pointing out the three. “To hightail it after them.”

  Another pause.

  “What are you waiting for? Go after them now!”

  “And do what, if we find them?” A voice asked.

  “Make sure they’re not coming back,” the man said.

  Listening to his voice, numbness came over me. No, it was worse than that. I felt suddenly sick as a dog. My head reeled. I stumbled back, making Angel cry, “Sarah! What is it? Are you okay?”

  I stared at her in mute horror. I recognized that man’s voice. I glanced at Richard and saw that he’d recognized it, too! He wore a stupefied look on his face that mirrored my feelings.

  That man upstairs, the one who seemed to be in charge of this gang? He must have been the one called Walt, which was my father’s name. Because I knew, now.

  He was my father.

  chapter 35

  SARAH

  Angel led me to the couch where I lay back, gasping. The wave of nausea receded but my feeling of dismay did not. I took a deep breath, searching Richard’s face. Angel looked from me to Richard and back. “What is going on?”

  Richard frowned. “That man up there sounds like our dad.”

  Tex’s brows went up. “Your DAD?” He shook his head and gave a low whistle. “The one who just ordered his men to go after us and get rid of us?”

  I began to cry. Richard nodded. “We both think so.”

  Tex and Angel looked at each other. They seemed at a loss.”

  Richard said, “I’m going up to confront him.”

  “No, you’re not!” Tex said. “He may be your father or he may just sound like him. If you go up there, you give away our location, and that is not an option.”

  “I know my dad’s voice,” Richard retorted. “It’s him, it’s definitely him.”

  Tex looked at me. “I think it’s him, too,” I said.

  “You think.”

  “No, I’m sure.”

  He sniffed, looking around, thinking. “Here’s the deal, Richard. Sarah.” He motioned for Angel to join him. When she was beside him, he circled her waist with one arm, and she turned into him so they were close. I understood he was speaking for both of them. Leveling serious eyes upon us, Tex continued, “Maybe it is your dad. But he’s with marauders. He’s in charge of them. They have been terrorizing us, stealing from us, destroying our property—and they’re trying to kill us. They’re probably gonna wipe us out of anything and everything that’s left up there. Your dad is behind that.”

  Richard and I listened in silence. Everything Tex had said was true. “Whatever he used to be—.” He fanned out his hands as he spoke—“he is no longer. The pulse changed people. Look at those old folks you stayed with,” he said, turning to Richard. “They put mines outside their home. Mines that’ll tear a man limb from limb, leave him in agony! They probably used to be your average old couple, working their garden and flower beds.” He paused and took a deep breath. He came and sat beside me. With regret in his eyes, he took my hand. In a softer voice, he said, “Your father is no longer the loving dad you once knew. He’s responsible for a gang, now. The fact is you just don’t know him any longer; or what he’s capable of.”

  Richard shook his head. “Look, we know our dad. He isn’t a monster.”

  “You mean, he wasn’t.” Tex said. “Did you hear him charge those men with finding us and getting rid of us? For all he knows, we high-tailed it out of there. We posed no threat to him or his gang, but he ordered our deaths.”

  Richard crossed his arms, then uncrossed them and strode towards the speaker. “Which is why I want to confront him!” he hissed. He raked a hand through his hair. “He’s probably doing what he thinks he needs to do. We’ve been out there—it’s a cutthroat world. He’s just going with the flow.”

  “Richard—I know this must be hard, for both of you,” he added, including me in his gaze for a moment. “But we are not giving ourselves up--."

  “Not you, just me. Not even Sarah. I’ll go alone.”

  “You’ll just pop up inside the house? With no explanation? How long do you think our escape route will stay hidden if they find you in there?” He paused. “And if the wrong person sees you first, you could be dead before you get a chance to lay eyes on your father. It’s too dangerous, the outcome is uncertain, and I don’t like it. You’re not going, and that’s final.”

  Richard looked around, frustration emanating from him in waves. “So what is your plan? To hide down here like rats? What are we going to do? How long can we stay down here without going out of our minds?”

  Tex took a deep breath and said, “Richard, come sit down. I want to speak to both of you.” I moved aside so Richard could fit on the couch. Angel came and sat on the arm, and stroked my head reassuringly. I tried to give her a smile but inside I was feeling torn. I should have been overjoyed to know my dad was alive but it was like discovering he was Mr. Hyde. Like Tex said, my father was a stranger—a scary, dangerous stranger. I wished I hadn’t heard his voice. I’d have preferred to think of him as I long had been—as having died somewhere tragically, rather than becoming a monster gang leader!

  “I’ll explain this to you once,” Tex said. “We built this bunker a long time ago; but we added to it, in time putting up the cabin above us.”

  “You built this first?” I asked, surprised.

  He nodded. “That’s right. I worked for the government and we saw the writing on the wall. The media down-played the dangers of any kind of Armageddon—whether it be a pandemic, an EMP, or a nuclear holocaust. But we believed something was coming and knew it could have dire consequences.”

  “What did you do for the government?” Richard asked.

  Tex eyed him gravely. “I’ll tell you about that another time.”

  Angel piped in, “Tex has a double PhD!” Richard and I must have gawked, because she giggled.

  Tex said, “Right now, this here’s the point: “We made this place to be nuke proof—that makes it bullet proof and pretty much impenetrable. We have enough power, thanks to hidden solar panels on the property, to generate electricity—more electricity than anyone above ground has seen since before the pulse. We have food, running water from an underground spring, and can send waste into a septic tank just for that purpose. We have enough of everything we need to live here for six months or more.”

  “Hon,” put in Angel, “that was if it was just the two of us. We didn’t plan on having four people.”

  He nodded. “That’s true, but we’ve been adding to our provisions steadily, so my estimate should be good.”

  “People need sunlight to live,” Richard breathed. “I could never stay down here that long.”

  “We got that covered!” piped in Angel. “We have sun lamps. We just need to spend twenty minutes a day in front of one. That’s enough to manufacture vitam
in D and ward off the winter blues.”

  “We also got nutrition covered,” said Tex.

  “Storage buckets, right? Richard asked. We both were probably picturing the shelves of white storage buckets we’d had brief access to before the guerrilla army torched them.

  “Oh, we did better than that. We got special stuff--."

  “MREs?” Richard said.

  Tex shook his head. “What we got is even better than that. We got space food! NASA certified. It packs better nutrition than MREs, including what they call ‘sunlight nutrition.’ It has more vitamins like D3 than you could get in anything except IV drips of the stuff.”

  Richard nodded his head, looking duly impressed but I suspected he was not a happy camper. He said, “Look, I get it. We can get by. But even if they found the route down here, you got that heavy steel door at the entrance, right? If I go up and they find the tunnel, that door will keep them out.”

  “Richard, I don’t want them at my door. That’s what happened upstairs and it did not go well. Those doors were reinforced, too. You are not going up there, do you understand?”

  Richard stared at Tex and Tex stared at Richard. I did not like the tension in the room.

  “Richard,” I said, nervously. “It might not have been Dad.”

  “You know it was!”

  “I’m not really sure!”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Tex barked. “No one is going up there until these people clear out. Hopefully they will go through what is left up there in a week or two and we’ll be able to return. We can add a room to the cabin for you two—if they don’t burn it down.”

  “You said it’s reinforced with steel,” I said. “They can’t burn steel down, can they?”

  “They can burn the wood around it. It’d be a skeleton of steel, angle iron, and rebar, but a skeleton just the same.”

  That seemed to end the discussion for the time being. We spent the rest of the day getting settled. For dinner, we enjoyed ready-to-eat dehydrated food—each of us getting to select what we wanted from a big box of packaged meals. All Angel had to do was heat up water, which she did in the microwave. What a joy to have electricity! Tex cautioned that it wouldn’t last forever—even solar panels run out of juice—so we had to know from day one that using electricity was a privilege and only to be done with permission.

  If we weren’t underground, I could almost have believed we had a chance for a normal life again. I felt at home with Tex and Angel. They were my new family. Whoever that man was upstairs, Tex was right. He was no longer my father.

  Chapter 36

  SARAH

  The next morning I awoke on the sofa to find Tex, Angel and Richard congregated around the speaker. Richard saw me getting up and said, “Something’s happening up there.” Tex turned up the volume and I immediately heard shouting, rapid gunfire, and muffled explosions. It was pandemonium.

  Tex whistled under his breath. “Man, that is the sound of warfare.”

  A great deal of scuffling and pounding, interspersed with more rapid fire, continued for the next fifteen minutes. I pulled my legs up, wrapped my arms around them, and rocked nervously on the couch. I was hearing a real battle going on. People were probably getting killed! I wondered if a second band of marauders had come. Would they kill my father?

  Richard said, “I think it’s soldiers, like the ones Sarah and I saw. They come by truckloads.”

  Tex said, “Maybe it’s a good thing we got chased out of the house when we did. Maybe it was a God-thing.”

  And then faintly, very faintly, we heard something amazing: THIS IS THE UNITED STATES ARMY. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.

  The gunfire ceased and for the next fifteen minutes we heard footsteps, low voices, furniture being moved here and there, along with someone saying, “C’mon, c’mon, Give me that weapon. Let’s go. Out of there.” And then, at long last—nothing.

  “Do you think it’s really our army?” I asked. “You think they’re here to help?”

  “Remember what we saw out there,” Richard said quickly. “No U.S. Army. Just foreign troops claiming to offer help—and taking people prisoner to their camps.”

  “They also burn everything down,” I muttered. I thought of our cozy cabin upstairs and felt a deep sadness. Tex was just reaching up to turn off the speaker when we heard a man’s voice. “They’re still out there. And that is NOT our army, I’m telling you!”

  “That’s him!” Richard said. “That’s my father.”

  I closed my eyes and covered my mouth, wishing away the tears that filled my eyes. As much as I believed he was no longer my loving father, I still cared for him.

  “I’m going out,” another voice said. “Look, they aren’t killing us—they’re putting everyone in a truck. So what if they go to a refugee camp? I’m a refugee. I’m ready.”

  My father let loose a string of expletives that sent a wave of shame through me. I’d heard him swear on occasion as I was growing up but never in such a way as this. It didn’t make me feel like he was strong or brave—just the opposite. And it underscored the fact that he was no longer the man I once knew.

  “If you go out with your hands up, they will slaughter you.”

  “They didn’t slaughter the others!” A man’s angry voice.

  “Fine! You go if you want! You go crawl to the enemy! See where that gets you.” And then the sound of a terrific blast, something exploding, made us jump—and resulted in footsteps running, doors slamming...and then silence. Richard’s eyes met mine. Despite everything, I felt heartsick at the thought of someone brutally killing my father. Richard’s expression told me he felt the same.

  Angel reached over and took my hand. She was often attuned to how I felt when I hadn’t said a word. Tex had joked once that they could read me like an open book. “You couldn’t hide your heart if you tried,” he’d said.

  “Let’s pray, y’all,” she said. Angel wasn’t a blue-blood southerner but she liked to say “y’all,” now and then. It had a homey sound to it. I tried to smile as I clasped her hand.

  We closed our eyes to pray. But a barrage of shots, louder now, came through the speaker and silenced us. Once more, we sat listening. My father’s voice: “Quick, get under there again!” A few seconds passed and we heard a foreign language.

  “Sounds like an Arab,” said Tex.

  Angel nodded.

  Richard jumped up. “I’m getting my dad.”

  Tex faced him. “You will do no such thing! You don’t know that he’ll even be alive when you get up there, for one thing. And you may not bring him here.”

  “I have to do this,” Richard said. “They’ll take him to a refugee camp and let him starve!”

  “And what’s to stop them from taking you, too?” Tex asked. “If your father’s band couldn’t keep these guys off, you can’t, either.”

  Richard nodded. “I need to face my dad. I don’t think you’ll ever understand this, okay? But I have to. I have to see him, man to man.”

  “I can’t let you do that, Richard. You may not understand this—but you left once before and brought back trouble. That may be your dad, it may not; you are not going up there to find out. And that’s final.”

  Richard stared at Tex. Slowly he looked away. His face was stony.

  “Richard!” My voice broke. “Tex is right! Dad abandoned us, and you heard what he said up there. He’s not the man we knew.”

  “He did what he had to do to survive,” my brother said. “To stay alive.”

  “Yeah, but why didn’t he come back? To help his family? Why didn’t he come back to us?” I took a shuddering breath, trying not to cry. “He could have come back, he could have—but he didn’t! He let Jesse die! He let Mom die!”

  “It’s not his fault they died!” Richard said.

  “They’d be alive if he came back,” I said, shaking my head and staring at my brother accusingly. “You know they would!” I paused. “Instead of saving his family he chose to lead this—gang!” I stared
hard at my brother. His face was like flint, unmoving.

  “I gotta know what happened. I gotta face him, like I said.”

  “If it was just you and me, Richard, I’d let you do it. But I can’t let you put Angel and Sarah in harm’s way. Listen, after the battle’s over we can look for survivors, and maybe your dad will be one of them.” Tex said. “After this force moves out.”

  Richard said nothing.

  Tex shook his head with pursed lips. “We brought you down here with us, Richard, because we care for you. And we trust you.” He paused. “Don’t make us regret it.”

  Angel, with sympathetic eyes, sat next to Richard. Her voice was sweet and caring. “Richard, you do not want to go up there. There’s just no good reason for you to risk your life.”

  “And ours,” Tex added.

  “If you went up,” I said. “We’d never see you again! Don’t do that to me, Richard!”

  “Look, nobody’s going up,” Tex said, in his heavy voice. “This discussion is over.”

  We spent the next hour unloading the last of the supplies, stacking canned goods, and putting everything away. Richard still looked unhappy. He came beside me as I transferred supplies to a storage cabinet and said, keeping his voice low, “I need to see him.”

  “Richard, please!” I whispered. “You can’t!”

  “Don’t you want to know what kept him away? I want to know. I need to talk to him.”

  I placed a hand on his arm. “So because you’re curious you’re going to risk everything?”

  “I’m only putting myself at risk.”

  “Even so, that’s enough! You don’t owe him anything! He abandoned us!”

  He gently removed my hold on his arm. He sniffed. “You can pray for me, okay? Pray for me.”

  “Wait. You are going to tell Tex and Angel, right?”

  He shook his head. “I think Tex would tie me up, if I did!”