The Pulse

by Holly Hook

  "That's odd," Dr. Shetlin said. "The other group should be down here by now." Her bun blew around a bit in the fans' breeze as she pulled out her phone and dialed a number. Hers was still working. She held it to her ear and it rang, and rang, and rang...a worried look came across her face. "I'm not getting through to the desk," she said, marching over to the elevator. "I'll go and see what's up. In fact, the rest of you can ride up with me. We'll get this straightened out."

  She pressed the button on the elevator pad and the humming started again. It was just now coming down. I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding.

  We waited. A sense of dread rose in my gut, and I dismissed it as the thought of getting on the elevator, but now that I think about it, something else was bothering me. David was right that something was very, very wrong.

  At last, after several minutes, the humming stopped, the elevator clicked as it settled, and the metal doors came open.

  Christina screamed.

  Lying in the elevator, sprawled out on the floor, was Mr. Ellis.

  He was the only one inside the prison. And he was dying.

  Chapter Two

  Mr. Ellis lay there, face-down, one leg cocked up like he had been caught in the midst of some terrible pain. He groaned and managed to look up at us for a second before his head fell down again and made a horrible, hollow thud on the elevator floor.

  There was blood streaking out of his nose. His skin was red. Swollen, as if someone had dunked him into a vat of boiling water, took him out again, and flopped him down in the elevator to die a slow, agonizing death.

  "M..." Mr. Ellis said. His voice was gurgly. He took a breath and the same rattling sound followed. "Mu..."

  The world expanded around me and then closed again with each heartbeat. My pulse raced. I trembled.

  Mr. Ellis was going to die very shortly.

  The sound was unmistakable. I had heard it before.

  "What's wrong with him?" Jerome asked.

  Dr. Shetlin turned as if wrenched out of her shock. Her skin had taken on a strange shade of light brown like all the blood had drained out of it. She held up both hands. "Back," she ordered. "I want all of you to go stand by the tunnel doors. I don't know what's wrong with this man."

  I backed away. I stopped breathing. I couldn't watch something like this again. I had seen it once, far too many times, but not like this. At least Mom's passing had been peaceful. She hadn't been wrenching around in pain like this due to all the morphine. This was a different kind of death. Mr. Ellis didn't have the mercy of modern medication.

  "Back!" Dr. Shetlin ordered again. Her voice was sharp.

  It was as if the tour group had been struck with a whip. We all flinched and backpedaled at once. No one spoke. It was all shocked silence. David grabbed my hand again, but I barely felt it. Christina stood against the wall with tears in her eyes. They shone under the huge lights that hung over us.

  "Come on," I said, taking Alana's arm with my free hand.

  "Mu..." Mr. Ellis was really struggling to speak. "Lethal dose. I couldn't get them down fast enough. They're all dying." I stopped in the mouth of the tunnel as Dr. Shetlin leaned down next to him and dialed a number on her phone. She held it up to her ear. I could barely see Mr. Ellis now.

  "Ohmigod," Alana whispered. "Ohmigod. What's happening? Did he get burned?"

  "I don't know," I said. I wished Mr. Ellis would go unconscious. He wouldn't be suffering. Death was better than suffering. At least then he would have some peace. Those thoughts echoed through my mind in a strange numbness, one I had felt before, one that Alana and David and the rest of the class had never had the misfortune to experience.

  "Come on," David said, pulling on my hand. The rest of the class wandered around us. Christina was sobbing into her shirt, pulling the smiling monkey out of proportion. Tony's eyes were wide. Shocked. They had never seen anything like this before. Mina leaned on him and they walked quickly, trying to get away from the new reality.

  But I stayed.

  I wanted to run. I wanted to leave my mother behind as she took those last labored breaths, but I couldn't. I was trapped all over again.

  Dr. Shetlin swore in a very unprofessional manner and threw the phone down. She couldn't reach anyone. "Stay with me," she said to Mr. Ellis, choking up. She placed one hand on Mr. Ellis's back as he struggled to breathe. "Stay with me. We'll get you help."

  "Laney, come on," Alana begged.

  "Let go of me," I hissed, sounding worse than a poisonous cobra. "Don't watch this."

  She did. Alana backed into the tunnel to where Mina and the art girl I didn't know hugged each other and cried.

  Something had happened and that light had everything to do with it.

  David knew it. Mr. Ellis knew it.

  And it had to do with that new star in the sky, the one that had only lasted seconds.

  "You're safe," Mr. Ellis told Dr. Shetlin. "You're going to survive. You don't want to."

  Mr. Ellis turned his head and vomited.

  I flinched and my own stomach turned.

  His vomit was red and black, spreading out on the elevator floor.

  Bloody.

  Dr. Shetlin swore again and backed away the best she could on her knees.

  "Kill me," Mr. Ellis said. "Please. It was a gamma...a gamma ray..." He spoke quieter. Dr. Shetlin leaned close to him and gasped. He said something else and she froze.

  Then a sob escaped from her and she stood. "No."

  She took another step back. "No. My kids are out there." She let out a breath and stepped over the phone she'd thrown down, the one that could reach no one. About half of the color had drained from her face and she stood there, leaning against the mine wall, shaking with indecision. In this moment, we were no longer there. The thing on the floor was no longer the Astronomy teacher. It was a swollen dummy from the set of some horror movie. That Stephen King one about the flu that killed almost everybody, maybe. Dad had some old taped versions of that one.

  I was standing alone. Everyone else had backed into the final shelter of the tunnel.

  Mr. Ellis coughed. It was wet and strained. Dr. Shetlin leaned close to Mr. Ellis as he muttered again. Then she paced again, gripped with indecision. Her gaze fell on me and she opened her mouth like she wanted to speak, then closed it again.

  She knew what was happening, too.

  Our Astronomy teacher turned his head one more time and took another rasping breath.

  Paused. Ten seconds.

  Then another. His back fell and he remained still.

  This time, for twenty-nine seconds.

  I backed away.

  He breathed again, wet and labored.

  Five seconds.

  Another breath.

  Four seconds.

  One more.

  Thirty-five seconds this time.

  I turned and I ran towards the tunnel doors, where everyone else was gathered.

  I couldn't watch this again, even if it wasn't someone that I had any feelings for.

  "Laney?" David asked.

  I turned away from him. "You don't want to watch this," I said. "All of us. Why don't we find another way out of here?"

  "What was he saying?" Alana asked. "I heard him talking a little."

  "It didn't make any sense," I said. "Mr. Ellis is gone, okay? He's as good as dead."

  "Does anyone have a working phone?" Dr. Shetlin said from the main room. She appeared in the tunnel. Dr. Shetlin was no longer the calm, collected woman I had met when we first came out of the elevator. It seemed like a strange thing for her to ask. "Did anyone's phone not get hit by the pulse?"

  The pulse. It was the first time I'd heard this event have a name.

  My hands were shaking. Tony said something to Mina and Jerome dug into his jeans as well, to produce a dead rectangle that had no more use than the dust bunnies trying to hide out in the corner.

  "What's going on?" Jerome asked. "What's the pulse? Was it that light we saw out there bef
ore we came in?"

  Dr. Shetlin breathed out. She glanced back at where Mr. Ellis lay. I could no longer hear anything. "Yes," she said. "I have to go. Wait down here for a few hours before you try to go to the surface. There might still be dangerous particles raining down from the sky. You came down before they hit. Wait for a little while, and they'll be gone. "

  "Particles?" I asked. "What particles?"

  "Muons," Dr. Shetlin said. She wiped a layer of shining sweat off her forehead. "They kill in high numbers. They don't last long. I have to go."

  She turned away and ran.

  Her kids. They beat us out and I couldn't blame her for leaving.

  The elevator doors closed and I knew she was riding with the dying Mr. Ellis back up to the surface, to whatever had happened.

  We all stood there and stared at each other. No one spoke for what felt like an eternity. I checked through the collider window to see if that Dr. Marson guy was in sight, but he'd vanished and we couldn't go into that chamber without radiation suits.

  Dr. Shetlin had left without one. If there was radiation on the surface, a suit was what I would have wanted. But she had freaked. You couldn't think when you were freaked out.

  I waited for David to come up with something funny, like how muons sounded like something to do with cows, but he was pale and very sick-looking. He glanced at me and Alana in turn. He even shot Christina a glance. Tony and Mina shrunk back along with the art girl. The ten of us didn't know what to do.

  Our guide had left us.

  "Did you hear what they were saying?" Alana asked me.

  "A little," I said. "Mr. Ellis said..." I straightened up and got my composure. "He said they're all dying on the surface. He also said something about gamma rays. I know those are bad," I said.

  "It was that light," Mina said. "That light did something. But we were up there when it hit. We should be dying, too."

  "Don't say that," Christina said.

  "You heard Dr. Shetlin," Tony said. "She said something about particles. In the tour she said dangerous particles move just under the speed of light. If dangerous particles came with that light, they would have hit just behind it. So they came right after we came down here."

  "You know, that makes sense," I said.

  "We learned something from this," David said.

  "Mr. Ellis and Mrs. Taney knew this would happen," I blurted out.

  "Huh?" Alana asked. Everyone turned to face me.

  "They were rushing us," I said.

  "Mrs. Taney always does that," David said. "No shock there."

  "But Mr. Ellis is always all relaxed," I said. "He started acting worse than Mrs. Taney after we saw the light. Whatever happened, he knew what it was. He knew we were in danger and tried to get us underground before the particles hit."

  "So it was a supernova," Tony said. "He's the Astronomy teacher. He'd know about that. I thought he said there weren't any stars close by big enough to blow up like that. I remember his class last year."

  "A star blew up and rained death on us," the Goth girl said. "That's awesome."

  "Or a nuke went off," David said. "There could be an old launch tower out here that exploded."

  "We don't know what it was," I said. I thought of Dad in New York. Did this thing hit New York? The light had come from close to the horizon. From the west. The Earth was round. The light and particles from the pulse would have only hit one side, right?

  "It came from space," Jerome said. "Whatever this was did not come from Earth. A nuke would have caused shock waves."

  "There was an EMP or something," David said. "Our phones all went dead when the light hit. Other things must have gone dead, too."

  "Like people," I said.

  Apparently, from what had happened to Mr. Ellis, it was very deadly indeed.

  Our tour group had come down the elevator right before the worst part hit.

  Deadly particles from space. Our atmosphere hadn't protected us after all.

  It must have been a lot of particles.

  We might be the only survivors of our field trip. Everyone else--the rest of the class, Mrs. Taney, the lady behind the counter--they could be dead or dying. And all because they weren't in the first group.

  Chapter Three

  "I want to go home," Mina said. "I need to call my parents and my brother. He's at the university. I need to go and see them!"

  Tony held her tighter while everyone watched her break down.

  "We can't leave yet," David said. "Dr. Shetlin told us there might still be that radiation on the surface. She called it muons. I guess that's supposed to be another name for dangerous particles. But she said they don't last long."

  I was shaking.

  Dad was on the surface along with everyone that this group here cared about. Families were up there. Kids were up there.

  "If she was right," Jerome said. "How do we know she even knew what this was?"

  "Mr. Ellis knew what was happening," Christina said. "I saw how he changed after the light hit."

  I still had to pee. There was no bathroom down here that I could find. I crossed my legs and searched around. It was a good distraction. At last I spotted a small door near where the elevator was supposed to be and rushed for that. A tiny bathroom waited on the other side. I had to go so badly that I didn't even care that it was such a small space. I clicked on a light and closed the door.

  The world might be royally screwed and all I could think about was relieving myself.

  "There's still light down here," Mina said.

  "This is underground," David told her. "An EMP wouldn't hit that."

  Dad might be in a plane. He was supposed to start flying back today. I finished and rushed back out of the bathroom.

  "Can planes go down in an EMP?" I asked to no one in particular.

  Alana's mouth fell open and she gave me a look of horror. "Your dad," she said.

  David cleared his throat. "They can," he said. "A lot of them would have gone down if that explosion hit a big area. But it was probably a nuke, so it wouldn't affect a big area."

  "That wasn't a nuke," Jerome said. "No shock wave."

  David glared at him.

  The dread in my gut turned into sheer panic. I swallowed. "We have to see if there are any cell phone towers left."

  "Not around here, there aren't," Tony said. "Dr. Shetlin couldn't reach anyone."

  I ran for the elevator. Stopped, and stood there. There still might be danger on the surface. We didn't know what was happening. I had never taken Astronomy. I knew nothing about supernovas except that they were big stars that blew up. I was leaning towards that.

  "Dr. Shetlin's going to get help," Alana explained. "She'll be back soon, I'm sure."

  "What if everyone's dead?" I asked, pulling away from him. "Everyone in the world could be dying right now. Some help we're going to get. What if it's just us?"

  Tony stepped forward. "We don't know the extent of this."

  That was what they had said about Mom's cancer when they first found it. At first, there was hope. Mom could recover after the horrible treatments. She might even be good for the holidays.

  Nope.

  "I'm not hopeful," I said. I knew better. I'd learned that lesson the hard way.

  "We have to be," Alana said. "Like Tony said, we don't know. Let's all just stick together and stay calm, okay? Keep calm and carry on."

  Behind her, the rest of the tour group stood close together. Tony still had his arm around Mina's waist. Christina wasn't even glaring at me, which was shocking as David was standing next to me, looking at me with grave concern. Jerome fiddled with his phone again, sighed, and threw it down. It met its end with the bottom of his boot. Eric and the Goth girl kind of looked at each other.

  "There's nothing we can do right now but wait," Alana said. "Why don't we see if there are any snacks in that computer room?" She walked over and opened the door. Cool air rushed out.

  "I don't think we should be doing that," Tony said.

/>   "It's an emergency," I said, breathing in to calm my racing heartbeat. "I don't think Dr. Shetlin will mind unless we mess with the data or something." What if the radiation was still up there a few hours from now, a few days from now? We'd have to go up eventually.

  I had to get my mind off other things. I walked into the computer room behind Alana, which was dark except for some glowing monitors. Everything was fine here. Screens glowed with Windows icons for the most part. I sat down at one. The chair was comfortable. It reminded me of class and how Mr. Morse would turn off the lights so we could work without being distracted too badly by each other. It felt...normal.

  I breathed out.

  Counted to five.

  "I don't see any food," Alana said.

  "Maybe we should check the Internet," I said. "This place is probably fed by underground cables. We'll see if there's any news."

  "Yes," David said, speaking up. "We should check the Internet."

  I clicked on the Google Chrome icon. A little spinning blue ring appeared, but then an error screen popped up. CHECK YOUR CONNECTION.

  "Try another computer," Alana said. Even she was beginning to sound anxious.

  I rolled over to the neighboring one and tried to open the Internet, to the same result.

  "Nothing," David said.

  "Maybe the workers here don't get Internet access," Alana said. "They might have been slacking off and the boss had to disconnect them."

  "Scientists who don't have Internet to show their findings to the world?" I asked.

  "It could be that they're disconnected to keep hackers from getting in," David said. "That's the safest way to go about it. It must be a local network."

  "There's a way to check that," Jerome said. "Look up the browsing history and see if there's one." I hadn't realized he had come into the room. Everyone else was standing in the doorway, trying to get a peek at what was happening, which was not much.

  I let Jerome get in the chair. I had never heard the guy speak much, but he pulled down a browsing history from the top of the error screen.

  "These scientists like to surf, all right," Jerome said. "That means they normally have the Web. Ohhh. That looks like a porn site."