The Pulse

by Skylar Finn

  “Well! How do you like that, Clarice? Grandpa here don’t keep none of that magic on hand for exactly this reason.” He mimicked Pat in a high, unpleasant voice. It hit me: it was the same man who held up the other pharmacy, when I went to get Grace’s medicine. A horrible sense of deja vu washed over me.

  I risked peering around the end of the aisle. There he was: the same greasy hair, sunglasses, stained and yellowing teeth. Dexter, she called him. He had a gun trained on Pat’s face. A woman with long, snarled red hair paced behind them with what looked like an automatic rifle slung over her shoulder. I assumed this was Clarice.

  Dexter sighed theatrically. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to take everything else, then.” He turned to the woman. “We’re gonna have to come back with the wagons, I expect. Get some help, get all this stuff back to our place.”

  Clarice’s eyes roved over the shelves behind the counter, as if she refused to believe they really didn’t carry what they came there for. She turned to him and sighed. “All right, I guess. What should we do with him?”

  Dexter studied Pat, who stood with his hands above his head in a position of surrender. “No need to come back and find out he’s called the calvary in on us,” he said. “Sorry, friend. No hard feelings.” Without so much as blinking an eye, he shot Pat in the face.

  I shoved my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming. Pat’s body toppled to the ground, hitting the carpet with a dull thud. Clarice glanced down, indifferent, then stepped over him as if he were nothing more than a crack in the sidewalk. “Let’s get going, then. I want to get back here and get all this stuff before it gets too hot. Or before anybody else shows up looking for Grandpa here.”

  I crawled backwards down the aisle as quickly as I could and concealed myself at the opposite end, pressing my back against the shelves of the endcap display. I listened, shaking, as their heavy boot falls left the counter and retreated down the hall for the back door. I heard the door open and close and silently counted to ten.

  I made my way back to the counter, gun drawn, staying as low as possible. I imagined them forgetting something, coming back. Shooting me the way they shot Pat. I crawled under the counter and over to Pat, just in case. But he was long gone. I took off my jacket and covered his face as I choked back a sob.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the list that Peterman had given me back at the house. Swiping at the tears that blurred my vision, I pulled down bottle after bottle from the shelf, tossing them in my bag. Pat did stock painkillers, and I wondered why he had lied to them: would it have made any difference if he hadn’t? Maybe he just didn’t want to give them what they wanted. Or maybe he’d been saving them for Mary, his wife, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis.

  I went down the hallway with my gun out and ready to fire at the slightest sign of movement. I didn’t hear anything. When I reached the back door, I saw that both bikes were gone. But I knew they would be back. And when they came, they’d have reinforcements with them.

  As I rode back to the ranch, I tried to block the images I’d just witnessed from my mind. It was impossible to keep them out. It would be a long time before I forgot what I’d seen, and that was only if I ever did.

  9

  Peterman paced the living room, agitated. After I recounted what I’d seen in town, he thought we should leave immediately. He thought we should go north, under the theory that maybe only the Texas interconnected grid was affected.

  “It’s clearly just as unsafe here as it was in the city,” he said. “And we don’t know how long we might be without power. It might be a day, it might be a year. There’s no way for us to know with no communication. We’ve got to head north and see if there’s someplace where civilization is still standing.”

  “I understand your reasoning,” Ethan said calmly. “But there’s also no way to know that it’s any better anywhere else. The odds are that it’s worse. We’re pretty cut off down here, yes, but I believe what we’re experiencing are the very outer rings of an extremely large boulder being dropped in the center of a lake. It might feel extreme, but rest assured, it’s mild compared to the site of the blast—which, realistically speaking, is probably some place like D.C. or New York. Your theory that the Eastern grid might still be intact is an unlikely one.”

  “If the Eastern grid is out, then we could still head West,” said Peterman. “They might not even know this is happening, out in Colorado. Or California. Think of Oregon: a place that’s both remote and potentially untroubled by what we’re experiencing here.”

  “You might as well suggest we drive to Canada,” I objected. I was deeply shaken by what I’d seen, and it took every ounce of my strength to repress it. We’d seen death before this, since the EMP, but it was the first time it was someone who I knew. There were no words for the feeling. “We’d be out on the road, exposed, for days,” I continued, shoving the thought to the back of my mind. “We’d run out of gas and have to steal it. We would almost certainly be attacked, likely multiple times.”

  “How is it any safer here?” asked Peterman. “Think of what you told us, Charlie. With those people roaming the countryside, looking for people like us: people with resources and little means to defend them.”

  “We have means,” said Ethan.

  “We have three people, two of whom have a child to think about. We have no idea how many people are with them. There could be twenty, there could be fifty.”

  “There could be five,” I said.

  “That’s exactly my point. It’s all entirely speculation. In the very likely event that they come nosing around this ranch, looking for things to steal, we’ll have to defend ourselves. It’s a fight-or-flight scenario.”

  “I know how to defend myself,” said Ethan. “So does my family. We’ve been preparing for this—well, I’ve been preparing for this my whole life. I’ve prepared Grace for it all her life. And Charlie here has been subject to my mania for the last five years.”

  “Mania, not so much,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  He smiled wanly. “I’ve taken into account the variables. Anything we do will be dangerous. Staying put and entrenching ourselves is the least dangerous thing we can do. There is the possibility of an outside threat, but they would first have to penetrate our defenses. On the road, we would have no idea what was coming. We’d have to make split-second decisions and turn on a dime. We’d be constantly exposed and vulnerable to attack.”

  “What are our defenses?” asked Peterman. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Every window in this place—what few there are—are constructed from bulletproof glass,” said Ethan. “Of course, some of our defenses have been shot—the surveillance system, the generator, the electric fence—but we still have a three-hundred-sixty-degree vantage point from the roof, with a view of all surrounding land. The land is flat. There are few shrubs and trees. It’s virtually impossible for anyone to sneak up on us. There’s barbed wire on all the fences. We have a rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun. We’ll each be armed at all times. There’s a thousand-gallon underground water tank. We have enough food to last a year.”

  “What about when somebody else wants everything that you have?” asked Peterman. “What then?”

  “We have to accept the reality that we’ll have to defend it,” said Ethan. “We’ll take precautions. Fortify the ranch to the best of our ability. Protect it against invasion. If anyone tries to get through, or does—then we have to be prepared for that possibility and do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves.”

  “For that eventuality, you mean,” said Peterman. He turned to me. “What about you? Are you prepared to go to war with strangers, intent on killing and stealing?”

  “No,” I said frankly. “I’m not.” Ethan looked startled. “I’m an academic,” I continued. “I’m not trained in combat. In the likely event that we have to fight, there’s a very real possibility that I might die, that we all might. But I just don’t see any alternative. Travel is dangerous, a
nd Grace is vulnerable. We can’t go on some misguided cross-country trek, chasing after an imaginary ideal of safety that most likely no longer exists.”

  “No one has to die,” Ethan said firmly. “If we’re careful, if we plan—”

  “The best-laid plans,” said Peterman darkly, “often go awry.”

  Peterman was outside smoking his pipe. Grace was in the living room in front of the unlit fireplace, reading. Ethan sat at the kitchen table, studying his plans. In the corner, I transcribed an inventory of our food into a notebook, working from the list taped to the inside door of the pantry.

  “You don’t think we’ll be safe here?” Ethan asked.

  I looked up to find that he’d stopped looking at his plans was now studying me. I closed the notebook, thinking.

  “You didn’t see it,” I said finally. The horrible images in my brain played on an endless loop. “The way that man just…shot Pat, right in the face and killed him. I’ll never be able to unsee that. They wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to us.”

  “I’m so sorry you had to see that,” he said. “If I could take it away from you, I would. But that’s not us. That’s never going to be us. Caught off-guard, defenseless. I would never let that happen to you or Grace.”

  “I know,” I said. “And it’s not that I think that you would. I guess I just don’t equivocate safety with being under attack.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “Under normal circumstances. Under normal circumstances, those two things are opposite. But under our present circumstances, in which attack is inevitable, being safe means the ability to defend ourselves. If we defend ourselves adequately, I promise you, Charlie: we will be safe.”

  Grace sat at the kitchen table, glumly eating SpaghettiOs. She hated the ranch. She loathed the outdoors, and thought it was boring and like a punishment every time we came here.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “How long do we have to stay here?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “But it’s better than being in the city.”

  “Do I have to go to school anymore?” she asked.

  “Probably not,” I said. I didn’t want to convey how serious the situation was or how afraid I felt. I didn’t want to lie to her, either.

  “Good.” With that established, she went back to her can with a sigh. I admired her resilience.

  Ethan drew up a diagram of everything we needed to do: in addition to the bulletproof glass, we would board up the windows and most of the doors, leaving the back door as the sole entrance/exit. He wrote up a schedule for us to keep watch from the roof.

  I was glad for the work because it kept both me and Grace distracted. She helped me out, fetching hammer and nails while we boarded up the windows. It kept both of us from worrying: about what happened to Pat, if Mary and Tom knew, if they were okay. About how long we might have to live this way.

  “I think we should also make another supply run,” said Ethan. He was eating instant mashed potatoes and studying one of his many lists.

  “Why don’t you let me take Peterman?” I asked. “It would be easier if he can visually assess what he might need in the way of supplies. And nobody knows better than you what needs to be done in this house. I feel like he’s trustworthy, Ethan. I really do.”

  “That’s true.” He rested the list on his lap. “But I’d rather it was me and Peterman going. I hate thinking about how close you came to being shot in that store.” I realized then that what happened at Davidson’s had been weighing just as heavily on his mind as it was on mine.

  “Do you think that Tom and Mary are okay?” I asked. “I hate the idea that they’re sitting at home somewhere, wondering if Pat is going to come back.”

  “It’s hard to say,” he said. “From what you’ve told me about these people, Charlie, they’re going to try to take everything they can from everywhere they can find. With any luck, they were just passing through. Maybe they just hit the shops on Main on their way out of the city to someplace else. But if we’re unlucky, they’re camped out somewhere nearby.”

  “I think that at this point, we have to assume that luck is not on our side,” I said.

  “I agree,” said Ethan. “We might be here for a long time. And if we’re going to have to defend ourselves, we need more ammunition. Every place in a ten-mile radius has at least a shotgun in the house. We might be able to find some places where folks have stayed in the city and borrow their weapons.”

  I mulled this for a moment. “I don’t know, Ethan. I don’t like the idea of leaving you and Grace any more than you like the idea of me out there with Peterman. What if they come here while Peterman and I are out?”

  “It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” he said. “The longer we wait, the more likely they are to show up. It’s early enough that they might still be clearing out the drug store. The better prepared we are to defend ourselves against a possible attack, the better off we’ll be.”

  “Where should we go?” I asked, stretching out next to him and looking over his shoulder at the list.

  “The Aldersons,” he said immediately. “They’re pretty much summer people, so they won’t be there, but they host Thanksgiving for their entire family. Lydia starts stockpiling for it in September.”

  “How do you remember all this?” I asked, amazed.

  “She told me at that barbeque last summer,” he said dismissively. “It always amazes me what other people consider ‘stockpiling.’ Bud saw me with about twenty or thirty cans at the market and asked if I was preparing for Armageddon. I said that yes, frankly I was, and he gave me a hard time about it every time I saw him after that. Lydia reassured me at the barbeque that she was also very thorough about ‘preparedness’ whenever there was a major holiday approaching.”

  I imagined Lydia’s cupboard stocked with enough food to feed their entire extended family. Their house was a similar layout to ours, but much homier: more like a vacation getaway than a remote fortress.

  “There might be something we can use in the medicine cabinets,” I said, envisioning the bathrooms. “And we could get more wood for the fireplace.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Ethan leaned back against his chair. “I always liked making runs,” he added ruminatively, his gaze distant as he remembered. “I was young enough that it was like a game to me. Reconnaissance, we called it. It felt like a scavenger hunt. I’d always try to find the biggest and best thing to impress my dad.” He gave a short, sad laugh.

  This was probably the most I’d ever heard Ethan address his childhood since I met him. “How old were you?” I asked.

  “I started going out when I was seven, eight? I was small, so it was easier for me to get inside. I could fit through dog doors and things like that. To be honest, it was probably the worst assignment they could have given me if they actually expected to keep me around.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “It gave me a glimpse into other people’s lives,” he said. “It made me realize there were other ways to live, ways that were different from ours. The thing that interested me most about the houses weren’t how vulnerable and inefficient they were, which was how my dad taught me to see them. It was the pictures.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “At first, it was just the obvious ones: on the mantel over the fireplace, hanging in the hallways. Then I realized there were more, once I really started looking through things: photo albums, yearbooks. We’d split up to search entire neighborhoods at a time, vacation homes, mostly. Places people left empty for most of the year. I’d disappear for hours just looking at all the pictures. Living vicariously through other people’s lives.”

  I was deeply saddened, imagining this childhood spent looking through the window at other people’s dreams. Ethan seemed to shake himself from his memories and noticed my expression.

  “It’s probably why I became a writer,” he concluded, sounding brighter than I knew he felt. “Anyway. Are you ready to go?”
>
  Peterman looked dubious when I led Clover from the barn. “Have you ever ridden a horse?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “Can’t we take the Jeep?”

  “If they’re anywhere near that house, they’ll hear us coming a mile away,” I said. “They’ll shoot us the second we step out. If they’re willing to kill over toilet paper, I can’t imagine what they’d do for a vehicle. We won’t be able to bring back as much on horseback, but we can make a slightly stealthier getaway.”

  “All right,” he said dubiously. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  Once both Peterman and I were on the horse with our guns and knapsacks, Clover was slower than usual trotting up the road. The Aldersons were the next place up from ours. It wasn’t far on horseback, but Peterman looked thoroughly rattled by the time we made it up their long, rambling drive to the house.

  “That was terrible,” he huffed, slipping off Clover’s back. He stumbled and almost fell.

  “It’s kind of like having sea legs,” I explained.

  “Why do people even do that?” he asked.

  “It’s a pretty solid alternative to cars,” I said mildly. I studied the Aldersons’ place. It looked relatively undisturbed from where we were standing. No windows were broken and the doors were shut tight. My guard, however, stayed up.

  “I’m going to put Clover in the barn,” I said. “In case anyone comes while we’re inside. I don’t want them to see her.”

  The Aldersons didn’t stay at their ranch often enough to keep horses, their barn being a holdover from the previous owners. I closed Clover in a stall and went back to the house.

  Peterman had already checked the doors. “They’re all locked,” he said. “So I guess that means those people haven’t been here yet.”

  “Let’s try the windows,” I said, heading around the side of the house.

  The bedroom window was unlocked. Lydia had always commented on how safe she felt at the ranch, like she didn’t even have to lock the doors. “Who would come all the way out here looking for trouble?” she always said. I didn’t have to ask what Ethan thought about that.