The Pulse

by Skylar Finn

  “It’s not about someone taking her place,” said Ethan. “I think it’s about finding someone who occupies a different space in your heart.” He reached for my hand. “Maybe she fulfilled a certain part of you, and that part will always belong to her. But maybe there are other parts to you that you never realized that you had, and maybe someone else could bring them out. I know that I thought I would never meet anyone again after Sharon. But then I met Charlie.”

  “What happened to Sharon?” asked Peterman curiously. It was normally something of an elephant in the room—the fact that Ethan and Grace were very obviously father and daughter while I looked nothing like either of them—but something about the strange intimacy caused by the danger and instability of our situation made it easier to talk about the things that we wouldn’t normally address.

  “She left,” said Ethan, gazing into the fireplace. Peterman looked uneasy, glancing from Grace to me. Grace didn’t even look up from her drawing, and continued sketching away as if she hadn’t heard anything. Knowing how absorbed Grace was in her work when she drew, retreating into her own inner world, I would be startled if she had.

  I shrugged. The subject of Ethan’s ex-wife, Sharon, failed to incite any particular feelings in me. I had never seen or met her and she was little more than a cartoon caricature in my mind: an abstract villain who failed to understand or empathize with Ethan, making something of a hero of me for simply accepting him as he was.

  “Sharon couldn’t handle the whole prepper lifestyle,” Ethan continued. “At first, she thought it was all terribly romantic and exciting—ensuring we were ready for the worst possible outcome, should it occur. She thought it was some peculiar eccentricity of mine, rather than a way of life. I don’t think she understood how seriously I took it. She thought it just meant having a few extra cans in the pantry and a gun in the nightstand drawer.

  “Things changed when Grace was born. I had all the usual fears of any parent with a new child, of all the things that could hurt them in this world, but mine were multiplied ad infinitum. Sharon was picking out colors for the nursery and I was cursing myself for buying a house in the suburbs like everybody else. I wanted to at least build a panic room, but she thought it was an insane waste of money we should be saving for Grace’s education. ‘Can’t we just hide in the basement?’ she asked. ‘Like you do when there’s a tornado or something?’ I was so frustrated.

  “There were so many things that were out of the question and off the table with her: I wanted to take Grace to the range when she was old enough and teach her how to shoot. Sharon would have strangled me. She came to despise me, bit by bit. She thought I was a deeply paranoid individual with a troubled childhood. She thought I needed therapy. As if the problem wasn’t the world and all the things that can go wrong in it, but me.”

  “How did you and Charlie meet?” asked Peterman.

  I thought of the day five years ago when I walked into the library on campus. I was preparing a lecture on the breakdown of society during times of crisis--how prescient that had turned out to be--and I was in search of a particular book called The Mass Epidemic of Panic, of which there was only one copy in the tri-state area. Lo and behold, just as I reached for it on the shelf, another hand appeared and grasped the spine.

  It wasn’t the meet-cute it sounds like. I was ready to come to blows over that book. It was written by a professor in Louisiana and had a limited print run. It wasn’t available online. I felt instantly hostile.

  It was Ethan, of course. He looked utterly surprised that anyone else would be interested in the book besides him. “Oh, hello,” he said, looking startled. He temporarily released the tome and regarded me, squaring off against him in the aisle.

  “I saw it first,” I said, petty as a child.

  “Are you interested in survivalism?” he asked curiously.

  “What?” I hadn’t had my coffee yet and was made further irritable by the fact. “What are you talking about?”

  “I write apocalyptic doomsday fiction,” he explained. “End-of-the-world kind of stuff. The college library has way better stuff for research than the public library downtown.”

  “That’s probably because it’s a valuable resource for students and professors at this school,” I said dryly. “Of which I happen to be one.”

  I imagined a small paperback with a lurid cover of aliens attacking a major city: just the right size and taste to fit into an airplane carry-on and brainless enough to read on vacation. To my line of thought, the individual responsible for such questionable material was currently invading school grounds in order to sabotage my lecture, all so that he could write another one.

  Really, it’s embarrassing to remember my rudeness. My ex-husband and I were dead in the middle of a messy and acrimonious divorce, and I was combative and hostile in virtually every situation. I picked a fight in a McDonald’s because they gave me the wrong size McFlurry.

  Ethan, in spite of Sharon’s relative terribleness in any given situation, didn’t react to me as an imminent threat--even with my prickliness and my determination to rob him of his valuable research material. I still think about that, sometimes. How he looked right past it.

  “Well, teachers first, of course,” he said, smiling. He handed me the book.

  “Obviously,” I said.

  I turned and took the book straight to the check-out counter and left. I didn’t introduce myself or stick around to chat. Honestly, I probably would have forgotten the encounter had he not returned to the library every single day, ostensibly to work on his book. I say ‘ostensibly’ due to the fact that he was almost certainly spying on me. He observed what study carrel I used and what I got from the vending machine, and would leave my favorite granola bar and bottled tea for me moments before I arrived.

  Initially, I was suspicious: what did this airport book writer want from me? I assumed he was up to no good. After two weeks of this, he left his number under my granola bar. I didn’t see him in the library anymore. It was six months before I called him.

  “What do you want from me, anyway?” I was no less unpleasant even having taken the initiative of picking up the phone. But I needed to know.

  “Something about you interests me,” he said. “You’re not like other people.”

  Of course it’s always flattering to be told that you’re different or special. We all

  secretly believe it, in our own heads. That something about us sets us apart from the crowd. Or how we’re so misunderstood, and just need one person to recognize who we really are. It’s a fairly common phenomenon. I knew this, but it still struck a very deep chord in me.

  Now, in front of the fireplace in the living room with so much at stake, I felt oddly protective of the memory. “We had similar interests,” I said simply.

  “Charlie was the first person Grace trusted after Sharon left,” said Ethan. “Besides me, obviously. I don’t mean the first woman, because I didn’t date anyone else. I mean the first person in general. She was very closed-off and reticent with everyone else. But with Charlie, she was immediately open, as if she intuitively divined there was something special about her. The same way that I did.”

  I thought again of how frightened I had been to think that I could lose him. It was because of the feeling I had when he said things like that.

  “Charlie’s good people,” said Grace, getting to her feet and setting her drawing to the side. I guess she had been listening, after all.

  Grace went into the kitchen and there was a thoughtful silence in the living room, each of us contemplating where we’d been before and how we’d gotten where we were now. I snapped out of my reverie when I heard Grace’s socked feet pad rapidly back into the living room. She jumped over the back of the couch and grabbed Ethan’s arms.

  “Dad?” she said. “I think there’s someone outside.”

  Ethan sat up immediately, reaching for the Governor. I grabbed the second handgun from the hearth and Peterman went for the hunting rifle, just as the w
ire on the front porch tripped and the air horn blasted outside.

  12

  Ethan’s expression darkened. Peterman looked alarmed. I felt absolute, abject fear. I couldn’t help but imagine us suffering the same fate as the Davidsons: one after the other. What if they dragged us out, lined us up, and executed us one by one?

  I shook myself of these thoughts and tried to gain control. Ethan got up and went to the front door. We’d left a narrow opening in between the two boards surrounding the peephole. Ethan peered through, then stepped back with a grim expression. He checked the Governor to make sure it was fully loaded.

  I stepped up to the peephole, in the spot that Ethan had vacated. I was confronted with the fisheye-distorted sight of Dexter and his gang. He was at the forefront, shoving his face up to the peephole and leering maniacally, gold teeth glinting. Fanned out behind him on either side, descending down the steps and into the front yard, were eight of the most unpleasant, brutal, ragged figures I’d ever seen.

  The two on his immediate left and right were Clarice and Buddy, the two I’d seen at the Aldersons. I didn’t recognize the others. Two of them looked vaguely familiar, as if they might be the men he’d robbed the original pharmacy with.

  “Well, hello there,” he said, his loud, booming voice only slightly muffled by the thick wood door. “We just wanted to come see you folks to say hi, so…” He stepped back from the door and gave a big, theatrical wave. “Hi!”

  On the other side of the door, we were silent, waiting. Ethan tensed. “What do you want?” he called through the door.

  Dexter raised a hand to his heart, looking mock-offended. “What do we want? Why, is that any way to greet a neighbor? We want to make friends, of course. Don’t you?”

  “We don’t need any friends,” said Ethan. “What we need is for you to leave.”

  “Sorry, friend.” Dexter chuckled, buffing his nails against his red-and-black checked flannel shirt. “I’m afraid we can’t do that. What we’re gonna need from you is your complete and total cooperation.” As he spoke, he pointed from his chest to the door. “That entails giving up any valuable resources you might have to share--you know, such as what’s in the barn, what’s in your house, in your fridge, in your rifles, et cetera. Make a neighborly gesture, and help a ragtag band of wandering nomads get by in these strange times of ours.”

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t have the resources to spare.” As he spoke, Ethan raised his gun to the door, holding the muzzle to the wood. I stepped aside so he could use the peephole to aim.

  “Well, I hate to break this to you, neighbor, but I’m afraid y’all don’t have a choice.” There was a drawn-out pause. Ethan moved the gun to the left as he looked through the peephole. “Think of it as a land tax. The law’s days are numbered, and the way I see it, there’s a new sheriff in town. And his name is Dexter King. So think of it as a tribute. To your king.” He laughed aloud, a braying laugh like a donkey. This, more than anything, seemed indicative of his madness. His joviality, his merriment at the notion of extorting and threatening complete and total strangers.

  “Tell you what: I’ll give you folks some time to think it over,” continued Dexter. “I’m a reasonable man. We will return in one hour.” He held up a single finger to the peephole. “That’s sixty minutes, or three thousand and six hundred entire seconds to think it over. That’s quite a lot, in my opinion. I told you, I’m a reasonable man. And when we return, you’ll surrender any gun or weapon you might have--and I know you have at least one, because judging by your trip wires and your little traps and so forth out here, at least one of you in there is military--whatever is in your barn, and a quarter of your rations, in terms of food and water and so forth. See? I’m a reasonable guy. That leaves three-quarters of your rations for you to enjoy. And you won’t need to defend yourselves, because we’ll be friends. Right? So you won’t be needing your guns. And judging by these here fortifications, you’re not planning on going anywhere any time soon. So you won’t need to travel. Therefore, whatever’s in your barn will become extraneous. Right? Good. We’ll be back in an hour.”

  There was a brief silence, and for a moment I thought he was done. Then he continued. “And if, for whatever reason, you choose not to acknowledge how infinitely reasonable my requests are, we will rain down upon you with the full amount of our reserve firepower, which, I assure you, is not inconsiderable. We will rain down upon you until there is nothing left. So I highly advise you get with the program.”

  I heard heavy boot falls thud against the porch as Dexter and his royal guard retreated. Ethan remained pressed against the peephole until they were gone. It took them several minutes to disappear into the darkness, based on how long he remained, still and rigid, pressed up against the door. Then he stepped back and lowered the gun, his jaw clenched.

  Peterman looked visibly shaken. “My god,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Imagine what they’ll do.”

  Ethan shook his head. “There are men like them everywhere,” he said. “They were everywhere to begin with. Now they’ve come out of the woodwork, and they think they can take over. Make law-abiding, decent people afraid and oppressed. We will encounter them again and again, even if we leave. On the road, there might be a dozen more Dexters before we get to any place resembling sanctuary. Here, there’s only one. I know it might not seem like it, but we can take out this guy. I know we can.”

  I was shaking. “Ethan, there were so many of them,” I said. All I could see in my mind was the body of Pat Davidson laid out on the floor of the store he’d owned and operated his entire life. Followed by this was the image of what I imagined Peterman had prevented me from seeing: Mary and Tom, cut down in their own home. How easily we could share the same fate.

  “There are more of them,” Ethan agreed. “But these people are sloppy, Charlie. I promise you. I can tell just by looking at them. They’re arrogant. I’d be surprised if any of them have any hard survival skills. They thought one of us was military just because we set up a few traps. If we took out the leader, the rest would fall. They use brute force, not strategy. Our choices are to take out one Dexter, or take our chances on the road. It might seem better at first, safer; till we encounter another man just like Dexter. And maybe he’s got twenty guys instead of eight. Maybe we’re exposed and vulnerable in the world, with no place to hide. We can win now or lose later.”

  “But why not just cater to their demands?” asked Peterman. “They don’t know how many guns we have, or people. We hand over one or two, some of the food. What’s the harm? Maybe then they’ll leave us alone.”

  “They will never leave us alone,” Ethan said. “If we acquiesce to any of their terms, they’ll be back in a matter of days. Maybe sooner. Once they know we’re a resource to be exploited, they’ll do that and then have us eliminated. And they don’t just want food and a gun. They want what’s in the barn. Our Jeep, our horse. Our only means of transportation. They want to make us helpless.”

  “But how can we defend ourselves?” I asked. “The three of us and Grace, against all of them. It seems like the odds are against us.”

  “They’re not,” he said. “I know it seems that way now, I do. But we’re much stronger than you realize, Charlie. There’s a reason they didn’t just storm the place and try to take over. You got away from them once. They see that we know what we’re doing here. They see that they can’t take us with ease, that it would require force--force which might cause them to lose numbers. They don’t want to do that. They think if they can just bully us into submitting, we’ll lie down and make it easy for them. But I assure you, our set up here gives them pause. They know we’re a force to contend with.”

  As much as I wanted to believe Ethan--that we were safer here, that we could overcome these people, with our resiliency and cleverness--all I could think of was what had befallen everyone they’d already come across.

  “What about the Davidsons?” I said. “What if they thought the same thing?”

>   “They caught them completely off-guard and unaware,” said Ethan. “They were unarmed. We won’t be. We’ll be prepared. We’ll be ready.”

  As frightening as it sounded, I trusted Ethan. I trusted Ethan with my life. I knew that every risk he took was calculated, and he would never take a risk that might result in Grace--or me--or both of us losing our lives. This was bad, but it could be worse. I imagined a gang of twenty Dexters, surrounding us on the highway.

  “But how can we defend ourselves?” Peterman was demanding. “If they want to come in here--if they really want to come in here--what can we do to stop them?”

  “First of all, they have to get through all our fortifications,” said Ethan. “They have to get through bulletproof glass and reinforced doors. We’ll know where they’re at, at all times. We’ll blow them away the instant they come through. We have the advantage of surprise. We know exactly how many of them there are, and they have no idea how many of us there are or how many guns we have. I promise you: we can defend ourselves.”

  “Why not just try to work with them?” asked Peterman. “Why try to fight them?”

  “They make it seem so reasonable, don’t they?” said Ethan. “Just a quarter of our resources? One of our guns, because that’s probably all they think we have? Our sole transportation? But they’ll be back. Rest assured, they will be back. And when they come back, they’ll want everything. And when we don’t have anything left to give, we’ll be just as disposable as Mary, Tom, and Pat. That will be the end of the line for us. We’d only be postponing the inevitable. Delaying it, not avoiding it.”

  Peterman looked nervous, but also like he was taking Ethan’s words to heart. “Do you have a plan? For how we can defend ourselves, against these people?”

  “I always have a plan,” said Ethan.

  An hour came and went. The old-fashioned clock that rested on the mantel chimed the hour. We sat in a semi-circle in the living room, solemn and largely silent. Grace was curled up on the couch like a cat, wide-awake beneath her afghan, staring into the fire. Peterman pensively cleaned his gun. I twisted my hair around my finger compulsively, much in the way that Grace often did: unaware, until I finally noticed what I was doing and forced myself to stop. Only Ethan was calm, sitting stoic and resolute in the armchair next to the hearth, the Governor in his lap and his walking stick by his side.