The Pulse

by Skylar Finn

  Ethan staggered out of the bedroom, stumbling down the hallway as if each step was excruciating. His hand was over his heart as if he’d been shot.

  “Grace--”

  I rolled off the couch, shaking off Peterman’s hand as he tried to restrain me. I ran past Ethan to the back bedroom, expecting the worst. I fought my way through the warped pieces of wood scattering the door Clarice had broken through.

  The closet door had been smashed open. The closet was empty. Grace was gone.

  16

  Ethan blamed himself. “If we’d listened to you,” he kept saying to Peterman, “and just picked up and left, she would still be here. She would be here. Not...wherever they might have taken her. If she’s even still alive.” His voice broke. He hung his head.

  We sat in a semicircle on the living room floor. Peterman bandaged Ethan’s arm, which had been grazed by a bullet.

  “She’s alive,” he said firmly. Ethan looked at him, bleary-eyed, as if trying to focus on what he was saying. “Think about it. If they wanted to kill her, why not just do it here? They wanted her as leverage. They know they can get whatever they want from you now.”

  He turned to me and flicked his Zippo lighter, holding it up to my face and moving it back and forth in front of my eyes. “How’s your head?”

  “Fine,” I said miserably. It felt like someone was mixing cement inside of it, but I felt it was no less than I deserved. I was little comfort to Ethan in my current condition. I blamed myself, too, but for different reasons. If I had just stayed in the bedroom instead of chasing after that woman, if I hadn’t left Grace alone, she might still be here. I couldn’t even bring myself to say it out loud. But I didn’t need to. The atmosphere of the room was thick with self-blame.

  “There’s no point in speculating what might have been,” said Peterman briskly, trying to pull Ethan and I out of our shared hole. “Say we had left: what would have prevented them from surrounding us on the road and shooting us in the car? Like a stage coach robbery. There were any number of ways we could have died. All paths were dangerous. Things seem dire right now, but we’re all still alive. For all we know, this was the best possible outcome.”

  “Best possible outcome?” Ethan looked at him incredulously. “My daughter is gone. She’s being held captive, or worse, by a band of murderers, and this is the best possible scenario?”

  “I think he means that any scenario in which we’re all still alive can be considered the best we can expect,” I said tiredly. “If one of us had died, that would be the point of no return. There would be nothing more we could do.”

  “Exactly,” said Peterman. “But right now, there is. I believe that man will come back and offer you some sort of deal, one that will likely entail your giving him everything we have. In return, he’ll offer to let Grace go. We have no assurances, of course, that he actually will. Although I can’t see what purpose it would possibly serve him to harm her.”

  “Even the most hardened criminals tend to have their own set of ethics or moral codes,” I said. “Things they ‘don’t do,’ or consider beneath them, even while they commit the most heinous of crimes.”

  “They might be willing to send us away with nothing, but with all of us intact,” mused Peterman.

  Ethan shook his head. “That’s an awfully strong might,” he said. “I’m not willing to take that chance where Grace is concerned.”

  “Then our second option,” continued Peterman, “is to find out where they are and get Grace back.”

  “Then that’s what we’re going to do,” said Ethan.

  “Most of them are injured,” I said, trying to ignore the throbbing in my head. “It will take them a day or so to regroup. Knowing Dexter’s propensity for psychological warfare, he’ll want to wait till we’re sick with fear and worry, so relieved and grateful when he shows up with his ransom terms that we’ll agree to anything. We might have more than a day.”

  “We have to find out where they’re staying,” said Ethan. “We know they’re not at the Aldersons’ or the Davidsons’ houses. There’s only so many places where they can be.” He pulled his map out from beneath the rug. It was one of the few things in the room that wasn’t riddled with bullet holes. He unfolded it, and Peterman and I leaned over it with him.

  “There’s an abandoned farmhouse at the edge of town, just before the highway,” he said, pointing to the plot of land on the map. “No one’s lived in it for years. It’s derelict and dilapidated. It was borderline uninhabitable before the EMP, but it’s the perfect place for a bunch of degenerates to hole up and squat.”

  “What’s that?” Peterman asked, pointing to a small, unlabeled building several miles after Main Street.

  Ethan and I exchanged glances. “Nobody goes out there,” I said. “No one that we know, anyway. They’re not exactly...neighborly.”

  “Who are they?” asked Peterman, intrigued.

  “Separatist nutbags who believe we should secede from the union and become our own country,” said Ethan dismissively. “Militia types. People I always get lumped in with, when their views have nothing to do with my own.”

  “There is something to be said for state versus federal regulation,” mused Peterman. “Many of our failings did emerge from the notion that a single governing body could control as vast a territory as the continental United States.”

  “How does that help us now?” I asked irritably. Something about the hypothesis struck a bitter chord with me: not the premise itself, but the the way that it reminded me of my ex-husband, waxing poetic about academic theories in times of crisis rather than addressing the matter at hand. It’s easy to see in hindsight why Ethan seemed like such a breath of fresh air in comparison.

  “It doesn’t,” he said. “But maybe such a concept will help us to speak to them on their level.”

  “Speak to them?” Ethan laughed in his face. “They will shoot you on sight the instant you step onto the property. Cut you down without a second thought. I don’t think they even deliver mail there anymore. Well, I mean, before.”

  “I’m sure Dexter hasn’t tried to mess with them,” I said. “And if he has, he learned very quickly not to.”

  Peterman was getting excited. “That’s perfect!” he cried. We stared at him. “If this is some sort of militia group, that means they’re heavily armed and trained in combat,” he said. “This isn’t some pack of wild bandits, like Dexter and his mob. These are men of principle, no matter how dubious those principles might be to us. I’m sure if we just approached them, explained the situation--”

  “You’re not from around here, are you,” said Ethan. It wasn’t a question.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” demanded Peterman. Ethan raised an eyebrow, saying nothing. “I was raised in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which is where I went to med school, and I did my residency in Chicago,” he added irritably when he saw that Ethan wasn’t going to elaborate. “I’m aware that it’s different here, but--”

  “It was legal to shoot someone who trespassed before the EMP,” I interrupted. “That’s true of a lot of places, but here, it was not only legal, but also nothing anyone would frown upon. You’d just be viewed as defending your land. And everybody has a gun.”

  “If that was the prevailing sentiment before, you can imagine what it’s like now,” said Ethan dryly. “A lot of people have had their worst suspicions affirmed. I know I have. People like the ones at this compound feel perfectly validated now in all their pre-existing views. They won’t think twice about mowing down a few trespassers, however well-meaning. It’s a shoot first/ask questions later type of crowd.”

  “But if the three of us stage some sort of siege on an unknown property with x amount of people, unknown to us, armed…” Peterman shook his head. “I just don’t see how we could survive that, Ethan. The only reason we’re alive right now is because they didn’t come here for the specific purpose of killing us. They came here to take Grace.”

  Ethan mulled his words
over. I knew he was eaten up by regret at not having listened to Peterman before, though I agreed with Peterman when he said we probably would have just ended up worse off if we’d tried to escape and that at least we were alive --for the time being. But I also suspected that Ethan saw the other group as the inverse of the people who raised him, who were themselves a kind of extremist. I knew he didn’t relish the prospect of doing business with them. What if we came out the worse for it?

  “Say we did try to establish some kind of contact with these people,” he said finally. “How long is that going to take? Grace has asthma. She has the inhaler she had on her, but what if that runs out? They don’t know she has a medical condition, and I doubt they care. We’ve got to get her back before something happens.”

  “What if we just go out there and ask?” said Peterman. “How much of a detour can it really be? Either they say no, and we’re exactly where we are now, no better or worse for it, or they say yes, and we can ensure certain victory against our opponents.”

  “This isn’t a game of Risk, Charles,” I said. “This is our lives. Worst-case scenario, they say no and then shoot us. Or shoot us before we even ask.”

  “What if I go alone?” asked Peterman. “The two of you prepare for what we’ll have to do, and I’ll try to make contact with them. That way, I’m the only one taking the risk.”

  Ethan shook his head. “I don’t like that,” he said. “You’re the only doctor we’ve got. What if something happens to one of us? Which, if we’re being honest, is more than likely will. Then we won’t have proper medical attention. We’ll be pretty much done for.”

  “How about this,” I proposed. “We can’t take on Dexter and his entire gang--or what’s left of it--without at least getting more ammunition than what we have, which means going into town. If we have to go into town anyway, we can consider potentially investigating the possibility of paying a visit to our...neighbors.”

  “We’re also going to have to at least look at this farmhouse and make sure they’re there before we go rushing into the situation blind,” said Ethan. “I’d like to get an idea of how many people are there and refamiliarize myself with all the entry and exit points. I have a pretty good idea of the layout of the place because I went there once when I was considering buying the place.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, surprised.

  “I was worried you’d hate the idea,” he admitted. “I wanted to have a contingency plan for our contingency plan. After Sharon and the panic room, I wanted to approach the situation as carefully as possible. I didn’t even want to bring it up if it wasn’t a viable prospect. It ended up being irrelevant, anyway. The place was uninhabitable.”

  “You know what the inside of the building looks like?” asked Peterman, startled.

  “For the most part, yes. I’ll draw a map of what I remember, and we’ll see how many people they have stationed as guards. If it looks like we’re severely outnumbered, to the point where a siege would be a Pyrrhic victory at best, then we’ll revisit your idea of attaining allies. But first, we’ll stop in town and see if anybody we knew left a hidden gun Dexter and his crew haven’t found--maybe under the counter at the general store or the hardware store, for example. We’ll get fertilizer from the feed store and scope out the situation at the farmhouse.”

  “Fertilizer?” I asked quizzically.

  “I’m not going into this without explosives,” he said. Again, I had a flash of who he might have been before.

  “How will we all fit on the horse?” asked Peterman, perplexed.

  “We’re not all going,” said Ethan. “We need you to stay here.” He continued talking over Peterman’s protests. “Listen, Charles, we need a doctor. If anything happens to you, we’re doomed, and so is Grace. And we need someone here in case Dexter comes back with new terms while we’re gone.”

  Peterman reluctantly agreed. “All right, I suppose,” he said. “But I don’t like the idea of just the two of you out there when we don’t even know for sure where they are.”

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving you here,” said Ethan. “But like Charlie said, they’re very likely regrouping. Planning the next phase of their attack. We have a narrow window to plan a counterstrike.”

  Ethan and I emptied our packs of everything but water and a little bit of food and took all the ammunition we had left. It wasn’t much. Peterman helped us out through the hole in the front of the house, handing our packs to us one at a time.

  “Be careful,” he cautioned us one final time before disappearing back through the hole. There was a scraping sound as he moved the couch in front of it as Ethan instructed. It wasn’t much of a reinforcement, as the couch now resembled a piece of Swiss cheese more closely than it did a couch, but it was better than nothing.

  We went out to the barn. Ethan unlocked the padlock with his key and we pulled the barn door open with a resounding scrape. To my surprise, he went past Clover’s stall and the saddle hanging on the wall and straight for the Jeep.

  “We’re taking the Jeep?” I asked.

  “We’ll never get everything back on the horse,” he said. “Not what we need. They’re probably incapacitated for now, but if they do come after us, I won’t hesitate to mow them down. It’s a calculated risk.”

  I got in, buckling my seatbelt. I looked up to see a trace of a smile on Ethan’s lips. It was the closest I’d seen him come to exhibiting anything resembling his trademark humor since we realized Grace was missing. I was surprised to see it now.

  “What?” I asked.

  “With everything that’s happened,” he said, putting the Jeep in gear. “I just love that you still consider it of paramount importance to buckle your safety belt.”

  “How dumb would it be to die in a car accident after surviving a hail of gunfire during a siege on our home?” I asked. “I mean, what if a cow steps into the road or something?”

  “It’s a valid point,” he said. He pulled out of the barn and went down the driveway, pausing at the mailbox and scanning the horizon for any sign of our enemies. There was nothing but flat, blank, empty space, the plains extending on either side as far as the eye could see.

  “Which one are we hitting first?” I asked. “Town, or the farmhouse?” It was a strange conversation to have. This time last month, our discussion had revolved around whether we were having spaghetti or pizza for dinner. Last year, it was whether we’d go to the ranch for our next vacation or the shore. Now the topic under discussion was whether we’d arm ourselves, or spy on a heavily-armed gang at the edge of town.

  Ethan put his blinker on, and I understood then why he’d laughed at me for buckling my seatbelt. It seemed so arbitrary now. Funny the way these residual traces of ourselves remained, no matter what. He turned off the main road onto the narrow, bumpy back road that led towards the highway.

  “Reconnaissance,” he said.

  17

  As the Jeep juddered over the narrow, rocky back road, my thoughts returned to Grace. She was all I could think about. Huddled in a small ball in the corner of the closet, trusting that we’d keep her safe. My heart hurt far more than my head did, and I couldn’t keep myself from imagining all the things that could go wrong.

  Glancing over at Ethan in the driver’s side, his jaw clenched and eyes narrowed, I knew his mind was running along a similar path. I almost pitied whoever stood in his way. I thought back to what he said about explosives, and I wondered what he had in mind.

  There was a thick patch of woods that ran along the creek adjacent to the highway. Ethan pulled into the woods and parked behind a bush. We got out and covered the vehicle as best as we could with nearby dead and leafy branches lying on the ground.

  “We’ll go the rest of the way on foot,” he said. “Daylight is not the ideal time to be doing this, obviously; not that it stopped them. And anyway, we won’t have to get that close.” He tugged at the strap around his neck: Grace’s binoculars. My heart hurt all over again.

  As we mo
ved through the trees, Ethan walked soundlessly, without a single dry leaf rustling or twig crackling beneath his feet. I watched the way he walked across the forest floor and tried to imitate him. I probably sounded like a bear bumbling through the woods by comparison.

  At the edge of the forest, the farmhouse looked like a tiny toy. Ethan lifted the binoculars to his eyes and studied it for a long moment before handing them off to me. The horses were tethered out front and pawed restlessly at the ground. There was a single guard on the front porch, cradling his automatic weapon. He was slumped up against the banister and looked like he was asleep.

  “Are they really that careless?” I asked, handing the binoculars back to Ethan. “One guy? Asleep?”

  “Part of me feels like it’s a trap,” he said. “But I also think they’ve gotten very arrogant, even more so than they probably were to begin with. Who would confront them here? Most of the people they’ve encountered, they’ve already murdered in cold blood. They assume that we’re injured and hiding. It’s possible they’ve let their guard down.” He lowered the binoculars and handed them to me. “I’m going to have to get closer.”

  My stomach twisted painfully. The prospect of losing both him and Grace in the same day was more than I could bear.

  He was still for a moment, listening. A bird whistled in the trees. He whistled back. “That will be the signal,” he said. “That whistle. Try it.”

  I formed my lips into an O. I had always been a terrible whistler. At first, my mouth was too dry and I barely emitted a breathy tweet. I was nervous and stressed out. My head hurt less after the aspirin-and-acetaminophen cocktail Peterman had served me, but I was under less than ideal conditions to learn how to whistle.

  “Try again,” Ethan urged me. I took a deep breath and thought of Grace. I blew out the same three notes as the bird, and it tweeted back at me through the trees.

  “Whistle like that, three times in a row, if you see that guy going into the house,” said Ethan. “You’re going to have to get a little bit closer, too.”