The Solar Pulse (Book 2): Escape the Pulse

by Will Hawthorne

  © 2017 Will Hawthorne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercials uses permitted by copyright law.

  Escape The Pulse: The Solar Pulse Book 2

  Will Hawthorne

  2017

  This work of written fiction is protected under the copyright laws of the United Kingdom and other countries throughout the world. Country of first publication: United Kingdom. Any unauthorized exhibition, distribution, or copying of this book or any part thereof may result in legal action. The story, all names =, characters, and incidents portrayed in this book are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

  No person or entity associated with this book received payment or anything of value, or entered into any agreement or connection with the depiction of tobacco products.

  Contents

  Chapter One - Clear Shot

  Chapter Two - Farm

  Chapter Three - Basement

  Chapter Four - Houseguest

  Chapter Five - Dolores

  Chapter Six - Redwood

  Chapter Seven - Rooftop

  Chapter Eight - Drone

  Chapter Nine - Intruder

  Chapter Ten - Stitch

  Chapter Eleven - Abort

  Chapter Twelve - Howl

  Chapter Thirteen - Visitors

  Chapter Fourteen - Downhill

  Chapter Fifteen - Capture

  Escape the Pulse

  The Solar Pulse Book 2

  Chapter One

  Clear Shot

  The I-92 highway ran for more than 100 miles in an almost perfect straight line from the city. Whilst its simplicity and straightforwardness should have been a source for comfort, I had increasingly found myself to be deeply unsettled by the seemingly endless nature of it. As a kid I had made the trip with my Dad more times than I could count. We would come to town for a few days during the holidays from school and eat ice cream, watch movies and see a baseball game.

  With the absence of my mother, my Dad and I had always been close in a macho kind of way. He was averse to showing any weakness, and I had only become aware of his place as anything less than a superhero when I was fourteen years old. I had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. I crept through the house in the dark, but as I approached the kitchen I saw that there was a light on, a line of it creeping out from the almost-closed door. Dad always woke up for work early, around 4am, but it was even earlier than that.

  I could hear something coming from within.

  I put my eye to the gap and looked into the kitchen, and sat at the kitchen table I saw my father crying, his head in his hands.

  My mother had been dead for 12 years at that point, and from time to time the thought of her still came back to him, but he would do his crying in private, away from me.

  Suffice it to say that I didn’t get a glass of water that night, and I had never, ever mentioned it to him.

  That was what I thought about as we rode our stolen bikes up the empty highway, breathing deeply. Helen and Luke’s parents lived on the other side of the country, but my Dad lived no less than 50 miles outside of the city in a small town called Redwood. We had been cycling for three hours and had managed to cover about 25 miles. We were all city-goers, so walking was second nature, and our endurance had kept us going up until now. The problem, of course, was that none of us had had a decent night’s sleep, and with the amount of mental, physical and emotional exhaustion that the three of us had been through over the course of the previous evening, life was starting to take its toll.

  We agreed to pull over, parking our bikes in the shade of a large, lone oak tree at the edge of a patch of grassland.

  We hadn’t seen another person since leaving the more occupied points of the highway as it exited the city. The occasional abandoned car was the only sign that anybody had been here at all.

  The last 24 hours had been the most psychotic of my entire life. Luke and I had found ourselves awake around midnight, suddenly enlightened to the fact that nothing electrical worked anymore. It didn’t take long for us also to become aware that the upcoming solar flare from the sun that was supposed to miss us had, in fact, struck us head on. Planes fell out of the sky, cars came to a halt, and the city went dark… Until it had suddenly lit up with the flames and gunshots that came with the desperation of humanity.

  Chaos had ruled, and Luke and I had headed across that sprawling, nightmarish metropolis in an effort to find my girlfriend, Helen. She was no damsel in distress – that was us, if anything. We had been threatened, shot at, almost been set on fire, and in the midst of it all had seen and done things that nobody in a civilised world should see or do.

  But this world was no longer a civilised one. I had quickly realised that I had to look after myself and those closest to me, and right now that was the only thing on my mind.

  That was the excuse I used in the recesses of my mind to justify the killing of somebody else. The man who I had protected had, over the course of less than an hour, become somebody close to me. He was a good person, somebody who was just trying to mind his own business, when the despicable members of society who take any opportunity to feed on those with principles had murdered him.

  We all sat by the tree in silence, eating from the food we had brought with us in the backpacks and drinking lightly from the bottles of water.

  ‘What do you think your dad’s doing right now?’ Luke asked.

  ‘Hunkered down in his basement with a shotgun and a bottle of whisky.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Probably. After I left for college he was already retired. My mom had a pretty massive life insurance policy after she passed, and it was plenty for him to live on. He still sells things from the farm from time to time, but with all of that free time on his hands he ended up spending a little too long on internet forums and watching doomsday documentaries. He’s a prepper, sort of.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They prepare for doomsday scenarios, terrorist attacks, things like that. They stock anything that they might need, food, water, weapons… I used to think that it was a little stupid, but as long as it kept him busy when he was on his own I was happy for him to do it… Turns out it might not have been so stupid after all. I just hope he hasn’t run off.’

  ‘He’d just leave you like that?’

  ‘He wouldn’t leave us with nothing. Trust me.’

  ‘I’m so tired…’ Helen sighed, leaning back against the trunk of the tree and closing her eyes. ‘I vote,’ she said sarcastically, ‘that we take a short nap before getting back on the road.’

  ‘No way,’ I said, but also placing my head back. ‘We can’t afford to be exposed out here like this. Considering the types of people that we’ve run into over the past 24 hours I really don’t feel like being asleep when anybody could come wandering by. We can sleep when we get to my Dads.’

  ‘You’re a real dictator, you know that?’ Luke smiled. ‘If North Korea actually did this and timed it perfectly with the flare just to cover it up, you should contact them about an internship. You’d go far, buddy.’

  ‘Screw you.’

  ‘Hey, you’re the one falling asleep, too.’

  ‘I’m not…’

  ‘But that was a lie.

  ‘You know, you’re only supposed to start the race when we�
��re both standing still. It doesn’t exactly work when you suddenly say go and get a head start.’

  ‘Well how else would I win, Sam?’

  ‘At least you’re honest about that…’

  It was a decade or so before the pulse, and myself and a friend from school, long before I met Luke, were walking back along the five mile stretch of road towards my hometown. I couldn’t remember this friends name – we had drifted apart like so many people do when they move from institution to institution. Let’s call him Jack.

  Jack and I had had detention for screwing around after school that day, and were now headed home on foot. I honestly can’t remember what it was that we were talking about to pass the time, but that isn’t the important part of this story.

  The important of this story is Mr Carruthers.

  The behavioural manager at our school, Mr Carruthers, had a knack for stringing students up for first time offences. While I rarely got into trouble and pretty much kept to myself, Jack had a talent for getting into trouble, and on this occasion I had gotten stuck with him.

  So, on this late afternoon at the start of the summer, Jack and I were walking home, playing stupid games while I seriously considered walking into the field just to get away from him. I don’t remember why we ended up looking behind us along the quiet single-lane highway that stretched ahead and behind, but one of us noticed the bike coming towards us.

  It must have been three or four hundred yards off, but whoever was riding it was coming up fast. Head down, riding straight – they would be with us soon.

  ‘You know who that is, right?’ I said, smacking Jack on the arm. ‘That’s Carruthers.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘That’s him. Don’t you ever listen during home room? He always spouts that stuff about the importance of cardio and how he cycles to work every day.’

  Jack looked at me, then looked down the road curiously towards the steadily approaching Carruthers.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing my sleeve and pulling me to the edge of the road. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  Blindly, apathetically, I followed him. I would rather stay out of sight than deal with another lecture from Carruthers.

  So there we were, crouching in the dirt, hiding amongst the crushed crops at the edge of the road, completely out of sight, when Jack fished around on the ground and retrieved this stick, maybe two feet long.

  ‘What the hell are you gonna do with that?’ I asked. ‘Beat him to death?’

  ‘No – way better. I’m gonna throw it when Carruthers goes past on that fucking bike, get it right between the spokes, his wheel is gonna lock up and he’s gonna go flying over the handlebars.’

  ‘Can I have some?’

  ‘Have some of what?’

  ‘Some of the drugs that you’ve been smoking when you thought that this would actually work.’

  ‘Just watch,’ Jack said, smiling and raising the stick. ‘He’s isn’t gonna know what’s hit him.’

  ‘Because nothing’s gonna hit him in the first place.’

  We waited in silence as the bike approached. About fifty yards from the point that the wheels would become adjacent with where we were crouching he came into sight. He was, as my dad would have said when something was moving fast, ‘going like the clappers.’

  So Jack readied this stick in his hand, calculating the shot and the necessary force like a golf pro, before bringing it back fully and throwing it.

  I swear, I can still see that slim, pathetic piece of wood sliding through the air like a misplaced javelin. Even then I didn’t think that it would even remotely make contact with Carruthers, never mind slide between the bike spokes.

  But it did. It really fucking did.

  To this day I’ve never seen a more precise throw or lucky shot, not on a pro basketball game or on Monday night football. It slid between the spokes like a glove sliding into place, the wheel locked, the bike halted – and Carruthers kept moving.

  He flew through the air, soaring over the handlebars and travelling perhaps five or six yards through ahead before he even started to make a descent towards the tarmac.

  I thought that we had killed him.

  Jack never anticipated that it would actually happen. It was just another one of his stupid pranks. But after a brief few seconds of bewildered, breathless staring, we both jumped up from where we were crouched and went sprinting towards him.

  And that’s the tale of how myself and a school friend almost killed a teacher and then had to help him limp back the four miles to my hometown, whilst wheeling his bike too.

  I stuttered awake, my first reaction being to check the others. They had both fallen asleep in the shade of the tree that we had settled in.

  I didn’t know whether I had been asleep or awake or caught in between, but I felt that it was the final of the three.

  Waking hadn’t come to me naturally either – something had caused it. It was a sound that I was familiar with, but which I never thought I would hear again.

  It was a car engine.

  We were only a little way from the road, perhaps a little further than Jack and I had been that time. Luke and Helen remained asleep, so I stood quietly and, the gun in hand, set off towards the road.

  I crouched in the shrubbery at the edge, hearing the engine get closer and closer, until it finally came into view from the direction we were headed.

  It was a car, and even from two hundred yards off I could hear screams and shouts coming from it, matching the roaring sound of the engine.

  Less than a minute later that car came zooming past. There were three or four inside by my count, windows rolled down, leaning out, glass bottles in hand as they howled and screeched hysterically. It was a muscle car, swinging all over the road, with a hell of a lot of power behind it.

  After it passed, taking off towards the city, I checked both ways twice like I was heading across the road between red and green lights and made my way out to stand between the lanes. I was so intent on watching it go that I failed to register my friends appearing from the tall grass, emerging onto the road.

  ‘Sam? What’s happening?’ Helen asked, heading over and pressing a hand on my shoulder. ‘Was that a car?’

  ‘How the hell is that even possible?’ Luke said.

  ‘Faraday cage,’ I said, still staring after it. ‘Remember what Moody said? If anything with circuits is kept inside a metallic cage it can potentially be protected from an EMP event.’

  ‘And now people are just driving them around,’ Helen continued. ‘You’d think that they’d have a little more care. If I had a car that actually worked in a situation like this then I’d do everything to keep that fact hidden… If somebody found out I wouldn’t be surprised at what they might do to get a hold of it.’

  ‘I don’t think these people are exactly responsible,’ I said. ‘I think that they’re drunk and having fun in a world that lets them have a little power over others.’

  ‘Wait…’ Luke said. ‘They’re coming back.’

  I didn’t realise how quickly my prediction would be proved correct. The car didn’t end up going out of sight. Instead, it slowed to a stop, becoming no smaller than it previously had been, and made a U-turn about three hundred yards away before I saw it begin to move towards me again.

  Us again.

  ‘Let’s get off the road,’ I said, as we moved away to the side. ‘Whoever they are, they’re not gonna go around us.’

  We stayed near to the tall grass, on edge as the car came closer and closer… But fifty yards off it took a sharp turn in our direction.

  ‘Move!’

  We near enough dived back into the grass like something out of a cartoon as the car sped by, so close to the field that it picked up a cloud of dust into the air. I swear that I could have smelt the liquor as it tore past us.

  ‘Who are these assholes?’ Luke asked with exasperation, picking himself up and moving back towards the tree. ‘I know people don’t exactly come together like I th
ought they would in times of crisis, but fuck…’

  I headed out to the edge of the road again as the dust cleared, watching the car come to a stop two hundred yards or so off this time.

  ‘They’re coming back again,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘I know that you don’t see me as some pathetic girl, guys, but let me emphasise that I’m really fucking scared right now,’ Helen said. ‘We’ve got miles to go and it’s a hell of a long way to track through fields just to avoid these people.’

  ‘They could kill us,’ Luke said. ‘We stand a better chance in the fields.’

  Despite the life or death nature of this all, I had completely forgotten about the rifle in my hand.

  I looked down at it like I was holding some unknown relic.

  I was too tired for tolerance right now.

  And then, the thought of Jack throwing that damned stick came into my mind.

  I saw the assailant’s head in the city exploding onto the tarmac.

  I turned back to my friends.

  ‘I need to say something,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have a lenient or a nice way to say it, so hear me out. If I could stop these people right now, but it meant maybe killing them, would that be a problem with you?’

  ‘No,’ Luke said, shaking his head. ‘They almost just mowed us down.’

  ‘What are you gonna do?’ Helen asked.

  ‘I asked you a question first.’

  She looked to the side over the grass, seeing the road ahead, our destination nowhere near being in sight yet.

  She looked back to me and shook her head.

  ‘We don’t know who’s driving that thing. They could get out and kill us at any second if they want to. They’ve already shown that they’re fine with putting our lives at risk. If you can stop them then do it… I just don’t know how you’re gonna do that.’

  ‘It’s a long shot,’ I said, loading the rifle and checking the sight. ‘Literally.’

  I knelt down at the edge of the road, watching the car move towards us again. Down the sight of the rifle it came into view, gleaming and sharp in the midday brightness.