Pulse

by Patrick Carman

  “Hiding is just going to make this take longer, Hawk,” Wade said. He sounded less menacing, friendlier, but Hawk knew all too well that this was only one of Wade’s many weapons of persuasion. “Come on, man—I’ll put the wheel back on my cart and take you for a ride. You’re gonna love it.”

  Knowing Wade had not somehow arrived in the darkness behind the door, Hawk made his move, crawling as fast as he could along the cold tile floor. He opened the door a little wider and crept through, then he pulled the door closed and heard it click shut. He held his breath in the dark, hoping he hadn’t been heard.

  “Running out of patience here, Hawk,” Wade said. He was standing out in the hall, Hawk could tell, and he cursed himself for letting the door click shut as he closed it. He was too afraid to shed any light on the storage room with his Tablet for fear that Wade would see the light under the door in the classroom. He could hear Wade coming closer, probably about to look under the desk, and then he’d be at the storage room and it would be over.

  Hawk slid his Tablet into his back pocket and started feeling around with his hands out in front of him. He was careful not to move too quickly, shuffling around in a circle, feeling the shelves. At the back of the room he found another door, and, turning the handle, he opened it slowly. The smell of the room took his breath away, and he began to gag, but then he heard a tapping on the door leading out to the classroom.

  “No way you’re in there, right, Hawk?”

  Hawk sucked in a giant gulp of breath and passed through the second doorway into more darkness. When he closed the door behind him, he risked taking out his Tablet and shining a light on the situation. Wade still hadn’t come through the first of the two doorways, so at least for a second it was safe. He immediately wished he hadn’t seen what the room contained the moment a soft light bathed all the dead bodies. He’d stumbled onto Wade Quinn’s idea of a burial ground. He hadn’t used a shovel to bury the Drifters he’d killed. He’d just piled them up in this room and left them to rot. Hawk turned off the light on his Tablet and placed it back where it was safe, not because he couldn’t stand to see what he was seeing, but because Wade had opened the first door. By the time he got to the second door, Hawk had done the unthinkable: he had gotten in with the bodies, hiding among the trench coats and the shotguns and the rotting limbs. When Wade opened that second door, he shined his own light on the grisly contents of the room.

  “I knew I should have buried these damn things,” he complained, turning up his nose at the smell of death. “God, what a mess.”

  And with that he slammed the door shut and went looking for Hawk elsewhere in the building. Hawk didn’t move for another five minutes, just to be sure, and in those minutes he came to understand that his life was not going to be as easy as he might have hoped. It had always been difficult, but it was getting harder still; and he was becoming part of something bigger than himself—something he was pretty sure might get him killed. When he felt sure Wade Quinn had abandoned his search, Hawk crept out of the closed area of the school. How Wade had done what he had done was unclear, but there was no doubt Wade had been responsible.

  If he could have seen outside the long line of windows of the classroom, Hawk would have noticed that Dylan Gilmore had been watching everything that had happened inside the room. The moment Dylan knew that Hawk was safe he was gone. He had another place to be, and he was already running late.

  “You’re nowhere near ready to be doing that, and there are other risks, too,” Dylan said as he landed on the roof behind Faith. She was standing at the railed ledge, staring off into the distant light of the Western State, and hearing his unhappy voice startled her.

  “A little warning would have been nice. You scared me half to death.”

  Dylan walked away toward the table they’d sat at the night before. He’d arranged some things there that he needed her to work on, but, sitting down, he doubted they should be on the roof at all. “I shouldn’t have told you. It was too soon.”

  Faith was irritated. Getting back up to the roof in the dark had been a harrowing experience, and when she’d finally made it to the top, she’d found herself alone. For all she knew he was going to stand her up. Or worse, the whole event really had been a bad dream or a bad trip. Maybe, she had thought as she stood there staring out at the light, I really am crazy. Dylan’s insensitivity bordered on cruelty.

  “You’re being kind of a jerk.”

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  “I bet you have. Lots of times.”

  Faith walked to the table and sat down hard in the chair, looking off toward the ledge where the ladder was, thinking about whether or not she should just leave. Dylan wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t speak. It took about ten seconds for Faith to break the silence.

  “Okay, so I blew it; but seriously, what’s the big deal? I moved my shoelace. So what!”

  Dylan looked straight at her, all business.

  “They can feel you.”

  “What? Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter who,” Dylan said. “I told you not to move things unless we’re up here. Please, trust me on this. You can’t do that again, ever.”

  “It matters to me,” Faith said. She understood she’d made a mistake, but she was also starting to feel like she was being played. “I need to know what’s going on, Dylan. Put yourself in my place. I’m moving things with my brain! It’s not exactly normal.”

  Dylan peeled off his jacket and hung it on his chair. He had on a flannel shirt and began rolling up the sleeves.

  “Time to go to work,” he said, ignoring Faith’s plea. She leaned back and folded her arms across her chest.

  “Screw that.”

  Dylan had finished rolling up the sleeve on his left arm and began doing the same to the right. The table was arrayed with all sorts of colored balls, blocks, and cups of different colors.

  “Move the yellow ball into the blue cup,” he said.

  “Move it yourself. I’m tying my shoe.”

  Dylan leaned under the table and saw that the untied shoelace on her left foot was, in fact, busily tying itself back into a perfect double loop. He was more than a little surprised at how well she was able to do this, given how little training she’d had. When he sat back up, all the balls, blocks, and cups were gone. Faith smiled sarcastically, then everything that had been sitting on the table fell out of the sky and landed, one by one, on Dylan’s head. Luckily for Dylan, the balls and blocks were made of foam, and the cups were plastic.

  “Very funny,” he said, instantly putting every item back on the table in the places where they had been. One ball was missing, a green one, which bounced off Dylan’s head and rolled away on the roof.

  “You missed one,” Faith said.

  “I can see you’re going to be a model student.”

  Faith didn’t answer. She was not going to let Dylan run the show, at least not without getting some answers first. Dylan could see he wasn’t getting anywhere, so he resorted to bargaining.

  “If you move the yellow ball into the blue cup, I’ll tell you why you can only use your newly discovered skills up here on the roof of an empty building.”

  Faith stared at Dylan but didn’t move. She raised an eyebrow and smirked, and the yellow ball lifted off the table. It lifted in front of Dylan’s face, then floated around his head three times before peeling off and landing in the blue cup.

  “Slam dunk,” she said. “Your defense stinks.”

  The ball came out of the cup and returned to where it had been, which was all Dylan’s work, and then he leaned back in his chair like he were going to take a nap.

  “Try again,” he said, taunting her enough that she momentarily forgot she was owed a reward. She went to work again, thinking of the yellow ball, but nothing happened. She kept trying to make it move, but it had turned to granite on the table. Not only that, but each of the three cups on the table popped up in the air and landed on top of the ball, one after the other. She kept trying to
move the ball, and it kept sitting there. Dylan was vastly more powerful than she was. It was nothing to force the items not to move even when Faith was giving it her all.

  “The reason we have to do this up here,” Dylan said as he made the cups dance in the air like they were being thrown by an invisible juggler, “is because up here, no one can feel what we’re doing.”

  “Why not,” Faith asked.

  “As long as we’re higher than other carriers, they can’t detect a pulse.”

  “So whoever you don’t want finding out about me is down there while we’re up here?”

  Dylan nodded, setting down the cups on the table. “Signal won’t carry up or down very far. But side to side at the same level, a pulse will ripple out about thirty feet. Think of it like a pebble hitting a pond. The ripple only goes out, not up and down. That’s what a pulse does.”

  “You keep talking about a pulse. You mean like the one in my neck?”

  Faith felt the soft space under her cheek, searching for the tiny tremor under her skin she knew was there. Again, Dylan wouldn’t answer unless Faith participated in some work. He made her stack the blocks, move the balls into different cups, get all the foam items floating at once. Dylan was surprised at how quickly she learned and how precise she was with her movements.

  “My head is starting to hurt,” Faith said after about fifteen minutes of work. She held her hand on her temple and looked down at the table.

  “That’s normal. It will get easier, and you’ll get stronger. Right now you’re moving things that weigh almost nothing, but it’s a start.”

  Faith smiled softly and placed her hands flat on the table. Dylan was blown away when he felt himself moving, rising slowly in the air until he was lying flat on his back ten feet over the table.

  “Impressive,” Dylan said. But then Faith felt a sharp pain in the side of her neck, and suddenly Dylan was free-falling. He should have landed on the table, sending the balls and the blocks and the cups flying everywhere. But instead he only fell until he was an inch away from landing, then hovered in the air, turned over, and sat himself back down.

  “You might not be ready for something as heavy as me,” he said. “I’ve got a huge head.”

  Faith laughed nervously. She touched her neck again, thought of the pain, which bore a strong resemblance to being stuck with a tattoo needle.

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” Dylan said. “Think of it as a growing pain. Over time it will happen less and less.”

  Faith nodded and smiled weakly. When he said things like that, it made her think about how her life wasn’t ever going back to the way it was.

  “How many people can move things the way you and I can?”

  Dylan took his time answering, and even when he did, it was vague.

  “More than just you and me.”

  “That’s not much of an answer. What, like a thousand?”

  Dylan laughed. “If there were a thousand carriers, it wouldn’t be much of a secret. It’s rare. Until we know more about your skill set I think I’ve told you everything I can.”

  “Don’t make me pick you up again. I might drop you a lot farther next time. I’m unpredictable.”

  Dylan was starting to get a good feeling about his student. She was whip-smart and fast on her feet, and she didn’t mind working hard once he had her focused. But he was running low on time; and time was one of those things that, once it was gone, there was no getting it back. He would need to make the most of every second he had before the school closed.

  In the nights that followed, Faith was diligently trained by Dylan. She asked a lot of questions, all of which Dylan answered the same way: you’ll find out in time. Faith wanted to know why she and Dylan were carriers, who else had the power, how it had been discovered, and on and on.

  On the next night Dylan worked with the cups, balls, and blocks, teaching Faith how to pick them up and move them at different speeds and in different ways. By the third night the items had been replaced with pool balls, blocks of wood, and metal cups. She found these items more difficult to work with. They caused the sharp pain in her neck to reappear several times, all the items crashing down onto the table at once. At the end of a particularly grueling night of exercises, Dylan removed all the items from the table but one black pool ball. It was a number eight. Faith would always remember this, long after Dylan used it to teach her a hard lesson.

  “You’ve been asking me about the pulse,” Dylan said, rolling the pool ball back and forth on the table in front of her. “You have a special one, very rare. It’s what allows you to do these things. And I have the same kind of pulse, so I can do the same things.”

  Faith could tell by the way he was looking at her that there was something more he was trying to say. Their relationship was becoming more intimate that way—they could tell what the other was thinking, sometimes just by looking into each other’s eyes.

  “There’s something else about the pulse, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling me?”

  Dylan nodded, then lifted the eight ball with his mind. It hovered a few feet up in the air as he set his hand flat, facedown, on the solid table beneath it. He blinked, and the ball fell like it were held up by a string and the string had been cut. When it reached his hand, the ball moved sideways, rolling across the table and landing on the floor with a loud pop. Before it bounced a second time, Dylan moved it back onto the table with his mind and picked it up.

  “There’s more than one pulse,” he said. “There’s a second pulse, much deeper than the first.”

  “A second pulse?” Faith asked. “But that’s impossible. No one has two pulses.”

  “You don’t have to believe me, but I’ll tell you what it does and why it’s so important just the same. If you’re a carrier, you have a second pulse, but it takes a lot of work and special understanding to bring it to the surface. It’s hidden deep inside you, and it’s the most important part of being a carrier. Want to know why?”

  Faith’s head was reeling, but she was very curious and desperately wanted answers. She nodded, said nothing, hoped for some new insight.

  “Put your hand on the table, like I did,” Dylan instructed.

  “Are we back in school again? I thought you were going to tell me a secret.”

  Dylan didn’t respond, which was his way of saying he was done talking until Faith did what he’d instructed her to do. Faith rolled her eyes, feeling tired of being told what to do. But she laid her hand flat on the table, palm down, hoping for something.

  “Now promise me you won’t move,” Dylan said. “No matter what.”

  “I won’t move.”

  Dylan tossed the black ball in the air, and it stopped about ten feet over the table. It spun around in circles but otherwise stayed in the same location. He knew she wouldn’t be able to keep her promise, so without her knowledge, he held her hand in place with his mind. No matter how much she might want to move it, nothing on Earth could make that happen as long as Dylan didn’t want it to. He let the ball free-fall, and as it approached Faith’s hand, she couldn’t help but try to move her hand out of the way. Her arm wrenched back, tightening at the elbow, but her hand didn’t budge. When the pool ball hit her squarely on the knuckles, she yelled in pain. Without thinking, she used her power to pick up the ball again and throw it in the direction of Dylan’s chest. He in turn moved the ball back toward her, catching her in the sternum.

  “Stop throwing that thing at me!” she yelled.

  “I will if you will.”

  Faith hated being manipulated more than anything. She wanted to get up and leave, but she couldn’t. Her hand was still stuck to the table.

  “How long are you going to hold my hand down?” she asked.

  Dylan leaned forward.

  “Throw it as hard as you can, right at my forehead.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  Dylan moved the ball so it clocked Faith on the side of the head. Not too hard, but hard enough that she definitel
y felt it.

  “Do it. Hit me with the ball. Use everything you’ve got.”

  Faith’s face turned angry: her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. The eight ball flew behind her, then back toward Dylan like it had been shot out of a cannon. When it arrived at his forehead he didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t care. It seemed to hit him, but he didn’t react. The ball appeared to bounce off his forehead. As it ricocheted forward it found Faith’s shoulder. The impact hurt worse than the shots to the chest and hand put together.

  “Ouch! Okay, that one really hurt. That’s gonna leave a bruise.”

  “Probably so. Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen. But it makes my point. Accidents happen when you do this stuff. Bad accidents.”

  He stood up and came around to Faith’s side of the table, leaning back and sitting down on its edge, tossing the eight ball between his two hands.

  “How’s your head?” Faith asked. It felt like they’d had a small war in which they’d inflicted minor wounds on each other for no reason.

  “I have a second pulse, Faith,” Dylan said. “You don’t.”

  Faith seemed to finally understand that there was something fundamentally different about the power in Dylan’s hands than in her own.

  “Wait, you mean you didn’t feel that at all?”