The Pulse

Chapter 2
Welcome to Walmart

Chapter Description: Craig learns Brooke's fate and heads to Walmart for supplies before fleeing the burning city

The apartment was just as Craig had left it this morning, his sweater still lay across the arm of the couch in the living room and a pile of books and old manuscripts had been knocked over and lay in a pile next to the computer. The place had a certain smell to it that he associated with home, and it was all the more welcome now. On the wall a photo of Brooke getting her Masters’ Degree last year was hanging smiling at him. Brooke was 26, and looked younger than that. It wasn’t why he loved her, but he did like that it pissed of his ex-wife to no end. The only thing that was out of place was that the TV was on. There was nothing but a test pattern on the TV now, everything was off the air, the global communications network had ceased to exist just like that. Craig shut off the TV and listened closely for any noise in the apartment, he heard muttering from the bedroom. Steeling himself he headed into the room he shared with Brooke.

He found her on the floor next to their bed. She was on her hands and knees and was dressed in nothing but a small T-shirt, her bare butt was raised in the air for him to see. There was no doubt in his mind that she was gone now. “Brooke, sweetie, it’s me, Craig,” he called softly.

Brooke turned around to face him and sat on her butt, legs splayed out in front of her. She stared up at him with wide glassy eyes, her mouth agape, silently appraising him.

“Brooke, it’s me, Craig. Do you know who I am?” he asked hopefully, speaking slowly.

Brooke looked at him a long moment and Craig held out hope she was trying to remember his name even if she couldn’t say it. But then she stuck her fist in her gaping mouth and chewed at it, totally ignoring Craig’s presence. Craig felt his stomach drop, all was lost, his love had been reduced to a drooling infant and she didn’t even know or care who he was anymore. Just as he felt waves of depression beginning to crush his spirit he noticed that there was a notebook laying on the floor next to Brooke. Craig leaned down and opened the red note-book. Inside was a pen that was wet with slobber, clearly it had been in Brooke’s mouth. But there on the first page was a kind of note. At the top in large but clear writing was “Something’s wrong, the TV, the tv.” Below that in big childish letters was “Brooke feels funny.” Finally below a couple drawings of flowers and hearts was the barely decipherable message, “Luv U Creg.” After this there was just a lot of scribbling and some wet spots from her dribbling spittle.

The note gave Craig back his resolve, her final act while she still had the intelligence to do it was to tell him she loved him. He looked over at Brooke. She had a triumphant look on her face as she succeeded in sticking her big toe in her mouth and sucking on it. He still loved her, even if she was going to be like this for the rest of their lives, he’d stay with her. Laying there half naked with her foot in her mouth, she was actually kind of cute. Craig wrapped his arms around his girlfriend and pulled her into a bear hug, softly stroking her soft blonde hair and rubbing her back. “I love you too Brooke, I always will, I’ll always be here to take care of you honey.”

Brooke just cooed pleasantly around her toes as they cuddled and nestled her head into his chest. Finally Craig released her from the hug and looked around for something to feed her, she had to be hungry by now. Eventually he settled on some left-over chicken and warmed it up in the microwave. He enticed her to come to the kitchen by clapping his hands and guiding her saying, “C’mon Brooke, this way, yes that’s right, good girl.” Then he picked her up by her armpits and guided her into the seat. She swung her long bare legs back and forth as her fed her the chicken a piece at a time. She seemed to enjoy her meal and giggled every time she dropped a piece in her lap. Finally she was done and Craig declared, “What a good girl you are, you made it go all gone! Yes you did!” Brooke grinned and slapped at the table, babbling “Aaahbooo!” and clapping her feet happily.

A moment later, Craig heard the sound of liquid dripping on the floor and saw that Brooke was peeing all over. She gazed curiously at the growing puddle unaware of her accident. Craig realized he needed to get Brooke some diapers before she wet the whole house this way. In the meantime he just used a high cheerful tone of voice to tell Brooke she was a silly little girl to make pee-pee all over. Since she didn’t understand anything but the happy tone of his voice she just babbled more and blew a spit bubble. Craig noticed that the collar of her t-shirt was now very wet from her drool, she’d be needing more t-shirts and a drool bib too.

As Craig pondered all this the lights suddenly went out, plunging the apartment into darkness. His heart pounding fast from the shock, he threw open the curtains on the kitchen window to let in the evening sun and calmed down Brooke who’d begun to cry. It was now 7 o’clock, the sun would go down in another hour or so and then it would be pitch black here, he and Brooke had never liked candles. But what was worse was the noticeable amount of smoke in the sky. Craig realized that he had been right when he thought earlier that the city was going to burn. They needed to get out of the city and they needed diapers and candles and other supplies. But where could they get all those very different things? Well of course there was just one place to go, Walmart.

Craig made a make-shift stroller using the wheeled computer chair and some bath towels tied together. He carried it down the stairs and then lifted Brooke on his back and carried her down too, finally seating her in the new stroller. He wondered if he should have dressed her more, but clearly any clothes would just get wet and Brooke was clearly beyond caring who saw her naked. Given the track pants and panties he’d found discarded on the bedroom floor, Brooke clearly wanted to be unhindered by clothing. He loaded Brooke in his Subaru Outback and made sure he turned off the radio before starting the car. Then he set off for Walmart. The question of where they’d go after that was simple to answer, Maine. That was where Brian and Jessica were and that seemed like a safe place to go. Most of all he just needed to know his son was safe, he thanked God he’d told Jessica that Brian was too young to get a cell phone last Christmas and she had agreed. Clearly the terrorists, or whoever had set this thing up, had targeted cell phones. The biggest problem that Craig now faced was his lack of cash. He was a bit worried about using an ATM, it would be no good if he got his mind wiped, but he had no cash on him. He’d just have to hope Walmart had been abandoned by its staff.

The city was in more chaos than ever as night fell. The flames from crashed airliners and cars had eaten away at vast swaths of the city and there seemed to be no end to it. The National Guard had not arrived, the cops had disappeared, the firemen were gone. Everyone left in the city seemed to have gone mad. It made Craig understand what it must have been like to be in New Orleans after Katrina hit. He wondered if this event was localized to Boston or if the whole nation or world had been affected. Without news on TV, radio or any means of communication he simply didn’t know. As all these worried gnawed away at him he felt briefly envious of Brooke, who sat strapped in the back seat gawking curiously at the passing buildings like she’d never seen such things before, patting at the window and crowing her delight at her discoveries. But then he knew he was better off than her, and really quite lucky. This couldn’t be a temporary thing, some kind of hypnotic trance or suggestion; it wouldn’t be possible to make it so fast and effective on everyone exposed. Clearly whatever had been done to them, it had wiped their brains clean. It was doubtful that was reversible. Craig focused on the road again, weaving around wrecks and avoiding all the neighborhoods that smoke was pouring from and they made their way past the darkened and abandoned buildings.

The Walmart in Newton was swamped. There was no way into the parking lot so Craig put the car on the grass beside the road and got Brooke out and into the stroller he had made. He sat her on several towels in case she wet herself again, or worse. Crowds of frantic people, rushed into the Walmart entrance, but were being stopped before getting into the store. Soon Craig made out the obstacle, it was a wall of blue. There were several older, burly looking men in Walmart blue uniforms stopping people and demanding to see cash or credit cards and checking people for weapons. At the center of the line was a grey-haired man who looked old enough to have served in World War II. His nametag said “Welcome to Walmart” but the twelve-gauge shotgun in his arms said otherwise.

“Everyone be patient, we will let you in as soon as you prove you aren’t here too loot, we are well stocked,” another old man with a bull-horn was saying.

Craig looked to his right and saw that the check-out lines were all open and manned and accepting debit and credit apparently. It seemed that the only place in Boston with power and technology still running was Walmart, they had learned their lesson from Katrina well, they would not get looted again. Eventually Craig was allowed in pushing Brooke past the blue wall and into the store. He found the adult diaper section emptied already but there were still Goodnites and baby diapers left and he bought several of each. As he looked through the t-shirt section he bent down to check a price tag and noticed a pair of bare feet behind the rack of clothes. Pulling the clothes back revealed a pimply faced boy of about 15 hiding behind there, dressed in a t-shirt and underoos. He put a finger to his mouth and said, “Shh, I’m hidin’” in a childish voice, smiling.

Before Craig could say anything a word, a girl’s voice declared, “Danny there you are, get out of there.” A girl of about 10 walked up and reached out her hand to the hiding boy.

“I was just pwayin’ Sawah,” the boy pleaded, pouting as he took his little sisters hand and let her lead him away. He skipped along barefoot behind her, sticking out his tongue at her like a 5-year old.

Craig saw several teens and college aged kids being led around in nothing but big oversized diapers by younger siblings. The oddest site of all though had to be the six year old girl leading her father, who had to be in his thirties, by the hand while he literally toddled awkwardly behind her in a t-shirt and adult diaper. “Mommy is waiting with Bradley daddy, you gotta hurry up, kay,” she told the mentally infantized man. He followed her willingly but gazed vacantly about the store, ignoring her words. Craig thought perhaps he should help the little girl, but soon a haggard looking woman appeared holding the hand of a boy of about twelve who was dressed in SpongeBob pajamas and slippers and was sucking his thumb. She took her husband’s hand and lead the whole family away.

It was so frightening to Craig to see that a major effect of this disaster was that young kids of ten or eleven or a little older were now effectively the head of their household, the only one too young to have used a cell phone when the whole world seemed to fall apart. Now these kids were the ones taking care of older siblings and their parents in some cases. Craig thought of his own son Brian now having to care for his mother because she had a cell phone. It was actually pretty likely that had happened if this disaster had happened outside of Boston. And that was pretty likely since there hadn’t been any outside help entering Boston yet.

In the house-wares department he walked in on a gathering of unaffected men and women who were talking about what was going on. A middle-aged woman was saying “I’m telling you, it’s not just cell phones, it’s TV and radio too, and I wouldn’t even think of using a land-line either. You can’t be too careful, don’t want to end up like that,” she gestured to a busty teen girl who was toddling by completely naked, her large breasts bouncing as she toddled along, sucking on a pacifier.

“Yeah I know, we know that now don’t we?” demanded a large man. “I mean the real question is, what is this preparation for, right.”

“What do you mean?” asked a skinny little woman who was holding the hand of a much larger man who was dressed in a big diaper and totally oblivious to the discussion.

“I mean that this was obviously a terrorist attack, and a good one too. I’m wondering when Osama himself will show up to try and take over. I mean look, they disabled the communication system, decimated the populace and who knows what else will happen.”

“Don’t say that, who knows who is behind this!” another young man interjected.

“Is it true they’ve closed the border to Canada, I heard that somewhere?” the little woman asked.

“Who told you that, sounds fake.” The young man declared.

“Hey you never know do you. I mean who would have imagined this happening.” The large man insisted. “Did you ever think you’d be leading your husband around Walmart in a diaper?” he asked the little woman.

“No, my Walt was always such a strong man, always took good care of me...” she whispered, beginning to cry as she watched her husband suck on his fingers.

Craig didn’t want to hear anymore rumors or watch this poor woman cry, so he moved on. Soon he was done with shopping, he had all the supplies he could afford, and still fit in his car. By the time they left Walmart it was after dark. Craig loaded their supplies in the car and then laid Brooke in the back seat and taped together two smaller diapers to make a big one and diapered her. She amused herself with a rattle he had bought her, jamming it in her mouth and cooing happily when it made noise. He still sat her on towels as his make-shift diaper wasn’t fool-proof.

As Craig drove out of the city, heading north across the Charles River, he couldn’t help but notice the reddish glow in his rear-view mirror. Boston was burning all right, the fires had spread until they met and now the whole of the city was alight. Craig tried not to think of the thousands of souls who surely perished in the flames, so many of them robbed of the ability to form complex thought, unable to comprehend they were being trapped in their homes by the approaching flames.

They drove north, sticking to back roads, Craig was sure I-93 would be jammed with traffic, or blocked by debris. The roads weren’t too congested, it seemed those who were able to had fled the city earlier or were hunkering down where they were. Driving through the myriad of small towns to the north of the city presented its own set of problems though. For one he had to drive very slowly because all the mentally altered people would just wander out into the road, some had actually gone to sleep in the middle of the street. Then there was of course the problem of roads blocked by un-cleared traffic accidents. These forced him to snake his way though residential roads to get past. At one small stream crossing the bridge had actually been eaten away by a chemical fire from a crashed semi. Eventually they stopped for gas at a Mobil station in Medford. Craig had always imagined that when the Armageddon came there would be fighting at gas stations as some gun-wielding yahoo held off the hordes looking for fuel. Craig found that the opposite was true. With the exception of Walmart, with its loyal force of the desperate and the elderly, all the other businesses’ employees had fled. The gas stations were unmanned but the gas still flowed fine.

Craig had hoped to make it up to his ex-wife’s place in Cornish, Maine by midnight, but it wasn’t to be. What would normally have been a three hour drive on the highway, was turning into an all-nighter. By midnight he had reached the New Hampshire border and discovered a small community of cars and vans parked at the Pelham Mall. He wasn’t sure if they were waiting for the mall to open in the morning, he wasn’t sure that it would ever open again. These people had survived, he had survived, but the economy, the nation’s infrastructure, they were undoubtedly ruined if what had happened in Boston had happened everywhere. The fact that the electricity was out in New Hampshire too was not encouraging.

Craig decided that this was good a place as any to rest till morning and he parked the Subaru beside an old Ford Explorer in the mall parking lot. Brooke was fast asleep now in the back, so he got out quietly as he could. He was about to lock the car when he realized how absurd that idea was. There were surely thousands of cars laying around whose owners would never need them again, who would want to steal his, how many people were left who could even drive? Craig left the car unlocked and headed for the center of the circle of cars where a large group had gathered in the light of two kerosene lamps. Craig was reminded strongly of a Boy Scout camp fire. He came into earshot just as a short bald man with a squeaky voice was addressing the crowd.

“It was a pulse that’s what it was,” he explained. A few people asked what he meant so he continued, “An electronic pulse, being broadcast by a powerful radio transmitter or perhaps a cell phone tower. Think of it like an electromagnetic pulse. It’s what happens when a nuclear bomb is set off, it destroys anything electronic within range, power grids, watches, whatever. I remember reading in a magazine once about the fear of terrorists setting off and E-bomb, basically a big electromagnetic pulse that would destroy the economy because it would wipe out all our computers.”

An older woman stepped forward from the crowd looking shocked, “So you think that’s how they took out the power?” she asked in a shaky voice.

“No, no I think that was likely a result of the fires and car accidents taking out the poles,” he replied.

“Then what’s it got to do with what’s happened here?” someone who Craig couldn’t see, asked.

“You see, what I believe may have happened is they, whoever it was, designed an E-bomb that worked on a different kind of computer, an organic one, the human brain.” The reaction to this pronouncement was mixed, a few people gasped, some looked impressed and others just chuckled and whispered among themselves. Undeterred, the man continued on. “So you have to understand how the human mind is really like a big organic computer. Basically the pulse was downloaded to our brains via cell phones and radios and TVs and the result was the same as an E-bomb, they wiped our brains clean, and not just our memories, but our abilities to reason and communicate, everything.”

“Then why are some of them worse off than others?” a woman’s voice from the edge of the crowd asked.

“Well it would depend on the strength of the signal, wouldn’t it. People with poorer reception wouldn’t have got the full blast. I would think those who saw the TV pulse would have gotten the worst of it, but I understand the pulse there was brief, the TVs went down too quickly, so few were so exposed. Those with the worst cell reception seem to have been least affected,” the man said with a tone of conclusion in his voice. After finishing this last statement he seemed to run out of resolve to stand in the middle of the circle and he moved quietly back into the crowd.

After a few moments of milling about, the crowd dispersed to their individual cars. Craig returned to his Subaru and noticed a woman about his age getting sleeping bags out of the back of her Explorer. She looked very tired and her red hair was unkempt, yet she maintained a certain look of calm on her face, she looked like she had everything under control. “You planning on camping out?” Craig asked her.

She smiled sadly at him, “No, these are for the kids, I’ll be in the car watching over my husband, Bill.”

“I’m sorry, is he?” Craig couldn’t finish the sentence; he didn’t know how to put it delicately. But he didn’t have to say it, she knew what he meant.

“Yes, he was home from work early, watching cartoons with the kids. He had sent them to the kitchen for some snacks when it happened, I don’t know what I’d have done if it was all of them. But when they came back in they found him lying on his back and playing with his toes they thought it was some kind of game, when they realized it wasn’t they came and got me. I almost called ?911’ and I’m sure if I had that would’ve been the end of me. But my neighbor, Sue, came by just then and told me not to touch the phone. I saw that the TV was all fuzz and I thought something weird had happened so I just sat there with him for awhile trying to get through to him.” She seemed unable to say anymore, though her face was as calm as ever.

“Why are you headed north?” Craig finally asked.

“My parents live in Laconia, I need to know they’re okay.”

Craig nodded, he understood completely. He realized as she walked away with her bags that he hadn’t asked her name nor told her his. It didn’t really matter but he felt so alone now, with Brooke unable to talk with him, his whole family out of communication, alone in this foreign parking lot in the darkness. Craig walked away from the gathered cars to be alone with his thoughts. Looking up at the night sky as he pondered Craig became aware that after living all his life in the city he had never fully appreciated just how many stars there were. For some reason watching those millions of bright white lights in the sky made him feel a little bit less alone. Craig returned to the car feeling a little more hopeful and laid down for a well deserved rest. Tomorrow he would drive to Maine and learn whether he still had a family or not.

To Be Continued...