When the man walked out of the store, he left a full cart of processed groceries standing there alone. Natalie felt a collective shudder move through the line of customers. A woman raised her hand and gestured at the officious employee until she had his attention.
“Um, are you accepting credit or debit cards?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but due to the unusual nature of this situation, we will accept only cash. We announced this a few minutes ago and there’s a sign posted by the door.”
“We didn’t see your damned sign,” another shopper yelled. He was severely overweight and dressed in a black knit shirt with a car logo on it. “No one uses cash anymore!”
“I understand,” said the store employee. “But with the power and computer networks out, there’s no way to know if these non-cash methods of payment are valid.”
“Who are you to decide who gets to eat and who doesn’t?”
“I’m the manager of this store.”
“So you’re going to deny honest, hardworking folks the food they need just so you can follow your stupid rules?”
“I’m sure the power will be back on shortly, sir. In the meantime it’s my job to protect the financial integrity of this store. You would do the same if you were in my place.”
“You just turned away an old man!” a woman yelled.
“I’m sorry,” said the store manager. “I can’t pick and choose who to apply the rules to.”
“So none of us who don’t have cash is gonna be able to buy food today?” someone else asked.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Truly. But until the power is restored, we can only accept cash. U.S. currency.”
“And what do we do in the meantime?” someone yelled. “We can’t exactly go to the ATM and get money!”
The store manager nodded. “I’m sure the banks keep hardcopy ledgers. It may take some time, but eventually you’ll be able to withdraw your funds.”
Natalie glanced at the desk for Bank of Oklahoma. As far as she could tell there was no one on duty. Was the staff on lunch break, or had they simply gone home?
“This is bullshit!” someone else yelled. “Be reasonable, man. We just want to buy food from you. That’s all. Be a human being, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Right,” the overweight man said as he pushed his cart of groceries into a display case and walked toward the door. “I bet you wouldn’t feel so sorry if I came back here with a gun.”
Over the next couple of minutes, at least half the people waiting in line left the store without their groceries.
Even so, it was more than an hour before Natalie and her family finally made it to the register.
SEVEN
So they were really going to do this. They were going to leave behind the relative security of his house, abandon things like food supplies and the generator and the water pump, in order to make a trip of more than two hundred miles to check on a family connected to Thomas by nothing more than an ancient high school crush. It was terrible what Seth had done, or tried to do, but the awful truth was that after the pulse, a single suicide was but a drop in an ocean of death.
The only way to survive an extinction-level event was to make decisions others would not. You had to be ruthless even if you were anything but. Still, the look on Skylar’s face when she proposed the trip left no room for negotiation. If Thomas had refused, her opinion of him would have never recovered. And he wanted her to like him. Partly because of who she was and partly because they might be stuck together for a very long time.
Now he was loading a cooler of food and drinks into the back seat of his Mustang. He’d already placed four plastic containers of gasoline in the trunk and tossed a Rand McNally North American street atlas onto the dash. The atlas was dated 1997. Its cover was falling off.
He kept thinking about Seth’s email and the address included at the bottom. 7702 S. Braden. Or 7720 S. Brandon. Or maybe some combination of the two. He couldn’t be sure and now there was no way to check. There was a Tulsa city map in the atlas, but it was too small to resolve residential streets and basically useless.
“You stocked up on everything except maps?” asked Skylar, who stood nearby, overseeing the operation.
“The atlas seemed good enough at the time. I didn’t think I’d be going anywhere for a while. And certainly nowhere specific.”
When he opened the garage door (manually, with an emergency release) the two of them walked outside to look at the southern sky. The smoke was a black and billowing mountain range on the horizon. He could smell the acrid odor of fire and even this far away there was a curtain of haze in the air. He wondered when he would wake up and realize all this was a terrible nightmare.
Finally, Thomas started the car and pulled into the driveway. Skylar had suggested driving with the top closed, but he wanted as much visibility as possible. He wondered if someone would hear the engine and walk outside to look, but no one did. Eventually Skylar climbed into the car and shut the door.
“This route looks the most direct,” he said, pointing at the atlas. “121 to 75, which goes straight north.”
He flipped pages from Texas to Oklahoma.
“But we’ll want to avoid towns as much as possible, so we should maybe take this turnpike.”
“Sounds good to me,” Skylar said.
They worked their way out of the neighborhood, toward State Route 121, navigating the same intersections as before. An increasing number of the stalled cars were abandoned, and the sidewalks were becoming crowded, as if people had given up on immediate rescue and were migrating toward permanent destinations. On the freeway they found rivers of more stranded drivers walking on shoulders and the median. Vehicle carcasses dotted the highway like slain buffalo. Thomas navigated them with care, gradually picking up speed. On the other side of the road, a couple of small motorcycles sped by in the opposite direction. People in the median craned their necks to watch. Others stared at Thomas and his own working vehicle. Once again Skylar had hidden herself behind sunglasses.
“I feel like I’m living in your screenplay,” she said. “This is exactly how you described it. It’s fucking weird.”
During every minute since the new star appeared, as it became more and more likely a real-life pulse had occurred, Thomas ignored any relationship the event bore to his screenplay… partly because he’d been consumed with getting them home safely, but also because conflating such a horrific event with his own work felt wildly self-indulgent. Still, it was impossible not to see a connection between today’s events and the plot of Thomas World, in which his fictional doppelgänger had written a story that became reality. Even spookier was the presence of Skylar herself, an actress who was here to discuss The Pulse, who landed minutes before a real pulse paralyzed the world.
But weird as that all was, how much did it matter right now? Whatever had caused the pulse seemed less important than how they chose to react to it.
“Pretty strange,” he eventually said.
Ahead, a highway interchanged loomed. According to a big green sign, the entrance to Highway 75 was gained by driving onto a high, curving access ramp. But from here it looked like cars were stalled directly in front of the ramp’s entrance.
“I don’t think we’re going to make it,” Skylar said.
“Sure we will. See that gap on the left?”
There had been an accident between a white BMW SUV and a silver Honda Accord. From what Thomas could tell, the BMW had abruptly veered away from the ramp and collided with the Accord. Both cars appeared empty.