Except I never saw it as thankless. I saw it as entertainment, as pleasurable for them as playing golf was for me. Because what sane person would prefer this life to the one we had before? Even if that family somehow manages to reach their hypothetical cabin in the woods, even if their supplies last for weeks or months, do they really want to live like settlers on the frontier? And what will happen when hordes of starving people from Dallas and Ft. Worth pour into the countryside, parents desperate to save their children, to save themselves? The father no doubt imagines he will sit on the porch and pick off these desperate souls with his arsenal of deadly force, but will he really? Will he possess the will to kill as many of his fellow humans as it takes? And if he can summon the will, has he stockpiled enough rounds of ammunition? Will his wife and kids be ready to take up arms while he sleeps? And if by some miracle this family manages to protect itself from the swarm of humanity, will they possess the strength to bury all the bodies? Will the children address their dad as Pa and their mother as Ma? Will they grow beans and potatoes and trade with other settlers for tomatoes and cucumbers? Will they honestly enjoy this new way of life, which seemed romantic while they were dreaming it in front of their glowing computer screens and television sets, or will they long for their earlier, pampered existence, when their children didn’t lose a leg from a rattlesnake bite or die from an infection that could have been easily cured with antibiotics?
Will the survivors join together? Will they find a way to combine resources and knowhow to push humanity forward again? Or will God simply hit the reset button?
I looked away from the television and saw Bart and Keri were both asleep. Chelsea might have been awake, or not, it was hard to know with her. In fact, the loudest sounds I could hear, other than the high whistle of my own brain, was the deep and measured breathing of the sleeping humans in this room.
I wasn’t afraid to die, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if my new plan was such a hot idea after all. If God wanted us dead, why fight the inevitable?
I stood up and went into the kitchen. Found the bottle of Jimmy’s painkillers and washed two of them down with another glass of lemonade.
Then I went back to the sofa, lay next to Keri, and dreamt beautiful dreams.
GATHERING STORM
TEN
Ever since being interrupted by a phone call while trying to take his own life, since his discovery of the star in the sky, the brain cells in Seth’s skull had seemed to be mechanically separated from one another, as if the space between them had somehow expanded. This effect induced a disassociation with the physical world that transformed, for instance, the short walk to the daycare into a journey of Tolkien proportions. At the daycare he worried the woman in charge would refuse to release his sons, that she would smell alcohol or car exhaust or nausea on him. Natalie’s appearance in the golf cart was so unexpected that for a moment he feared he was hallucinating her.
Shopping for groceries in near darkness would have been surreal even with the clearest possible head, and the wait in the checkout line had been soul-crushing. None of it would have been possible if Natalie hadn’t taken the drink cart, but it was foolish of her to promise the vehicle to Blake. Seth wanted to overrule her decision but Natalie’s venomous response had been immediate.
“I made a promise,” she hissed as they stood in half-light near the register. “Someone might have taken the goddamned thing from me if it weren’t for him.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic?”
“Look around this store,” she said, “and tell me I’m being dramatic.”
All his life, the way Seth had held depression at bay was to indulge self-destructive behavior—cheating on tests and faking grades in high school, stealing sales and manipulating his way up the corporate food chain, and most recently gambling away his family’s financial solvency. Though he hadn’t realized it before, he understood now these obsessive behaviors had insulated him from darkness by pushing it into the background. But today something miraculous had happened. Today he had been set free from his self-imposed restraints by an event that was maybe divine or maybe pure luck. Either way, Seth was fairly certain this unexpected second chance didn’t involve taking orders from his snooping wife.
He kept thinking about the phone call, how Thomas had offered to pay his debts, how he had promised to take care of Natalie. What would possess a man you didn’t know to be so generous? Was he in love with her? Had Thomas planned to swoop in and steal Seth’s family? Honestly, he had no proof of their infidelity. He’d inferred as much after reading two messages in her Gmail account. On the other hand, Natalie definitely believed Seth had cheated on her, which possibly explained why her behavior this morning had vacillated between needy and surly.
“Whatcha thinking about?” Natalie asked, having materialized behind him.
Seth realized he was standing in front of the open pantry, staring at spices and flour and boxes of Lipton soup. He turned to face his wife, who was smiling like she didn’t mean it.
“What we’re going to eat when our food runs out.”
“Maybe it won’t come to that,” Natalie said. She stepped forward and put her arms around him. “Maybe the government is already working on how to fix this.”
“I don’t know. All these things that aren’t working, there’s something internally wrong with them.”
“Do you think this might be a pulse?” Natalie asked.
At the word pulse, Seth’s head jerked involuntarily, as if he’d been struck, and waves of understanding rolled over him. The first thing he’d done after reading Natalie’s emails was look up Thomas Phillips, which is how he had learned of the man’s success in Hollywood. His second screenplay, Seth now remembered, had been called The Pulse, which was a story about the death of technology by way of solar flare. And if today’s events were similar to what had happened in the screenplay, it meant microchips and transistors everywhere had been rendered inoperable. But what was Seth to make of this new information? Was Thomas some kind of demon?
“A pulse?” said Seth, as if he didn’t know. “What’s that?”
“It’s like a burst of electricity or something that kills all the computer chips.”
“How do you even know what that is?”
“I think I saw a story on FOX about it. I can’t remember.”
Because Seth knew his wife was lying, it lent him a kind of leverage over her.
“You know more than me,” he said. “So what happens if you’re right?”
“I think it means the whole world is fried. Nothing can be fixed anytime soon and meanwhile everyone in big cities will starve to death when the food runs out.”
“What do you think we should do?”
Natalie looked at Seth as if she expected him to already know the answer.
“I would think,” he said, “that if things don’t go back to normal soon, we’ll need to get out of the city.”
“And how would we do that? With no car?”
“I suppose we’d have to walk.”
“How do we walk that far with Ben and Brandon? And where would we go?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m scared, Seth. If the government can’t fix this, I’m afraid it’s going to be pandemonium and we don’t have a backup plan.”