Free The Pulse: An EMP Prepper Survival Tale by Roger Hayden

office and down the hall to her co-worker
Laura's office. There were no windows in the hall, and it had
gotten dark very fast. She knocked, and Laura told her to come in.
Janice opened the door. Sunlight beamed in through the tall windows
behind Laura's desk. "I was right in the middle of drafting our
newsletter,” Laura said, clenching her fists. “Son of a bitch, I
forgot to add it to the share drive. Ugh!"
    "I'm sorry," Janice said. “I don't know why
it went out.”
    "Who the hell knows,” Laura said. "There's no
storm. Not a damn cloud in the sky."
    Janice shook her head. "Hopefully it will
come back on soon. I have a lot of people waiting out there. I'll
talk to you later." She walked back down the hall as Laura stared
at her screen in a daze.
    Back in her office, Janice found a small
flashlight in the top drawer of her desk. She pulled it out and
turned it on. Mr. Tracey had wandered off, and he was no longer
there. She could hear co-workers outside her office complaining
that their cell phones weren't working. The scenario seemed
familiar. It was something Mark used to talk about. Something
called an EMP attack that destroyed power systems and electronic
devices. Something that would take the country back to the 1800s in
a matter of seconds if it could really happen. She dug her phone
out of her purse and saw that it had fared no better than the
others. The screen was blank, as if all its power had been drained
away. Janice sat at her desk and thought for a moment.
    "Excuse me, miss, just what in the hell's
going on here?" an angry old man asked, breaking her concentration.
He had left the lobby and found to her office, a highly irregular
move for an applicant.
    "One moment, please, sir," she said. She
picked up the receiver of her land-line phone to call her boss,
Brian. There was no dial tone. It was as if the phone wasn't even
plugged in. She slammed the receiver down in frustration. She got
up from her desk, and pushed past the man. “I'm sorry, I don't know
what's going on.” The man was not satisfied, and yelled at her as
she walked away from him. He reeked of alcohol.
     
    Janice left office of the temp agency and
decided to look elsewhere in the three-story building. The
elevators weren’t working, so she headed for the stairwell. People
were exiting, hurrying down as she was climbing up. She searched
the second and third floors and found them to be the same as the
first: dimly lit, full of confused wanderers.
    She went back down to the first floor and
exited the building. She was met with an unruly cluster of people
on the bottom floor. Various job-seekers from all walks of life had
convened outside the doors, lost and aimless. They wanted to know
why the power was out. They wanted to know how much longer before
everything magically came back on. Many of them held cell phones,
frantically trying to get them to work. Without the guidance of
their electronics, they looked to Janice for answers.
    She was about to make her way back inside
when she noticed an unusual quietness from the nearby highway. She
could see the highway from the parking lot. It looked to be frozen
in time. Vehicles sat motionless in what looked like early-morning
gridlock. Nothing was moving, not even an inch. Janice stared,
waiting for one of the hundreds of cars on the four-lane highway to
move. Suddenly, she noticed something else: drivers and passengers
were exiting their cars then circling them, looking perplexed.
    Her boss, Brian, called out to her from
outside the building as she walked to her white 2015 Toyota
Corolla. "Janice, where ya’ going?" he said, standing with his
hands on his hips.
    “Damn,” she thought. She was about to
leave.
    She turned around and yelled back, "I just
have to get something out of my car."
    She unlocked the driver's side door and
stepped in. She stuck the key in and turned the ignition switch. At
first, she thought she was doing something wrong. She checked the
dashboard to make sure that the