The Pulse by Shoshanna Evers

how, how on earth could something be broadcast on the radio? Wasn’t every place hit as bad as New York City? If the attack hadn’t devastated all of America, then help would have arrived by now. The silence from the rest of the country was a deafening testament to the scope of destruction.
    “Mason?” she asked, sipping the last of the soup out of her mug.
    He looked at her warily, as if he was afraid she might try to jump his bones again. “What?”
    “Do you know what happened?”
    “What happened, when?”
    “The attack. The war, I guess. One minute everything was… normal…”
    Mason nodded and she paused, allowing herself the luxury of reminiscing for a moment. She had taken it all for granted. Electricity. Running water. Cars. If she could get it all back, she’d be grateful every time she flipped a light switch or turned on a faucet.
    “The next thing I know,” she continued, “we were all thrown back to the dark ages. I know it was the Pulse. I mean, an EMP. But I don’t get it, not really. Why doesn’t anything work? Why didn’t generators kick on? Why haven’t they been able to get the power back on like it used to be?”
    “That’s a lot of questions,” he murmured.
    “Do you even know?”
    “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Unfortunately.”
    Emily looked at him with interest. His tousled hair fell in his face but she resisted the urge to sweep it out of his eyes.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “You just hear… nuclear. And it makes you think—well, when everyone started saying there’d been a nuclear strike against the US, I really expected—something different, I guess.”
    “Like what?”
    “Explosions. Mushroom clouds. Fallout. Radiation sickness…” She looked into her empty mug and sighed. “But there wasn’t anything like that.”
    “No,” Mason agreed. “I imagine they fired just one nuke, right above the center of Kansas. If they shot it up high enough into the atmosphere, there wouldn’t be any explosion or even fallout. Just a big ol’ Pulse, wiping out everything.”
    “The generators too, though? I mean, that was everyone’s backup plan for a big power outage.”
    “Yeah, I know. That’s how I got out of Rikers. Everything got fried.”
    But what about the secret radio? she wondered. Why—how does that still work? “Is it possible some things still work, though?”
    She didn’t trust him yet to tell him her secret, but hopefully she could get enough information out of him without making him suspicious.
    “Well, old cars, as you know. If they didn’t have computer chips in them, they were okay. And some people prepared for an EMP and put some stuff—walkie-talkies, radios, that sort of thing—into a Faraday cage.”
    Her face must have registered her confusion, because Mason explained what he meant.
    “Yeah, it protects stuff inside from an EMP. People made them themselves, you know—survivalists, that sort of type.”
    “How the hell do you know about this stuff?” she asked. Then it hit her.
    Oh God—he’s in the military after all , she realized. How else could he know? She stood up suddenly, stumbling over her feet.
    “What’s wrong?”
    She shook her head, not trusting her voice. Of course he didn’t want her to leave. If she left, he’d never find the stolen radio. How could she have been so naïve? She never should have trusted him.
    “I—nothing’s wrong,” she lied. “I just—” Her pulse raced as Mason stood up, towering over her.
    This is why he didn’t want me to leave. This is why he told me to stay with him.
    She felt panicked, her breath closing up as she struggled to wrap her mind around the danger in which she had inadvertently placed herself. Emily took a shaky breath, stepping backward.
    He leaned down, capturing her mouth with his. “Stay with me,” he whispered against her lips.
    “No, Mason,” she gasped. His mouth left her panting lips, kissing her neck, running his hands down her arms. “I—I—” All