Handing his credit card over to the clerk had taken almost physical courage. He had bought it on his walk back from the Copley Square Hotel to the much humbler Atlantic Avenue Inn where he was staying, frightened by the ninety-dollar pricetag on the paperweight’s base, somehow even more frightened by the realization that he could now afford such a thing. The item inside the bag was a rather expensive glass paperweight with a gray haze of dandelion fluff caught in its center. You might further have guessed that this Clayton Riddell was a young man seeking to commemorate some small (or perhaps even not so small) victory with a small treasure, and you would have been right again.

A present, you might have guessed, and you would have been right. Inside the bag, swinging back and forth, was a small round object. Twined around the fingers of his right hand was the drawstring of a brown plastic shopping bag with the words small treasures printed on it for anyone who cared to read them. From his left hand there swung the handles of an artist’s portfolio, the kind that closes and latches to make a traveling case. There was an expression of undoubted contentment on his face to go along with the spring in his step. What mattered was the effect.Īt three o’clock on that day, a young man of no particular importance to history came walking-almost bouncing-east along Boylston Street in Boston. The term was a misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane. The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1. A promise of a safe haven, perhaps, or quite possibly the deadliest trap of all… Excerpt But for Clay, an arrow points the way home to his family in Maine, and as he and his fellow refugees make their harrowing journey north, they begin to see the crude signs confirming their direction. There’s really no escaping this nightmare. Now Clay and the few desperate survivors who join him suddenly find themselves in the pitch-black night of civilization’s darkest age, surrounded by chaos, carnage, and a relentless human horde that has been reduced to its basest nature.and then begins to evolve. The delivery method is a cell phone- everyone’s cell phone. But all those good feelings about the future change in a hurry thanks to a devastating phenomenon that will come to be known as The Pulse.

On October 1, God is in His heaven, the stock market stands at 10,140, most of the planes are on time, and graphic artist Clayton Riddell is visiting Boston, having just landed a deal that might finally enable him to make art instead of teaching it. The next call you take could be your last in this terrifying #1 New York Times bestseller by master storyteller Stephen King!

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