Coyote by David L. Foster

time. [8] )
    I have to admit, it felt good to fight back. That was the first time since all this started that I took something on instead of just running or hiding. Of course, there were only two of the things, but still. It’s good to be in a group—it gives a person options.
    After we killed those things, we met two more people. One is a woman, used to be a nurse, and that’s just about all we got out of her. When Bait asked if she had family she was searching for, or what she’d done the day of the Fall (that’s what everyone seems to be calling the day the world went to hell—the Fall—so I’m making it official and capitalizing it now), she didn’t want to talk about it.  My guess is that whatever she went through isn’t something she wants to remember.
    The other person, a guy, was a lot more talkative. He said he used to be a Professor of Electrical Engineering (am I supposed to capitalize all that? In fact, with most of the English teachers gone who’s going to keep track of grammar rules now?) at Portland State University. So of course, our first question to him was why nothing that uses electricity works any more. I mean, one day I’m playing video games, and then next I’m living life by candlelight—weird.
    Unfortunately, he’s as mystified as the rest of us. He said at first he thought was an electromagnetic pulse, like from solar flares or from a nuclear bomb, but now he doesn’t think so. He says EMPs just mess up computer chips, making stuff not work. But now, even simple things like flashlights that run on batteries don’t work. I guess he did a lot of thinking on that the first days after the Fall, taking batteries out of abandoned cars and wiring things together, but nothing worked.
    So it wasn’t an EMP, because that would have been a one-time event. It wouldn’t continue on like this. For some reason, electricity just isn’t working any more. Batteries don’t put it out, and even when he tried to make static electricity by shuffling across the carpet that didn’t even work. He says he knows enough to say that something fundamental about the world has changed, but he doesn’t know enough to say what that fundamental thing is.
    He thinks the fact that electricity somehow has changed its nature or been cancelled out is probably a more fundamental change than the fact that there are monsters roaming the world now. I disagree on that point. Having no electricity makes things suck, but the monsters are trying to eat us. I’m much more worried about the monsters.
    So… he’s in the same camp as the rest of us, fancy degree and all. Nothing works and we don’t know why.
    He did tell us his story, though. He had lived out in the foothills of Mount Hood. He’s still wearing the clothes he had on as he was driving in to teach a class on the day of the Fall, and the clothes look like they’ve been through a lot.
    He was driving along and his car just stopped working. He pulled over, wondering what had happened, when he noticed that everyone else’s car had stopped working as well. Then he saw that his cell phone was dead, too, and I guess being a professor helped him put things together a little faster than some. Like I mentioned, he figured an EMP was the only thing that could knock everything out like that.
    He says that at the time, the only thing he could think of that would make an EMP happen was a nuclear bomb going off. So he high-tailed it to a farm house a few yards off the highway. There was nobody home, but the house did have a basement so he broke in and took shelter down there.
    After a while he realized that there must not have been a nuclear blast, because he would have seen the light and felt the shockwave. But he didn’t leave his shelter because by then the screaming had started. It must have been all the other folks standing by their broken-down cars who were doing the screaming. The last he saw of them, they were standing around on the roadside, looking at each other