The Blue Pulse

The water wasn't contaminated. It was coordinated. Christmas Eve, 1996. In the blue-collar town of Bridgewater, the taps run cold, the sausages sizzle, and the radio hums at eighty megahertz. Nobody notices the eggs in the reservoir. Nobody notices the larvae in the water main. And nobody notices that the lead pipes beneath the town are singing. By morning, the waterborne contamination has spread through every kitchen, every church, every school. The infected don't rage. They don't bleed. They simply stop being alone — a hive mind of twitching neighbors who finish each other's sentences and stare at the pipes between clicks. Three clicks. A pause. Two clicks. Then something answers. Twelve-year-old Nick and his sister Gina watch their mother set the Christmas table with hands that are no longer entirely hers. You have to eat, Susan whispers, smiling with too many teeth. Finish your dinner. While the town coordinates itself around the signal, the kids — and Simeone, the lineman who first traced the hum — must follow the frequency upstream, to the reservoir, to the woman in the red coat standing motionless in the frozen dark. She is not a survivor. She is the carrier wave. And she has been waiting for the pipes to warm. A creepy, atmospheric body horror science fiction novel of hive mind invasion, biological infestation, and a small town's last Christmas, The Blue Pulse blends kid-protagonist survival thrills with blue-collar family dread. Perfect for fans of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, John Carpenter's The Thing, and the first season of Stranger Things. The water wasn't contaminated. It was coordinated. And the broadcast has only begun. The Blue Pulse is Book One of the Bridgewater Cycle.