The Pulse in His Pocket

The Pulse in His Pocket

The subway car was exhaling its usual exhausted rhythm, the lights flickering above as though deciding whether or not to give up completely. Anton Callow slouched on a rusted seat, his hands instinctively resting in his coat pockets where his fingers absentmindedly fidgeted with a half-crushed pack of cigarettes. He was a man of habits—bad ones, mostly. The kind of guy you'd cross the street to avoid, even if he wasn't wearing his perpetual scowl. His brown hair was slicked back with too much pomade, his cheap leather boots scuffed beyond repair. A liar, a criminal, a hustler with nothing left to hustle.

He hated the subway but he hated walking even more. Every step felt like it marked just how far he'd fallen. No home, no friends, probably a few too many warrants. When the train screeched to a stop and a swarm of engers spilled into the car, Anton saw opportunity. The press of bodies made it easy to lift from pockets.

He’d spotted his mark the moment he got on: a wiry man in a navy coat. The guy moved with jittery energy, clutching whatever was in his pocket like it was a lifeline. Rookie mistake. Anton knew how people looked when they thought they were holding something important—they always gave it away.

With a little bump and a swipe, the smooth rectangle was in Anton's hand before the subway even lurched forward again. No one screamed. No one noticed. Another win for Anton, unnoticed king of petty thefts.

By the time he got off at the next station, he'd already stuffed the freshly pilfered phone into his pocket. It felt warm, like it was alive. An hour later, perched on a park bench under the too-bright glare of a lamppost, Anton finally pulled it out. Cheap burner phones were what he was used to stealing; this one was sleek, dark, and weighed just enough to feel expensive. Definitely worth selling, he'd thought, clicking the button to wake the screen.

But then his breath hitched.

The date. It wasn’t today. It wasn’t even this week.

May 27, 2018.

Anton laughed aloud, startling the old man asleep on the next bench over. He shook his head and muttered,

“These tech types, always releasing buggy crap... Probably set the wrong time zone.” He fiddled with the menu, trying to reset it. But the more he looked, the weirder it got. News notifications pinged with chaotic urgency:

"Megaquake devastates Eastern Seaboard,"

one read.

“Breakthrough in Alzheimer's treatment announced,”

proclaimed another.

All of it was dated a year in the future.

At first, Anton smirked, thinking it was a prank app or some elaborate hoax. But then he scrolled through live-streaming forums and breaking feeds. He found tweets predicted details about events that hadn't even happened yet, corroborated by things he’d seen with his own two eyes that week. Every article, every video—accurate, undeniable, impossible.

He’d hit the jackpot.

"Stock markets, lottery numbers, odds on horse races," Anton muttered under his breath. He didn't care how or why the phone worked this way. He'd always believed in luck, even when it cursed him. Maybe his luck had finally flipped.

For the next six weeks, Anton’s fortunes soared. His first score was buying into stocks he'd only vaguely heard of, betting every shady stolen cent he had, and walking away with triple what he'd invested. Small-time bets turned into big ones. By the time he cracked his second set of lottery numbers, Anton wasn’t just comfortably floating above life’s sludge; he was swimming in champagne pools. Lavish spending replaced his hollow desperation.

And yet, something about the phone kept

itching at him. He couldn’t help it: when it was quiet and the glow of the night reached its crest, he kept reading the darker stories in its future feed. Climate disasters. Strange disappearances. Violent protests. The world coming apart thread by thread.

One evening, something new came through. A terse headline.

“Unknown Virus Breaks Out in Northern Europe; WHO Declares Emergency.”

Anton froze. He pulled the tabs apart to scour the article. People dropping dead in days. Symptoms unexplainable. Government silence. For hours, he searched until his fingers cramped, realizing this event wasn’t just bad—it was catastrophic. It was

extinction-level.

Every thread he followed ended in billions of deaths.

Anton read through, over and over, looking for the cause, something he could piece together from the data. And there it was:

Patient Zero identified—escaped from secure facility in NYC blood lab hours before explosion.

The date chilled his blood.

Tomorrow.

Anton’s first thought was to find the wiry man he'd stolen the phone from. His gut told him whoever carried this phone had carried it for a reason. Only problem: Anton didn’t have an ID. He only had hazy details from that brief subway encounter.

For the rest of the night, Anton scoured every subway car and station bench he vaguely ed. He asked questions, won false smiles from hostile conductors, bribed sketchy information from anyone who looked half-interested. Nothing.

The next day, as the clock ticked closer to the supposed explosion at the NYC blood lab, Anton cracked in frustration. No one would believe him if he warned anybody. He’d tried telling his few remaining s over the last week about his surreal streak of "luck," about what he knew—but they’d laughed. Or worse, they didn’t even laugh. They just shrugged. Dismissed him.

"Never trust a liar," one had spit.

The lab wasn’t far, nestled in a surprisingly ordinary-looking white stone building near a medical research district. Anton pressed a sweat-slicked palm against the phone screen one last time, double-checking his facts. If the facility was wrecked before whoever escaped… Maybe none of it would happen.

Sneaking toward the loading dock, heart hammering, Anton tried to figure out what to do. His life was stealing, hiding, spinning webs; solving a global crisis was... beyond him. But every warning notification that popped up from the glowing rectangle in his pocket reminded him that no one else saw what he did.

The explosion hit before Anton even reached the building. Light and heat consumed his vision, plaster shards flowing through the air like paper. He was thrown backward into the cracked pavement, the phone flying from his grip and shattering in the alley. Smoke filled the skies.

When Anton came to, firefighters and sirens filled the streets. He crawled toward the wreckage on instinct, but hostile hands yanked him backward—a responder, treating him as just another dazed bystander.

"It's too late…" he slurred, his ribs aching. "It’s too late!"

The responder looked at him oddly, then walked off muttering something into her radio about concussion delusions.

His last moment of clarity before ing out again was the sounds of boots running behind the wreckage, too fast and too calm for panicking. Someone escaping. Someone very familiar.

The wiry man in the navy coat.

When Anton woke in the hospital a day later, the news was already moving on—to earthquakes, breakthroughs, distractions big and small. No one believed his ramblings. No one believed the liar.

But something gnawed at him, refusing to die.

The phone had told him the truth. And so had his instincts. The man who carried it, who had slipped through his fingers, knew something.

Anton left the hospital that night, slipping out without a word. Wherever the man in the navy coat was, Anton had all the time in the world to find him. Until he didn’t.

In his still-stolen coat pocket, Anton found something lodged in the lining. A note, hastily scribbled on worn paper:

"It’s not the future. It’s a warning— rewrite the past, while you still can.”