The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid

by Williams, Scott B.

  “There!” he said, as he quickly dug his paddle in and did a correction stroke to turn the bow into shore.

  “What is it, do you see them?” Jessica asked, as she scanned the river ahead, thinking Grant was looking that way.

  “He stopped right here!” Grant said as he leapt out of the canoe and pulled it up for Jessica. As soon as she was out he warned her not to walk over the tracks and then he crouched down to see if he could make sense of them.

  “Yep, it was him! Look, it’s the same footprints, those moccasins or whatever they are that he’s wearing. The tracks are identical to the ones on the sandbar where he took Casey. Now we know for sure he’s still ahead of us, somewhere on the river. See, there’s the mark he made when he pulled his canoe up, like I just did with ours.” Grant followed a straight line of the tracks off across the sandbar to where a lone, stunted cypress tree stood weathered and broken out in the open. “He walked over here to pee,” he called back to Jessica, then he went back to the canoe.

  “I don’t see any other tracks,” Jessica said.

  “He probably didn’t let Casey get out. That could be a good sign. At least he didn’t make her get out so he could try to rape her or something.” Grant was still bent over, looking carefully at the tracks. The man had walked back and forth around the place where he stopped the canoe quite a bit, and the details were vague as there were prints on top of prints.

  “I’m amazed at how you can tell all this just from looking at the ground. I would have never thought of any of that.”

  “I only know the very basics. If it wasn’t for all the sand along this river, I wouldn’t know any of it—even that Casey had been taken. Real experts, like the Wapishana hunters I spent time with, could find and read signs even in dense jungle where you can’t see the ground. But that’s what they do for a living. At any rate, I know he stopped here, and I’m sure Casey must still be with him, but then again, I can’t even prove that without a single track of hers to be found. And I’m afraid I’m not good enough to tell if these prints were made last night or sometime earlier this morning.”

  “So, you think they’re still somewhere ahead of us?”

  “They pretty much have to be downstream, the question is how far. Come on, let’s go.”

  Over the course of the next four or five miles they paddled before noon, the character of the river and its surrounding forest began changing somewhat. Occasional areas of high bluffs with pine trees on them gave way to almost unbroken hardwood forest and large stands of cypress. In many stretches the sandbars disappeared, with the river’s edge running right up to the bases of the cypress and tupelo trees. They passed several sloughs connecting the river to dead oxbow lakes left behind long ago when the river had changed its course over time, and at the entrance to each of these, Grant stopped to investigate and look for any clue that the man who had Casey might have turned off the river. He looked for tracks in the mud and on both sides of each tributary, but only near their entrances, as it would have killed the entire day to paddle each one to where it came to a dead end. Each time he stopped he came to the conclusion that the mysterious paddler must be still ahead of them, and each time they got underway, he dug in and paddled hard with renewed determination not to give up until they caught up with him.

  The hours of darkness seemed to Casey to go on forever, lying bound in the bottom of the canoe, watching the trees go by overhead against a backdrop of starry sky while worrying about what was to become of her. This man who had taken her against her will, who called himself Derek, relentlessly and tirelessly paddled hour after hour, expertly guiding the canoe among the countless snags and fallen logs that were everywhere in the river. Sometimes he spoke to her, but for the most part he was quiet while he paddled, and she was glad he was. She had no idea how far they’d come since he had found her the afternoon before, but at this pace she knew it had to be many miles, and with every hour they were on the river, she was being taken deeper and deeper into a land of swamps and forest that separated her from everyone and everything she knew.

  When the first pale grays of dawn replaced the darkness, he turned off of the river into an opening in the forest, and paddled into a stagnant, smelly slough of still water. At the far end he ran the bow of the canoe into the stinking mud and hopped out to pull it aground. “We’ll stop here awhile,” he said, “and rest and eat.”

  Casey didn’t want to acknowledge him, but she was hungry and thirsty, and more than anything, her bladder was about to burst and she couldn’t hold it any longer. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  “Of course. I’ll untie you so you can go over there in the bushes. But don’t get any ideas. This is an island with the river on one side and a dead lake on the other. There’s no way out of here on foot, and I’m going to be right over here. Believe me when I tell you, you cannot outrun me out here, so don’t bother trying.”

  Derek squatted behind her and worked at the lashings binding her wrists, and then he untied her ankles. “I’m sorry I’ve had to keep you all trussed up like this, but you understand I couldn’t have you jumping out of the canoe or something.”

  Casey avoided eye contact with him as she rubbed her wrists and ankles and tried to get the circulation going in them again. Now that the morning light was getting brighter, she could see a bit more of what he looked like. He was tall and lanky but it was hard to tell much about how he was built because of his loose-fitting clothes—olive drab military fatigues and an untucked, long-sleeved shirt that was a couple of shades darker green than the pants. The most unusual thing about the way he was dressed was his footwear—tall, over-the-calf moccasins that looked to be homemade from some kind of animal hide. From what she could see of his hands and bearded face, he was deeply tanned, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors, and his shoulder-length hair was shaggy and somewhere between blond and light brown. His movements suggested that he was fit and at ease in this environment, as he showed no signs of fatigue despite paddling all night without rest.

  After he untied her, he ignored her while he pulled one of his backpacks out of the canoe and rummaged through it for something. “Go ahead and do your business,” he said, “just don’t go far.”

  Casey was both surprised and greatly relieved that he would offer to let her have her privacy. She had been holding it all night because she was so afraid that he wouldn’t and had decided she would sooner pee in her pants than have him see her naked, though she knew he had seen her bathing. She pulled herself up out of the canoe with difficulty, and nearly fell back down as she waited for the numbness to go away in her feet. She stepped over the gunwale into the muck and wet leaves of the forest floor, still barefoot because she had left her shoes on the log where she had undressed for her bath. She picked her way carefully over fallen branches and around thorny vines, feeling the disgusting, foul-smelling mud of the swamp squishing up between her toes with every step until she had gone far enough to screen herself from his view with foliage.

  When she stood again, she thought about running as fast as she could in the opposite direction, but peering through the trees and bushes that limited her view to just a few dozen yards, she could see that there was indeed more water that way, just as Derek had said. With no shoes, she knew it would be hard for her to walk fast, much less run with all the protruding cypress knees, fallen branches, and twisted briar vines covered with thorns that were everywhere on the forest floor. From the ease with which Derek moved and paddled the canoe, she knew he was in good shape, and she doubted she could outsprint him even in open terrain. She resigned herself to the hard truth that there was no use trying to escape right now. It would be better to wait for another opportunity when she had a better chance of succeeding, and she was determined to find one, and not miss it when it presented itself.

  When she made her way back over to the canoe, Derek had just finished tying a dark green cloth hammock between two nearby trees. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” he said. “I hate to have to do
it, but I’ve got to tie your hands and feet again. You can sleep in the bottom of the canoe if you like. I’ll move my stuff out to give you more room. I don’t plan to stay here more than four or five hours though, and then we’re going to be on the move again.”

  Casey had no choice but to submit to being tied up again. At least this time he tied her hands in front of her body instead of behind her back, so she could lie down comfortably. He had also tied a piece of light rope between her bound ankles and one of his own wrists, so that when he fell asleep in the hammock he would know if she was trying to get away. She resigned herself to wait. The only way to escape now would be to somehow untie her wrists with her teeth without waking him, and then launch the canoe and paddle away in it. She knew that was hopeless, as his hammock was strung squarely in the path the canoe would have to be dragged to get it afloat again.

  They were back on the river around noon, and to Casey’s surprise she too had dozed off to sleep in the bottom of the canoe while Derek slept in the hammock. Fear had kept her awake the entire previous night, but today exhaustion had caught up with her, and in a more comfortable position, she probably slept at least two hours. As they traveled through the afternoon, she was once again low in the canoe among his gear bags, and more than once he pulled the tarp over her head to hide her when they passed riverside cabins. He did refrain from using the gag or blindfold again, but he told her any outcry in the vicinity of anyone they happened to pass would be met with a swift blow from the paddle that would knock her out. She had no reason to doubt that he would do it, and kept quiet, even when he exchanged a few words with a man who was fishing on the bank near one of the weekend getaway camps they passed.

  Just as she could no longer resist sleep, hunger overcame her that second day as well, and the next time they stopped she accepted some of the smoked venison jerky he had offered her before. It was surprisingly delicious, even better than the processed beef variety Grant had bought that first day when they had stocked up at the grocery store near campus. She knew it could have been simply that she was really hungry, but this stuff was delicious. After trying it she ate another piece.

  “Venison,” Derek said. “I eat it year round; it’s much better than eating fat, grain-fed cattle. I hunt year round too, even before, when it was illegal and there were people trying to enforce their idiotic laws. Now most of the people that thought up laws like that are probably dead already—too stupid to survive in a world without a government to take care of them.”

  “This isn’t going to last forever,” Casey said, “and it’s no excuse to break the law and do as you please. But I don’t care if you kill deer out of season and want to live in a swamp. Just please let me go. I’ll walk back to where you found me, and you can just go on and do whatever you want to do.”

  “You know I can’t do that. I can’t let a beautiful young woman like you take off walking on the roads the way things are now. You still don’t get it, but I’m saving you. I’m doing you a favor and saving you from the fate that would have awaited you if I hadn’t come along, and will still catch up to your two friends. I don’t think you understand, but most people are going to die as a result of the power grid going down. Most of them don’t have the will to do what it takes to survive, but I’m different, and always have been. I’ve been literally living for a time like this. I’ve been preparing for it and knowing it would happen eventually. The artificial lifestyle you and everyone you know has been living is just that—artificial. It’s not real, and it could not go on indefinitely. Now, at last, we get a chance to live a life that is real, and I’ve chosen you to be my partner in that life. I know it’s all new and unfamiliar to you and maybe a little frightening, but I’m going to teach you. You’re going to love it when you get used to it, and we’re going to live in a beautiful place—a nearly perfect place that is wild and natural—where we will have everything we need, and be free, like our ancestors were before modern civilization screwed everything up.”

  “You’re insane,” Casey said. “I would rather die than be anywhere, even in a paradise, with someone who would do what you did to me. I don’t know where you came up with your fantasy, but it doesn’t involve me! Why didn’t you bring your wife or girlfriend, or whatever? Oh, never mind, you probably never had one. You’re too weird to get one! And you’re completely wrong if you think I needed ‘saving’ from anything. My friend Grant knew what he was doing, and we had a place to go where we would be safe and have everything we would need until this was all over.”

  Derek’s only response was to laugh. He was genuinely insane, of that she was certain—insane in a dangerous way, but she felt more confident than ever that he wouldn’t hurt her, at least not deliberately, unless she tried to escape or cry out to someone. It seemed that he really believed his delusion that she would eventually be grateful to him for ‘rescuing’ her, and that they would somehow live off the land deep in some swamp hideaway, like some kind of happy pioneer couple or something.

  Back on the river, Derek continued to rant about the evils of civilization as he paddled the canoe. He told her that he had never fit into modern society, and had known he was not meant to live that way ever since childhood. Instead of playing sports in school, he spent every spare minute hunting and fishing, and often played hooky to get in more time doing so. He said that as an adult, he hated working for money, and didn’t want most of the things it could buy anyway. He mostly did odd jobs on a friend’s farm and then took off for weeks at a time to live in the woods and do what he really wanted to do. In between these excursions he read everything he could get his hands on about the way the Indians and later the white trappers and explorers had lived before the whole country was settled and tamed and completely ruined, as he saw it. He practiced their skills and learned to use every part of the animals he killed, pointing out the deerskin moccasins he wore as an example to her. Then he said that he had a brain-tanned deer hide rolled up in his bags and promised that once they got to his secret camp he would make her a pair of nice moccasins like his, since she didn’t have her shoes.

  He talked about the solar flare and how everybody in modern America was so dependent upon electric power that they didn’t know how to do anything else but go apeshit crazy when the lights went out. He said they were all so stupid they would just sit and wait for the government to bail them out and only a few would take any initiative to do anything, and then, if they did, it would be the wrong thing.

  “I may have hated school,” he said, “but I’m not some ignorant dumbass backwoods hick like most people around here. I didn’t like somebody else telling me what to read and having to take a test on it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like to read. I studied what I wanted to learn about on my own and one thing that always interested me was the history of various cultures and especially the decline of ancient civilizations. I was into a lot of philosophy too, especially Thoreau and the ancient Chinese Taoist teachings. Do you know who Lao Tzu was? Have you ever read the Tao Te Ching? Would you like to hear what my favorite quote of his was? “Water flows in the places men reject.” You can see now how true this is. Look at this river, for instance. It winds and twists for more than a hundred miles through some of the finest woods and wild lands left anywhere in these parts, and what do all those ‘civilized’ idiots do? They sit in those square boxes they call houses or take off down the road, stuck in their way of thinking that nature has to be shaped and conformed to their needs, and not the other way around. All the while, this river flows nearby, twisting quietly and unnoticed through these forgotten ‘places that men reject,’ offering a route of travel, a refuge, food to eat and water to drink. Yet they’re just too blind to see it. That’s why they will die, and that’s why they deserve to. We’re entering a new era now, and those who can’t figure out fast that they’ve got to give up on their technology are not going to be a part of it. It might be hard for a while until the die-off is complete, but give it a good year or so and we won’t have to lie low in one a
rea anymore. There’ll be so few people around that there will be room enough for everyone who is smart enough to still be here. Then we can live the way we were meant to—free—as nomadic hunter-gatherers roaming whenever and wherever we please. There will be others like us too, and it will take time to reconnect, but someday we will eventually join together and form new tribes. By then, we will be fully adapted to the old ways, and this transition period will be a distant memory.”

  Casey had to listen to this for hour upon hour as Derek paddled. The longer they were together, the more he talked, but he wasn’t really trying to engage her in conversation. For the most part she didn’t bother trying to argue with him, and had given up on asking him to let her go. They traveled through the rest of the afternoon and another night, and the farther downriver they went, the lower and swampier the terrain surrounding the river became. By now, the wide sandbars that were in nearly every bend upstream were non-existent, replaced by low, muddy banks where the forest reached right to the river’s edge and the understory was a green wall of head-high palmettos. The current in this lower part of the Bogue Chitto was much slower, but Derek’s tireless stroke kept the canoe slicing through the nearly still water at the same relentless pace. Before dawn they passed a man-made canal extending north and south, and the Bogue Chitto reached the end of its course, becoming less defined as a separate river as it joined a maze of channels and bayous of a much larger river system flowing south to the Gulf.

  “This is the Pearl,” he said. “We’re home free now. There are miles and miles of winding little bayous in this swamp that are so small a canoe can barely pass through them. I’ve been coming here for years, and I’ve found one of the most remote spots in the entire basin that I always figured would be my go-to place when the shit finally hit the fan. You couldn’t find a better hideout anywhere in the state, you’ll see. There’s no way in and no way out except by canoe or pirogue, but everything we need is already there.”