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

by Williams, Scott B.

  When the light finally came, she lost no time getting on the move again. She wanted to get to the end of the little bayou as quickly as possible, and away from the closed-in feeling of the dense forest that surrounded it. In less than an hour of paddling, she reached that goal. The bayou suddenly opened up ahead of her and its clear waters merged with the muddy brown current of a big river, which she was certain had to be a branch of the Pearl. She drifted out onto its broad, sunlit expanse, feeling as if she had suddenly stepped out of a darkened room into daylight after days of confinement. But despite her relief at the relatively wide-open space before her, she could see that she was literally not out of the woods yet. There was nothing on either bank but walls of greenery bounding the waterway on both sides, much the same as the river upstream had appeared before they turned off to go to Derek’s camp.

  She resumed paddling, easing into a steady rhythm that would eat up the miles, but hoping to find a place to land soon so she could eat something and take a short nap to make up for losing so much sleep during the night. She had only rounded one big bend of the river when she came to a good-sized sandbar. Knowing now that such nice places to stop would be few and far between in the swamp, she landed and tied the canoe off to a big piece of driftwood. The warmth of the morning sun was so pleasant she stretched out immediately on the soft sand next to the canoe and fell fast asleep.

  How long she slept there, she had no idea, but when she awoke it was to the sharp clang of metal on metal as something banged against the side of the canoe. At first she thought she was still in the boat and that it had drifted down the river and bumped against a log or something, but she was really too tired to care and just wanted to go back to sleep—that is, until she heard voices—men’s voices. Still thinking she was in the canoe, she reached for her paddle, and her hand grasped only sand. At the same time, she opened her eyes and saw a grinning apparition looming over her, squatting just an arm’s length away. She cried out as she sat up, and then she heard her name uttered from the lips of a completely unexpected black face, a face framed by wild cords of matted hair hanging down and draping across the man’s shoulders and arms. A shock of recognition swept over her—despite the utter impossibility, she knew that she was looking at none other than her Uncle Larry’s friend Scully! Before she could open her lips to form a question, she heard her name called again in another nearby voice that trembled with excitement and joy. There could certainly be no mistaking that one, and when she turned her head to look, beyond her canoe to the boat behind it, Casey knew for sure that she was not dreaming.

  When Artie and Scully set out in the battered johnboat at daybreak from the lake where Larry would wait with the Casey Nicole, Artie fully expected to spend the entire day winding their way upstream, first to the mouth of the Bogue Chitto, and then up most of its length to beyond the state line to the north. He could only hope that the old Evinrude would continue to run as smoothly as it had while pushing the catamaran, and that the quick and dirty patch job they’d done to the battered johnboat would keep the water out long enough to get them there. He also worried that there would not be enough depth in the Bogue Chitto, or that they would hit something such as a submerged log and damage the engine. It was going to be a long journey, well over a hundred miles, and a lot could go wrong. Still, he felt hopeful that he would be reunited with Casey before dark, because finding the boat was more of a lucky break than he’d dared to hope for after what the fisherman in Pearlington had said of their chances of buying one.

  Early morning mist hanging over the river forced them to run at idle speed for almost two hours, Scully sitting in the stern and steering the boat with the outboard’s combination tiller and throttle, while Artie crouched in the bow, straining to see through the fog to direct him around stumps and floating debris. They passed under the double overpass bridges of Interstate 59 at around the same time the sun began to burn off the fog. The river here was still wide, but in many places there were logjams spanning almost bank to bank, forcing them to pick a channel to steer through. At one of the worst of these, Artie realized that if they had brought the catamaran this far upriver, they would have been blocked from further progress at this point. With the narrow johnboat, it was tedious, but not too difficult to thread their way through all these obstructions. They would typically come to one every third bend or so, and then enjoy a mile or more of open river where Scully could open up the engine enough to get the johnboat up on a plane. They had just sped up again in this manner when Artie spotted a sandbar far ahead and what looked like a canoe pulled halfway out of the water onto it. He pointed it out to Scully, and the Rastaman slowed the engine back to idle as they approached the sandbar from downriver. Not wanting to take any chances on being ambushed by someone who might be hiding in the woods near the canoe, Scully steered them to the far side of the river to keep as much distance as possible between them and the sandbar when they passed. Both of them watched the woods for movement, Artie cradling the loaded shotgun at ready in his lap, just in case. They were adjacent to the upper end of the sandbar, where they could see on both sides of the canoe, when Scully shifted the engine into neutral and pointed.

  “Take a look wid de glasses, Doc. I t’ink mehbe dat’s some dead mon in de sand by dat canoe.”

  Artie reached behind him and took his brother’s binoculars out of his bag, bringing them to bear on the canoe and the body lying beside it as the johnboat started slowly drifting back downstream.

  “It is someone, but I think it’s a woman. I can’t tell if she’s dead, but I don’t see any movement. I think we ought to check it out.”

  “Could be a trap, mon,” Scully warned. “Keep dat Mossberg ready.” Scully put the outboard back in gear and idled across the river, killing it when they were within 10 feet of the canoe and allowing it to drift until it bumped into the stern of the other aluminum hull before Artie could fend it off.

  “Sit tight wid dat gun,” Scully whispered as he hopped out. “I an’ I checking if she dead.”

  From where he sat in the bow of the boat, the canoe blocked his view of the body on the sandy beach. That was just as well for Artie, who didn’t really want a close-up look at some unfortunate dead woman if he could help it. He was happy to let Scully check it out, and he was totally unprepared for what happened next as he tried to see into the dense woods beyond the sandbar, half-expecting to find they had fallen for a setup. There was a sudden movement and a female voice cried out. He heard Scully suddenly say the name Casey and then, from behind the canoe, he saw his daughter rise to a sitting position on the sandbar, the look on her face as amazed as he knew the one on his own had to be. Artie dropped the shotgun and leapt out of the canoe.

  The three of them spent the heat of the day sitting in the shade of the woods beyond the sandbar. When Artie learned of all that Casey had been through, and saw the condition she was in from her many days of captivity in the swamp, the last thing he wanted to do was hurry her back downriver. She had been sleeping soundly on the sandbar, totally wiped out with exhaustion, and undoubtedly in shock from what had happened to her and what she’d had to do to escape her captor. On top of all that, she was worried sick over what might have become of her friends, Grant and Jessica, who certainly must have spent a lot of time frantically looking for her. Scully suggested that since they had everything in the boat they needed, they should let her rest longer, camping here overnight and then getting a fresh start back to where Larry waited with the Casey Nicole early in the morning.

  It was later that afternoon, when he and Scully were getting their gear out of the boat to set up camp, that the second miracle occurred. Artie had stopped to stare absentmindedly upriver for a moment, and was about to turn back to the boat to grab his bag, when he heard a female voice cry out: Dr. Drager! Straining to see who it could be and where it could possibly come from, he was startled when the bow of a canoe suddenly emerged from a dense stand of cattails along the riverbank some 50 yards upstream. The smiling girl paddli
ng in the bow was none other than Casey’s roommate, Jessica, and the young man in the stern had to be Grant!

  “What were the odds we’d all meet here?” Artie asked again as they sat around the campfire that evening, everyone full from a big meal of rice and beans they’d cooked just before dark and shared as they told their separate tales of what had transpired since the event.

  “I just can’t believe you guys found your way here,” Casey said. “I knew you would come looking for me, and that Larry would find a way to get you to New Orleans, but wow, I wouldn’t have hoped in my wildest dreams you’d find me on this river.”

  “Now the rivers are the natural highways,” Grant said. “Just like in Guyana, where there are no roads to begin with. I’m glad you guys didn’t try to follow us on foot. You wouldn’t have made it through on the roads, and even if you had found the cabin, you would be so far behind us now that we would have never found each other.”

  “My question is, what do we do now? Is it still a good idea to all go to the cabin and wait until the power is restored? And if so, how do we get there?” Jessica wanted to know.

  “No, Jessica. That’s not the best plan. Larry has a much better idea, I think. With the boat, we’re not limited to staying anywhere in this country. He thinks it will be too dangerous to be near any populated areas, or even anywhere around the mainland. He says that because the U.S. is such a technologically dependent country, and most people here are ill-equipped to live otherwise, it would be safer to sail to some place much more remote, somewhere that we can live on the boat but have access to the resources of the sea and the land nearby, preferably where there are few people, or at least people who live a simpler life.”

  “Some place in de sun,” Scully said. “A mon not supposed to be dis far north.”

  “This is hardly what I’d call North, Scully. But yeah, Larry is talking about sailing south again, maybe to the Yucatán, or somewhere farther south along the Central American coast,” Artie said as he looked around to see everyone’s reaction.

  “Hey, we could sail to Guyana!” Grant said. “If the catamaran can get up this river, it can get up the Essequibo, and I know a lot of the villages there. One thing about it, that’s one place that’s definitely off the beaten path to anywhere.”

  “You can run that idea by Larry,” Artie said. “He’s the captain and I think he’s far more qualified than any of us to make that decision. But regardless of where we go, just be glad we’ve got a boat and a knowledgeable skipper that can take us practically anywhere in the world. I don’t know about you all, but I’m going to feel a lot better as soon as we are back aboard tomorrow.”

  “I an’ I feelin’ mo’ bettah when de wind fill de sails, Doc, an’ put dis Bobbylon astern in de wake.”

  “That too, Scully. That too.” Artie put his arm around his daughter and squeezed her close to him. “I’ve got what I came here to find, so that sounds good to me.”

  ALSO BY SCOTT B. WILLIAMS

  Bug Out: The Complete Plan for Escaping a Catastrophic Disaster Before It’s Too Late

  $14.95

  Warning sirens are blaring. You have 15 minutes to evacuate. What will you do? Being prepared makes the difference between survival and disaster. Guiding you step by step, Bug Out shows you how to be ready at a second’s notice.

  Bug Out Vehicles and Shelters: Build and Outfit Your Life-Saving Escape

  $15.95

  A cataclysmic disaster strikes. Do you have a vehicle you can count on to evacuate your family safely? Bug Out Vehicles and Shelters zeroes in on the key considerations and essential equipment for planning all your bug-out needs.

  Getting Out Alive: 13 Deadly Scenarios and How Others Survived

  $14.95

  Every year, ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary life-or-death situations. Delving into 13 harrowing scenarios, Getting Out Alive combines riveting narratives with expert advice and real-life accounts of savvy survivors.

  To order these books call 800-377-2542 or 510-601-8301, fax 510-601-8307, e-mail ulysses@ulyssespress.com, or write to Ulysses Press, P.O. Box 3440, Berkeley, CA 94703. All retail orders are shipped free of charge. California residents must include sales tax. Allow two to three weeks for delivery.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SCOTT B. WILLIAMS has been exploring wild places and seeking adventure on both land and sea for most of his life. At the age of twenty-five, he embarked on an open-ended solo sea kayaking journey from his home in Mississippi to the islands of the Caribbean. His nonfiction book On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean is a narrative of that life-changing journey. His pursuit of adventure travel led him to further develop his wilderness survival skills that began with hunting and fishing while growing up in rural Mississippi. After his Caribbean kayak trip, he spent years testing his skills in a variety of environments throughout North America, using both modern and primitive methods, and traveling both on foot and by canoe and kayak. His enthusiasm for travel by water fueled an interest in a variety of boats and led him to learn the craft of wooden boatbuilding. In addition to building boats, paddling small craft, and offshore sailing, he enjoys backpacking, bicycling, martial arts training, dual-sport motorcycling, and photography. He maintains several blogs related to these pursuits and occasionally writes for magazines including Sea Kayaker and SAIL. His most popular blog is Bug Out Survival (www.bugoutsurvival.com), which expands on his books Bug Out: The Complete Plan for Escaping a Catastrophic Disaster Before It’s Too Late and Bug Out Vehicles and Shelters. More information about Scott can be found on his main website, www.scottbwilliams.com. He lives in Prentiss, Mississippi.

  Text copyright © Scott B. Williams 2012. Design © Ulysses Press 2012 and its licensors. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by

  ULYSSES PRESS

  P.O. Box 3440

  Berkeley, CA 94703

  www.ulyssespress.com

  eISBN : 978-1-612-43090-4

  Library of Congress Control Number 2012937119

  Distributed by Publishers Group West