Voyage After the Collapse (The Pulse Series Book 3)

by Scott B. Williams

  This older couple that Tara had befriended would likely be another factor in what she decided to do. He could tell that not only had she taken pity on them because of their age and frailty, but she was also seeing her own sailing parents in this older retired couple with a boat. She would not want to abandon them now, but from what she’d said about them, Larry didn’t think they would be up to a lengthy voyage. And their deeper draft boat would be a liability elsewhere just as it was here at Cat Island. He didn’t quite have an answer for all the what-ifs that would surely present themselves, but he knew he had to put first things first. That meant helping these folks out of their predicament, then having a talk with Tara. What she ultimately decided would be up to her, but then again, Larry knew he had a way of being pretty persuasive with women.

  These were the thoughts in his head as he guided the Miss Lucy north along the long sand spit that extended from that part of the island. The dunes receded and the point became a low sandbar the farther north they went, and finally, they were able to see across it to the anchorage on the north side well before they were able to make the turn to get around the end of the point. Larry and Scully and Grant were all expecting to see a large sailboat, hard aground, and they did. What they were not expecting though was the sight of another mast standing beside the leaning boat, this one much shorter, but in the normal vertical orientation rather than at a crazy angle like that of the yacht.

  “Dat’s a little catamaran, mon,” Scully said, after grabbing Larry’s binoculars for a closer look. “One o’ dem kind dey rent on de beach to de tourist.”

  “Hmm. Can you tell what they’re up to? Are they trying to help the old couple out?”

  “See a mon in de cockpit o’ de yacht. Three more people in de watah. Look like dem in de watah got de anchor lines. I t’ink one o’ dem is a girl. Maybe dem try an’ set de anchor an’ pull de boat free?”

  Scully said he didn’t see a white-haired man or woman when Larry asked. That worried him a bit. Maybe they were down below, but still…. Larry opened up the throttle to push the tired old Miss Lucy as hard as she would go. He still had to swing wide to the north even after he cleared the point in order to avoid a long line of submerged sandbars hidden under the brown, choppy waters of the sound. It would take a few minutes to get there, and Scully said the people in the water and on the boat had seen them coming and were working faster than before. Beside him at the helm was the 12-gauge shotgun that one of the men who’d stolen the Miss Lucy from her rightful owners had threatened him with when they rammed the Casey Nicole. The other two weapons were the AK-47 and the short-barreled Winchester .357 Magnum lever-action that had belonged to the guy who abducted Casey on the Bogue Chitto River. The three of them were well armed, Larry was not concerned about that, but whatever was going on here, he intended to approach with eyes wide open and weapons locked and loaded.

  EIGHT

  GRANT DYER FELT THE knots twisting in his stomach as Larry cleared the last of the shoals and turned the bow of the Miss Lucy back toward Cat Island and the two sailboats in the anchorage. He had a tense grip on the stock of the Winchester carbine as he, like Larry and Scully standing beside him, attempted to decipher what was going on in the vicinity of the grounded sailboat. The person Scully had first seen aboard the yacht was now on the catamaran, which like Scully said, was one of those ubiquitous little Hobie day sailors with nothing but a trampoline stretched between its two slender hulls. There was no sign of the older couple Tara had described as the owners of the yacht, but these other people around it were acting with a sense of urgency. Grant felt the Miss Lucy suddenly slow as Larry backed down on the throttle, while Scully continued to study the scene through the binoculars.

  “Somet’ing else in de wahtah by de big boat, mon.”

  “What is it?” Larry asked. “Can you tell?”

  Grant took the binoculars when Scully handed them to him, leaning the rifle against the console as he steadied them with both hands.

  “It’s a body!” he said. “It’s floating face-down, but I can see thick white hair. I think it’s a woman!”

  “Those sons of bitches! I knew something wasn’t right here!”

  “The one on the Hobie cat has got a gun, and it looks like he’s getting ready to take off!” Grant handed the binoculars back to Scully as Larry backed the engine all the way down to idle, letting the big boat drift while they sorted out the situation. He saw a multicolored sail quickly go up the mast, followed by the unrolling of another one. Grant knew the different sails had specific names but he couldn’t keep them straight yet. It didn’t matter what they were called anyway; the two sails instantly filled with wind and the catamaran quickly leapt into motion.

  “I’m not letting that bastard get away with this!” Larry said. But just as he opened the throttle to attempt to cut off the man’s escape, a shot rang out and Grant saw that one of the other men standing in waist-deep water was pointing a rifle at them. Following his friend’s initiative, the one on the catamaran raised his weapon and fired at them too, even as he steered. Grant heard the impact of a bullet smack the lower cabin side below the bridgedeck where they were standing by the helm. There was little left of the pilothouse after Scully’s running the boat under a highway bridge a few days prior, but Grant knew it didn’t matter because the wooden structure wouldn’t have stopped bullets anyway. If these people kept shooting their aim was going to get better, but Scully put a stop to that with the AK.

  Firing as fast as he could pull the trigger, the island man opened up on the guy aboard the catamaran and Grant saw him drop his weapon and fall onto the fabric deck between the hulls. The boat continued sailing on the course he’d set though, skimming west across the shallows parallel to the north coast of the island with its sheets cleated. Grant heard shouts from the others in the water as they watched their ride sail away, but they all three turned and ran for the beach as fast as they could when Scully brought his fire in their direction. It was happening so fast Grant had not even brought his rifle into action before Scully emptied his 30-round magazine. He was firing from a moving platform and at moving targets as well, missing more than he was hitting, but Grant saw the woman go down before she reached the water’s edge and then one of the two men tumble face-first into the sand. But somehow, despite the hail of fire he was running through, the last of the four made it to the tall grass beyond the beach and disappeared into the scrub. The last glimpse Grant had of him, he was still clinging to his weapon and was apparently untouched. Scully locked a fresh magazine into the AK and fired another half dozen rounds into the area where they lost sight of him. The lone survivor had probably gotten much deeper into the brush by now, but the additional rounds would make him think twice about stopping to fire at them again.

  “Sorry ‘bout dat, Copt’n. Didn’t t’ink no mon in wahtah like dat could run dat fast!”

  “It happens, Scully, but that was damn good shooting if you ask me! You got the rest of them, and they were trying like hell to kill us first. Dammit! If only I had moved faster when Tara came and asked for our help! These people must have just sailed in here not long after she left to come get us.”

  “They were trying to get the Wind Shadow back afloat, weren’t they?”

  “Looks that way to me, Grant. Worthless bastards came along and saw a helpless older couple aground and figured they would kill them for their boat.”

  “Where do you supposed they came from, the mainland?”

  “I don’t know, but that one that’s still alive worries me. If they knew there were boats on the other side of the island, he could be headed that way now, especially since he’s marooned here now. There’s no way we can get back around to Smuggler’s Cove in this slow tub before he can cross the island on foot. We’ve got to go after him!”

  “I an’ I take dat kayak to de beach an’ den I track he down an’ finish dis job,” Scully said.

  “No, Scully. You can’t run on that leg. I’ll go.”

  “You
can’t fight with one arm, either,” Grant said. “Let me go. I can run faster and farther than either one of you and I can shoot too!”

  “Dat mon mehbe he wait in de ambush! Gotta be careful, track a mon like dat. Get he in a corner an’ he fight like de lion!”

  “We can’t let him get to the Casey Nicole! He could sneak up to the anchorage and shoot everyone on board before they even know he’s around.”

  “You’re right, Grant, and they probably didn’t hear any of the shooting from where they are, with the way the wind’s blowing. Look, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go to the beach with you in the kayak and you can go on ahead and try and catch him. I’ll be behind you for back up if you need it. Scully, you take the Miss Lucy back to Smuggler’s Cove! By the time you get there we should be done and we’ll meet you on that side of the island.”

  Grant knew Larry’s plan was their best option and there was no more time to discuss it. They had to move and move fast. Scully steered as close to the beach as the water depths allowed and then Grant slid the kayak over the side, getting in the stern seat and holding it steady until Larry was seated in the bow. He did all the paddling while Larry kept the AK at the ready in case the man on the island doubled-back and shot at them again. As soon as they were underway, Scully turned the Miss Lucy back around to open water to take her around the shoals and the north point. Grant knew Larry was right. There was no way the old fishing boat could make it all the way around there to where the Casey Nicole was anchored before the man on the island could get there on foot—if that was where he was headed.

  He paddled past the grounded yacht and the partially submerged body that had floated closer to the beach. At this distance they could clearly see it was indeed a white-haired woman, and Grant knew it had to be Mrs. Owens. They didn’t see another body in the water and there was no time to search the yacht right now. When Grant mentioned it, Larry said that if the wife was dead her husband almost certainly was too, and Grant figured he was probably right.

  As they neared the beach they couldn’t help but pass the body of the woman Scully had shot, her long, sandy-blonde hair flowing back and forth in the surge of small waves that washed against the shore. Grant saw that she looked to be about his age—surely no older than her early twenties—a girlfriend or wife of one of these cutthroats, no doubt. But she had fired at them just the same as the rest and for all he knew, she had participated in the murder of the Owens as well. The other one Scully had hit was crumpled onto the sand just a couple of steps from the water’s edge, his shirt stained dark with his own blood and the rifle he’d been carrying locked in the grasp of his still right hand. Larry stooped to pull it away as soon as he hopped out of the kayak.

  “Nice SKS,” he whispered as he hung it over his back with the sling. “You don’t see many of these paratrooper models around but they’re as handy as an AK.”

  “It didn’t do him any good this time though, did it?” Grant said as he pulled the kayak up on the beach and tied the bow painter to a heavy driftwood log.”

  “Nope. I suppose they weren’t expecting their own game to be played on them.”

  The two of them quickly made their way into the cover of the trees and away from the exposed expanse of open beach. Grant looked one last time out to the sound, where Scully was still heading north to clear the shoals, having to go so far out of the way in order to head back to the south side of the island. He was glad he was not on that slow boat, where each minute would drag by like an hour as he worried himself sick about the armed killer reaching Casey and the others before they could.

  He began scanning the sandy ground between clumps of brush and grass, looking for the trail of the one who’d gotten away. It was easy enough to find, his footprints leading straight away into the interior of the island from the point where they’d last seen him. Grant had not explored the entire island, but he and Casey and Jessica had poked around enough of it on foot that he knew there were impassable marshes in parts of the interior, as well as impenetrable briar thickets in places. But if the man they were after wanted to reach Smuggler’s Cove, he could do so by sticking mostly to the lightly wooded eastern side of the island.

  Tracking a man here was going to be much easier than in the woods along the Bogue Chitto River where he’d found the telltale signs of Casey’s abductor on a sandbar. In those woods, with heavy layers of leaf litter on the forest floor, the sandbars along the creek where about the only place humans on foot would leave discernible tracks. Here on Cat Island, there was sand everywhere and much less debris on the ground. Tracking and woodcraft was one area that Grant had much more experience in than Larry, so after a quick whispered exchange, he set out ahead, keeping the short Winchester at the ready in front of him. It was a bit nerve-wracking to think that the man they were pursuing could possibly stop and hide somewhere and pick them off as they stepped into view, but Grant hoped he didn’t know they landed on the beach. If the man was making a beeline in the direction of the other boats, he wouldn’t stop, thinking that the fishing boat might be going back around there and that he had to beat it. He had already disappeared from view before they offloaded the kayak, so at least there was that. Grant knew that by taking the lead he was making himself the first target of opportunity, but knowing Larry was behind him with the firepower of the AK bolstered his confidence.

  NINE

  NICK MCGRAW WAS IN disbelief as he pushed his way through the undergrowth and thick grass of Cat Island. His arms were ripped and bleeding from busting through briar patches, but at least he’d escaped the beach with no bullet holes ventilating his body. Tim, Craig and Gina had not been so lucky. It was too bad about Gina. She was a chick he was really beginning to dig, but Nick didn’t look at any relationship as permanent. The fact was, she was dead or dying now, but he was still alive. The Hobie cat was hopelessly out of reach, and they had not begun to make progress with getting the grounded yacht afloat when those bastards on that old fishing boat suddenly showed up. Nick didn’t know where they could have come from, but it didn’t matter. He’d seen the tall masts of two sailboats that had to be anchored in Smuggler’s Cove, and he knew that one of them was his best option for getting off this hellhole of an island. Even if the men on the fishing boat didn’t take the grounded Wind Shadow for themselves, there was no way he was going to get her off alone, any more than the hapless old couple who’d gotten her there in the first place could have.

  Nick had been to Cat Island a few times, but not since the blackout. He knew enough about the island to know parts of the interior were impassable because of marshes—all the barrier islands on this coast were like that. It wasn’t that it would be impossible to wade or swim them, but they were crawling with cottonmouths and alligators, not to mention the muddy waters concealed all kinds of things like sharp oyster shells that would rip his bare feet to pieces. Nick was wearing nothing but his cargo shorts, but thankfully, the pockets were bulging with shells for the Browning 12-gauge. He shouldn’t have wasted two on the old man and woman, but at the time he had not wanted to mess up such a nice yacht by doing them with his knife in the cockpit.

  Nick had enough sense to know when he was outgunned, and even with alternating loads of slugs and double-aught buckshot the distance to the fishing boat was a bit much for a shotgun. There was no way he was going to stand there and shoot it out with someone opening up on him with what he was pretty sure was an AK-47. The shooter on the boat was pretty good too—taking down all three of his friends despite the wave action and the fact that two of the targets were running. He didn’t really blame Craig for trying to make a getaway on the Hobie—he would have done the same himself and left the others behind—but in that situation it was stupid. There was no way he could have sailed out of rifle range in time starting from where he did. All in all, it had been a close call today for Nick, but he’d survived this unexpected turn of events so far and now his only priority was to get off this island and back to West Ship where it was safe.

  H
e would make his way to Smuggler’s Cove by sticking as close to the long, eastern shoreline of the island as possible. It would be stupid to walk down the open beach, but he could stay just within the edge of the pines and live oaks trees and still skirt around the marshes. He knew that his best hope of taking one of the sailboats was by utilizing the element of surprise. He would slip up as close as possible behind the cover of the dunes and sea oats, and hope the boats were close enough to shore to be in shotgun range. If not, he would somehow conceal his weapon behind his back until he could approach close enough to use it. Then he would kill everyone on board and take whichever boat was most suitable for his purpose.

  The baking heat and humidity of the afternoon sun and the constant assault of biting deer flies that buzzed around his face and neck made his trek torture. He stubbed his toe on a piece of driftwood and stepped on a half-buried prickly pear pad, forcing him to sit and pull the thorns out of his foot. Nick hated venturing into the interior of these islands and every time he did, he didn’t have to wonder why they’d remained uninhabited before the blackout. They weren’t fit for anything but reptiles, bugs and birds. West Ship at least had the old fort and a wooden boardwalk that crossed it from the fort to the Gulf side. They’d picked the best of the islands for their base camp, that was for sure, and the rest of his friends would be elated to see him return with another captured yacht likely full of supplies that hopefully included liquor or beer.