The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid (27 page)

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Authors: Scott B. Williams

BOOK: The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid
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“Shouldn’t I be in the back, since I don’t know what I’m doing?” she asked.
“No, that’s exactly why you need to sit up front. The stern paddler is the one who does all the steering and keeps the boat going straight. All you have to do from the front is paddle to provide extra power. It’ll take both of us to paddle against the current.”
When Jessica was situated, Grant grabbed the gunwales with both hands and put one foot in the boat while he shoved them off with the other. The canoe immediately started drifting backwards until he dug in with his paddle and began stroking hard to gain momentum against the river. Jessica splashed her paddle awkwardly until Grant told her how to properly hold it and how deep to dip it on each stroke. They made progress at a crawling pace at first, slowly leaving the cabin behind them as they paddled past the woods they’d crept through on foot to get there. The river made a gradual bend to the right and it was not until they had followed that curve around to the end that they could get a glimpse of the distant bridge where Casey would be waiting with the bikes.
“There it is!” Jessica said. “We made it, but this is a lot harder than riding the bikes, even uphill. How far did we paddle, a mile?”
“Not hardly,” Grant said. “More like a little over a quarter of a mile. It’ll be a half by the time we get to the bridge.”
“Oh wow. We’ll
never
get to the cabin at this rate then. Didn’t you say it was like 10 miles?”
“It is, but it’s still just like riding the bikes. Remember when we left New Orleans? I said don’t think about the whole distance. Just focus on riding and the miles will slip by. It’s the same with paddling, it’s just a lot slower—but we don’t have nearly as far to travel by canoe as we did by bike. We’ll get there, probably by tomorrow night, in spite of the current.”
As he spoke these words of encouragement to Jessica, he knew it was going to be a hard slog upstream, but had no doubt they would make it. By the time they got to the cabin, Jessica and Casey would know how to paddle a canoe, he figured. Now that they had a canoe, he felt a whole lot better about their overall situation than he had earlier that day when faced with the prospect of being turned back at the roadblock. It had always amazed him how practically no one in this country utilized the rivers any more for anything other than occasional recreation. In Guyana, the rivers were the highways of the jungle. One seldom traveled far without passing local dugouts, going both upstream and down. He was just wondering if anyone else would be using the Bogue Chitto as a travel route when he saw the flash of a reflection off a wet paddle under the bridge ahead. Sure enough, it was a canoe coming downstream. Jessica saw it too as they continued to paddle, hugging the bank next to the woods to stay out of the strongest current. The downstream-bound canoe, however, was closer to the other side of the river, taking advantage of the main flow. As it came closer, they could see the hull was a dull aluminum color, identical to the one they were in. It was guided by a lone paddler with a mountain of gear in front of him, all of it covered by a camouflage tarp lashed over it. The other canoeist saw them too; there was no way to avoid it. Grant hoped he wasn’t a local resident who knew the owners of the cabin they’d “borrowed” their boat from, but from the amount of stuff he had with him it seemed unlikely. This guy looked like he was planning to stay in the woods for a long time, and was just passing through here as quickly as possible.
The solitary paddler looked right at them as he went by going downstream, and Grant waved. The distance was a little too far for comfortable conversation, and Grant figured if he had wanted to talk, he would have steered his canoe closer to their side of the river when he first saw them. Instead, he waved back, watching them as he paddled by, but showing no intention of slowing down. Grant wondered if Casey had seen him go by or if the man had seen her when he paddled past the bridge.
“I wonder where he’s going?” Jessica asked.
“I don’t know, but it looks like he knows what he’s doing. See how he’s only paddling on one side of the canoe? He’s using a guide stroke to keep it tracking straight, and he’s right in the middle of the current for better speed. Not at all your typical weekend canoe renter like you usually see around here. He’s probably traveling the river to avoid people, which is a smart idea. It looks like he’s loaded to bug out to the woods for a long time too. He may be headed for the big swamps downstream, where the Bogue Chitto runs into the Pearl River.”
When Grant and Jessica were out of sight, Casey began thinking about how nice it would be to clean up a bit while she had the privacy. The rain had stopped and the afternoon sky was starting to brighten a bit in the west, giving her hope that the cloudy overcast would soon give way to sunshine again. She felt awful after riding in the rain for two days, and knew a quick bath and changing back into dry clothes would do wonders for her attitude. The river did not look inviting at the edge of the canebrake where they had hidden the bicycles. The bank there was muddy and it looked like it dropped off into a deep hole with swirling currents where she could not see anything below the surface. But when they had pushed the bikes down the bank from the highway, she had noticed a large sandbar just upstream of the bridge. Part of it was probably visible from the roadway above, but it looked to her like it continued on, beyond where the river curved around out of sight to where it would be obscured by trees and secluded enough for a quick dip before Grant and Jessica returned. She knew Grant wouldn’t want her to wander off and leave the bikes, but they had seen no one on the road in the vicinity of the bridge and she couldn’t imagine anyone finding them before she got back.
She sorted through her gear and made sure she had dry clothes and shampoo in her backpack, then she put her father’s pistol in it as well and started up the bank, passing beneath the concrete pilings supporting the bridge. She had to push her way through more river cane on the other side of the bridge to reach the sandbar, but once she was there, she saw that it was ideal for her purpose. It did indeed stretch around the bend, its edge sloping off as a sandy beach into the river, where she could sit or crouch in two feet of amber-colored water that was translucent enough to allow her to see what was on the bottom.
She walked until she found a convenient log to put her backpack on to keep it out of the sand, then looked back to make sure she was completely out of sight of the bridge. She felt a little self-conscious taking her clothes off on the wide-open sandbar in broad daylight, but told herself that was silly as there was no one around and nothing in sight of the sandbar but the river itself and the surrounding dense woods. Besides, it felt great to peel off her soggy long-sleeve shirt and cargo pants, which she hung on a nearby branch. It was even better to remove her wet socks and feel the soft sand between her toes. She continued stripping down until she was completely naked, hanging her sports bra and panties next to the rest of her clothes and wading into the river with the bottle of shampoo. The water was colder than she expected, but she was determined to have a bath. She walked in until she was knee-deep and gradually eased herself down to a sitting position on the bottom. Once the water was up to her waist, it didn’t feel quite as cold. She held the shampoo bottle between her knees and used her cupped hands to dip water over her head to wash her hair. Lathering up and washing away the greasy feeling and road grime of the last three days was wonderful. When she was done with her hair, she stood and used the shampoo to wash her entire body, then, after rinsing the shampoo by kneeling back in and splashing herself with her hands, she stepped back onto the sandbar to drip dry. She rinsed and squeezed out the bra and underwear and hung them back up on the branch. Even though she was sure she was alone, she still felt uncomfortable standing out in the open naked, and slipped on the sweatpants and last clean T-shirt from her backpack. Grant and Jessica would be jealous to learn she’d had a nice bath and changed into her last dry clothes. She was sure they would want to do the same when they came back, hopefully in the canoe that would take them to the cabin.
Thinking about the canoe, she looked out at the river and wondered how hard it was going to be to travel upstream against the current. Grant had said that it was less than 10 miles by river from this bridge to the cabin, but it sure looked to her like it wouldn’t be easy to paddle that far going the wrong way. Grant had said the strongest current was usually in the middle and along the outside edge of bends, and that by sticking to the inside edges of the river’s curves they could play the eddies and patches of slack water to make progress. Looking upriver along the sandbar on which she stood, it
did
appear that there was a reverse current flowing the other way near the bank. Curious, she left her backpack and drying clothes where they were and walked a bit further in that direction to get a closer look at the eddy and see how far it went. The river seemed to curve on around almost like a horseshoe bend, and she thought if she walked upriver another hundred feet or so she might see where it straightened out again. Then it would be time to head back to the bicycles and wait for Grant and Jessica.
The sandbar narrowed as she went upstream, and in places tall river birch and sycamore trees leaned out of the forested top bank and forced her to duck under to pass. She could see now why Grant had said they couldn’t walk upstream following the river. The sandbars were not continuous, and in the places where there were none, this hardwood forest would be extremely difficult to travel through, as the understory beneath the trees was a choked tangle of vines and bushes forming a wall of greenery at the water’s edge. She looked at the river as she walked, fascinated by the counter-current and marveling at how much Grant knew about rivers and so many other things relevant to their situation. It felt liberating to be walking barefoot in such a pristine place after bathing naked in the river, and she imagined that Grant would feel right at home doing exactly that. Then she thought about what it would be like if he were here now, just the two of them, without Jessica. It was a momentary pleasant daydream, but she was suddenly startled out of it when she ducked under another big tree and was stopped in her tracks by what she saw just a short distance upstream, at the upper limit of the sandbar. Pulled halfway up on the bank ahead of her was an old aluminum canoe that clearly had not just washed up there on its own. A paddle was leaning against it, and a green canvas backpack and two large duffel bags were lashed down to the thwarts inside it. Casey felt suddenly exposed and vulnerable, not believing someone could have been this close all this time without her knowing it, especially when she was bathing naked in the river just around the bend. She took a faltering step backward, suddenly wishing she had not left the backpack and the gun that was in it behind. As she did, she backed into something solid that had not been there before, and faster than she could react, she felt an impossibly strong arm encircle her waist and a steely hand close over her mouth to stifle the instinctive cry of alarm that would have come next.
Before she could even struggle, she felt herself pulled backward and off her feet by her unseen assailant. The next thing she knew she was on the ground and belly down in the sand, both arms pinned behind her by an immovable weight that she soon realized was her attacker’s knee as he forced some kind of fabric in her mouth and used both hands to tie it tightly behind her head. She tried desperately to spit it out and scream, but it was no use. She couldn’t even turn her head to see what he looked like before she felt yet another piece of cloth being wrapped and tied over her eyes and forehead. The weight shifted and she felt hands working at her wrists, tying something around them, securing them behind her back so that she was totally helpless, blindfolded and gagged. She tried to use her feet to flip herself over and kick at her attacker, but when he had finished securing her hands, she felt her ankles locked together in a vise-like grip and then the constricting force of something being wrapped and tied around them as well. The next thing she knew, she was lifted from the sand in strong arms, carried a short distance, and put down on the sand again. She heard movement that she realized was the sound of the canoe sliding in the water, and then felt herself lifted again. Twisting and squirming did nothing to prevent her from being picked up and set down again, this time on a hard surface, with softer objects under her feet and head. She heard a crackling sound as something was pulled over her, and then could feel it being tucked around her and pulled tight as the other objects in the canoe were shifted around and positioned so that her movements were even further restricted. She realized that she being covered by something, as it shut out what little light she had seen before through the blindfold. She felt the canoe slide some more until it was free of the bank, then she could feel it floating free and tipping sharply to one side as someone stepped into it and sat down. She heard a paddle dip into the water, then felt the canoe surge beneath her, then pick up speed to the sound of rhythmic stroking as it moved into the river current.

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