The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid (39 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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Artie was beginning to second-guess his brother’s plan as they motored on upriver after hearing this bit of advice. What the man had said made perfect sense. In a world where the grocery stores were cleaned out and the delivery trucks were not running, anyone living on a riverbank with a functional boat would have a distinct advantage over those less fortunate souls who had no way to access the abundant food sources the river offered. And if they couldn’t find someone willing to part with the right kind of boat that could negotiate the smaller waters of the Bogue Chitto, they would end up walking once they reached the limits of where the
Casey Nicole
could go.
After leaving what was left of civilization behind at Pearlington, they motored upriver the rest of the afternoon, winding through the endless bottomland forests lining the banks on both sides, while carefully watching the muddy brown current for signs of sandbars, hidden logs, and other dangers. These hazards made it necessary to go slowly, and when the sun dropped below the trees, they had not covered as many miles as Larry had hoped. They were well to the north of the Interstate 10 bridge over the swamp, but still several miles downstream of the next bridge at Interstate 59, at least by Larry’s calculation. The I-59 crossing was the last bridge spanning the river basin between them and the mouth of the Bogue Chitto, and Artie could feel a growing sense of anticipation at being that much closer to Casey, but he was also overwhelmed with frustration about not having an appropriate boat and having to stop for the night. Larry insisted it was too risky to navigate the river in the dark, though, and steered them off the river into a wide slough that led into a large dead lake bounded by tall cypress trees. As they were maneuvering about to find the best place to drop the anchor, Scully spotted something washed up in the debris of logs, plastic bottles, and other trash that had been deposited by the last flood among the cypress knees at the lake’s edge. Upon closer inspection through Larry’s binoculars, they could see that it was a boat—or at least part of one—turned on its side and halfway submerged in the shallows. As soon as the anchor was down, Artie and Scully off-loaded the kayak and paddled over to check it out. It was indeed a battered and abandoned aluminum boat, jammed in between two cypress knees, its stern end sunk and its port gunwale bent and twisted. Upon closer inspection, Artie saw that there was large hole punctured through the thin aluminum hull, which was why it sank and probably why no one bothered to salvage it. It looked to be at least a couple of decades old, and Artie knew that such boats were cheap to buy even when new. It likely had washed downriver from some camp upstream, and probably was already neglected and abandoned before then.
Scully said Larry could fix the hole, though, and if they could get it out, he thought it was big enough to carry the outboard. But try as they might, because of the way it was jammed between the cypress knees and weighted down with water inside, the two of them couldn’t budge it. They paddled back to the catamaran; Larry passed them one end of a long mooring line and handed Scully his machete. After cutting one of the cypress knees that had it hung up and fastening the line to the bow, they were able to winch it free just as they had pulled Craig’s sailboat off the bottom at Ship Island. Once it was alongside, Artie and Scully muscled it aboard the forward deck.
After a close examination, Larry was ecstatic. “Sure, it’s all beat to hell and ugly as shit, but I can fix this. We’ll straighten the bent gunwale as much as we can and hammer the aluminum flat around the hole, and then sandwich the damaged area between two pieces of quarter-inch marine plywood, which I’ve got plenty of.”
“How will we attach the plywood so it won’t leak?” Artie asked.
“It’ll be a quick and dirty job—not pretty—but simple enough. We’ll just slather the plywood pieces in 5200, one of the toughest marine adhesives on the planet, and bolt’em together right through the hull. It’ll keep the water out long enough to get you where you’re going. This hull is twisted some too—not much we can do about that—but at least it’s big enough to mount the outboard on. I say let’s get it done tonight and then you and Scully can take off in the morning. This is as good a place as any for me to wait with the
Casey Nicole.
If you go from here in the skiff, you’ll get there before tomorrow night, easily. I think that makes more sense than trying to navigate this big-ass catamaran any farther upriver, don’t you?”
Artie did think it made more sense, and he was thrilled that he could possibly be reunited with his daughter by tomorrow night! They set to work and got the repair done after dark, leaving the boat upside down on the deck so the adhesive could at least partially cure. Larry said it wouldn’t fully cure for days, but it was thick enough to keep the water out anyway, and the screws they bolted the plywood together with would keep the patch in place. The only thing left to do was pack some food, water, and emergency gear, along with the shotgun and ammunition. Artie and Scully were going on an expedition!
More than a week had passed since Grant and Jessica had seen any sign of Casey and her abductor. He didn’t even know exactly how long it had been, maybe even longer than ten days. The days all ran together, now that every one was just the same struggle to survive and keep looking. Though they scanned every likely place someone might land a canoe during their entire descent of the Bogue Chitto, the tracks they had examined on that one sandbar their second morning on the river were both the first and the last that they found. That seemed like the distant past now to Grant, almost like another place in another time, miles and miles upstream on the banks of a river they had long since left astern. Today they turned once more down yet another twisting bayou in the lower Pearl River basin, looking for anything that might be a clue to Casey’s whereabouts. But each waterway they traveled in this labyrinth of flooded forest confirmed what he’d already known. Searching for two people, in one small canoe, in 250 square miles of swampy forest—was a daunting prospect. There was simply no way he and Jessica could try all the possible routes that the man who had Casey could have taken, and he knew there was also a chance that he had left the river and taken her somewhere overland. They could have missed any sign where he did this and continued on downriver without knowing it.
Of course Grant didn’t have a map of the river basin with him, and he’d only paddled through it once, several years ago, and along just one the dozens of possible routes that a canoe could take to the river’s end at the coast. Now he was faced with trying to explore all these possibilities, without the benefit of a map, and each time they reached the end of one bayou, they had to backtrack upstream against the current to check out others that branched off on different routes. It was incredibly frustrating, not to mention physically exhausting. Grant knew that even if he had a boat with an outboard motor and could zip up and down all these waterways at speed, it would still take days to cover them all and there was no way to account for the endless changes in route that the man he was pursuing might take in the meantime.
On top of the difficulties of trying to find Casey, Grant had the even bigger problem of trying to forage and catch enough food for them both to eat while they traveled. This was proving to be a greater challenge than he had imagined, despite the fact that they were in a rich ecosystem with great diversity of plant and animal life both in the water and in the forests it flowed through.The biggest problem with trying to find food while also looking for Casey was the amount of time it took away from their search for her. While he’d had been lucky that first night he set drop hooks and caught a catfish, night after successive night he was unsuccessful in catching another by this method. He did manage to land a decent-sized bass on one occasion with the rod and reel and one of the lures he’d found in the canoe shed, but other than that, fishing was not as productive as he’d hoped.
Jessica finally succumbed to hunger and ate a sizeable portion of fish when he cooked the bass in the coals of their campfire that night, and that was a big relief to Grant, as he was worried about her getting weaker. Just as he expected, it was proving really difficult to find enough food to support her vegetarian diet in the swamp, especially this early in the year when a lot of seasonal wild plant foods simply were not available. It was the right time of year for tender cattail shoots, though, and they both ate their fill of these whenever they came to a patch of them at the water’s edge. They were tasty and easy to gather, but not very sustaining for the kind of effort they were expending each day paddling the canoe. When they reached the swamps of the Pearl, he was also able to gather hearts of palm from the dense thickets of palmettos that grew there, but getting to these required a lot of effort with the machete for the small reward in each plant.
The easiest source of available protein in the swamp, he soon discovered, were the abundant freshwater crawfish that were everywhere in the still backwaters and slow-running creeks. At first, catching them by hand proved nearly impossible, but then he tried wading in the edges of the shallows at night after they’d made camp, using his flashlight in one hand to spot them and cause them to back away from the beam. This made it possible to grab them with the other hand and eventually collect enough to make a meal. Jessica was reluctant to try the bug-like creatures at first, but again, her hunger was becoming so constant that she gave in and discovered she liked them almost as much as the fish. Grant said they were exactly the same as lobsters, only smaller, and having crawfish boils was a long-standing tradition among the locals throughout the region. The only problem with this food source was that he only had one more set of batteries for the flashlight, and using it for a couple of hours at a time would soon deplete those. He also saw bullfrogs along the bank at night, but could never get close enough to even attempt to grab one. If only he still had the .22 pistol, he knew he could shoot them before they hopped away, but then again, if he had that, he would be able to put a wide variety of meat in the pot fairly easily.
They frequently passed chattering squirrels from just a few feet away and saw many small birds, rabbits, and even wild turkeys that would have been in range of a well-placed shot, but they were all out of reach without a projectile weapon. Grant had seen the Wapishana hunt with primitive bows and arrows and the blowguns they made from materials collected in the jungle, and while he knew a lot about the theory of primitive weapons from his anthropology studies, he lacked any practical experience in making them. He did know enough to know that producing useable weapons, especially bows, required not only skill in choosing materials and crafting them, but also time for the wood to season properly. It was not something he could invest that much time in yet, but after seeing all those frogs at night he did fashion a rudimentary spear out of a large section of river cane in hopes of getting lucky and impaling one. They also saw plenty of big garfish in the shallows practically every day, and he knew that with patience he might be able to spear one. At this point, he was ready to eat anything that moved, and also kept a lookout for snakes and turtles, both of which were abundant, but difficult to approach close enough to catch.
The coffee had run out a few days ago, and following more than a year of caffeine addiction in graduate school, he suffered headaches for a couple of days, but now seemed to be over it. He doubted he’d get another cup of coffee any time soon, even if they had not been combing the swamp looking for Casey. Coffee was one of those luxury commodities imported from afar that simply would no longer be available after the collapse of the power grid and easy transportation. He knew that a lot of things wouldn’t be available, but he still felt that if they had made it to the cabin according to their initial plan, they would have been better off than most. With enough canned foods to last a few weeks and the pistol for hunting, as well as a better selection of fishing gear that his father had left there, he felt they could have hung on long enough. And though it might have been difficult, the difficulty would have been nothing compared to trying to survive with hardly any equipment while paddling and searching for someone day after day, always on the move.
With what would soon be two weeks of fruitless searching behind them, Grant had to admit to himself that they might never see Casey again. He still felt guilt for letting the abduction happen to begin with, but he also told himself that he had done everything that anyone could reasonably expect in his efforts to track down the man who had taken her. He knew that they couldn’t go on like this, and that he couldn’t provide for Jessica indefinitely with so little equipment. He knew it was time to start thinking about their future, both in the long term and in terms of what they should do next. One thing he was sure of—it would be out of the question to turn around and travel upriver all that distance they’d come and then some to try to reach his cabin in the canoe. If they were well fed and had their full strength, that would be one thing, but before they could even contemplate such a journey, Grant knew they had to try to find some supplies and equipment. He didn’t know if that was within reason or not, but it seemed that if they traveled on downriver, closer to the coast, they might find people in some of the rural areas who were in a better situation than most and could help them. The other option was to try to find more uninhabited weekend camps like some they had seen on the Bogue Chitto, where they might be able to pillage some canned goods or other groceries. He knew that if the owners of any such retreats had been unable to get to them by now, they likely never would, and would not need them anyway. Thinking about this, he realized it was just as likely that some desperate refugees might have taken up residence in his own cabin and made use of the goods stored there. If so, going all that way would prove a waste of time and effort. Considering all this, he didn’t really know what to do.

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