“She’s right, Jessica. Scully will look out for both of them. I’d feel safe going anywhere with him. You’ll see….” Artie’s reply was cut short by a sudden, echoing sound that seemed to come from the direction they were heading. It was faint and far away, yet close enough that there could be no mistaking what it was.
“That was a gunshot, wasn’t it?” Jessica asked,
“Yeah, I think so,” Casey said.
“There’s no doubt about that,” her dad agreed.
“We must be pretty close to the boat by now, aren’t we? I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with Larry. Could it just be him shooting something, Dad? Maybe he got bored and went hunting.”
“No. He doesn’t have a gun on the boat. That Mossberg shotgun Scully took this morning was his vessel defense weapon. He’s had it on board since we left Culebra, and that was the only firearm any of us had. That shot must have been from someone else.”
“Then we’d better paddle faster!” Casey said, “Uncle Larry may be in trouble.”
“Hold on now, Casey. Sounds like that can be deceptive in the woods, and carry farther than you’d think. It’s hard to know if it was even anywhere near Larry and the boat. We do need to hurry as much as possible, but let’s also proceed with caution and try not to make too much noise. We don’t want to run into any surprises, but we need to be ready if we do. Here, you need to take this.”
Casey turned around on her seat to see her dad put down his paddle and reach into the duffle bag in the bottom of the canoe to retrieve the pistol that Grant had returned to him yesterday. He had left it in his parked car at the New Orleans airport, and Grant had found it when he’d gone there to leave Casey’s note explaining their plans to leave the city and go to the remote cabin. It was only a .22 Long Rifle automatic, but Casey had learned to shoot with it years before and knew she could use it with accuracy and control. He passed it to her by way of Jessica so she would have it ready at hand if something happened, but she was glad to also see her dad taking out the Saiga AK-47 she had taken from Derek’s camp. Her dead abductor’s other hunting rifles were also in the bag, but if they needed to shoot from a moving canoe, it would be better to have the firepower of the AK’s 30-round magazine to make up for the inevitable misses.
“Okay, we can go on now, but try not to make any splashes with the paddles. If somebody’s around, we don’t want to let them know we’re coming and give them time to set up an ambush.”
“This is exactly the reason I didn’t want Grant and Scully to take that boat upriver,” Jessica said. “We should have all stuck together.”
“It’s going to be okay, Jessica. It was only one shot. It was probably just someone else out here hunting. Everybody in a place like this has got to get food somehow. Whoever it is, they are probably no threat to us. We just need to be cautious, that’s all.”
Casey hoped he was right. The last thing she wanted was another confrontation out in these woods. All she really wanted was peace and safety; two simple things that she’d taken for granted all her life but that seemed like nearly unattainable dreams today. To wish for more was beyond comprehension now.
THREE
Grant glanced over his shoulder from the bow of the Johnboat as Scully steered it into the first bend upriver from where Jessica, Casey, and Artie stood watching them go. He didn’t like the idea of splitting up the group any more than Jessica did, but he had to let reason get the better of emotion. There was nothing easy about this life in the aftermath of the pulse, and with no information on the scope of the damage, and no word from anyone who came from any place that was not affected, it would be foolish to assume things would get better anytime soon. While it might be true that other survivors had found and ransacked the small cabin his parents had built years ago for weekends and vacations, the location was remote enough that there was a good chance they had not. Grant knew that some of the local rural people in the area were aware of the cabin, but he also knew that most people living out there full time were already fairly well equipped and self-sufficient as a lifestyle choice. Those people would respect the property of others and likely leave the cabin alone, at least to a point. Those who wouldn’t do so were the desperate and ill-equipped who were making an exodus from the desperation of cities like New Orleans, where there was little chance of survival in the midst of so many. Many of them would not make it out of the suburbs, as Grant and his friends had already seen, but those who did would sweep the countryside like a swarm of locusts, looking for anything they could find to sustain life. It was certain that some of them would eventually find their way to the cabin, but if he and Scully could just get there first and get the supplies and tools he knew were stored there, he didn’t care what happened after that to the land or the building. Staying there to defend it would be suicide, and they now had a far better option anyway. Grant was happy indeed at this turn of events, marked by the arrival of Casey’s dad and Scully on the river. The prospect of sailing away from the mainland on a seaworthy boat gave him more hope than anything that had happened since he had left New Orleans on bicycles with Casey and Jessica.
In those first days after the power grid collapsed, he had thought of the cabin as the best refuge until order was restored and supplies and aid started arriving from other regions. That was when he still maintained hope that the blackout was a local or regional event and that the damage could be repaired in a few weeks, or at most, months. Now he knew for certain that it was more widespread, to at least as far away as the eastern Caribbean, so he knew the cabin in the woods was almost certainly an unsustainable option. Staying put anywhere was probably a bad idea, especially anywhere that others could get to on foot. At least with the sailboat they could anchor at remote islands reachable only by other boats. That would eliminate the threat from the majority of the population right from the start. And the best thing about it was that he would be with Casey and Jessica through it all, wherever the journey might take them and however long the situation lasted. The two of them were all he really had here anyway, with his parents living in a remote part of Bolivia that made communication with them difficult and infrequent even in normal times. Grant was certain they were better off than most folks, even if the effects of the blackout indeed reached that part of South America. He had no other relatives or close friends still living in the New Orleans area, so if not for Casey and Jessica he would have been dealing with all of this alone.
Grant had barely known Casey before and had just met her roommate, Jessica, after the blackout occurred. With his close friends either at other universities or starting their careers in other cities, Grant had mostly kept to himself while working his way through a graduate degree in anthropology at Tulane University. He had first run into Casey while assisting one of his professors on a field trip for an undergrad class. After that she had occasionally stopped to chat when they passed in a hallway or on campus. He found her attractive, but at the time had failed to realize how interested in him she really was. As he often did with girls, he missed an opportunity to get to know her further by never taking the initiative to simply ask her out for a date, which he now realized she would have certainly said yes to. Had it been Jessica stopping to chat, he would have been even shyer. Jessica was one of those girls he considered out of his league—so gorgeous he would have barely made eye contact with her—and he wouldn’t have dared to assume she’d be interested in him. They wouldn’t have had anything in common anyway, as she certainly didn’t appear to be the outdoorsy type, and as a theater major she was too busy with rehearsals and performances to go camping or on field trips. While Jessica could get the attention of most any guy she wanted and was used to getting her way, Grant saw that as a strike against her in a time of crisis. At first, she had seemed clueless to the real nature of the danger they were in, and he thought she would have a much harder time dealing with it and adapting than Casey would. And he was right up to a point, at least in the beginning. But after spending days alone in the wild with he
r as they searched for Casey, his opinion of her had changed along with the changes in her own attitude. Jessica had turned out to be tougher than she looked, and her readiness and ability to adapt to changing circumstances both surprised and impressed him.
It also surprised him that she didn’t want him out of her sight. By the time they left New Orleans on the bikes, he already knew Casey wanted to be more than just friends. It was becoming obvious that she had a crush on him even if he hadn’t realized it before. Now it was clear that Jessica did, too. Grant wasn’t sure how any of this would play out, but the last thing he wanted to do was come between the two friends or hurt one or both of them. With everything else they all had to deal with, that kind of drama was the last thing any of them needed. As he often did when faced with choices, Grant trusted that he would be presented with some kind of sign to tell him what to do. He trusted that whatever was to happen, it would work itself out. But one thing he was already sure of was that he wanted to make this trip to the cabin as fast as possible and get back to the company of both Casey and Jessica. He had been worried about them from the moment he and Scully left them behind, even though he felt they were safe with Casey’s dad.
He saw that the canoe was riding fine at the end of its towline in the wake of the outboard, and that Scully was a natural at reading the channels of an unfamiliar river and avoiding shoals and obstructions. Grant had decided he liked Scully the moment he met him. It was clear that the Rastafarian islander was unperturbed by the hardships and dangers of this new reality they all found themselves in. A man with his confidence and skills could be nothing other than a valuable asset to the group, and Grant was glad he was along for this trip upriver. While he would have been willing to make this run to the cabin alone if necessary, it felt good to have someone watching his back, and to know that his companion was competent at handling both boats and guns. Scully had the Mossberg shotgun on the stern seat beside him and Grant was cradling the lever-action carbine in his lap as he scanned the dark forests at the water’s edge for any signs of danger. Each bend of the river could reveal a surprise, so he kept his attention focused, knowing there might be little time to act if something was amiss.
The battered old Johnboat that Casey’s Uncle Larry had patched up after they found it abandoned in the swamp was no speedboat, by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to the canoe he had been paddling for more than a week it sure seemed fast. To paddle upriver from that far down would have been so slow the trip to the cabin would have taken well over a week, but the motor pushed them against the current with ease. In less than four hours they were out of the big swamps of the lower Pearl River and had entered the Bogue Chitto River, the smaller tributary stream upon which the cabin was located. It would have been difficult to find if Grant had not been familiar with the confluence, but he had paddled this way just days before with Jessica, as they tried in vain to catch up to Casey and her abductor.
Grant knew this part of the Bogue Chitto was three or four long days away from the cabin at the normal pace of a canoe going downstream, and he had only been this far down it one other time during a weeklong canoe-camping trip that ended near the coast. These lower reaches were unfamiliar to him, but easier for Scully to navigate because the channel was still wide and deep, much like the Pearl. The banks here were mostly overhung with bushes and other foliage fighting for sunlight at the edges of the dark forests along both banks. When they finally came to a small sandbar with a gently sloping beach that would make landing the boat easy, Grant motioned for Scully to pull over.
“I need to stretch my legs and take a pee,” he explained.
Scully nodded and reduced the engine speed to idle, allowing the boat to drift to the bank. Upon landing they walked around the sandbar for a few minutes, looking for signs that other people had been there since the last rain. But there was nothing but raccoon and alligator tracks, including the trail of a big gator that had left slide marks with its tail where it had apparently crawled into the water earlier that same day.
“Nevah knew so much bush in dis place,” Scully said. “Before I comin’ here, I t’ink everyt’ing in dis country is like Miami and New York.”
“So you thought America was just one big city, huh? I think a lot of people from other countries think that until they come here. When I was in Guyana all the villagers there had that impression. All they asked about was the cities. But what struck me about the jungle there was how much it was like these swamps and woods around here in the Deep South.”
“A mon could live hoppy in dis bush, you know,” Scully said, looking at the tracks and watching as a large-mouth bass struck at something on the surface of the river near the far bank.
“Yeah, there’s plenty of game and fish, but I don’t know how long it will stay that way. It looks like nothing but wilderness right here along the river, but you get just a short distance away on high ground and there are roads, farms, and small towns. The people that live in these rural areas will be hunting nonstop when they run out of what they have on hand.”
As if to prove his point, the silence of the forest was shattered by two gunshots in rapid succession, far in the distance, but still close enough to distinguish as coming from a large-caliber rifle.
“Mehbe somebody shoot somet’ing to eat jus’ now, mon.”
“Probably. Could have been a deer. These woods are full of deer, even though there have always been plenty of outlaws who hunted them out of season even before all this happened.”
“A mon’s got to feed his family when dem hungry. Not to worry ’bout what de law seh.”
“Yeah, that’s true, and more than ever now. But now that there’s no law at all, it may not be as good as it seems. We’re really on our own now.”
“Not to worry, Grant. Let’s go. We going to dat cabin and get bok to de boat tomorrow. Where Larry sailin’ nevah havin’ law to begin. We goin’ to de sea an’ livin’ like dem pirate in de old days. De wind, de sun, de sea…a good boat, good friends, lotta fish an’ some island to hide on, mehbe plant de ganja seed. Who can ask for somet’ing more, mon?”
Another hour of motoring after leaving the sandbar put them into a part of the Bogue Chitto that looked completely different than the swampy lowlands they had left downstream. Here, the forests were predominately pine, and the channel was bounded by alternating areas of steep clay banks and bars of mixed sand and gravel. The water ran swift and clear over shallow shoals, and fallen trees and stumps were everywhere, forcing Scully to slow down and carefully pick his way among them to follow the deepest channel. In some places, they even had to get out of the boat and wade, towing it and the canoe upstream behind them, with the motor shut down and tilted up. The outboard was vulnerable to damage with so many obstructions and they couldn’t risk bending or breaking the prop; without it, getting much farther upstream would be hopeless. As a result of all this stopping and starting, the afternoon hours slipped away and Grant realized they were going to have to camp for the night. The trip was going to take the better part of two days instead of the one long one he’d hoped for. They found a place on a high sandbar before it got too dark to see, and though there were no paths or other signs that the spot connected to a nearby road or farm, they kept their camp dark, putting out their cooking fire as soon as the rice was done.
“So tell me, mon, how you knowin’ de two most beautiful girls in de college an’ how you talkin’ dem into going to de bush wid you?”
Grant laughed. “I don’t think it was me so much as it was the promise of a roof over their heads in a place where everybody wasn’t going crazy. I told them there was a generator at the cabin, and that we would have lights, a fan, and plenty to eat and drink. I think that’s what they were interested in.
“Anyway, I met Casey last semester when she came along on an anthropology dig I was helping my professor with. We kind of kept running into each other around campus and stuff, but I never asked her out. I didn’t think she liked me that way. I had seen her roo
mmate around, but we had never been introduced. I sure wouldn’t have gone after her. She was one of those girls that always had guys hanging around, you know what I mean?”
“So she had a boyfriend before, den?”
“Oh sure. Good-looking guy, pre-med student, nice car, parents with money…. I doubt it was serious, and she probably would have dumped him anyway, but guys like that always get the hot girls on campus.”
“But if a mon havin’ a girl like Jessica, where he at now? Why she wid you an’ not wid he?”
“Because he was stupid, that’s why. I invited him to come to the cabin, too, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t believe the blackout was serious. They had a big fight. He stayed in New Orleans and she came with me and Casey.”
“An’ now, both de girl dem likin’ you! I can see it in Casey eye when she lookin’ at you, mon. An’ I can hear it in de way Jessica, she don’t want you goin’ up de river wid I. So what you gonna do, mon? Two beautiful girl, an’ dem got not’ing to do now, no place to goin’ bok to. All de world fresh an’ new now dat Jah, he seh enough of dis technology an’ desecration of he creation an’ put out de light for good. Mehbe you gonna soon be married, mon, an’ start a family down in de island!”
Grant laughed at this. “I don’t know about all that, Scully. I was just trying to help out a friend, and her friend, too, of course. I needed them as much as they needed me, though. I would have hated to try and make that trip out here alone. Casey’s one tough and smart woman, I’ll tell you that. But Jessica surprised me, too. I thought she would break down at first, but man, she’s really hung in there when things were at their worst. They’re both survivors, and I’m glad they both came with me. I’m really glad Casey’s got her dad and her uncle and that she’s with them now. I know how close she was to her dad. She told me what happened to her mom when she was just twelve. I feel for Jessica though, the not knowing. Her parents live in Los Angeles, and there’s just no telling how long it’ll be before she finds out anything. She must be worried sick, and I’m sure they are, too. Right now, all she has is Casey and me. So, I guess it’s natural she would want to cling to us both.”
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