Refuge: After the Collapse

by Scott B. Williams

  Once they were under the bridge and had rounded the first bend, putting them safely out of sight of the bridge, it was once again Artie’s turn to get a break from the paddling. He climbed aboard the catamaran while Jessica took his place behind Casey.

  “We’re doing great, Doc! I didn’t expect this to go so smoothly, much less this fast.”

  “Well, about all Casey and Jessica have been doing for the last few weeks is riding bicycles and paddling canoes!”

  “They are two tough young women, I’ll tell you that! I’m a lucky captain to have a crew like this.”

  “I just hope the rest of that crew catches up soon.”

  “You and me both, Doc. I don’t want to have to hang around Cat Island for long, but I’ll sure feel better out there than on this river. I don’t even like the idea of stopping for the night. But I know how hard all of you are working in the kayak. You’ve got to get some rest, but I’ve been thinking, we’re doing so well, maybe we ought to stop somewhere in the next mile or two for a few hours, then get the anchor back up and get on down the river past that last bridge while it’s still dark. The moon will be plenty bright enough to see how to navigate. What do you say, are you up for it?”

  “You’re the captain. Whatever you think is best, we’ll do it. I’m sure we can make it if we can get at least a few hours of sleep.”

  “Good. Go up there and tell the girls. If they can paddle one more hour, we’ll look for a place to drop anchor. It’ll be almost sundown by then, anyway.”

  Scully dozed, off and on, with his back against the tree, as he waited for dawn so he could get moving. The gash in his leg was hurting more now than it had when it had first happened, as he had known it would. It was not a clean cut, like a slash from a blade, which would have been painful enough. It was worse, because skin and muscle had been roughly torn by whatever ragged piece of metal he’d run into. The force of the current and the speed at which he was swimming underwater in an effort to escape his captors provided enough impact that the object did not have to be particularly sharp to do the nasty damage it did. Still, Scully counted himself lucky. He knew it could have been far worse. In that inky black river water, he could have hit the unseen object with his face and gouged out an eye, or, even scarier, could have been hung up and trapped there beneath the surface until he drowned. He had not stopped Joey and Zach or taken back the boat and canoe as he’d hoped to, but he was alive, and more importantly, free. It would be painful, but he could still walk, and as the darkness that cloaked the forest lightened to the gray of dawn, he pulled himself to his feet to get started.

  Scully had spent the hours he was awake through the night thinking about the best course of action. He knew that attempting to travel downstream any distance on foot was futile. He could never reach the place where the catamaran was anchored that way. There was too much swamp and too many sloughs, side creeks, and dead lakes blocking the way. He thought about trying to go back to the cabin. But that was a long way, and although he was sure that he could get there on foot, it would take a lot of extra time. Of course he would have preferred to let Grant know he had escaped, and to travel with him in an effort to get to the catamaran in time. But beating Joey and Zach there would be impossible if he backtracked all that way, and it was improbable no matter what he did.

  The biggest problem with going to the cabin was that he doubted Grant would be sitting there waiting around. Why would he? From what Scully had learned of him in the brief time since he’d met him, all his energies since the blackout happened had been devoted to helping Casey and Jessica get out of the city. Without them, he would have no purpose. No, Scully was sure that Grant would have left, one way or the other. Even now he was probably walking south, or perhaps he had figured out a way to get the motorcycle running. Scully couldn’t believe those two had simply left Grant there free to go and do as he pleased. It showed that they really were not experienced men and still boys—naïve college boys who had been insulated from danger all their lives and didn’t have sense enough to survive in this kind of reality. The kind of people Scully was used to dealing with on the islands certainly would not have left Grant alive in that situation, after robbing him and telling him they were going after the people he loved. That had been their mistake, and Scully hoped Grant would find a way to the boat on his own, but he knew it was unrealistic to think he could help him. Instead, what he had to do was get another boat and get himself down the river as fast as possible. The good thing was that he knew exactly where to find one, and not that far away. The rich person’s weekend retreat they had passed shortly before they encountered the rough water was within reasonable walking distance, even in these thick woods with his injured leg. And Scully knew that two of the aluminum canoes like the one they had been towing behind the Johnboat were still there. They had all seen them in the moonlight as they passed and Joey and Zach had even commented on them. What he did not know was that the kayak he had seen there with the canoes when he and Grant went by the day before was now missing. And even as he spent the night resting against the tree to make sure the bleeding from his leg had stopped, Grant had paddled by in it less than a quarter of a mile away and was now miles ahead of him downstream.

  Before he left the lightning-damaged pine tree with its supply of sticky sap that he had used to seal his wound, Scully checked his leg to be sure he had applied enough to last. The thing about the sap was that it was nearly impossible to get off skin even if you were trying. His hand was still sticky with it and even with the amount of blood running out of the gash when he’d applied it, the gooey resin on his leg was not going to come off anytime soon. Scully had seen this technique used many times while living in the bush in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. There, at elevations far above the jungle lowlands, similar pine trees grew and the sap was an old-time remedy often used by woodcutters after an accident with a machete or axe. The sap had the double benefit of almost instantly stopping the blood flow and sealing the wound from outside infection by becoming a congealed, sticky, and airtight mess that pathogens could not penetrate. He knew that by the time the sap did dry enough to peel away, the wound would be well on its way to healing. He was just grateful to Jah this had happened in a place where he could find the gift of the resin. And if later the wound was still too slow to heal and needed stitches, then Larry’s brother, Doc, could fix him up.

  It took him nearly two hours to make his way to the house where the canoes were stored, and by then the sun was high enough to give plenty of light for him to check that the place was indeed empty. Scully still berated himself for foolishly walking into the sights of Zach’s rifle. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. From the edge of the woods, he saw that there were two canoes left, and though they had been chained to the two-by-four lumber racks on which they were stored, someone had chopped through the wood to free the other boat and the short piece of chain used to secure each boat was now passing around only a thwart. Scully was relieved to see that the two remaining boats were not locked to each other either. Whoever owned them had thoughtfully purchased a separate padlock and piece of chain for each one.

  The other missing boat puzzled him, though. He knew it was some kind of small kayak because Grant had made a remark about it the day before when they passed it going upriver. Someone had taken it in the short time since, and Scully couldn’t say if it had been before or after he had passed by with Joey and Zach, as there had not been enough light to see anything but the silhouettes of the two canoes, which were much bigger and more visible. Could Grant have possibly made it here that fast? Scully thought that perhaps that might be the case. Who else would just happen to come along and find it now after it had sat here untouched for all this time since the blackout? If it had been Grant, then he was on the river even now and already ahead of him on the journey back to the catamaran.

  The pain in his leg made him want to sit down and rest, but the prospect of catching up to Grant was too promising. He knew he could rest his leg on
ce he was on the river in the canoe, so he decided to push on immediately. He found a paddle, and then dragged the boat down the bank to the muddy landing at the water’s edge. Sure enough, there were fresh footprints and drag marks where someone had recently launched a boat. The tracks were too smeared and elongated from where whoever had made them had slipped and slid around in the soft mud for him to tell if they were even an appropriate size to be Grant’s. But whoever it had been, Scully planned to do his best to catch up and find out.

  Being in the canoe was much easier on his leg than walking had been, as long as he kept it angled so that the wound was in the shade, as the sun was now high enough to reach all but the edges of the river. Scully had not eaten since the afternoon before, and he was hungry. He knew he would have to stop and find a way to catch a fish or something, but for now had to make do with satisfying only his thirst. He drank his fill from a spring dripping out of a steep clay bank, and, finding an old discarded soda bottle in the debris of a log jam nearby, filled it so that he would have more of the clear, cool water for later. Then he continued on until he reached the rapids where he’d made his escape. He wondered how far the person paddling the plastic kayak could be ahead of him, and he knew that if the person was Grant, that distance was likely very far. If Grant was so determined that he took the kayak in the middle of the night, Scully was sure he was not going to stop until he was too exhausted to go on.

  Catching up seemed unlikely no matter how hard he paddled, so, as he was here where the canoe had capsized and the Johnboat had been swamped, Scully decided to pull over and spend a few minutes searching the bottom to see what he could find.

  It felt good to submerge his leg in the cold water, but it was painful to swim with it. Using mostly his arms, he pulled his way to the bottom from a point upstream of the accident and drifted along just above the sand, feeling with his hands and scanning the three- or four-foot radius the cloudy water allowed him to see. Scully knew that anything heavy enough to sink could not have gone far. He’d spent half his life diving wrecks, searching for lost anchors and objects dropped overboard from boats, as well as hunting fish with a spear gun underwater. He didn’t find anything on the first pass, but the second time he cruised over the spot he saw something sticking out of the sand and wrapped his hand around the handle of his own favorite machete, the one that had been in the Johnboat with him since he and Artie had first made their foray upstream from the catamaran. Scully grinned and whispered a thank you to Jah as he surfaced and put it in the canoe. Now he knew he was in the right spot, so he dove again and again, determined to find everything he could. His effort was rewarded handsomely; first, in the form of food. He found several canned items ranging from chili with beans to chunky vegetable soup and tins of tuna, all from Grant’s stores at the cabin. Then, the real prize: feeling with his hands in the sand, he finally found the short lever-action Winchester carbine Grant had been carrying. When he came to the surface with that, Scully was satisfied to end his search. He had not found the scoped hunting rifle Zach had pointed at him, but it didn’t matter. The carbine was more useful in a canoe, anyway. He poured the water out of the barrel and worked the action to eject the cartridges. There were nine rounds in the magazine; they were all he had, but enough if used wisely. The blued-steel gun would rust without proper disassembly, cleaning, and oiling, but that would have to wait until he reached the catamaran. At least he was armed now, and he knew the lever-action would function after drying out. He opened a can of vegetable soup with his machete, and after mostly drinking it from the can, resumed his journey, so elated at his find he almost forgot the pain in his leg.

  He didn’t expect to find anything else, as he had watched from hiding as Joey and Zach scrambled to grab the bags and other things that were still floating. But a mile below the rapids, half-submerged and hidden in a tangle of leafy branches of a tree that had fallen in the river when the bank crumbled away in some flood, was a tan canvas knapsack. Scully knew what it was as soon as he spotted it, and he worked the canoe in among the branches until he could lift it by one of the straps from the end of his paddle. He was sure they must have been looking for it, but unlike the plastic dry bags they had taken from Grant, this bag was barely visible above the surface. The only reason it floated at all was because of the sealed Ziploc inside it. Scully opened it to see, and sure enough, the stacks of U.S. currency he’d seen before were still there and still dry inside the plastic. It was a lot of money, but whether it was worth anything to anyone now, he didn’t know. He knew it wasn’t likely to do him any good out here, but it gave him satisfaction that Joey had lost something that was so important to him. He sealed the bag back up and tossed it forward into the bow of the canoe. It was worth taking it along, one way or the other. Maybe in another place or time it would come in handy.

  FIFTEEN

  Joey and Zach were both so wired after their unexpected swim, Scully’s escape, and the hassle with the outboard, that they continued running the boat most of the following day, although at a much slower pace than before lest they encounter another tricky section of river. By late afternoon, though, they were both having trouble staying awake, so when they found a suitable sandbar on which to camp, Joey steered to it. They both felt they were safe after motoring a few hours from where they’d last seen Scully; it seemed impossible that he could be a threat to them now.

  “If you hadn’t dumped all our supplies and stove, we could be having a decent meal about now,” Zach grumbled as they sat by a smoky fire, eating crackers, granola bars, raisins, and mixed nuts that had been packed in some of the floating dry bags.

  “Just shut the fuck up already. There’ll be food on the boat when we get there. What’s a bunch of groceries worth anyway? Fuck, there was almost ten grand in cash in that damned bag that probably sank.”

  “Yeah, and what good would it do us out here if we had it? You couldn’t even buy a cold beer out here with the whole freakin’ wad.”

  “Don’t even remind me of beer, asshole, when all we’ve got to drink is muddy river water! What I want to know is where the fuck that island man disappeared to. It was like he was a ghost or something. You’d think we would have at least caught a glimpse of him running away.”

  “How?” Zach asked. “There’s black, but I’ve never seen anyone as dark as that guy. Must be a Jamaican thing. He would be invisible in the woods at night as long as he wasn’t moving.”

  “Yeah, but he had to move to get out of the river. I just don’t see how he did it so fast.”

  “Maybe he was hiding in the water, breathing through a reed or something like Indians used to do.”

  “Nah, that’s just movie bullshit. But still, I’d like to know how he did it. I’m still a little freaked out by it. If he could do that, he could have taken us out if I hadn’t hung on to the shotgun.”

  “But you did, and it probably scared the shit out of him when you started unloading it. Hell, maybe you really did hit him and don’t even know it. It’s possible.”

  “Maybe. I doubt it, though.

  “Well, at least we got that fucking engine running. We’ve gone so far since then there’s no way in hell he’ll ever catch up, even if it never cranks again and we have to paddle the whole rest of the way.”

  “Shut up! Don’t even say that shit.”

  When they woke the next morning, the sun was already above the riverside trees. They pushed the boat back into the river, and though Joey pulled and pulled, then cursed and screamed, the outboard motor sure enough refused to start. They tried checking the spark plug again, as well as the carburetor bowl, but nothing helped. They ended up spending most of the day alternating between paddling the heavy, awkward aluminum boat that was never meant to be propelled by any means other than a motor, and repeating the same futile diagnostics and attempted fixes, hoping they would get lucky. Although Zach suggested it more than once, Joey refused to even consider ditching the Johnboat and simply paddling the more efficient canoe. Instead, he decided th
at towing the canoe was slowing them down, so the next time they stopped he cut it loose and dragged it far enough into the woods so that anyone coming down the river would not see it.

  Ironically, after this stop where once more their mechanical attempts had really done nothing, the motor just started right up on its own the next time Joey yanked the cord. This got them another twenty miles or so downriver, and then it quit again. They paddled until dark, then found another sandbar upon which to sleep, this time so plagued by mosquitos they were forced to keep a fire going all night in an attempt to smoke them away. The next day was a repeat of the second, except for a little better luck with the engine. By early afternoon, they found themselves in a completely different environment, much lower and swampier than the land they had explored around Grant’s cabin. The river was wider here, too, and the current sluggish, in many places appearing to be completely still.

  “We must be getting into the big swamp where they said the boat is,” Joey said.

  “I think we’re close, but this is still the Bogue Chitto. When we come to the end of it, we’ll know when we’re on the Pearl. It’s a bigger river than this, especially the East Pearl.”

  “So there are two Pearl Rivers, an east and a west?”

  “Yeah. It splits for some reason and the two run several miles apart. In between them there’s nothing but woods and swamp. That’s what they call Honey Island Swamp.”

  Joey had, of course, heard of it, growing up in Louisiana, but he’d never been there. He hardly ever gave the river a passing glance, even all those times he’d driven across it on the Interstate 10 bridge en route to the casinos of the Mississippi coast. “How are we going to find the catamaran if we have to look on two rivers?”