The Pulse

by Scott B. Williams

  “But this isn’t the Ninth Ward, Grant,” Jessica said. “This is Uptown. It’s nice here. People here don’t loot and rob. I think you’re being a bit paranoid.”

  “I know it’s nice here now. And yes, it’s relatively safe. But this kind of stuff would happen anywhere after a disaster like this. When people get desperate, they’ll do anything. And besides, the people in the truly bad areas like you’re talking about know that with everything shut down, nothing is going to stop them from coming here. And they know there’s money and other goods here.”

  “He may be right, Jessica,” Casey said. “He’s been through hurricanes and lived all over.”

  “But why us, Grant? You hardly know us—well, me anyway…. Don’t you have other friends or family that will need to go there?”

  “Not now, I don’t. My parents are much too far away to get any good out of it. And as I already told Casey, after Katrina all my close friends left New Orleans and never came back. I suppose I would go alone to the cabin if I didn’t know anyone who wanted to go with me, and I still will if you two aren’t interested. I’m certainly not staying here in the city, regardless. Casey and I just kind of ran into each other today; it’s been a really weird day, and, well, here we all are at your apartment. I don’t really have anyone else to spend the first day of the total shutdown of the grid with.”

  “We don’t know that it’s a total shutdown,” Casey reminded him.

  “No, but we should assume that it is in the immediate region, anyway. Look, I don’t want to try to talk either of you into anything. But I’ve got a few of the things we need over at my apartment, and whether you leave the city with me or not, it would be safer to stick together for now. I’d like for you to both come over after you get your things together. I’ve got battery-powered lights and candles in my camping gear. At least we’ll be able to see after dark at my place, and we can talk it over tonight and see how things are looking in the morning. What do you say?”

  “That’s fine with me,” Casey said. “I hate blackouts even when they’re just for a few hours. It’d be scary over here with no flashlights or anything.”

  “I’m okay with that too, I just don’t know about going to some cabin in Mississippi,” Jessica said. “And what about Joey? If I go, can he come too?”

  “Of course,” Grant said.

  “If he would even want to,” Jessica added.

  “He may stop by here looking for you before he goes home tonight,” Casey told her. “Why don’t you leave him a note telling him we’ll be at Grant’s place and that he can find us there?”

  They locked the door to the apartment at dusk, slipping a small piece of paper with Grant’s address in the crack just above the deadbolt, where Joey couldn’t miss it. Jessica and Casey had both emptied their backpack/book bags and stuffed them with as many items of clothing as they could possibly jam inside without breaking the zippers. The groceries were still tied on the bikes in the plastic bags. They walked them on campus, to the bike rack near the theater where Jessica had left her bike the day before. Grant’s place was an efficiency apartment in back of a house on Freret Street, so after a short ride of a few blocks they were there.

  “Wow, you’ve got some cool stuff in here,” Casey said after Grant let them into his apartment and lit up the living room with a battery-powered Coleman lantern he dug out of a closet.

  “Thanks. It’s mostly stuff I traded for during summer field study in Guyana. These things are all that made it home. A lot of the artifacts I shipped got lost, or more likely stolen, somewhere along the way.”

  “What were you studying?” Jessica asked as she looked around the room at the collection of carved wooden drums, masks, blowguns, and bows and arrows hanging from every wall.

  “Grant is an anthropology grad student,” Casey explained. “I forgot that I hadn’t told you. He spent three months last summer in the Amazon jungle.”

  “Actually it was in the highlands of Guyana, not in the Amazon Basin,” Grant said. “I was working on a project our department is conducting among an indigenous tribe called the Wapishana on the upper reaches of the Kamoa River.”

  “That’s crazy,” Jessica said. “Do those people still use this stuff? Are they cannibals or something?”

  Grant laughed. “No, they’re not cannibals, but they’re still mostly naked. And yes, they do use primitive tools and maintain most of their ancestral ceremonies. They are true hunter-gatherers, and really don’t need anything but what the rainforest provides.”

  “Hunters? That’s just wrong!” Jessica said. “Why do they still do that? I thought the jungle was full of tropical fruit and stuff.”

  “It is, but not enough to live on and get a balanced diet. They eat everything the forest provides, from the smallest insects and fish, to monkeys, snakes, wild pigs…you name it.”

  “It must have been an awesome experience staying in their villages and seeing how they live,” Casey said, before Jessica and Grant could get into an argument about the ethics of eating animals.

  “It was quite the experience, but this particular subgroup of the tribe has such a nomadic way of life they don’t even live in villages. That’s one reason we know so little about them. Our department is the first group of anthropologists to study them. Their first contact with the outside world was just in 1995. Anyway, there’ll be time to tell you more about it later, if it doesn’t bore you to death. I need to sort out some stuff and we need to talk about a plan, that is, if you two are still in with me after seeing all my jungle headhunter gear.”

  Casey and Jessica waited while Grant pulled a large duffel bag out of the same closet where he had gotten the lantern. He said it was the gear that he took on the jungle expedition and also occasionally used for weekend canoe camping on the river near his parent’s cabin.

  “The problem is, we can’t carry all this stuff on the bikes, plus the food and water we’re going to need for the trip. I can carry much more on mine, since I’ve got a rack on it and it’s a lightweight bike anyway, but you two are going to have a hard enough time just pedaling those heavy clunkers you have even without any weight.”

  “Can’t we just wear our backpacks?” Casey asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s not ideal. If you keep them light with just your clothes and things like that, I suppose it will have to do. But too much weight that high up will wear you out and keep you off balance. It’s better to let the bike carry the weight. I think if you both carry your clothes in your packs and we strap some of the lighter, bulkier stuff like sleeping bags on the handlebars and under the seats, I can manage everything else we need.”

  “Didn’t you say the cabin would have everything we need?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes, but we can’t head out on a trip that far and count on getting there in a certain length of time. A lot of factors could delay us, considering what has happened, so we need to be prepared to be as self-sufficient on the road as possible.”

  “I would have never thought like that,” Casey said. “I guess that comes from what you learned in the jungle, huh?”

  “Just travel in general. I learned more from my parents than from anywhere else. We were always on the move, it seems. I learned that real travel, not the tourist stuff, requires flexibility in your thinking and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. We’re not going to be tourists. If we go anywhere while the grid is down, we’ll be travelers, and we had better be ready for anything.”

  THREE

  THE ARRIVAL OF IBIS in the harbor at Charlotte Amalie brought most of the occupants of the other vessels near her mooring to their decks to wave and shout questions to the newcomers. Most simply wanted to know from where the two men in the schooner had sailed, and what they had seen or heard of the bizarre flash in the northern sky that was the first sign of the series of events that took out communications, the power grid, and most forms of transportation. Artie was still reeling from days and nights of constant motion, and felt his body still compensating despi
te the calm of the harbor in which Ibis floated peacefully, tethered to her mooring without rolling, pitching, or bobbing. He fought to steady himself while Larry was busy securing the sails and sorting out lines. When asked how far to the southeast of St. Thomas they’d been when they saw the flash, Artie replied with the numbers of the last coordinates the GPS had displayed before it lost satellite reception. These were numbers he would never forget, as they marked the point where Larry began navigating by dead reckoning.

  “We have no way of knowing how Martinique might have been affected,” Larry added after saying that those coordinates from when the event occurred put them over a hundred nautical miles from their departure point.

  They were directing most of their answers to an older couple aboard a sleek, 50-odd-foot sailing yacht of modern design, with immaculate white topsides and polished metal fittings that indicated it was nearly new and well maintained. This boat, with the name Celebration displayed on her stern above the hailing port of Norfolk, VA, was the nearest vessel to Ibis, and the owners lost no time introducing themselves as Pete and Maryanne Buckley, inviting them to come aboard for a cup of coffee and more conversation.

  “Our dinghy’s already in the water,” Pete said. “I’ll come pick you up.”

  Pete rowed the rigid-bottomed inflatable alongside Ibis, explaining that the EFI-equipped 25-horsepower Honda outboard on the stern hadn’t started since the power surge.

  “It’s not just the dinghy motor either,” Pete said. “We’re pretty much dead in the water. Celebration is just too dependent on high-tech equipment. But oh, wow! What a beauty you guys are on! She looks like you just sailed her in from an era before all this stuff was needed.”

  “Yeah, Ibis is pretty sweet,” Larry said. “I wish she were mine, but as usual, I’m just doing a delivery.”

  “We thought we were doing the right thing,” Pete said, “setting the boat up for our retirement with all those gadgets to do the work for us. You know, when you’re an old fart like me, cranking a sheet winch by hand ain’t the fun it looks to be. Now all this technology has come back to bite us on the ass, now that it won’t work anymore. Maryanne’s not taking it too well, but I told her, at least we’re safe out here on the boat, even if we just stay here in the harbor.”

  “So nothing is working on the island?” Larry asked.

  “As far as we can tell, no. We went to town several times yesterday, talked to a lot of people, tried to find out what we could. There’s no contact with the outside world at all. And no way to get off the island, unless you’re among the lucky few like us out here who have our own boats.”

  “What about the airport?” Artie was almost afraid to ask.

  “Burned all day and into the night yesterday. People on that end of the island say that right after the power went out, a Delta flight coming in from Fort Lauderdale crashed right into the terminal. Nothing has flown over here since.”

  Artie’s hopeful expression upon asking the question faded to a blank look of solemn acceptance. “I was afraid of that,” he said.

  Larry told Pete about the wreckage they had discovered late yesterday.

  “This isn’t gonna fix itself,” Pete said. “Hell, even most cars are shut down because of their electronic ignitions, just like my Honda outboard. People around here are saying that if that surge was strong enough to knock out practically everything with any kind of electrical or electronic circuit, then there won’t be any way to fix the damage for a long time.”

  “I guess it depends on how far-reaching the damage actually was,” Larry said, as he and Artie climbed into the dinghy for the short row back over to Celebration.

  “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Pete agreed.

  Pete secured the dinghy to the stern platform of the gleaming yacht and they all climbed into the cockpit, greeted by Maryanne, who had brought out a tray with four cups of coffee and a loaf of fresh-baked local bread along with a knife and butter dish.

  “We bought as much bread and fresh fruits and vegetables as we could find in the market yesterday,” she said. “The lines were already getting long and they were selling out fast.”

  “This is wonderful!” Artie said as he took a seat in the plush cockpit and reached for his coffee. I’ve barely eaten for the past three days.”

  “Offshore sailing didn’t agree too well with my brother,” Larry said. “But the light show he saw the other night cured him.”

  “So you saw it yourself?” Pete asked Artie.

  “Oh yeah. I was on watch when it happened. Couldn’t have missed it if I tried. The whole sky just lit up like daylight, except that there were all these different colors.”

  “We slept right through it, regrettably,” Maryanne said.

  “Yeah, that’s another thing about a boat like Celebration ,” Pete said. “Our stateroom is so well insulated down there that half the time you couldn’t tell if there was a hurricane blowing topsides.”

  “So this is a Tayana 54?” Larry asked. “First one I’ve been aboard, but I delivered a Tayana 42 Cutter from Annapolis to Antigua once. Solid boat.”

  “She’s comfortable, for sure,” Pete said. “Probably more boat than two people need for a retirement home, but you know, everybody is cruising bigger boats these days. You don’t see many people out cruising the world on anything under 45 feet anymore.”

  “I do,” Larry said, “but not in the popular anchorages. You probably can’t get into many of the out-of-the-way places. What does she draw, anyway?”

  “Seven feet, two inches,” Pete said.

  Larry whistled. Artie was just listening, not knowing enough about boats to really have an opinion. “I guess you didn’t see much of the Bahamas then. Not many anchorages there that carry seven feet of water.”

  “No, but our goal was to get down here to the Virgins first,” Pete said. “Then we were talking about trying to do a passage over to the Med if everything worked out. Out there in the Atlantic, draft doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “That sure is a pretty little schooner you guys are sailing,” Maryanne said, “It’s amazing how well-maintained it is. How old is it?”

  “Less than a year,” Larry said. “She looks like an old-time classic, but she’s really a new custom build, a Reuel Parker design. She only draws four feet. It’s all cold-molded wood-epoxy construction. The owner was supposed to meet me here tomorrow, but I guess that isn’t going to happen. He lives in Tampa, so unless he changed his plans and flew in early, it’s doubtful he’ll be picking up his boat.”

  “Tampa? Was he planning to sail her all the way home from here?” Pete asked.

  “No, he’s apparently got another boat he keeps there. He had this one built to keep here for cruising around the islands. She was built in Trinidad. I picked her up there and did a shakedown cruise through the Grenadines before my landlubber big brother here came down to meet me in Martinique.”

  “It wasn’t so bad, after I got my sea legs,” Artie said, the memory of the awful seasickness already fading to the back of his mind.

  Larry changed the subject back to the power outage as he stared across the harbor to the island. “I wonder how long it will be before people start to panic. If what we typically see after a big hurricane is any indication, it won’t be much longer.”

  “We haven’t been here for one of those yet,” Pete said. “This is our first year of cruising since we both retired and bought the boat. We just got here right after Christmas. We spent the fall in Key West.”

  “I’ve been down in these islands long enough to see it all. You’re right to say all of us out here on boats are better off. It’s probably going to get ugly ashore pretty quick. Especially here in Charlotte Amalie and the other crowded places. Even this harbor probably won’t be safe, so you ought to think about moving somewhere more remote. Only thing is, you don’t have many choices with that seven-foot draft.”

  “I don’t see how we could be in any danger out here,” Maryanne said. “There are so m
any other boats around. Who’s going to bother us?”

  “Well,” said Larry, “to people ashore, especially the gangs that don’t need an excuse like this anyway, a boat like Celebration is a gold mine. They know it’s full of expensive hardware, not to mention the food and water everyone is soon going to be desperate for. Cruisers have been targeted here before, and especially in St. Croix after Hurricane Hugo and some of the other really bad ones. I’m talking robbery, murder, gang rape, you name it.”

  Maryanne shuddered and looked at her husband. “Sounds like a realistic scenario to me,” Pete said. “The question is, where do we go? I thought we might be better off here than back home, depending on how big this thing really is. I mean, if the same pulse took out everything in the States, it might be even worse there. Look how dependent everything up there is on the power grid, not to mention transportation.”

  “It’s hard to believe this has shut down automobiles,” Artie said. “I never would have thought about that. Of course, I never would have thought about it causing airplanes to crash either. I can’t believe I’m stuck here now with no way to get back to New Orleans or even to call Casey and check on her.”

  “His daughter,” Larry explained. “Artie was just with me for a few days of vacation.”

  “If you’re going to get back to the mainland, you’ll probably have to sail,” Pete told Artie.

  “Sail? All the way back to America? How long would that take?”

  “Not as long as it took us to get down here, that’s for sure,” Pete said, adding that going back to the mainland was a downwind run with the help of the trade winds, while getting to the islands from Florida was a difficult, upwind bash.