The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid

by Williams, Scott B.

  Grant wondered again why Casey had not mentioned that her father kept a gun in his vehicle. Maybe she simply didn’t know about it, or perhaps it didn’t occur to her that a gun was something they might need. Grant knew that while Jessica seemed clueless about what they were facing, even Casey had not come to the full realization of the hardships that could lie ahead. She probably couldn’t fathom that they might actually have to defend themselves with deadly force, or kill animals for food. Though he didn’t believe in taking things that did not belong to him, there was no way Grant was going to leave something as potentially useful as the pistol in the vehicle. He knew that Casey’s father would understand, and would probably be glad that someone with her had it to protect her. Grant found a pen and quickly scribbled his explanation on the bottom of Casey’s note, adding that he would do his best to take care of the pistol until it could be returned when this was all over. Then he locked the Tahoe and remounted his bike, the Ruger and its ammunition zipped inside his handlebar bag.

  When Grant returned to his apartment, he found Casey there alone. In the short time he’d been gone, she said, Jessica and Joey had gotten out of bed and immediately started arguing about what they should do next. Joey had insisted on going back to his house and Jessica had left with him. She told Casey she would be back in a little while, but Casey was not convinced, especially since Joey was adamant about not leaving the city.

  “We can’t wait around to find out, Casey. Do you think she really wants to go with us or not?”

  “I think she does, but she doesn’t know what to do about Joey. He’s not going anywhere. He said it again this morning. He thinks you’re full of it and he’s blaming you for putting stupid ideas in Jessica’s head.”

  “From what I saw out there, we need to hurry, Casey. On the way back I passed a group of looters coming out of the broken windows of a CVS pharmacy with armloads of stuff. I also saw a fight with at least five people involved, and someone on the street threw a bottle at me that just barely missed my head.”

  “Where are the police? Aren’t they trying to do something about all this?”

  “Sure, they’re trying, but most of them are on foot too. I saw some officers on mountain bikes, and even a few on horseback down near the riverfront, but the mobs are getting bigger and getting out of control. There aren’t enough cops, Casey. After Katrina, it took the National Guard and even members of the regular army to restore order here. And they were sent in from areas that were not affected. They may not be coming this time, as far as we know, anyway.”

  “So what do we do, go to Joey’s and try to talk to Jessica?”

  “I’ll go. You stay here and keep the door locked. I’ve got to go tell her how it is, and she’s either going to have to come back with me or stay with him. When we get back, assuming she comes with me, we need to all get on the bikes and head for the Causeway. I want to be out of the city before dark.”

  Grant left without telling Casey about the gun and rode as fast as he could to Joey’s house. Jessica had taken her bike with her, but Casey said she was pushing it, since Joey didn’t have one. Walking, they would barely have time to get to the house before Grant could catch up.

  As he turned into the upscale neighborhood where Joey lived, Grant smelled smoke and heard several loud bangs that could only be gunshots. Before he reached the driveway to Joey’s house, he saw two New Orleans police officers in tactical gear running across a side street with rifles at the ready. One or more houses were burning somewhere in the direction they were headed, and from the sound of it, a gun battle had broken out between the police and whoever was responsible. He hopped off his bike and leaned it against Jessica’s, which was propped unlocked against the rail on Joey’s back porch. Grant knocked on the door. When no one answered, he began banging on it louder and calling their names.

  “It’s Grant!” he heard Jessica yell from inside. “Open the door, Joey!”

  “Son of a bitch! What the hell is he doing here?”

  Jessica unlocked the door herself when Joey wouldn’t do it. “Grant! Am I glad to see you! I’ve been scared to death ever since we got here. Did you see what was going on in the neighborhood? We got in here and locked the door as fast as we could when the shooting started.”

  “I did, Jessica. It’s starting even sooner than I thought. This area is a target for looters because it’s so upscale. I came to tell you we’ve got to go, and now.”

  “Screw you, man!” Joey came to the doorway, pushing Jessica aside. “Who are you to say what she needs to do, or Casey either for that matter? You think we all wanna go ride bicycles freakin’ 90 miles to stay in some cabin in the middle of nowhere? I’m not leaving my house and letting a bunch of thugs come in here and clean it out—maybe burn it down too.”

  “How are you going to stop them, Joey?” Jessica yelled. “You saw the same thing I saw. They’re shooting at the police, and you don’t even have a gun.”

  “You can’t stop them,” Grant said. “No one can. There will be far too many of them. It would be crazy to stay here just to protect your property.”

  “I am staying!” he yelled back at Grant, and turning to Jessica: “If you want to be with me, you’ll stay here too, where you belong. Let Casey go with this asshole if she wants to. No girl of mine is going to run off on a camping trip with some dude I don’t even know.”

  “I’m not staying here, Joey. People are shooting at each other! If you loved me you wouldn’t want me to stay where I am in danger….”

  “If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave me to go run off to the woods with some prick who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.”

  Grant stood in the open doorway, disgusted, but not wanting to step into the middle of the argument any more than he had to. He glanced around to make sure no one else was coming up the secluded, tree-lined driveway. The gunshots had stopped and he thought maybe the looters who had engaged the police in a firefight had made a run for it and were looking for places to hide anywhere they could find them.

  “We need to get out of here before more of this starts, Jessica.”

  At this, Joey turned away from Jessica and charged through the doorway, pushing Grant so hard that he fell over the porch railing into the hedges planted on the other side. “No, you need to get out of here, asshole, and stay the fuck out of our business!”

  Grant was caught by surprise, but unhurt by the fall, and quickly scrambled to his feet, expecting to have to defend himself as Joey came outside to follow up. But before Joey could come down the steps to the lawn where he waited, Jessica slapped him in the center of the back, causing him to turn around to face her, which opened him up perfectly to catch her other open hand right across the side of his face. “I’m done with you, you bastard!” Jessica yelled. “You’re the asshole, and I’m not going to be with anyone who treats my friends like this and cares more about their stupid stuff than my safety. You can sit here with it from now on. I’m leaving!”

  Jessica grabbed her bike and pulled it away from the railing to get on it. “Let’s go, Grant.”

  Grant half expected Joey to try to grab her or attack him again, but as they rode out of the driveway, all he did was vent his anger at her by yelling and kicking the wooden porch rail so hard that it broke: “Fuck you, you fuckin’ little bitch! You’ll wish you hadn’t left when all this shit is over and the lights come back on and you try to come running back to me. I’ll find someone who deserves me!”

  As she pedaled away with Grant, “I hope not—for her sake!” was the last thing Jessica ever said to Joey.

  Grant was nervous as they made their way out of Joey’s neighborhood at a much slower pace than he would have if he had been traveling alone. It was all Jessica could do to manage 10 miles per hour on her heavy Wal-Mart bike. Grant felt vulnerable on the mostly deserted avenue they were following. His worst fear became reality when two young men in their late teens stepped into the street from the sidewalk to intercept them before they could thin
k about turning around or making a detour.

  “Give us those bikes, man!” the first one demanded. He was lean and athletic, dressed in baggy shorts and a tank top that revealed sleeves of unintelligible gang tattoos that left little of his white skin showing. His black partner wore a Nike sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, despite the heat. They clearly were outsiders to the neighborhood on the prowl for targets of opportunity. Grant knew that, with Jessica holding him back, any escape would be impossible. They would catch her even if he could elude them, and there was no question that they were serious about taking the bikes. Grant knew that if they gave up their only means of transportation, getting replacement bikes would be impossible, and walking out of the city to his parent’s place would take days, if not an entire week.

  But fighting back was out of the question too. Grant was no fighter, even though he was aerobically fit from constant bike riding. The idea of tangling with even one of these guys, much less both of them, was not something he relished. Though they were younger, they had the look of experienced street fighters, and probably wouldn’t hesitate to pound him into the pavement or even kill him, leaving Jessica at their mercy. He had to buy a few seconds to get the gun out—it was his only chance. He locked up both brakes before he rode into the leader’s reach and quickly dismounted, pulling his bike to the side of the road. Jessica didn’t know what to do and couldn’t react quickly enough. She was still on her bike when the guy in the sweatshirt reached her handlebars and pulled her to a stop. Jessica screamed and struggled but the tattooed guy came to his buddy’s assistance and grabbed her from behind in a bear hug, pinning her arms and pulling her away from the bike. This distraction gave Grant just enough time to unholster the Ruger pistol inside his handlebar bag and draw the slide back to chamber a round. He wished now he had test-fired the gun at least once to make sure it would function properly, but he had no choice but to trust it now. The attackers had made the mistake of discounting him as a threat and probably assumed he would either run and leave his bike behind, or make a hopeless attempt to help his female companion empty-handed, giving them the opportunity to work him over. They thought they were looking at clueless college students whose bikes were easy pickings. What they didn’t expect was to face a gun. The last thing Grant wanted to do was kill someone over a couple of bikes, but he was determined not lose them.

  “LET HER GO AND BACK OFF!” he yelled as he leveled the long target barrel of the .22 at the head of the one holding Jessica’s bike.

  Both of them turned to look in his direction, the leader quickly pushing Jessica aside and turning to face him, with no intention of backing down. Grant raised his point of aim ever so slightly and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet whizzing right over the hooded guy’s head to strike the side of a brick-walled house across the street, where it ricocheted skyward with a high-pitched whine.

  “I won’t miss next time; that was your warning! NOW BACK OFF!

  The attackers didn’t argue. Grant figured that if they had been carrying weapons, it must have been only knives rather than handguns, as neither made a move to reach for anything. Seeing that Grant was willing to use his weapon gave them reason enough to move on to easier prey. They both backed away with their hands up while still facing him, and Jessica picked up her fallen bike and rolled it behind Grant to where he’d dropped his on the curb. He covered the two retreating assailants with the pistol until they reached the other side of the street and turned to walk quickly out of sight.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Jessica.

  She was shaking and had started to cry. “I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” she said as Grant put his free arm around her, still holding the pistol in his right hand. “Why are some people so mean?”

  “It’s just human nature, I’m afraid. Something like this often brings out the worst in some people. That’s why I’ve been saying it’s better to get away from the majority of people as much as possible. No crowded city anywhere will be safe as long as the power remains off.”

  “I can see that now,” Jessica said. “I can’t believe you have a gun, though. Why didn’t you say something about it? Where did you learn how to shoot guns?”

  “I didn’t have it until this morning. It belongs to Casey’s dad. I got it out of his car when I rode my bike to the airport to leave her note in it.”

  “I didn’t know he had guns either. Casey never said anything about her dad owning guns.”

  “Maybe she didn’t even know herself. Anyway, it’s just a target pistol, and only a .22 at that, but still, it may save our lives—and maybe it already has. I don’t think he’ll mind that I borrowed it. I’m going to tell Casey about it when we get back to my place.”

  “But won’t it get us in trouble with the police if they find out we have it?”

  “It could, but I’d rather take my chances than not have a weapon. Where were the police just now? They obviously have their hands full, and they can’t be everywhere all the time. After Katrina, they confiscated all the guns they could find in New Orleans from citizens who had them, but this is so much bigger than a hurricane, I think they have a lot more to worry about than going around door to door collecting guns. And when we get north of the city, there will be even fewer police. I’ll keep it hidden unless we need it.” Grant put the pistol back in his handlebar bag before they remounted the bikes, but this time he kept the zipper partly open for quick access and left the weapon ready to fire, with a round still chambered in the barrel and the safety on.

  The ride back to Grant’s apartment seemed to him to take forever, nervous as he was about the possibility of another attack at any point along the way. They passed through areas where lots of pedestrians were crowding the streets, but no one else threatened them, and when they reached the apartment, they found Casey locked inside and waiting.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” she said, hugging each of them in turn. “It’s been scary being here alone. I heard something that sounded like gunshots a couple of times, and lots of cursing and screaming. I couldn’t tell what was going on out there and didn’t want to go find out.”

  “Some people are starting to go nuts already,” Grant said. Then Jessica filled her roommate in on what had happened at Joey’s and on the street on the way back.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think about it,” Casey said when Grant showed her the pistol. “Of course I remember it. It’s probably older than I am. He took me to a shooting range a couple of times when I was probably 10 or 11. I forgot that he kept it in his car.”

  “I just thought we might need it more than he will, especially since he’s unlikely be able to get back to the airport until all this mess is straightened out anyway.”

  “It’s okay. You’re right; he would want us to take it. I’m glad you had it today.”

  “We would still be walking on the way back here if I didn’t,” Grant said, “if they had left us in any shape to walk at all. I’m going to feel a lot better armed on our trip to the Bogue Chitto. Besides that, this kind of pistol is accurate enough that we may be able to use it to supplement our food supply if this goes on long enough that we need to.”

  Jessica look puzzled. “How can we get food with a gun? You’re not thinking about robbing a grocery store or something, are you?”

  Casey laughed. “I think he’s talking about hunting with it, Jessica.”

  A look of disgust crossed Jessica’s face. The idea of having to hunt and kill for food had not even crossed her mind. “I’m not eating any animals, no matter what happens!” she said.

  Grant said nothing. He knew that both of the girls were overwhelmed by the events unfolding around them and he figured that both, even Jessica, would adapt to the changing circumstances as necessary. All they could handle right now was one challenge at a time, and for now, they had enough food to travel on if there were no unexpected delays in the journey to the cabin.

  He set to work immediately, completing their preparations to leave. As
his bike was the only one set up to carry luggage, there was no way to carry all the gear and equipment he owned, so he had to leave behind many items that would have been nice to have but were not essential. This included the French press, his expensive North Face tent (which was too small to accommodate all three of them), and the battery-powered lanterns. He did pack the propane stove and one extra bottle of fuel, along with a single cook pot that would serve for everything from making coffee, to cooking rice, to purifying questionable water. In place of the tent, he packed a lightweight nylon tarp that could be rigged as a lean-to or an A-frame shelter, and he carried his two sleeping bags for the girls and a lightweight wool blanket for himself. Other essentials included his machete, a couple of flashlights, matches and butane lighters for starting the stove and making fires, a pocketknife and multi-tool, his bike pump and tool kit for roadside repairs, and their clothing. With the food and water bottles they would also have to carry, there was no room for anything else. The cabin contained most of what they needed anyway, and they would be roughing it only during the journey there. By keeping their loads as light as possible, that journey could be shortened and, he hoped, not be too unpleasant.

  Even with their luggage pared down to the minimum, their loads were awkward. Grant lashed the heaviest items on the rear rack of his bike. All three of them wore the backpacks that had been used as book bags in their previous lives as college students. In addition, Grant had lashed the stuffed sleeping bags and rolled-up items of clothing to the handlebars and seat posts of Casey’s and Jessica’s bikes. In the end he was carrying at least twice as much as either of them, but that was only fair, he thought, as he was in better shape for riding, and his bike had a stronger frame and wheelset that could stand up to the load. A brief stop by Casey’s apartment gave her a minute to leave her second note for her father in her bedroom nightstand, where he would find it on the slim chance he made it back to the city and happened to come there first instead of to his car.