The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid (30 page)

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

Authors: Scott B. Williams

“I know it’s going to take some extra time,” Larry said when Artie protested, “but having an opportunity to grab another weapon,
any
weapon, is not something we can afford to pass up. You know what we’ve already been through, and you heard what Craig said. I think you and Scully need to take both my shotgun and your pistol for your trip to Tulane. You’re going to need every advantage you can get.”
Grant glanced over his shoulder one last time before they reached the canebrake where they’d left Casey with the hidden bikes. The solitary canoeist was disappearing from sight far down the river, carried swiftly by the current and his steady, practiced paddle stroke. Grant was envious that his destination lay downstream, while theirs entailed nothing but a struggle to go upstream. He steered the bow into the mud at the best landing spot and held the canoe against the bank by jamming his paddle into the bottom.
“Okay, you can step out now, then I’ll get out and pull it up on the bank.”
Jessica stepped ashore and immediately called out to announce their success: “Hey Casey! Guess what? We got a canoe!”
“Hey! Keep it down!” Grant whispered. “We don’t want anyone who might be crossing the bridge to know we’re down here.”
“Oh, sorry!” Jessica whispered back. She called Casey’s name again, this time in a quieter voice. When there was no answer, she turned back to Grant. “Where is she?”
Grant got out of the canoe and pulled the bow up far enough to tie it off to a small riverside bush. He pushed past Jessica into the dense cane to find the bikes just as they’d left them. “She probably walked over in the woods nearby to use the bathroom or something,” Grant said, then he called out to her too, in a loud whisper: “Casey! We’re back.”
Jessica joined him and looked at the bikes. “Hey, look, Grant. Her backpack is gone.”
“She must have taken it with her, then. I told her to keep the gun handy. She shouldn’t be far, though, because I told her we’d be back in about an hour, and we were. Let’s take a look around, but no more yelling, okay?”
“All right. She can’t be far. I know I wouldn’t wander off far into these woods alone, and I can’t imagine that Casey would either.”
Grant grabbed his machete and led the way out of the canebrake and back to the open area under the bridge. Casey was nowhere in sight. When they reached the sandy area at the end of the dirt access road that led up to the highway, he examined the ground and pointed out the footprints the three of them had made coming down the hill, as well as the tracks made by the bicycle tires as they had pushed them along. He walked closer to the river and then waved Jessica over to look at something else.
“She went this way,” he said, pointing at a separate set of tracks leading under the bridge along the sandbar that made up the riverbank here. The tracks were so obvious in the rain-swept sand that Jessica probably would have seen them too, if it had occurred to her to look for footprints at all. Grant said he’d learned a bit about tracking from the hunters he’d spent time with in Guyana, so it was second nature to him to try to figure out where Casey had gone by the trail she would have had to leave, especially in all this open sand, which he said was the easiest kind of terrain for finding and following footprints.
As they walked the route she’d taken upriver, Grant called Casey’s name several times in a slightly louder voice than he’d warned Jessica about before. After they passed under the bridge, it was obvious that no one else had come down to the river from the road, as there were no new tracks other than their own. But the farther Casey’s trail led upstream, the more surprised Grant was that she would walk so far alone when she was supposed to be watching the bikes. Once the bend in the river took them beyond sight of the bridge, he suddenly saw the reason she had come here. Hanging on a branch at the edge of the woods was a pair of black panties and a white sports bra. Casey’s New Balance walking shoes were sitting side by side on a log near the branch, her socks spread out next to them, along with her open backpack and a bottle of shampoo.
Grant suddenly stopped, not wanting to walk up on her if she were undressed. “Casey! Where are you?” When there was no answer, Jessica called loudly too, and still there was nothing but the sound of the river gurgling by. It was impossible that she would not have heard them by now if she was anywhere in the vicinity of her stuff. Grant rushed ahead to the log where her shoes were and looked around carefully at the sand. Casey’s bare footprints clearly led into the water at the edge of the river, and another set showed she had walked back to where her clothes were, but there were no other clothes in sight but the underwear, shoes and socks. There were many other prints circling around and covering up the first ones she’d made, indicating to Grant that she had probably been moving around while she dripped dry from her bath before putting at least some of her clothes back on. He saw other footprints as well, some of them covered up by hers, and figured someone had been here before the rain. The other footprints looked older, because they did not have a clearly defined shape or tread definition.
Looking beyond the immediate area, he then spotted another line of Casey’s barefoot tracks leading off up the sandbar, even farther upriver, but as soon as he started following them, a chill ran up his spine and he grabbed Jessica’s hand while motioning her to silence with a finger over his lips. Superimposed over some of the prints made by Casey’s bare feet were more of the larger, smooth tracks that he had mistakenly thought were old. The fact that some of them were on top of Casey’s tracks made his previous conclusion impossible, and upon closer examination, he determined that the shapeless, smooth footprints could have been made by a person wearing moccasins or some similar footwear. One thing was for certain: the tracks were made by a man. Grant could judge by their size compared with Casey’s tracks and his own that the person who made the prints had to be a man, as they were slightly bigger than the impressions left by his own size 11 hiking shoes.
His eyes swept back over the trail of larger tracks they had passed, and he could see where the person who made them had stepped out of the dense woods that began at the edge of the sandbar just a few feet uphill from the log where Casey had left her things. Someone had been walking around on this sandbar before she got here, and then must have been watching her from the cover of the trees while she bathed. When she walked farther upstream, he had re-emerged from the woods and followed her. It was the only explanation for the fact that some of his tracks were covered by hers, while these last were made on top of her trail. As this realization dawned on him, he wondered if the man who made them had been on the sandbar when they rode down the bank from the highway, and had hidden in the woods watching as he and Jessica left Casey alone and went to get the canoe.
Grant gave Jessica a serious look that conveyed the importance of keeping silent and then motioned downward with his hand, to tell her to stay put while he tried to figure this out. He crept over to the backpack and felt inside it for the Ruger pistol.
It was gone!
He could only hope that Casey had it with her. But now that he was looking for them, he saw moccasin tracks near the log as well, and realized the person who made them could have taken the gun if she had left it there when she walked away. Following along beside, but not touching the two sets of tracks, he moved as fast as he could while still remaining silent, which was easy enough in the damp sand. He gripped the machete so tightly his knuckles were white. Surely this person who had followed Casey had heard them calling her name. Surely she would have heard them too, but why didn’t she answer? Fear and worry gripped him as he struggled to find the answer while he followed the tracks, ducking under the river birch trees that leaned out of the forest over the sandbar.
He didn’t have to go far to reach the end of the narrow beach, where he found Casey’s trail obliterated by a large area of disturbed sand where both sets of footprints had been erased by something. Only the man’s tracks led beyond that point, and following them a few more steps, Grant’s heart nearly stopped when he saw the answer to the puzzle. There was a deep grove in the mix of sand and mud that extended from the water’s edge several feet up the bank, and on both sides of it, a flattened mark made by something smooth and heavy sliding into the water. On one side of these impressions were more of the larger tracks, but none of Casey’s. Some of them were deep and distorted from slipping and digging into the mud. Grant had done enough canoeing to know exactly what he was looking at. It was the mark made when someone pushes a heavily laden canoe into the water from the bank.
Almost as soon as it became clear what he was looking at, he whirled back the way he had come, knowing that the canoe they’d seen heading downriver less then twenty minutes ago had to be the one that had made these marks.
Casey was in that canoe,
he thought, probably hidden from their view under the camo tarp that Grant had assumed was covering the lone paddler’s gear! No wonder the man paddling it had not taken his eyes off them as he passed, much less shown any indication of wanting to stop and talk. With the strong current in his favor and his obvious experience as a paddler, there was no telling how far downriver he’d gotten by now. Grant was horrified by the thought of what his intentions might be. He turned and raced back down the sandbar, yelling: “Jessica! Quick, we’ve got to go!” The he grabbed Casey’s backpack, shoes, and underwear, and shoved them into Jessica’s hands as he hurried her back in the direction of the bridge.
“What happened? Where is she? Why are we going back this way?”
“That canoe we passed. She’s in it! That man we waved at must have stopped here for some reason before we all got here. He must have been in the woods when Casey walked up here to take a bath. He was probably watching her the whole time, and then followed her when she walked upriver to where he’d left his canoe. He grabbed her and put her in it, and she must have been hidden in that pile of gear he had when we saw him.”
“How do you know all that?” Jessica asked as she ran to keep up with Grant on the way back to where they’d left the bikes and the canoe.
“I’m no expert, but in this sand the tracks are easy to read. All the rain over the last two days would have swept away any tracks other than new ones made in the last couple of hours since it stopped. Her footprints leading upstream are covered by his, which makes it clear he was walking behind her. Then hers completely disappear and only his lead to the canoe. I could see where his feet dug in as he was pushing it back in the river. And, besides, there’s no other explanation. She can’t be anywhere near here or she would have heard us calling out to her.”
“But wouldn’t we have heard her scream if someone grabbed her?”
“Maybe not. He must have gagged her somehow. This probably happened when we were still trying to get the canoe and gear together at that camp. So we might not have heard anything even if she screamed as loud as she could, especially over the sound of the running water.”
“What are we going to do? How will we ever find her? We’ve got to help her, Grant!”
“We
are
going to help her. We’ve got to try to catch that guy, and that’s why we’ve got to go
now
, no time to waste! Let’s just throw our stuff in the canoe and go! He’s got a big head start, but he has to stop to rest somewhere.”
“Why would he be going downstream anyway? Doesn’t that go back the way we came, towards New Orleans?”
“No, not to New Orleans,” Grant said as he steadied the canoe while Jessica got in and got situated in the bow seat. “It runs to the Gulf eventually, of course, but first it joins the Pearl River, which is the biggest river in this region this side of the Mississippi. The lower reaches of the Pearl split apart into three rivers and lots of branching bayous that spread out to be more than five miles wide. For about 20 miles it becomes a maze of waterways, and runs through a vast river-bottom forest that is the closest thing I’ve seen in the States to a jungle. The general area is called the Honey Island Swamp, but this forest covers some 250 square miles, most of it protected as a national wildlife refuge. If he is headed there and gets there with Casey before we catch him, it will probably be impossible to find them.”
“How far is it from here?” Jessica asked. They were now afloat, with all their belongings, including Casey’s, stowed in the middle of the canoe between them. The bicycles were left where they’d hidden them, in the dense canebrake.
“By canoe? I’ve only done the trip once, and I think it took us about four days to get to the Pearl River from my parent’s cabin. But we weren’t in a hurry and we were stopping a lot to explore and take pictures. Then we paddled another three days through the swamps and took out almost at the coast. From here, somebody paddling like this guy was doing could be in those swamps in two days, not to mention the help he’ll get with the river up like it is after all this rain.”

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