Scott Williams - The Pulse

They were back on the river around noon, and to Casey’s surprise she too had dozed off to sleep in the bottom of the canoe while Derek slept in the hammock. Fear had kept her awake the entire previous night, but today exhaustion had caught up with her, and in a more comfortable position, she probably slept at least two hours. As they traveled through the afternoon, she was once again low in the canoe among his gear bags, and more than once he pulled the tarp over her head to hide her when they passed riverside cabins. He did refrain from using the gag or blindfold again, but he told her any outcry in the vicinity of anyone they happened to pass would be met with a swift blow from the paddle that would knock her out. She had no reason to doubt that he would do it, and kept quiet, even when he exchanged a few words with a man who was fishing on the bank near one of the weekend getaway camps they passed.

Just as she could no longer resist sleep, hunger overcame her that second day as well, and the next time they stopped she accepted some of the smoked venison jerky he had offered her before. It was surprisingly delicious, even better than the processed beef variety Grant had bought that first day when they had stocked up at the grocery store near campus. She knew it could have been simply that she was really hungry, but this stuff was delicious. After trying it she ate another piece.

“Venison,” Derek said. “I eat it year round; it’s much better than eating fat, grain-fed cattle. I hunt year round too, even before, when it was illegal and there were people trying to enforce their idiotic laws. Now most of the people that thought up laws like that are probably dead already—too stupid to survive in a world without a government to take care of them.”

“This isn’t going to last forever,” Casey said, “and it’s no excuse to break the law and do as you please. But I don’t care if you kill deer out of season and want to live in a swamp. Just please let me go. I’ll walk back to where you found me, and you can just go on and do whatever you want to do.”

“You know I can’t do that. I can’t let a beautiful young woman like you take off walking on the roads the way things are now. You still don’t get it, but I’m saving you. I’m doing you a favor and saving you from the fate that would have awaited you if I hadn’t come along, and will still catch up to your two friends. I don’t think you understand, but most people are going to die as a result of the power grid going down. Most of them don’t have the will to do what it takes to survive, but I’m different, and always have been. I’ve been literally living for a time like this. I’ve been preparing for it and knowing it would happen eventually. The artificial lifestyle you and everyone you know has been living is just that— artificial. It’s not real, and it could not go on indefinitely. Now, at last, we get a chance to live a life that is real, and I’ve chosen you to be my partner in that life. I know it’s all new and unfamiliar to you and maybe a little frightening, but I’m going to teach you. You’re going to love it when you get used to it, and we’re going to live in a beautiful place—a nearly perfect place that is wild and natural—where we will have everything we need, and be free, like our ancestors were before modern civilization screwed everything up.”

“You’re insane,” Casey said. “I would rather die than be anywhere, even in a paradise, with someone who would do what you did to me. I don’t know where you came up with your fantasy, but it doesn’t involve me! Why didn’t you bring your wife or girlfriend, or whatever? Oh, never mind, you probably never had one. You’re too weird to get one! And you’re completely wrong if you think I needed ‘saving’ from anything. My friend Grant knew what he was doing, and we had a place to go where we would be safe and have everything we would need until this was all over.”

Derek’s only response was to laugh. He was genuinely insane, of that she was certain—insane in a dangerous way, but she felt more confident than ever that he wouldn’t hurt her, at least not deliberately, unless she tried to escape or cry out to someone. It seemed that he really believed his delusion that she would eventually be grateful to him for ‘rescuing’ her, and that they would somehow live off the land deep in some swamp hideaway, like some kind of happy pioneer couple or something.

Back on the river, Derek continued to rant about the evils of civilization as he paddled the canoe. He told her that he had never fit into modern society, and had known he was not meant to live that way ever since childhood. Instead of playing sports in school, he spent every spare minute hunting and fishing, and often played hooky to get in more time doing so. He said that as an adult, he hated working for money, and didn’t want most of the things it could buy anyway. He mostly did odd jobs on a friend’s farm and then took off for weeks at a time to live in the woods and do what he really wanted to do. In between these excursions he read everything he could get his hands on about the way the Indians and later the white trappers and explorers had lived before the whole country was settled and tamed and completely ruined, as he saw it. He practiced their skills and learned to use every part of the animals he killed, pointing out the deerskin moccasins he wore as an example to her. Then he said that he had a brain-tanned deer hide rolled up in his bags and promised that once they got to his secret camp he would make her a pair of nice moccasins like his, since she didn’t have her shoes.

He talked about the solar flare and how everybody in modern America was so dependent upon electric power that they didn’t know how to do anything else but go apeshit crazy when the lights went out. He said they were all so stupid they would just sit and wait for the government to bail them out and only a few would take any initiative to do anything, and then, if they did, it would be the wrong thing.

“I may have hated school,” he said, “but I’m not some ignorant dumbass backwoods hick like most people around here. I didn’t like somebody else telling me what to read and having to take a test on it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like to read. I studied what I wanted to learn about on my own and one thing that always interested me was the history of various cultures and especially the decline of ancient civilizations. I was into a lot of philosophy too, especially Thoreau and the ancient Chinese Taoist teachings. Do you know who Lao Tzu was? Have you ever read the Tao Te Ching? Would you like to hear what my favorite quote of his was? “Water flows in the places men reject.” You can see now how true this is. Look at this river, for instance. It winds and twists for more than a hundred miles through some of the finest woods and wild lands left anywhere in these parts, and what do all those ‘civilized’ idiots do? They sit in those square boxes they call houses or take off down the road, stuck in their way of thinking that nature has to be shaped and conformed to their needs, and not the other way around. All the while, this river flows nearby, twisting quietly and unnoticed through these forgotten ‘places that men reject,’ offering a route of travel, a refuge, food to eat and water to drink. Yet they’re just too blind to see it. That’s why they will die, and that’s why they deserve to. We’re entering a new era now, and those who can’t figure out fast that they’ve got to give up on their technology are not going to be a part of it. It might be hard for a while until the die-off is complete, but give it a good year or so and we won’t have to lie low in one area anymore. There’ll be so few people around that there will be room enough for everyone who is smart enough to still be here. Then we can live the way we were meant to—free—as nomadic hunter-gatherers roaming whenever and wherever we please. There will be others like us too, and it will take time to reconnect, but someday we will eventually join together and form new tribes. By then, we will be fully adapted to the old ways, and this transition period will be a distant memory.”