Scott Williams: The Pulse

“How can you plan to live in a place like this?” Casey asked, tears starting to roll down her face as she slapped at the mosquitoes that were buzzing around her head and neck. “There is nothing here but trees. You can’t even see the canoe from where we’re standing, and it’s just a few yards away. I feel like I’m going to suffocate.” She slumped to the ground and sat with her head in her hands, gripping her hair with both hands and trying to resist the urge to yank it out as hard as she could. She was so frustrated, terrified, and exhausted. Every day since her alarm had failed to go off that morning that now seemed so very long ago, her life had gotten harder and scarier with each new passing day. Now that she saw this place that Derek had been planning to take her, the prospect of coming up with an idea for escaping his clutches and finding her way out of this nightmare seemed truly hopeless. And here at his camp, their journey on the river done, she feared time was running out before he would try and force his way on her.

ARTIE’S MIND WAS RACING with worry as he and Scully quietly paddled the kayak out of the dark canal to the open waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Had Casey and her friends left New Orleans early enough to avoid the horrors they’d had a vivid glimpse of today? If they had left in time to get ahead of the worst of the panicked exodus from the city, what would they have faced on the other side of the lake, and along the highways leading north? Was the cabin really in a safe enough location, or would they be in danger there too? Most of all, he wondered how he was going to get there and how long that would take. If they had to walk, traveling 90 miles would take days. And if things had deteriorated a lot more in the days since Casey and her friends made the trip, what dangers would they face trying to follow their route now? Artie had lots of questions; what he didn’t have was answers to any of them.

The map Grant had drawn was just a simple sketch, with highway numbers and turning directions. It was hard for Artie to grasp what the journey would really entail without seeing a real map, and he was anxious to get back aboard the catamaran so he and Larry could study the Louisiana state road map that Craig had given them. He was unfamiliar with the towns along the north shore of the lake, and especially with the countryside north of that. His route in and out of New Orleans had always been Interstate 10, which crossed over to the north shore at Slidell, but then continued east through the Gulf coast cities of Gulfport and Biloxi and on to Mobile. He hoped Larry might have some ideas, but doubted he knew the area to the north either because his only visits to New Orleans in decades had been a couple of yacht delivery trips in and out by the route they’d just sailed on the Casey Nicole.

Larry was waiting anxiously on deck for them when they paddled back alongside the boat. “Did you get your pistol?” he asked.

“She left,” Artie said, as he climbed aboard. “She and Jessica and their friend Grant. Grant left a note from her in my car. He borrowed my gun as well, and I’m glad he did, I just hope he hasn’t needed it and hope he never does.” Artie helped Scully pull the kayak back on deck, and when they’d secured it, he sat down with Larry to tell him about Casey and her friends’ plan to ride their bicycles to a cabin in Mississippi.

“Wow!” Larry said. “That’s quite a trip, but you know, it also sounds pretty smart to me. If this kid Grant had enough sense to lead them out of here that soon after the grid went down, I’ll bet they made it just fine. You know most people would just be confused and disoriented, not knowing what to do or where to turn in the first few days after an event like this. Chances are all the real problems and violence didn’t crop up until about four or five days into it. They probably got across the Causeway ahead of all that and made it to that camp with no problem. I’ve never heard of that river, the Bogue Chitto, but let’s check it out on the map….”

Crowding over the chart table in the starboard hull, the three of them looked at the official state road map of Louisiana and compared it to Grant’s hand-drawn sketch. His route made sense and seemed to be the most direct way to reach the state line while avoiding as many major highways and urban areas as possible. The level of detail on the road map showed only highways, because of its small scale, though there was enough overlap in the coverage area across the state line to include the corner of Mississippi where Grant’s sketch indicated the cabin was located, but none of the county roads or unpaved roads leading to it were shown. They would have to rely solely on his drawings to find their way the last few miles, once the route left the highway.

“There’s the Bogue Chitto,” Larry said, tracing it with his finger. “Look at that, it’s a tributary of the Pearl. See here, it empties into the river there, just downstream from this Highway 21 here.”

“So?”

“So that means we might be able to get a lot closer with the boat. I’ve heard that some of the shrimpers and other boat owners in the area sometimes use the lower reaches of the Pearl for a hurricane hole, so at least part of it is navigable. I don’t know how far up it we could get, but it looks like a big river to me. Let me get my chartbook and see what it shows for the entrance.”

“Yeah, but we could only go up it so far, right? Wouldn’t that take too long and wouldn’t it be better to try to follow the same route Casey and her friends took on the road?”

“How you goin’ down de road, Doc? You gonna walk 90 mile wid all dem hungry people? How you gonna take enough to eat an’ den keep it safe from a thief? What you gonna do den, mon, if you find dat place? You gonna want de girls to walk back all de way dem come, when t’ings more dangerous now?”

“Scully’s right. I think it would be crazy to try and hike it from here, and besides, that would take days, one way.” Larry pointed on the map, “Look, even if we sailed to the north shore and started here, you’d have to get through all this urban sprawl for miles and miles—Mandeville, Covington, and then more small towns to the north. And besides that, what would we do with the boat? We couldn’t all go and leave it behind, and I think it’s a real bad idea to split up for a long time like that, especially since we have no way of knowing how bad things are inland. If you go wandering off on the road, either alone or with Scully, I won’t have any idea when to expect you back and no way of knowing if something happened to you or if you just got delayed. And likewise, you’d have no way of knowing if I would even still be here with the boat when you get back. Someone could kill me and take it if I just sat here anchored in the lake that long. You heard what Craig said was happening in his marina, and I don’t have to remind you about Puerto Rico. Would you want to bring the kids through all that danger to get back to the north shore, only to find out that you didn’t have a ride when you got here? I don’t think it’s feasible at all to do it that way.”

“Well, what are you proposing then? It’s not like we can sail all the way to cabin, can we?”

“No, but with our extremely shallow draft, our working outboard motor, and our untouched fuel supply, not to mention the ability to easily lower the mast to go under bridges, power lines, and other obstacles, we may be able to get a hell of a lot closer to it than we are here.” Larry pulled out his chartbook for the northern Gulf coast and flipped through it to the appropriate page. “Here it is. Look, the main mouth of the river is here, this easternmost entrance. This chart doesn’t show it, but you can see on the road map how the river splits into two major branches, the West Pearl and the East Pearl, way upstream but below the place where the Bogue Chitto empties into it. The nautical chart doesn’t cover that part of the river, but you can see that there is a marked channel on the East Pearl, and it shows enough water even for much bigger boats than ours all the way north of Interstate 10. So we know we can get that far. It’s impossible to tell from the road map, of course, but I’m betting we could motor on upstream for quite some distance beyond the marked channel, maybe to here even, where Interstate 59 crosses the river. That’s almost halfway to the mouth of the Bogue Chitto. The closer we can get to that cabin with the boat, the easier it will be to get to them and get them all out of there. Once we’re that far upstream, you can see that there’s nothing but a few small towns and hardly any development along the river. The map shows that most of it is a national wildlife refuge.”