Scott Williams - The Pulse

The afternoon light was rapidly fading when she finally got underway in the canoe, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to go far before the swamp was enveloped in darkness. But she was determined to go as far as possible from that awful place while she could still see. She pushed off the bottom with the paddle and struggled to steer the long canoe through the twists and turns of the winding bayou. Frequently banging the bow into trees and getting the keel stuck in the mud along the edges, she made slow progress, but at least she was moving.

When the deepening twilight finally overtook her, Casey pulled the canoe onto a muddy bank and hurriedly scrounged some dry leaves and broke dead twigs off of nearby branches to start a fire. She managed to get it going before full nightfall, but there was not enough dry wood in the immediate vicinity to build it up to any size or to keep it stoked until morning. She huddled in its glow as long as she was able to keep it burning, using the can opener to open a can of mixed vegetable soup, which she placed near the flames to warm before eating it and drinking the broth from the can. In her haste to leave, she had not thought to include even one of Derek’s cooking pots as she gathered the things she thought she would need.

She had no idea what she would do when morning came; her only plan was to follow the bayou downstream. It had to come out somewhere , either on a bigger river or directly on the coast. Either way, it didn’t really matter. There was no way she could find her way back to the Bogue Chitto, and even if she could, she knew it would be impossible to travel back all the way they’d come, paddling alone and upstream against the current. Though she wanted to get to Grant’s cabin and be with Grant and Jessica more than anything, she knew she couldn’t get there by that route, and she sure couldn’t stay out here in the swamp indefinitely. She would have to take her chances with strangers somewhere downstream in what was left of civilization, and she could only hope that she could find other people with decency and morals remaining despite the collapse. If so, maybe she could get help in eventually making her way to the other side of the state line and finding her friends.

She sat by the fire thinking about the prospects for her future and worrying about Grant and Jessica, as well as her father and her Uncle Larry. After what she had gone through with Derek since that day he’d taken her by surprise, she couldn’t imagine that she would face anything worse. Even sitting there alone, surrounded by the blackness of the night forest with her firewood nearly depleted, she was not afraid anymore. She had turned the tables on her captor and rescued herself completely on her own, and she knew after that experience that she could overcome any other obstacles that might loom in her path tomorrow or beyond. When the fire finally burned down, she sat propped against the canoe, and finally dozed off.

She awoke with a scream, her rest shattered by a nightmare of Derek looming out of the blackness to grab her, half of his brains spilling out of the bloody wound in the back of his head like some specter from a horror movie. After that vision, she knew there was no hope of getting more sleep, so she spent the rest of the night awake, huddled against the canoe and waiting for dawn.

When the light finally came, she lost no time getting on the move again. She wanted to get to the end of the little bayou as quickly as possible, and away from the closed-in feeling of the dense forest that surrounded it. In less than an hour of paddling, she reached that goal. The bayou suddenly opened up ahead of her and its clear waters merged with the muddy brown current of a big river, which she was certain had to be a branch of the Pearl. She drifted out onto its broad, sunlit expanse, feeling as if she had suddenly stepped out of a darkened room into daylight after days of confinement. But despite her relief at the relatively wide-open space before her, she could see that she was literally not out of the woods yet. There was nothing on either bank but walls of greenery bounding the waterway on both sides, much the same as the river upstream had appeared before they turned off to go to Derek’s camp.

She resumed paddling, easing into a steady rhythm that would eat up the miles, but hoping to find a place to land soon so she could eat something and take a short nap to make up for losing so much sleep during the night. She had only rounded one big bend of the river when she came to a good-sized sandbar. Knowing now that such nice places to stop would be few and far between in the swamp, she landed and tied the canoe off to a big piece of driftwood. The warmth of the morning sun was so pleasant she stretched out immediately on the soft sand next to the canoe and fell fast asleep.

How long she slept there, she had no idea, but when she awoke it was to the sharp clang of metal on metal as something banged against the side of the canoe. At first she thought she was still in the boat and that it had drifted down the river and bumped against a log or something, but she was really too tired to care and just wanted to go back to sleep—that is, until she heard voices— men’s voices . Still thinking she was in the canoe, she reached for her paddle, and her hand grasped only sand. At the same time, she opened her eyes and saw a grinning apparition looming over her, squatting just an arm’s length away. She cried out as she sat up, and then she heard her name uttered from the lips of a completely unexpected black face, a face framed by wild cords of matted hair hanging down and draping across the man’s shoulders and arms. A shock of recognition swept over her—despite the utter impossibility, she knew that she was looking at none other than her Uncle Larry’s friend Scully! Before she could open her lips to form a question, she heard her name called again in another nearby voice that trembled with excitement and joy. There could certainly be no mistaking that one, and when she turned her head to look, beyond her canoe to the boat behind it, Casey knew for sure that she was not dreaming.

When Artie and Scully set out in the battered johnboat at daybreak from the lake where Larry would wait with the Casey Nicole, Artie fully expected to spend the entire day winding their way upstream, first to the mouth of the Bogue Chitto, and then up most of its length to beyond the state line to the north. He could only hope that the old Evinrude would continue to run as smoothly as it had while pushing the catamaran, and that the quick and dirty patch job they’d done to the battered johnboat would keep the water out long enough to get them there. He also worried that there would not be enough depth in the Bogue Chitto, or that they would hit something such as a submerged log and damage the engine. It was going to be a long journey, well over a hundred miles, and a lot could go wrong. Still, he felt hopeful that he would be reunited with Casey before dark, because finding the boat was more of a lucky break than he’d dared to hope for after what the fisherman in Pearlington had said of their chances of buying one.

Early morning mist hanging over the river forced them to run at idle speed for almost two hours, Scully sitting in the stern and steering the boat with the outboard’s combination tiller and throttle, while Artie crouched in the bow, straining to see through the fog to direct him around stumps and floating debris. They passed under the double overpass bridges of Interstate 59 at around the same time the sun began to burn off the fog. The river here was still wide, but in many places there were logjams spanning almost bank to bank, forcing them to pick a channel to steer through. At one of the worst of these, Artie realized that if they had brought the catamaran this far upriver, they would have been blocked from further progress at this point. With the narrow johnboat, it was tedious, but not too difficult to thread their way through all these obstructions. They would typically come to one every third bend or so, and then enjoy a mile or more of open river where Scully could open up the engine enough to get the johnboat up on a plane. They had just sped up again in this manner when Artie spotted a sandbar far ahead and what looked like a canoe pulled halfway out of the water onto it. He pointed it out to Scully, and the Rastaman slowed the engine back to idle as they approached the sandbar from downriver. Not wanting to take any chances on being ambushed by someone who might be hiding in the woods near the canoe, Scully steered them to the far side of the river to keep as much distance as possible between them and the sandbar when they passed. Both of them watched the woods for movement, Artie cradling the loaded shotgun at ready in his lap, just in case. They were adjacent to the upper end of the sandbar, where they could see on both sides of the canoe, when Scully shifted the engine into neutral and pointed.