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.”
“What good would it do to go all the way up there and only get halfway to the Bogue Chitto? That still leaves a long way to go, and then it looks like even farther on the Bogue Chitto itself to get to the state line.”
“Well, in the worst case, from that point, it would probably be feasible for you and Scully to strike out on one of these smaller roads that roughly parallel the course of the river and go overland the rest of the way. That’s far from ideal, but much better than leaving from here. We could tuck the boat into one of these smaller bayous or oxbow lakes and I could stay with it and hope no comes along that far out in the swamp who would realize the potential of a boat like this. I think it would be much safer there anyway, as anyone we encounter up there on the river is likely going to be more self-reliant and probably not desperate like all these folks here in the cities. But as I said, that’s the worst case. Here’s what I’m hoping: on all these Southern rivers, aluminum johnboats are everywhere. All the locals in the area use them for fishing, and you see them tied up or pulled up on the bank everywhere there’s a camp or cabin. I’m sure that given this situation, most people who have one are not going to want to let go of it, but we might find someone who will. Whether we’re able to borrow one, barter for it, or buy it outright, if we could get hold of a 14- or 16-foot johnboat, it would be a simple matter to mount our 25-horse outboard on it, and then you and Scully could probably reach Grant’s cabin in a day. We’ve got enough fuel on board to do that, and you’ll use less coming back downriver. Anyway, that’s the best plan I’ve got, and I think it’s our best shot. What do you say?”
“How long do you think it will take to get to the river mouth, and then motor up it to that point?” Artie wanted to know.
“You can see on the chart that it’s roughly 50 miles east of here to the mouth of the Pearl. We passed it yesterday on the way here to Lake Pontchartrain. We could be there tomorrow morning easily if we sail back to the eastern end of the lake tonight, and at least get to the other side of the Twin Span Bridge. We can get a few hours of sleep, then get up and go. We should be within the mouth of the Pearl before noon. We can then assess the situation better and make sure the outboard is ready for the trip upriver.”
“We could run into delays and obstacles on the upstream part, of course, but I figure, if the Pearl is typical of the rivers that empty into the Gulf, the current won’t be very strong. The outboard ought to push us at least three knots—maybe five if the current’s real sluggish. And if it proves to be slower, maybe we’ll get lucky and find a johnboat before we have to go that far. I mainly just want to take the big boat upriver far enough up to get it out of sight of anyone who might see it as a grand opportunity to sail the hell out of Dodge, and that mostly means getting inland of the coast.”
“So it looks like all day tomorrow to get the Casey Nicole situated, and then if we’re lucky and find a boat, the day after that Scully and I might make it to the cabin. I guess that’s not bad at all.”
“No, and even if we lose an extra day, you’ll still get there faster than you could walk from here. Even if you could walk 20 miles a day, which you probably couldn’t given the conditions, it would take you four and a half days to get there from here, and at least as long to get back.”
Once Larry had made his case Artie needed no further persuasion. Scully was certainly happy about the plan, as he had no desire to be walking any distance from the boat in ‘Babylon’ and just wanted to get the girls and their friend and get back to sea as soon as possible. With this settled, they hauled in the anchor and sailed back under the Causeway the way they’d come, and later in the night cleared the Twin Span Bridge and its awful smell of death. Once they’d gone a few miles farther east, they anchored to get some sleep and wait for daylight to navigate the Rigolets out of Lake Pontchartrain into the sound. But in the morning, when they were ready to leave, the wind had died down to a flat calm, and Larry said they might as well go ahead and use the motor; because of the land masses surrounding them it might be afternoon before the wind filled in again.
The 35-year-old Evinrude hadn’t inspired much confidence in Artie when he first saw it in Culebra. But since that day, it had been out of sight and out of mind, hanging below decks under the cockpit with the cover fixed over the well. With the favorable winds that had carried them everywhere they had wanted to go for more than a thousand miles, the motor simply had not been needed.
“It’s as good as new,” Larry assured him when he expressed his doubts. “Scully rebuilt the carburetor last time we used it to move somebody’s boat when a tropical storm was coming into Culebra. It ran like a top. One thing about these old two-stroke Evinrudes: they’re dead-nuts simple to work on and there’s little to go wrong.”
Scully proved him right when the engine cranked and ran on just the third pull of the starter rope. Once they put it in gear and got up to speed, the small outboard was able to push the Casey Nicole along nicely at seven knots, owing to the slim, knifelike profiles of the twin hulls that presented little resistance to the water.
“It’s not as fast as sailing, but it’ll get us there,” Larry said.
They motored on through the morning, droning along over the opaque, brown waters between Lake Pontchartrain and the clearer waters of the Mississippi Sound, and by late morning reached the marked channel that designated the entrance to the navigable part of the Pearl. Turning north into the river, before they even got to the first bend they encountered their first potential obstacle: a low bridge that spanned the channel. It was far too low to clear in any sailing vessel with a mast, but it was a railroad swing bridge, so it was kept in the open position most of the time when a train was not expected. Luckily it had been open when it was abandoned sometime after the pulse hit, because they found it out of their way now. For a few bends beyond the railroad, the river wound through an expansive marshland of tall grasses, snaking along through the transition zone between salt and fresh water. The Evinrude outboard was proving its reliability and had consumed only a few gallons of gas from their supply. Larry did some calculations based on how much it had taken to get this far from Lake Pontchartrain and was certain they had enough fuel to make the trip upriver and back, considering both the distances they planned to go on the catamaran, and by small boat the rest of the way.
“We probably won’t have much left after the trip, and I doubt we’ll ever be able to get any more, but if it enables us to get those kids and get back to the Gulf, it will have served its purpose,” he said. “After that, we’ll be real sailors like in the old days when no boats had an ‘iron staysail’ to fall back on when the wind died.”
“Hey Copt’n, what we gonna do ’bout dis otha drawbridge up ahead?” Scully asked. “Dat one’s de highway and she closed, mon.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. It wouldn’t have been open that day unless there happened to be a barge or something coming through, so it got locked down in the closed position. We’re going to have to lower the mast. Let’s drop the hook right here in the middle of the channel and get it done. We might as well stow the sails below. We won’t be stepping it again until we come back out under this bridge.”
The way Larry had the rig set up, with synthetic Dyneema shrouds and stays tensioned by simple dead-eyes, rather than turnbuckles, and the mast stepped in a tabernacle with a pivot, lowering the entire affair was a relatively quick and simple task. To bring it down in control, he connected a four-part tackle to the forestay, with the tail led back to the central cockpit winch. The total time lost in the operation was less than a half hour, and soon they were motoring north again, passing under the steel suspension bridge that the chart identified as Highway 90. As on all the other bridges they’d seen, abandoned cars were scattered along its length, but they saw no sign of life, nor the evidence of death that had been so clear from the presence of vultures on the long bridges leading out of New Orleans.
Immediately to the north of this bridge, they passed the small town of Pearlington on the right bank. It appeared that many of the residents here had chosen to remain in their homes, and they saw a few people as they motored by, all of them stopping to stare at the unusual catamaran going upriver. At a dock in front of a waterfront house, a middle-aged man was loading crawfish traps into a slightly larger version of the kind of johnboat Larry was on the lookout for. At his signal, Scully cut the throttle back to idle so that he could make him an offer to either buy or rent it. The man in the skiff just laughed out loud.
“Are you kidding? How you think I’m going to feed my family without a boat? A boat’s the only way anybody can make it around here now. I wouldn’t trade it for nothin’, not even that fancy yacht of yours there.”
Larry said he understood, and for the brief moments they were drifting within speaking distance, he plied the man for local knowledge of the river conditions upstream.
“You might make it as far as I-59, I don’t know. I’ve never run the river that far myself. If your draft is only two feet, like you say it is, you can probably find a channel. The only problem is that thing is so damned wide you may not find a place to get through with both of them hulls. Good luck trying to find a small boat, though. I can’t imagine anybody letting one go right about now, but there’s a fool born every minute, so you never know.”
Artie was beginning to second-guess his brother’s plan as they motored on upriver after hearing this bit of advice. What the man had said made perfect sense. In a world where the grocery stores were cleaned out and the delivery trucks were not running, anyone living on a riverbank with a functional boat would have a distinct advantage over those less fortunate souls who had no way to access the abundant food sources the river offered. And if they couldn’t find someone willing to part with the right kind of boat that could negotiate the smaller waters of the Bogue Chitto, they would end up walking once they reached the limits of where the Casey Nicole could go.
After leaving what was left of civilization behind at Pearlington, they motored upriver the rest of the afternoon, winding through the endless bottomland forests lining the banks on both sides, while carefully watching the muddy brown current for signs of sandbars, hidden logs, and other dangers. These hazards made it necessary to go slowly, and when the sun dropped below the trees, they had not covered as many miles as Larry had hoped. They were well to the north of the Interstate 10 bridge over the swamp, but still several miles downstream of the next bridge at Interstate 59, at least by Larry’s calculation. The I-59 crossing was the last bridge spanning the river basin between them and the mouth of the Bogue Chitto, and Artie could feel a growing sense of anticipation at being that much closer to Casey, but he was also overwhelmed with frustration about not having an appropriate boat and having to stop for the night. Larry insisted it was too risky to navigate the river in the dark, though, and steered them off the river into a wide slough that led into a large dead lake bounded by tall cypress trees. As they were maneuvering about to find the best place to drop the anchor, Scully spotted something washed up in the debris of logs, plastic bottles, and other trash that had been deposited by the last flood among the cypress knees at the lake’s edge. Upon closer inspection through Larry’s binoculars, they could see that it was a boat—or at least part of one—turned on its side and halfway submerged in the shallows. As soon as the anchor was down, Artie and Scully off-loaded the kayak and paddled over to check it out. It was indeed a battered and abandoned aluminum boat, jammed in between two cypress knees, its stern end sunk and its port gunwale bent and twisted. Upon closer inspection, Artie saw that there was large hole punctured through the thin aluminum hull, which was why it sank and probably why no one bothered to salvage it. It looked to be at least a couple of decades old, and Artie knew that such boats were cheap to buy even when new. It likely had washed downriver from some camp upstream, and probably was already neglected and abandoned before then.
Scully said Larry could fix the hole, though, and if they could get it out, he thought it was big enough to carry the outboard. But try as they might, because of the way it was jammed between the cypress knees and weighted down with water inside, the two of them couldn’t budge it. They paddled back to the catamaran; Larry passed them one end of a long mooring line and handed Scully his machete. After cutting one of the cypress knees that had it hung up and fastening the line to the bow, they were able to winch it free just as they had pulled Craig’s sailboat off the bottom at Ship Island. Once it was alongside, Artie and Scully muscled it aboard the forward deck.
After a close examination, Larry was ecstatic. “Sure, it’s all beat to hell and ugly as shit, but I can fix this. We’ll straighten the bent gunwale as much as we can and hammer the aluminum flat around the hole, and then sandwich the damaged area between two pieces of quarter-inch marine plywood, which I’ve got plenty of.”
“How will we attach the plywood so it won’t leak?” Artie asked.
“It’ll be a quick and dirty job—not pretty—but simple enough. We’ll just slather the plywood pieces in 5200, one of the toughest marine adhesives on the planet, and bolt’em together right through the hull. It’ll keep the water out long enough to get you where you’re going. This hull is twisted some too—not much we can do about that—but at least it’s big enough to mount the outboard on. I say let’s get it done tonight and then you and Scully can take off in the morning. This is as good a place as any for me to wait with the Casey Nicole. If you go from here in the skiff, you’ll get there before tomorrow night, easily. I think that makes more sense than trying to navigate this big-ass catamaran any farther upriver, don’t you?”
Artie did think it made more sense, and he was thrilled that he could possibly be reunited with his daughter by tomorrow night! They set to work and got the repair done after dark, leaving the boat upside down on the deck so the adhesive could at least partially cure. Larry said it wouldn’t fully cure for days, but it was thick enough to keep the water out anyway, and the screws they bolted the plywood together with would keep the patch in place. The only thing left to do was pack some food, water, and emergency gear, along with the shotgun and ammunition. Artie and Scully were going on an expedition!
More than a week had passed since Grant and Jessica had seen any sign of Casey and her abductor. He didn’t even know exactly how long it had been, maybe even longer than ten days. The days all ran together, now that every one was just the same struggle to survive and keep looking. Though they scanned every likely place someone might land a canoe during their entire descent of the Bogue Chitto, the tracks they had examined on that one sandbar their second morning on the river were both the first and the last that they found. That seemed like the distant past now to Grant, almost like another place in another time, miles and miles upstream on the banks of a river they had long since left astern. Today they turned once more down yet another twisting bayou in the lower Pearl River basin, looking for anything that might be a clue to Casey’s whereabouts. But each waterway they traveled in this labyrinth of flooded forest confirmed what he’d already known. Searching for two people, in one small canoe, in 250 square miles of swampy forest—was a daunting prospect. There was simply no way he and Jessica could try all the possible routes that the man who had Casey could have taken, and he knew there was also a chance that he had left the river and taken her somewhere overland. They could have missed any sign where he did this and continued on downriver without knowing it.
Of course Grant didn’t have a map of the river basin with him, and he’d only paddled through it once, several years ago, and along just one the dozens of possible routes that a canoe could take to the river’s end at the coast. Now he was faced with trying to explore all these possibilities, without the benefit of a map, and each time they reached the end of one bayou, they had to backtrack upstream against the current to check out others that branched off on different routes. It was incredibly frustrating, not to mention physically exhausting. Grant knew that even if he had a boat with an outboard motor and could zip up and down all these waterways at speed, it would still take days to cover them all and there was no way to account for the endless changes in route that the man he was pursuing might take in the meantime.
On top of the difficulties of trying to find Casey, Grant had the even bigger problem of trying to forage and catch enough food for them both to eat while they traveled. This was proving to be a greater challenge than he had imagined, despite the fact that they were in a rich ecosystem with great diversity of plant and animal life both in the water and in the forests it flowed through.The biggest problem with trying to find food while also looking for Casey was the amount of time it took away from their search for her. While he’d had been lucky that first night he set drop hooks and caught a catfish, night after successive night he was unsuccessful in catching another by this method. He did manage to land a decent-sized bass on one occasion with the rod and reel and one of the lures he’d found in the canoe shed, but other than that, fishing was not as productive as he’d hoped.
Jessica finally succumbed to hunger and ate a sizeable portion of fish when he cooked the bass in the coals of their campfire that night, and that was a big relief to Grant, as he was worried about her getting weaker. Just as he expected, it was proving really difficult to find enough food to support her vegetarian diet in the swamp, especially this early in the year when a lot of seasonal wild plant foods simply were not available. It was the right time of year for tender cattail shoots, though, and they both ate their fill of these whenever they came to a patch of them at the water’s edge. They were tasty and easy to gather, but not very sustaining for the kind of effort they were expending each day paddling the canoe. When they reached the swamps of the Pearl, he was also able to gather hearts of palm from the dense thickets of palmettos that grew there, but getting to these required a lot of effort with the machete for the small reward in each plant.
The easiest source of available protein in the swamp, he soon discovered, were the abundant freshwater crawfish that were everywhere in the still backwaters and slow-running creeks. At first, catching them by hand proved nearly impossible, but then he tried wading in the edges of the shallows at night after they’d made camp, using his flashlight in one hand to spot them and cause them to back away from the beam. This made it possible to grab them with the other hand and eventually collect enough to make a meal. Jessica was reluctant to try the bug-like creatures at first, but again, her hunger was becoming so constant that she gave in and discovered she liked them almost as much as the fish. Grant said they were exactly the same as lobsters, only smaller, and having crawfish boils was a long-standing tradition among the locals throughout the region. The only problem with this food source was that he only had one more set of batteries for the flashlight, and using it for a couple of hours at a time would soon deplete those. He also saw bullfrogs along the bank at night, but could never get close enough to even attempt to grab one. If only he still had the .22 pistol, he knew he could shoot them before they hopped away, but then again, if he had that, he would be able to put a wide variety of meat in the pot fairly easily.
They frequently passed chattering squirrels from just a few feet away and saw many small birds, rabbits, and even wild turkeys that would have been in range of a well-placed shot, but they were all out of reach without a projectile weapon. Grant had seen the Wapishana hunt with primitive bows and arrows and the blowguns they made from materials collected in the jungle, and while he knew a lot about the theory of primitive weapons from his anthropology studies, he lacked any practical experience in making them. He did know enough to know that producing useable weapons, especially bows, required not only skill in choosing materials and crafting them, but also time for the wood to season properly. It was not something he could invest that much time in yet, but after seeing all those frogs at night he did fashion a rudimentary spear out of a large section of river cane in hopes of getting lucky and impaling one. They also saw plenty of big garfish in the shallows practically every day, and he knew that with patience he might be able to spear one. At this point, he was ready to eat anything that moved, and also kept a lookout for snakes and turtles, both of which were abundant, but difficult to approach close enough to catch.
The coffee had run out a few days ago, and following more than a year of caffeine addiction in graduate school, he suffered headaches for a couple of days, but now seemed to be over it. He doubted he’d get another cup of coffee any time soon, even if they had not been combing the swamp looking for Casey. Coffee was one of those luxury commodities imported from afar that simply would no longer be available after the collapse of the power grid and easy transportation. He knew that a lot of things wouldn’t be available, but he still felt that if they had made it to the cabin according to their initial plan, they would have been better off than most. With enough canned foods to last a few weeks and the pistol for hunting, as well as a better selection of fishing gear that his father had left there, he felt they could have hung on long enough. And though it might have been difficult, the difficulty would have been nothing compared to trying to survive with hardly any equipment while paddling and searching for someone day after day, always on the move.
With what would soon be two weeks of fruitless searching behind them, Grant had to admit to himself that they might never see Casey again. He still felt guilt for letting the abduction happen to begin with, but he also told himself that he had done everything that anyone could reasonably expect in his efforts to track down the man who had taken her. He knew that they couldn’t go on like this, and that he couldn’t provide for Jessica indefinitely with so little equipment. He knew it was time to start thinking about their future, both in the long term and in terms of what they should do next. One thing he was sure of—it would be out of the question to turn around and travel upriver all that distance they’d come and then some to try to reach his cabin in the canoe. If they were well fed and had their full strength, that would be one thing, but before they could even contemplate such a journey, Grant knew they had to try to find some supplies and equipment. He didn’t know if that was within reason or not, but it seemed that if they traveled on downriver, closer to the coast, they might find people in some of the rural areas who were in a better situation than most and could help them. The other option was to try to find more uninhabited weekend camps like some they had seen on the Bogue Chitto, where they might be able to pillage some canned goods or other groceries. He knew that if the owners of any such retreats had been unable to get to them by now, they likely never would, and would not need them anyway. Thinking about this, he realized it was just as likely that some desperate refugees might have taken up residence in his own cabin and made use of the goods stored there. If so, going all that way would prove a waste of time and effort. Considering all this, he didn’t really know what to do.
Another consequence of the long days of being completely alone in such close proximity to Jessica was a growing attachment to her that he could tell was mutual on her part. He supposed it was inevitable, considering the situation into which they had been cast, but the more time he spent with her and got to know her, the more he liked what he discovered. Though he had felt they were as different as two people could be just a couple of weeks ago, the challenges of life in the woods brought out a part of her he hadn’t seen before, and he liked it. He thought her chances of adapting to life in this altered new reality were slim when they had first been preparing to leave New Orleans, but here on the river, she surprised him as she quickly conquered her fears of the dark and the local wildlife and even overcame her reluctance to try new foods.
The realization that he was feeling something more than mere friendship towards her gave him a twinge of guilt and brought nagging doubts that he was really as committed to finding Casey as he had been when they started out. On the one hand, he felt he had done the best he could and had put Jessica in even more danger by bringing her deep into this swamp on a fruitless chase. Continuing on to the cabin without trying to find Casey wasn’t an option he had considered for even a minute, and he knew Jessica wouldn’t have either. But after all this time, it was becoming clear how hopeless the search really was, and each day that went by with no sign of her at all made that realization all the more evident. He couldn’t help but think about what the future would bring, and right now Casey simply wasn’t in that future and he had to accept the fact that she might never be.
Whatever it was he was feeling towards Jessica, he had managed to keep it well in control, and did his best not to let her know. He certainly didn’t want to discuss it, as he wasn’t even sure if it was real or just a natural reaction to the stress of the situation. Not only did he feel bad about it because of Casey, but he knew that Jessica must be going through her own wide range of emotions considering how close she was with Casey as friends and roommates. And in the beginning, he had been much more attracted to Casey than to Jessica, as they seemed to have mutual interests that were apparent when he first met her at the freshman anthropology field trip he attended as an assistant.
But night after night, as he shared a camp with Jessica, and she slept close to him in their sleeping bags against the canoe or under the tarp, depending on the nature of the campsite, he felt a growing desire for her. It had started that first night when she wrapped her arms around him in terror at the shriek of an owl. He couldn’t deny that it felt good to comfort her then, and that he took comfort in the closeness of their embrace as well. The whole world had changed practically overnight, and they were only human, after all—a young man and a young woman—trying to survive without any of the systems or structure that had always been a part of their lives until now. As he steered the canoe from the stern, guiding around the twists and bends of this new bayou, he pondered the implications of these things as he watched her wield her paddle with the new skill she’d mastered so quickly.
This particular route was proving to be one of the most interesting yet. They had followed a series of dead sloughs that led them off of one of the main branches of the Pearl River. The route led through several still lakes, connected by sections of running water flowing generally southward. Paddling through this deep swamp, he’d almost overlooked a tiny channel that split off in a clear-running branch. They’d had to backtrack a few yards upstream to check it out, and at first it didn’t even look big enough to accommodate a canoe. But there was a strong current flowing into the entrance, evidence enough that it was indeed a bayou and not merely a slough. It had to come out again somewhere downstream, so Grant suggested they push on through a little ways and see if it was passable. Once they’d followed it for a few bends, it opened up a bit, and surprisingly, the water was clear enough to see the white sand bottom anywhere from a few inches to three feet below the surface. It was one of the many unexpected surprises of the swamp and one they would have completely missed if they had relied on first impressions. The little bayou led them into a magical stand of old-growth cypress and Tupelo gum, with huge flaring buttresses and almost solid sheets of Spanish moss hanging like curtains from their lower branches, nearly touching the water.
“This is magnificent,” Grant said. “This is a glimpse of what this entire river basin forest would have looked like back before they logged most of it over a hundred years ago.”
“It’s kind of creepy too,” Jessica said, looking around at the moss-draped giants in awe. “It has an otherworldly quality or something.”
“I know what you mean. It’s primeval, that’s what it is. Most people today have never seen anything like it, because in most places there are only tiny remnants like this scattered here and there. But a lot of the jungle I saw in Guyana was very similar.”
After that exchange, they drifted on in awed silence down the narrow bayou, staring up at the huge trees and only occasionally dipping their paddles to avoid hitting something. Being in this place made Grant think about the Wapishana people again. Their lifestyle would be totally unaffected by this solar event that had disrupted the world for everyone else. For them, life would be the same today as it was before, and they would likely be unaware that anything had happened. He was snapped out of his contemplation of this by a whispered, excited cry from Jessica:
“Grant! Look!”
He saw that she was focused on the bank to their left, where there was a small sandbar in the inside bend of the bayou, maybe four feet wide and several yards long. The edge of the sandbar, sculpted into a smooth-faced bluff by high water the last time the river level had been up, was collapsed and broken, and piles of it had fallen off and slid down to the water’s edge. At first, Grant thought maybe an alligator had pushed itself off the bank into the river, but the tracks that were everywhere on the sandbar were no reptile tracks—they were human footprints! And not only that, as he looked closer, he could see that what had collapsed the edge of the sand was the weight of a canoe being pulled over it, into the water. There was the unmistakable area of smooth, flattened sand that could only be made by the hull of a canoe or the belly of a big gator, but the sharp, central groove down the center of the slide mark told him for sure that it was the keel of an aluminum canoe. And he was certain the mark was just like the one at the place where Casey was taken and the last one they’d found so many days ago.
He was shocked, almost unable to believe what he was seeing. He immediately motioned Jessica to silence as he quietly jammed his paddle into the bottom to stop their forward motion. Stepping over the side of the canoe, he hung onto the gunwale while he pulled it closer to the bank and bent over the disturbed area for a closer look. There were many tracks in the sand, some old and shapeless and impossible to decipher, but the more recent ones made it clear to Grant that they had been made by two different people—a large man wearing moccasins and a person with significantly smaller bare feet! The latter could be Casey’s, and they could mean she was still alive! Furthermore, the barefoot tracks seemed to the be the most recent, as several of them were superimposed over the top of the moccasin prints, including a few that were alongside the slide mark made by the canoe. He wondered what that could mean as he crouched down beside the canoe and told Jessica that he was sure Casey had been here, and recently.
Looking beyond the sandbar into the dense undergrowth of palmettos and bay trees, he saw that someone had cut a path leading away from the bayou. Moving as quietly as he could, he stepped ashore to get a closer look. Some of the cut stems and saplings had turned brown and died long ago. Other cuts were fresh, with dripping sap and green pith showing inside. Someone had used the path both recently and sometime well before the pulse event. Could it be that this was the place Casey’s abductor had planned to take her all along? If so, where were they now, and why were Casey’s tracks the only ones visible where the canoe had been pulled into the water? Grant trembled a bit to think that the man might be nearby, and likely armed to the teeth as well as intimately familiar with the area. He knew it was extremely dangerous, but he had to follow that path and see if he could find any clue to this mystery. Though he was reluctant to expose Jessica to the possibility of running right smack into this man who had taken Casey, he had learned his lesson before and was determined not to leave her alone or out of his sight, even for a few minutes. He tied the bow of their canoe to a cypress knee near the little sandbar and took her hand in his, his machete in the other. Warning her to silence, he crept forward along the path with Jessica in tow, stopping to look and listen every few steps, just as he’d seen the Wapishana do when they were stalking game in the jungle.
There were more tracks in the deep carpet of leaves covering the ground along the narrow path, but none were clear enough to decipher or even to tell if they were made by Casey or by the man in moccasins. The presence of so many tracks made it all the more likely that the two of them had been here for much longer than just an overnight camp. Grant knew for certain his hunch was right when he emerged on the other side of the thicket into an open area of forest with little undergrowth. There, on the far side, was a platform hut built between four trees, not unlike those he’d frequently seen along the rivers of Guyana. A mix of man-made and natural materials, the hut’s log support beams and plastic tarp roof were an unusual combination he hadn’t seen before. A few feet away, hung upside down from a rope stretched between two trees, was the skinned carcass of a small deer. He froze at the sight of the camp, watching and listening to be sure no one was in the vicinity. Thanks to the fact that the tree house itself was open on all but one side, he could easily see that there was no one hiding inside it.
After waiting for what seemed like at least five minutes, he crept out into the clearing with Jessica’s hand still in his, his machete upright and ready for action in the other. There was something lying on the ground not far to one side of the tree house, opposite the side on which hung the deer carcass. He let go of Jessica’s hand to walk a little closer, giving her a look that told her not to follow. Even before he was close enough to really be sure, he heard the buzzing of flies and then could see them swarming by the countless hundreds. The object on the ground was the body of a man, sprawled face down onto an animal skin that had been staked out next to a fire pit. When he walked closer, Grant saw that next to the dead man’s head, bloody and thrown aside on the ground, was a full-sized axe with a weathered wooden handle. The man’s skull was split from a blow to the back of the head that surely must have been delivered by the nearby axe, and the thickest congregation of the flies covered the oozing mess that spilled out of the wound. Looking over the rest of the body, Grant’s eyes were immediately drawn to the man’s feet, which were clad in crude, handmade deerskin moccasins.
Grant took a couple of steps back, feeling a touch of nausea and shock at the violence of the man’s death. Though he couldn’t see the face to be sure it was the man they’d passed on the Bogue Chitto that day, the moccasins left no doubt in his mind that it was him. But who could have done this? Was it even possible that Casey could have done such a thing herself? To spare Jessica from the gruesome sight, he turned around and warned her to stay back, speaking in a normal voice now that he knew the man with the canoe was dead. Then he began calling Casey’s name, yelling at the top of his lungs, joined by Jessica, until their voices were hoarse. When they finally stopped, there was no answer, only the indifferent stillness of the swamp gradually replacing the fading echoes of their shouts.
Grant quickly scaled the primitive ladder to the platform floor, looking for clues among the duffel bags, backpacks, buckets, and ammo cans scattered around the floor. He searched through all the bags looking for the pistol that belonged to Casey’s father. It was gone, and there were no other firearms to be found, though upon opening the military surplus ammo cans he found that two of them were still packed with individual boxes of ammunition in three different calibers: .22 Long Rifle, .357 Magnum, and 7.62 x 39 steel-jacketed Czechoslovakian military surplus.
The plastic five-gallon buckets stacked along the one tarp wall of the shelter were empty except for one. Opening that one up, Grant was delighted to find that it was packed with cans of tuna fish, vegetable soup, chili beans, and one-pound bags of rice. If Casey had been the one who took out her abductor with the axe, it appeared she had the presence of mind to take all of the weapons and most of the food supplies in the shelter before leaving in the canoe. Grant resealed the bucket and the ammo boxes and carried them all down the ladder and over to the edge of the clearing where Jessica was waiting. Then he returned to the fire pit, trying not to look at the corpse beside it. He put his hands on top of the dead coals in its center and felt for heat. They were cold on the surface, but when he dug into the pile with his fingers, he found warmth just a few inches deep. He didn’t know how to estimate for sure how much time might have passed since there was a fire here, but he figured it couldn’t have been much more than about 24 hours at the most, and maybe a good bit less. It was clear that Casey had left the scene of whatever had happened here in the canoe, and the tracks they’d seen when they first got here made sense now. There was only one way she could have gone, and that was downstream. Since there was no one here who could have kept that fire going after she left, Grant was hopeful that she wouldn’t have had time to go very far.
He rushed Jessica back to the canoe and quickly loaded the supplies and ammunition he had taken from the tree house into the bottom of the hull with their own gear. He had been so hungry before they got here that, if not for the sight of the dead man, he would have surely wolfed down some of the soup, beans, and tuna right out of the cans to replenish lost calories that had been so hard to come by in the swamp. He would have also eagerly thrown most of the deer carcass in the canoe for later too, but right now, he was still feeling queasy from what he had seen and had completely lost his appetite, especially for meat.
They followed the current downstream as it twisted its way out of the old-growth forest and back into hardwood bottomland forests more typical of the rest of the river basin. Visibility was limited to a few yards, as the banks of the stream here were overgrown with head-high palmettos. They had paddled less than an hour when Grant spotted a sign that the canoe had been pulled up in the mud. He stopped and got out, and immediately noticed a small pile of charred wood on a patch of ground where the leaves had been cleared away. There were faint footprints, but the harder surface on the top bank did not leave clear impressions.
“I’ll bet this fire was from last night!” Grant said to Jessica. “She must have stopped here after she left the camp because it got dark. If that was the case, she wouldn’t have left here until daylight this morning, and can’t be too far ahead of us. Come on, let’s go!”
They worked their way around the twists and turns as fast as possible, but by the time the bayou emerged from the forest and rejoined one of the main branches of the Pearl River, it was late afternoon, with little time left before sunset. Grant was at a loss as to what to do next, but he had to assume that if Casey was indeed alone in the canoe, she would head downstream, as there was simply no way she could retrace her route back upriver against the current. He and Jessica paddled into the middle of the river and had only gone the distance of one big, sweeping bend, when she stopped mid-stroke and pointed at something in the distance ahead.
“Look! Is that a canoe?”
It was indeed a canoe, its bow pulled up halfway onto a small sandbar! And it was the common aluminum model, like the one the man who had taken Casey had been paddling when they saw him that first day of this ordeal. It had to be the same canoe, and if so, she surely must have paddled it there. But why was there was another boat pulled up alongside it? Grant could see that the other vessel was not another canoe, but rather a small johnboat, the type of watercraft most favored by the local fishermen in these parts. He could also see that it had an outboard motor hanging off the stern. Such a rig was too heavy to paddle far, so he assumed the motor must still be operable for the boat to be here in such a remote place. But who could it belong to? Could the owner have been the one who did that to Casey’s abductor? And if Casey had been in the canoe next to it, where was she now, and was she in danger yet again from these new strangers? Grant whispered to Jessica that the situation merited a cautious approach, though he could barely contain his anticipation to find out whether or not Casey was indeed finally within reach. With slow, deliberate strokes of the paddle, he maneuvered the canoe over to one side of the river, careful not to make a splash or any excessive movement that would attract attention from a distance.
“Don’t use your paddle, and keep quiet,” he whispered. “I just want to let the current carry us slowly, close in to the bank where they can’t see us. I want to get a good look at whoever it is in that other boat before we show ourselves.”
Using the paddle blade as a rudder, Grant steered the canoe as it slowly drifted downstream in the sluggish current. A thick stand of cattail marsh grew on the bank just ahead, between them and the two boats they were approaching. Grant aimed for the edge of it, and when the bow knifed into the tall grasses, he grabbed a handful to hold them in position, where they could observe the scene while staying hidden. For several minutes there was no movement or sound at all, and he wondered if whoever it was in that boat had taken Casey into the woods away from the river. He was about to paddle on ahead to find out when two men stepped out of the trees and walked over to the johnboat, one of them stooping down to get something out of it. Grant was glad they were well hidden by the tall grass when the other one turned and looked upriver, straight in their direction.
“Oh my God!” Jessica cried out loud. “I can’t believe it! How could this even be possible?”