EVERY DAY SINCE THEY had arrived at Derek’s hidden camp, time had slowed to an excruciating pace for Casey, the hours dragging endlessly by as she felt the confinement of the deep forest closing in around her. The nights were even worse, as she was only able to sleep for those brief periods when she was too exhausted to lay awake in fear or worry any longer. She had no way of marking time other than by the cycles of dark and light, and sometimes the position of the sun on the days it wasn’t cloudy or raining. Derek had no watch, nor did he care what time it was or even what day, week, or month, for that matter. He said that time was a stupid invention of civilization designed to imprison people who had to work for others. From now on, they would live free of time and free of all the other conventions and restrictions of society. But regardless of whether or not she could track the hours, Casey had some idea of the number of days she’d been there, and she thought it was at least nine or ten.
After spending this much time in such an inaccessible pocket of the swamp, among a forgotten remnant of old growth trees that were somehow spared the logger’s saw a century or more ago, she knew that it was highly improbable anyone would ever find her. The camp was essentially on an island, a slightly higher area of mostly dry ground surrounded by miles of sloughs, bayous, dead lakes, and, farther away, the two forks of the Pearl River that bounded each side of the basin. Practically all of the basin seemed to be unbroken forest, with trees growing on both the dry ground and in any water that wasn’t moving. There was no way in or out of it except by boat, and there was no boat that could negotiate the tiny bayou that led to the camp other than a narrow canoe or pirogue. Casey doubted anyone other than Derek had stumbled across it in decades, even before the supposed solar storm, when fishermen from nearby towns frequented the more accessible parts of the swamp in their bass boats year round. Derek had chosen his hideout well, and he had hidden the rough-built tree house platform far enough back in the forest that even if someone did by chance find the tiny creek, they would pass right by, unaware a camp was there.
One thing she discovered he was not exaggerating about was the amount of preparation he had done in his expectation that civilization would eventually collapse and he would someday be living in a place like this, surviving off the land. His skill as a hunter became readily apparent once they stopped traveling, and every morning he was gone before dawn, usually returning within a couple of hours with several squirrels, or sometimes a rabbit, and once, a wild turkey. When they’d arrived there and he had unpacked the big duffel bags and backpacks he had been carrying in the canoe, she discovered that among his gear were several firearms for different hunting and defensive purposes, each of which he showed to her and bragged about with great enthusiasm. First of all, there was a scoped, bolt-action Marlin .22 caliber rifle, which he said he would use for most of his hunting because it was relatively quiet and the ammunition was small and lightweight, allowing him to store enough to last for years. For larger game such as deer and wild hogs, which he said were plentiful in the swamp, he had a short lever-action Winchester carbine that looked to Casey like the typical cowboy rifle seen in old Western movies. Derek said it was chambered for the .357 Magnum, a cartridge that would kill anything that lived in these parts with one well-placed shot. Finally, he had an all-black gun that looked like a machine gun to Casey. He said it was a Saiga semiautomatic AK-47, and that its only purpose in his arsenal was to kill intruders—or anyone else that might present a threat in any way. He told Casey that one day, when he knew he could trust her, after she finally acknowledged that his bringing her here was the best thing that had ever happened to her, he would teach her how to use the guns and how to be a hunter too.
Despite his near-daily wanderings away from the camp to find game, Casey had no opportunities to escape. Although he gave her a bit of freedom around camp during the day, when he was there to watch her, he still bound her hands and feet each night before he went to sleep and left her that way until he returned from the hunt each morning. Casey knew that it wouldn’t have made much difference even if he hadn’t taken this precaution. Each time he left to hunt, he took the canoe and paddled it to other nearby islands of dry ground in the swamp, leaving her effectively cut off from the outside world, as it would have been impossible to walk out in any direction. She wondered if, left free, she would even be able to wade and swim, given a long enough opportunity to get a head start, but the number of large alligators they had seen on both the lower Bogue Chitto and in the waters of the Pearl on the way here made her push that idea to the background as an ultimate last resort. Besides, even if the alligators didn’t bother her and she didn’t get bitten by a snake, she had no idea how far she would have to go to get to solid land, and if what Derek had said was true, the swamp basin they were in was bounded on both sides by the two major branches of the Pearl River. Casey knew that in order to escape and find her way to help, she was going to need the canoe. And to get the canoe, she was somehow going to have to take Derek out of the picture. She didn’t know how she was going to do it, as he was much bigger and obviously quite agile and fit as well, judging by the way he moved. From what she had learned of his life, he had spent most of his adulthood hunting and practically living in the woods between odd jobs, and she had no doubt that he was plenty tough.
But, despite these doubts, Casey knew it would soon come down to fighting for her life anyway, as Derek was beginning to lose patience with his fantasy that she would somehow voluntarily come to like him and want to be his wild woman, enjoying the life he had dreamed of even before the lights went out. She could tell by the way that he looked at her that her time of being left alone was coming to a close. When he had first taken her captive, she would have never believed that he would have restrained himself this long, especially considering that he had already watched her naked, bathing in the river that first day. She could only surmise from listening to him talk that he had little, if any, experience with women, having lived most of his life as a loner, and never fitting into any social groups as an adult or teenager. Apparently his ideas of relationships were skewed by the many fantasy adventure novels he’d read along with his philosophy books, and he thought that winning her heart would be as simple as demonstrating his prowess as a hunter and woodsman—skills no one could deny were more valuable at the moment than the ability to earn a high salary.
But along with his ill-informed notions of romance between men and women, it was also clear that he regarded her as his property. It was one thing that he had taken her against her will, but now he expected her to follow his orders and do whatever work needed doing around camp. This included chopping firewood from the dead branches he dragged to the fire pit from the surrounding woods, cooking their meals, and washing pots and utensils in the bayou. On occasion, when she was awkwardly trying to swing the heavy axe to cut up the wood, the thought crossed her mind that she could use it as a weapon. The only problem was that every time he made her do this work, he was standing there watching her, out of range of the axe but easily close enough to rush in and disarm her if she tried anything. She also considered the guns. If she had to kill him to escape, she could imagine herself shooting him from a distance a lot more easily than she could contemplate something as violent as hitting him with an axe. But he was careful to keep the guns out of her reach in the tree house when she was untied, and never let her near them unsupervised. In addition, while in camp he often carried the short lever-action carbine hanging from one shoulder on a rifle sling. Though she looked for opportunities, there was never a time when she would have had a reasonable chance of making for one of the firearms and turning it on him before he could stop her. But Casey was determined to escape, and determined to keep looking for that opportunity and to take it when it presented itself. She was not going to give up and become this man’s slave and worse.
Today he was gone longer than usual, giving her lots of time to think about all these things as she pondered her dismal future. When he did return to the camp sometime around mid-day, she saw the reason. Apparently, he had traveled farther to hunt that day and had taken the time to hide and ambush a young female deer. He walked into the clearing with the bloody carcass slung over one shoulder, grinning with pride at his accomplishment. Casey had gotten used to eating the wild game that Derek brought in, and had even gotten good at cooking it over the fire, but she still didn’t like the sight of the dead animals before he dressed them. The deer was much worse than the small game. It was a pathetic-looking remnant of a once-beautiful and graceful animal, hanging limp, one glazed eye seemingly staring back into hers.
“We’ll be eating well for a long time now. I’ll rig up a shelter for smoking all this meat and then I won’t have to go hunting for a while. I know you’ll like that. I won’t have to leave every morning and we’re going to have a lot more time together. Now get over here and help me hang her up off the ground so the ants won’t get on the meat.”
Later that afternoon, Derek went back to work on the deer and finished the job of removing the skin, carrying the bloody hide to the edge of the bayou to wash it. Then he returned to the fire pit where Casey was sitting, watching the venison steaks roasting on green branches directly over the coals.
“Now I’m going to be able to make you a nice buckskin dress, to go with that pair of moccasins I’ve been working on. First this hide’s got to be scraped; then we’ll tan it with the deer’s brains. I bet you didn’t know it, but every animal has enough brains to tan its own hide. That’s how the Indians did it, and it makes the finest buckskin that can be had. I want you to watch closely, because this is women’s work and you’ll be doing the next one.”
Derek had cut some stakes from a small sapling with the axe. He used the blunt side of it to hammer them down, then laid the axe back down behind him, on top of the pile of firewood Casey had prepared earlier. Punching holes in the corners of the hide with his knife, he stretched it out between the stakes until it was tight, the hair side down, against the ground. Then he showed Casey how to scrape away the fat and bits of meat that still clung to it, using the edge of his hunting knife, turned at a 90-degree angle to keep from cutting into it.
“Here, you try it,” he said, holding the knife out to her.
“Okay, but can you give me a minute? I need to go over in the woods and use the bathroom.”
“Make it quick!”
When she was done, Casey returned to the fire, knowing she would be forced to do the disgusting work of scraping the deer hide. As she walked nearer, it suddenly struck her that Derek was totally preoccupied with the hide, not bothering to look up when she approached. His back was to her and he was bent over it on his knees, pulling the knife across it in long, two-handed strokes. She glanced at the woodpile and saw the axe. It was lying there forgotten, completely out of his field of view.
Casey realized that at last she had a chance to do something decisive about her situation. It was the best opportunity she’d had during the entire time she’d been this man’s prisoner, and there might not be another like it for a long time, if ever. There was no time to be squeamish or even let herself think about the fact that her captor was a fellow human being, just like her. There was only time to act, and that’s what she did. Without making a sound, she bent over and picked up the heavy tool, then shifted her grip to grasp the handle with both hands. She brought it back over her shoulder to gather all the strength she could muster, and swung it as hard as she could, knowing she had only one chance and that she’d better not miss or hold anything back.
She felt the shock of the impact all the way through her arms and into her shoulders. The axe blade struck with a dull thud and she could feel something give as Derek’s head absorbed the blow. His body slumped forward onto the stretched deerskin, and she wrenched the handle back to free the axe in case she needed to hit him again. But it was clear that there was no need. One of his legs was twitching, but he would never get back up. She could see that she had split the back of his skull with one blow, and she threw the axe aside in horror, turning away from a sight that she knew she would never be able to forget. She looked nervously around the clearing, as if she expected to see witnesses that would testify to this brutal murder she’d just committed, but she was all alone. She told herself again that she had done what she had to do. She’d had no choice if she wanted to ever be free to leave.
Casey stepped away from the fire pit and quickly climbed up the wooden ladder to the tree house. She began collecting the things she knew she would need, starting with Derek’s lever-action carbine, the .22 rifle, and the AK-47 with the folding stock. Then she rummaged through his backpack and found her father’s pistol. Once she had all the guns gathered up, she opened one of the ammo cans and sorted out a few boxes of shells, reading the labels to make sure she had some for each weapon. Then she opened the five-gallon buckets to go through the food supplies, and filled one to the top with bags of rice and canned goods before resealing the lid. She then put the guns and ammo in one of the big duffel bags and loaded a smaller pack with butane lighters, insect repellent, a cooking pot, a can opener, and other necessities Derek had among his gear. It took her three trips to carry all this stuff from the tree house to the edge of the bayou and load it in the canoe. Each time she walked back into the camp to get another load, she couldn’t help but glance at the body beside the fire pit, just to make sure Derek was really dead and no longer a threat to her.
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.
“Take a look wid de glasses, Doc. I t’ink mehbe dat’s some dead mon in de sand by dat canoe.”
Artie reached behind him and took his brother’s binoculars out of his bag, bringing them to bear on the canoe and the body lying beside it as the johnboat started slowly drifting back downstream.
“It is someone, but I think it’s a woman. I can’t tell if she’s dead, but I don’t see any movement. I think we ought to check it out.”
“Could be a trap, mon,” Scully warned. “Keep dat Mossberg ready.” Scully put the outboard back in gear and idled across the river, killing it when they were within 10 feet of the canoe and allowing it to drift until it bumped into the stern of the other aluminum hull before Artie could fend it off.
“Sit tight wid dat gun,” Scully whispered as he hopped out. “I an’ I checking if she dead.”
From where he sat in the bow of the boat, the canoe blocked his view of the body on the sandy beach. That was just as well for Artie, who didn’t really want a close-up look at some unfortunate dead woman if he could help it. He was happy to let Scully check it out, and he was totally unprepared for what happened next as he tried to see into the dense woods beyond the sandbar, half-expecting to find they had fallen for a setup. There was a sudden movement and a female voice cried out. He heard Scully suddenly say the name Casey and then, from behind the canoe, he saw his daughter rise to a sitting position on the sandbar, the look on her face as amazed as he knew the one on his own had to be. Artie dropped the shotgun and leapt out of the canoe.
The three of them spent the heat of the day sitting in the shade of the woods beyond the sandbar. When Artie learned of all that Casey had been through, and saw the condition she was in from her many days of captivity in the swamp, the last thing he wanted to do was hurry her back downriver. She had been sleeping soundly on the sandbar, totally wiped out with exhaustion, and undoubtedly in shock from what had happened to her and what she’d had to do to escape her captor. On top of all that, she was worried sick over what might have become of her friends, Grant and Jessica, who certainly must have spent a lot of time frantically looking for her. Scully suggested that since they had everything in the boat they needed, they should let her rest longer, camping here overnight and then getting a fresh start back to where Larry waited with the Casey Nicole early in the morning.
It was later that afternoon, when he and Scully were getting their gear out of the boat to set up camp, that the second miracle occurred. Artie had stopped to stare absentmindedly upriver for a moment, and was about to turn back to the boat to grab his bag, when he heard a female voice cry out: Dr. Drager! Straining to see who it could be and where it could possibly come from, he was startled when the bow of a canoe suddenly emerged from a dense stand of cattails along the riverbank some 50 yards upstream. The smiling girl paddling in the bow was none other than Casey’s roommate, Jessica, and the young man in the stern had to be Grant!
“What were the odds we’d all meet here?” Artie asked again as they sat around the campfire that evening, everyone full from a big meal of rice and beans they’d cooked just before dark and shared as they told their separate tales of what had transpired since the event.
“I just can’t believe you guys found your way here,” Casey said. “I knew you would come looking for me, and that Larry would find a way to get you to New Orleans, but wow, I wouldn’t have hoped in my wildest dreams you’d find me on this river.”
“Now the rivers are the natural highways,” Grant said. “Just like in Guyana, where there are no roads to begin with. I’m glad you guys didn’t try to follow us on foot. You wouldn’t have made it through on the roads, and even if you had found the cabin, you would be so far behind us now that we would have never found each other.”
“My question is, what do we do now? Is it still a good idea to all go to the cabin and wait until the power is restored? And if so, how do we get there?” Jessica wanted to know.
“No, Jessica. That’s not the best plan. Larry has a much better idea, I think. With the boat, we’re not limited to staying anywhere in this country. He thinks it will be too dangerous to be near any populated areas, or even anywhere around the mainland. He says that because the U.S. is such a technologically dependent country, and most people here are ill-equipped to live otherwise, it would be safer to sail to some place much more remote, somewhere that we can live on the boat but have access to the resources of the sea and the land nearby, preferably where there are few people, or at least people who live a simpler life.”
“Some place in de sun,” Scully said. “A mon not supposed to be dis far north.”
“This is hardly what I’d call North, Scully. But yeah, Larry is talking about sailing south again, maybe to the Yucatán, or somewhere farther south along the Central American coast,” Artie said as he looked around to see everyone’s reaction.
“Hey, we could sail to Guyana!” Grant said. “If the catamaran can get up this river, it can get up the Essequibo, and I know a lot of the villages there. One thing about it, that’s one place that’s definitely off the beaten path to anywhere.”
“You can run that idea by Larry,” Artie said. “He’s the captain and I think he’s far more qualified than any of us to make that decision. But regardless of where we go, just be glad we’ve got a boat and a knowledgeable skipper that can take us practically anywhere in the world. I don’t know about you all, but I’m going to feel a lot better as soon as we are back aboard tomorrow.”
“I an’ I feelin’ mo’ bettah when de wind fill de sails, Doc, an’ put dis Bobbylon astern in de wake.”
“That too, Scully. That too.” Artie put his arm around his daughter and squeezed her close to him. “I’ve got what I came here to find, so that sounds good to me.”