WHEN ARTIE WOKE AGAIN it was because of the heat of the late-morning sun on his face. He had fallen asleep on one of the cockpit seats sometime before dawn while Scully was on watch. Sitting up, he saw that they were far out in the Gulf, surrounded by empty horizons in all directions. Scully was slumped against the starboard cabin side, dozing off as well, while the wind vane kept the Casey Nicole on course. Artie stood and looked around for any sign of ships or other dangers, but there was nothing. He knew they had a long way to go before they had to worry about hitting anything associated with land again, at least until they reached the offshore oil platforms of the northern Gulf. This would be his longest crossing yet beyond the sight of land, as the past few days they had sailed a course that frequently was close enough to the islands they passed to allow an occasional visual reference.
Not wanting to disturb Scully, Artie peeked though the port companionway hatch to check on his brother. Larry was asleep as well, undoubtedly exhausted from yesterday’s tense encounter on the Cay Sal Bank and the tricky passage through the middle of the Keys the evening before. It had been a long day and night for all of them, but now they all could relax a bit and let the wind do the work as it bore them to the northwest for at least another three, and possibly four days.
Artie looked at the fillets of fish spread out on the rear netting to dry and saw that they were still there. The swell was gentle and there was barely a chop and certainly no danger of any seas big enough to sweep them overboard, at least for now. After sailing this many miles on the Casey Nicole , learning from Larry and Scully, he could now estimate their speed based on how the wake behind the hulls looked, and he guessed they were still making about eight knots. It certainly wasn’t the best the catamaran could do, but considering the nice conditions and light but steady wind, it was not bad. His thoughts turned to Casey and he wondered what she might be doing at this moment. He knew she would be thinking of him too, and probably worrying about him a lot as well, but he doubted it would occur to her that he would try to reach New Orleans by sailboat. She would probably assume he would hunker down in the islands with Larry until some more conventional mode of transportation was available again. And he likewise hoped she was hunkered down as well. If she had tried to leave New Orleans, as he sometimes thought she might have, he didn’t know how he would ever find her. He knew they couldn’t get very close to the Tulane campus by boat unless they entered the mouth of the Mississippi River and followed it upstream to where it penetrated the heart of the city, but Larry had ruled that out because it would require lots of motoring. The outboard would work if they needed it, but they had a limited amount of fuel and Larry wanted to save that for emergency maneuvering. He said the only feasible way to approach the city was via Lake Pontchartrain, which they could enter under sail from the Mississippi Sound. From there, it would be possible to anchor off or beach somewhere on the lakeshore near Metairie and then hike to the campus on foot. Someone would have to stay with the boat, and that would be Larry, because of his injury.
During that first full day and the following night on the open Gulf, little changed with the state of wind and sea, and the three of them slipped into an easy routine of alternating watches while the steering vane did all the work of keeping them on course. Their speed made good stayed about the same, averaging eight knots or so, which put them approximately 250 miles north of the Keys by their second morning waking up at sea. In such benign sailing conditions, they had been able to relax with the easy motion of the boat and enjoy better meals than they had eaten while on the passage through the Caribbean. The thin-cut fillets of grouper dried quickly on the netting, greatly increasing their stores of protein to go with the large amounts of stored staples such as rice, pasta, and corn meal that Larry already had aboard.
Larry’s comments about the unstable nature of the Gulf from their earlier discussions of the voyage proved accurate by their third evening out. Dark clouds loomed on the horizon to the west before sundown and quickly overtook them, much to Artie’s consternation. They appeared as dark blue and almost gray-black walls hanging just over the horizon and ominously growing larger as they neared. Their most frightening aspect was the frequent flashes of lightning that streaked out of them in all directions, appearing to continuously strike the water directly below. The thunder that followed every strike was getting louder and sounding just seconds after each brilliant flash. Larry and Scully had obviously been through this before, and quickly had the jib furled and the main tied to the second row of reefs. Larry said they could expect some short but vicious wind squalls, and might have to take down all sails depending on the squalls’ severity.
“I’m more worried about getting struck by lightning,” Artie said, looking up at the mast. “We’re the tallest thing out here.”
“Yeah, but we’re properly grounded. The way that works, the lightning doesn’t see any difference between the top of our mast and the surface around us. We could get hit, but if we did, it would mainly just be bad luck.”
“I’d say it would be worse than bad. I haven’t seen an electrical storm like this since we lived in Oklahoma, and out here, there’s nowhere to hide.”
“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about the electronics, because they’re already fried!”
Despite Larry’s reassurance, when the first of the seemingly endless line of thunderstorms swept over them after dark, Artie experienced terror such as he had never known from weather before. The storms brought torrential rain and winds that drove it sideways so that the drops stung their faces as if they were being pelted with BBs or pellets. At one point, the wind proved too much for heaving to with even a scrap of sail up, so Artie had to help Scully wrestle the sail down and secure it. This done, the Casey Nicole was lying ahull to the wind, pushed off course but safe from damage to the rig. Worse than the wind to Artie, though, were the horrific lightning strikes that tore across the sky seemingly right over the deck, so close that the deafening thunder was nearly simultaneous with each flash. He fully expected them all to die at any moment, lit up by hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity as they crouched in the wet cockpit in their drenched foul-weather gear. But despite hours and hours of opportunities that lasted until the following dawn, the lightning missed them every time, and somehow they came out of the storms unscathed. The feeling of relief Artie had at the sight of clearing skies the next morning exceeded even the feeling he had had when he’d first set foot on dry land in St. Thomas after that first offshore passage.
“You freakin’ sailors are absolutely insane!” he said to Larry as his brother handed him his first cup of coffee of the day.
“It’s all in a day’s work, Doc. You gotta weather a few storms if you want to drop anchor in paradise. Hell, if it weren’t for a good gale now and then, the sea would be crowded with landlubbers sailing all over the place.”
“I’ve never been so scared in my entire life.”
“A hot electrical storm like that can get pretty intense, but we really were in no danger. What’s bad is when you get caught in those kinds of squalls close to land. Then you’re in real danger of getting blown ashore or run down by a barge or any number of coastal vessels. Out here, there’s nothing to hit for a hell of a long way.”
“So how far did we get blown off course, and how long will it take to make up for it?”
“It’s not as much as you think. We might’ve got set about 10 miles east of our rhumb line, but I can’t be sure without the GPS. If I can get a clear shot of the sun at noon with the sextant, I can tell you to within a mile, anyway. Of course we lost a few hours of distance made good on our heading, but we’ll make it up as soon as the wind fills in. It looks like it’s picking up now, so we’d better take advantage of it and get up all the sail we can carry.”
Once they were back on course, after Larry confirmed their position with a noon sight shot with the sextant, they were able to take advantage of a steady southwest wind that leveled out around 15 knots in the afternoon and lasted through the next night. Steady sailing on a beam reach in this wind put them within 110 miles of the northern Gulf coast by the next morning. In this area, near the edge of the continental shelf, they began encountering offshore oil platforms, and by noon had sailed past dozens of these huge structures standing on stilt-like legs above the Gulf. All of them were shut down, of course, and there was none of the heavy boat traffic among them that Larry said would be a hazard to navigation in typical conditions. Nevertheless, he insisted on steering well clear of them, so that they didn’t pass closer than a mile to any of them.
“Do you think any of the crews are still out here, stranded?” Artie asked.
“Probably not, after this much time. I mean, they certainly wouldn’t be able to go home by helicopter, like they usually do, but these rigs all have some top-notch diesel mechanics keeping everything running. I would imagine that by now they’ve managed to get enough of the crewboats started to get everyone to the mainland. They certainly have enough fuel on hand, as well as tools and spare parts.”
“They must have gotten as good of a view of the flash as I did, that first night.”
“Yeah, I can imagine. Anyway, I’m just glad our timing worked out to cross this oilfield in daylight. You can see what a nightmare it would be to try to sail through here in the dark with all these rigs unlit. If this wind holds, we’ll be past the danger zone before it gets dark again, but then we’ve got to worry about our speed, because we’ll be making landfall before daylight.”
Larry got out his chartbook for the northern Gulf coast and showed Artie a chart called “Mississippi Sound and Approaches.” He pointed out the long chain of barrier islands that created the sound and paralleled the mainland from the Florida-Alabama state line to the entrance to Lake Pontchartrain.
“I never knew all those islands existed,” Artie said.
“Most of them are reachable only by boat, and are part of a national seashore preserve. There’s a lot of shoal water around them and inside the sound. This whole coast is hazardous to any deep-draft boat, in fact. We don’t have to worry as much as most, with the catamaran, but we’ve still got to stay on top of where we are. You could run a skiff aground on some of the sandbars around those islands. Look, here’s where we want to enter the sound.” Larry pointed at a marked channel leading in from the Gulf to the west side of a barrier island labeled West Ship Island. The channel continued north for miles across the sound to the city of Gulfport, Mississippi. “I’ve run that channel before, and we can do it at night, as long as there’s some moonlight, which we’ll have plenty of. We’ll drop anchor behind Ship Island and wait for dawn. From there, it’s less than a day’s sail to the west end of the sound and the entrance to Pontchartrain.”
“I can’t believe we’re almost there. It seemed like we were a world away when we first talked about this voyage in St. Thomas.”
“It’s a pretty good trip, no doubt. A couple more like that, and I’ll make a sailor out of you yet, Doc.”
“One’s enough, thanks. Except I know you’re going to tell me we’ve got to sail away somewhere else once we pick up Casey.”
“I don’t have a better answer, do you? I don’t know where we’d go or what we’d do on the mainland. You sure wouldn’t likely be able to get to your house right now. But we’ll figure all that out later. The main thing is to get to Casey first.”
When the last of the oil platforms dropped astern, the sun was setting on the Gulf and they were once more in open water. Larry calculated it was less than 30 miles to West Ship Island, but said it was so low lying, they wouldn’t see it until they were within five miles of it. Once it was fully dark, Artie helped Scully put a reef in the main so they could maintain a slower approach while they waited for the moonrise. Two hours later, they were able to pick out the unlit markers indicating the Gulfport Ship Channel in the moonlight. On the horizon to the north, a faint line of white sand could be seen, and soon they heard the distant sound of crashing surf as they sailed closer to the island. Artie was eager and elated at the prospect of the end of the voyage. But he was also disappointed to see that there were no lights or even a distant glow in the direction of the mainland, where he knew, from driving it, that there was almost a solid line of urban sprawl from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama. From what they could tell so far, the entire coast was as dark as the uninhabited barrier island they were approaching.
When they were closer to the island, Larry pointed out an odd, circular structure rising some 30 feet above the otherwise featureless dunes of the island. “In the daylight, we would have seen that before we could have seen the beaches. It’s Fort Massachusetts, built after the War of 1812. It’s a park now, and there is a dock near it on the north side of the island where excursion boats land to bring tourists out here. We can anchor around there on that side. It’s the best harbor at any of these islands, which is why they built the fort there in the first place, to guard the approach to New Orleans.”
Artie was surprised at how brightly the white sand beaches of the island glowed in the moonlight. It was almost like daylight against that white sand, and he could clearly see the outlines of the dunes and the sea oats that grew on them as they rounded the west end of the island and entered the sound to turn east to the anchorage area. The long excursion boat dock came into view, and as they sailed past the end of it, they saw something else—a small campfire on the beach, situated in a hollow between the high dunes that had made it invisible to them from the Gulf side of the island. A few yards out in the water from the fire, leaning over several degrees from upright, was a small monohull sailboat that was apparently aground on the bottom. Two anchor rodes could be seen leading from its bow and stern out to deeper water, and there was a third trailing off towards the beach. As soon as the Casey Nicole appeared past the pier, someone by the fire jumped up and began yelling and waving for help.
“Sailed dat boat too close to de beach, dat mon,” Scully said.
“Or, he could have been out here and dragged anchor when those squalls blew through the other night,” Larry said.
“Could it be a trap?” Artie asked. He’d seen enough at Isleta Palominito and the Cay Sal Bank to be suspicious of everyone they encountered on the water.
“I don’t think so,” Larry said. “But why don’t you bring the shotgun on deck anyway, just in case. I think what we have here is simply a fellow mariner in need of help, and he may be able to give us some useful information about the conditions ashore, if he’s local. Scully, let’s come about and sail within hailing distance on the other tack. I don’t see a dinghy of any kind on the beach, so he must have waded ashore when he couldn’t get it off.”
Artie laid the shotgun in the cockpit and helped Scully with the sheets. There was just enough wind to power the sails and allow them to maneuver, but with the ocean swell blocked by the island, the water was nearly smooth. They came around and sailed to within 50 feet of the beach.Then Scully put the bow through the wind again, allowing the jib to go aback momentarily and stall the boat long enough for a quick conversation.
“I’ve been stuck here for two days!” the man on the beach yelled back in response to Larry’s inquiry. “We had some hellacious thunderstorms that came through in the night, and once my anchor started dragging, I couldn’t get another one set before I was swept onto that sandbar. I went aground at high tide, and there’s no way I can get her off by myself.”
Artie started to relax. The man’s story certainly seemed plausible, and the boat was hard aground. Though the depth at this distance was probably three feet and no issue for the Casey Nicole, this man’s monohull obviously had a deeper keel. Larry yelled back that they would try to help, and then pointed to an area of deeper water out beyond the stranded boat where he wanted to anchor.
“What can we do?” Artie asked.
“We can try to pull him off if we can get a firm set on our own anchors. He doesn’t have a windlass or a decent winch on board, besides being alone. I can’t do much with this arm, but if you can work our winch, and Scully and the owner can get on board the boat and try to heel her over some more, then I think we can drag her to deep water. That’s just a little J/27, not very heavy for a keelboat, but draws almost five feet.”
When anchor was set, Artie helped Scully launch the two-seat kayak and, once he was in sitting in the boat, passed him the end of a long length of spare anchor line. Then Scully paddled away, first taking the line to the bow of the stranded boat, then continuing on to the beach to get the owner and explain what they were going to try to do. Artie and Larry waited until Scully and the owner returned to his boat and climbed on board from the kayak. Scully secured the end of the line to the main bow cleat of the J-boat, and at Larry’s direction, Artie took up all the slack from the other end and wound several turns around the big drum winch mounted in the center of the catamaran’s cockpit. This centrally mounted winch served mainly to handle the jib sheet and halyard loads, but Larry had sized it to do double duty as a windlass in just such emergencies. As Artie began putting tension on the line by cranking the winch handle, Scully and the boat’s owner used their combined body weight to heel the boat much farther over on her side by hanging on to the boom, which Scully rigged to stick out perpendicular to the hull. By leaning her over and getting some of the weight off the keel, it was a fairly simple matter to pull her free of the sand, but it was still a lot of work for Artie, who was sweating profusely by the time the job was done. Scully helped the owner reset his anchor just downwind of the catamaran, then the two of them paddled over and came aboard.
“I can’t thank you guys enough,” the grateful sailor said as he shook hands with everyone. “I didn’t think I would ever get out of this fix. I’m Craig, by the way.” Craig went on to explain that he’d decided to take to the water as a last resort, but really wasn’t prepared to do so and didn’t have much experience cruising or much of what he needed on board.
“I bought the boat for day sailing, mainly, with the idea of getting into racing later. I never thought I would try to go somewhere on it, but as things got worse, it occurred to me that leaving by water might be the best option. Trouble is, I didn’t have paper charts for this area, and of course the GPS is down. I knew some people from the marina that used to sail out here to these islands all the time on long weekends, though, and they talked about what a good anchorage this was. It was my first time to sail out of the lake, believe it or not, but I found my way here okay, I just wasn’t counting on those storms.”
“Lake? Do you mean Pontchartrain?” Artie asked with great interest.
“Yeah. I kept my boat at South Shore Harbor Marina.”
“Is that on the New Orleans side of the lake, I’m guessing?”
“Yeah, it’s just a few miles east of the Causeway, but west of where the I-10 bridge crosses the lake.”
“Oh man, that’s fantastic!” Artie said, then seeing the look of confusion on Craig’s face, he explained: “We’ve sailed all the way from St. Thomas to get to New Orleans to find my daughter. I can’t believe we were lucky enough to run into someone out here who’s just come from there since the lights went out.”
Craig shook his head. “I feel for you if your daughter is still in New Orleans. There’s nothing good happening there, and I would hate to know I had to go back there looking for someone I loved. What a nightmare that would be!” Craig went on to describe his experiences in the city since the pulse had occurred. If what he said was true, and they had no reason to doubt him, the entire city had descended into anarchy and chaos. Craig described gun battles between the police and large gangs, and rampant, unchecked looting, burning, and rioting. He said some people began trying to leave the city by the second day, mostly on foot, and then a much larger number began leaving within a week, when everyone finally realized help wasn’t on the way and the grocery stores were cleaned out. Craig said he would have been completely out of food, too, with no way to get any more, if not for the fact that he’d had a key to his dock neighbor’s larger cruising boat. The absentee owner lived in northern Louisiana and kept the boat at South Shore for vacation cruising. Knowing they would never be able to get to the marina until all this was over anyway, Craig said he didn’t feel bad about going on board the boat and taking the leftover provisions that were still there after her last Florida trip. He said he’d often driven to the marina in the middle of the night during storms to check the vessel’s dock lines, and he knew the owners were grateful for that and would want him to utilize supplies that wouldn’t do them any good.
“After that, I thought I might be able to just hang tight there at the marina for a while and see if things got better, living on my boat and keeping a low profile. But it didn’t get better; it just got worse. I knew I had to leave when some guys came in at night and stole a Catalina 42 that was a few docks over. It was just a matter of time before every boat in the marina would be taken, as people got desperate to get out of the city. I was afraid they’d just kill me and take my boat, so I got out of there the next morning, as soon as there was enough wind. I didn’t know where I’d go, but I knew I had to get out of Pontchartrain, because it’s just a big bowl surrounded by land. I knew about this place and planned to hang out here awhile and then decide about going to Florida, or who knows where. But then that storm blew me aground, and I’ve been on the beach ever since, until you guys found me.”
Artie was growing more anxious and restless the more of this he heard. “Did you hear anything about what was going on down in the Garden District, or around Tulane?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t been in that area at all since the lights went out. All I know is there are fires everywhere and for days there was so much gunfire it sounded like a war zone. It’s got to be bad down there. It’s bad all over the city.”
“Have you heard any news from other parts of the country?” Larry asked. “Does anyone know for sure what this event was, and exactly how widespread it was?”
“Everyone says it was a cataclysmic solar flare. They say it was something scientists have been claiming could happen for years, but few people really took seriously. There are rumors that some people have been in contact by ham radio with operators in Europe and Asia and that there was some damage there, but nothing like in North America, and from what you guys are saying, in the islands too. I don’t know where I’ll go from here now. I had thought about trying to make it down to the Caribbean myself, but if nothing’s different there, I don’t know now.”
“We’ll probably head south again ourselves,” Larry said, “only not to the eastern Caribbean, but down to the Yucatán, or maybe somewhere among the islands off the Mosquito Coast.”
“That sounds good. I hadn’t thought of that,” Craig said. “Hey, I know I’m not going back to New Orleans any time soon, if ever. I’m sure you have charts on board for these waters, but I just remembered, I’ve got a street map of the city and a Louisiana state road map. They might come in handy if you don’t already have them.”
“That’s fantastic!” Artie said. “I’ve got a map of New Orleans, but it’s in my car, of course, and that is parked at the airport.”
“Those will be much appreciated,” Larry said. “As you know, nautical charts show almost nothing of the details on land, and we’ve got to come up with a plan for quickly getting in and out of the Tulane area to look for Casey, without wandering around guessing which is the best route.”
“It’s the least I can do, guys. I really appreciate your taking the time to help me out of this bind. I don’t know if I would have ever gotten the boat off without your help.”
The next morning, Artie, Scully and Larry said goodbye to Craig, who was now securely anchored in deep water and had decided to stay at Ship Island for the time being, at least as long as it was safe there. They sailed off the anchor and headed west in the Mississippi Sound, passing to the north side of Cat Island, another large barrier island in the chain that protected the mainland coast. Their destination was a pass into Lake Pontchartrain called the Rigolets. After discussing all the options with Craig, and studying his city street map, they decided that the safest way to look for Casey was to make use of the many man-made canals that penetrated the city from Lake Pontchartrain. Larry could wait safely offshore in the lake with the boat while Artie and Scully paddled into the city in the kayak at night, keeping a low profile and hopefully remaining out of reach of the dangers that they imagined plagued every street. The canal that would take them closest to the university area emptied into the lake near West End Park, right around the corner from the marina where Craig had kept his boat. They decided that before going there, they would first paddle up a smaller canal to the west of the Causeway—one that would take them right to the New Orleans International Airport where Artie’s car was parked, and, he hoped, still locked, with his .22 pistol in the glove compartment.
“I know it’s going to take some extra time,” Larry said when Artie protested, “but having an opportunity to grab another weapon, any weapon, is not something we can afford to pass up. You know what we’ve already been through, and you heard what Craig said. I think you and Scully need to take both my shotgun and your pistol for your trip to Tulane. You’re going to need every advantage you can get.”
Grant glanced over his shoulder one last time before they reached the canebrake where they’d left Casey with the hidden bikes. The solitary canoeist was disappearing from sight far down the river, carried swiftly by the current and his steady, practiced paddle stroke. Grant was envious that his destination lay downstream, while theirs entailed nothing but a struggle to go upstream. He steered the bow into the mud at the best landing spot and held the canoe against the bank by jamming his paddle into the bottom.
“Okay, you can step out now, then I’ll get out and pull it up on the bank.”
Jessica stepped ashore and immediately called out to announce their success: “Hey Casey! Guess what? We got a canoe!”
“Hey! Keep it down!” Grant whispered. “We don’t want anyone who might be crossing the bridge to know we’re down here.”
“Oh, sorry!” Jessica whispered back. She called Casey’s name again, this time in a quieter voice. When there was no answer, she turned back to Grant. “Where is she?”
Grant got out of the canoe and pulled the bow up far enough to tie it off to a small riverside bush. He pushed past Jessica into the dense cane to find the bikes just as they’d left them. “She probably walked over in the woods nearby to use the bathroom or something,” Grant said, then he called out to her too, in a loud whisper: “Casey! We’re back.”
Jessica joined him and looked at the bikes. “Hey, look, Grant. Her backpack is gone.”
“She must have taken it with her, then. I told her to keep the gun handy. She shouldn’t be far, though, because I told her we’d be back in about an hour, and we were. Let’s take a look around, but no more yelling, okay?”
“All right. She can’t be far. I know I wouldn’t wander off far into these woods alone, and I can’t imagine that Casey would either.”
Grant grabbed his machete and led the way out of the canebrake and back to the open area under the bridge. Casey was nowhere in sight. When they reached the sandy area at the end of the dirt access road that led up to the highway, he examined the ground and pointed out the footprints the three of them had made coming down the hill, as well as the tracks made by the bicycle tires as they had pushed them along. He walked closer to the river and then waved Jessica over to look at something else.
“She went this way,” he said, pointing at a separate set of tracks leading under the bridge along the sandbar that made up the riverbank here. The tracks were so obvious in the rain-swept sand that Jessica probably would have seen them too, if it had occurred to her to look for footprints at all. Grant said he’d learned a bit about tracking from the hunters he’d spent time with in Guyana, so it was second nature to him to try to figure out where Casey had gone by the trail she would have had to leave, especially in all this open sand, which he said was the easiest kind of terrain for finding and following footprints.
As they walked the route she’d taken upriver, Grant called Casey’s name several times in a slightly louder voice than he’d warned Jessica about before. After they passed under the bridge, it was obvious that no one else had come down to the river from the road, as there were no new tracks other than their own. But the farther Casey’s trail led upstream, the more surprised Grant was that she would walk so far alone when she was supposed to be watching the bikes. Once the bend in the river took them beyond sight of the bridge, he suddenly saw the reason she had come here. Hanging on a branch at the edge of the woods was a pair of black panties and a white sports bra. Casey’s New Balance walking shoes were sitting side by side on a log near the branch, her socks spread out next to them, along with her open backpack and a bottle of shampoo.
Grant suddenly stopped, not wanting to walk up on her if she were undressed. “Casey! Where are you?” When there was no answer, Jessica called loudly too, and still there was nothing but the sound of the river gurgling by. It was impossible that she would not have heard them by now if she was anywhere in the vicinity of her stuff. Grant rushed ahead to the log where her shoes were and looked around carefully at the sand. Casey’s bare footprints clearly led into the water at the edge of the river, and another set showed she had walked back to where her clothes were, but there were no other clothes in sight but the underwear, shoes and socks. There were many other prints circling around and covering up the first ones she’d made, indicating to Grant that she had probably been moving around while she dripped dry from her bath before putting at least some of her clothes back on. He saw other footprints as well, some of them covered up by hers, and figured someone had been here before the rain. The other footprints looked older, because they did not have a clearly defined shape or tread definition.
Looking beyond the immediate area, he then spotted another line of Casey’s barefoot tracks leading off up the sandbar, even farther upriver, but as soon as he started following them, a chill ran up his spine and he grabbed Jessica’s hand while motioning her to silence with a finger over his lips. Superimposed over some of the prints made by Casey’s bare feet were more of the larger, smooth tracks that he had mistakenly thought were old. The fact that some of them were on top of Casey’s tracks made his previous conclusion impossible, and upon closer examination, he determined that the shapeless, smooth footprints could have been made by a person wearing moccasins or some similar footwear. One thing was for certain: the tracks were made by a man. Grant could judge by their size compared with Casey’s tracks and his own that the person who made the prints had to be a man, as they were slightly bigger than the impressions left by his own size 11 hiking shoes.
His eyes swept back over the trail of larger tracks they had passed, and he could see where the person who made them had stepped out of the dense woods that began at the edge of the sandbar just a few feet uphill from the log where Casey had left her things. Someone had been walking around on this sandbar before she got here, and then must have been watching her from the cover of the trees while she bathed. When she walked farther upstream, he had re-emerged from the woods and followed her. It was the only explanation for the fact that some of his tracks were covered by hers, while these last were made on top of her trail. As this realization dawned on him, he wondered if the man who made them had been on the sandbar when they rode down the bank from the highway, and had hidden in the woods watching as he and Jessica left Casey alone and went to get the canoe.
Grant gave Jessica a serious look that conveyed the importance of keeping silent and then motioned downward with his hand, to tell her to stay put while he tried to figure this out. He crept over to the backpack and felt inside it for the Ruger pistol. It was gone! He could only hope that Casey had it with her. But now that he was looking for them, he saw moccasin tracks near the log as well, and realized the person who made them could have taken the gun if she had left it there when she walked away. Following along beside, but not touching the two sets of tracks, he moved as fast as he could while still remaining silent, which was easy enough in the damp sand. He gripped the machete so tightly his knuckles were white. Surely this person who had followed Casey had heard them calling her name. Surely she would have heard them too, but why didn’t she answer? Fear and worry gripped him as he struggled to find the answer while he followed the tracks, ducking under the river birch trees that leaned out of the forest over the sandbar.
He didn’t have to go far to reach the end of the narrow beach, where he found Casey’s trail obliterated by a large area of disturbed sand where both sets of footprints had been erased by something. Only the man’s tracks led beyond that point, and following them a few more steps, Grant’s heart nearly stopped when he saw the answer to the puzzle. There was a deep grove in the mix of sand and mud that extended from the water’s edge several feet up the bank, and on both sides of it, a flattened mark made by something smooth and heavy sliding into the water. On one side of these impressions were more of the larger tracks, but none of Casey’s. Some of them were deep and distorted from slipping and digging into the mud. Grant had done enough canoeing to know exactly what he was looking at. It was the mark made when someone pushes a heavily laden canoe into the water from the bank.
Almost as soon as it became clear what he was looking at, he whirled back the way he had come, knowing that the canoe they’d seen heading downriver less then twenty minutes ago had to be the one that had made these marks. Casey was in that canoe, he thought, probably hidden from their view under the camo tarp that Grant had assumed was covering the lone paddler’s gear! No wonder the man paddling it had not taken his eyes off them as he passed, much less shown any indication of wanting to stop and talk. With the strong current in his favor and his obvious experience as a paddler, there was no telling how far downriver he’d gotten by now. Grant was horrified by the thought of what his intentions might be. He turned and raced back down the sandbar, yelling: “Jessica! Quick, we’ve got to go!” The he grabbed Casey’s backpack, shoes, and underwear, and shoved them into Jessica’s hands as he hurried her back in the direction of the bridge.
“What happened? Where is she? Why are we going back this way?”
“That canoe we passed. She’s in it! That man we waved at must have stopped here for some reason before we all got here. He must have been in the woods when Casey walked up here to take a bath. He was probably watching her the whole time, and then followed her when she walked upriver to where he’d left his canoe. He grabbed her and put her in it, and she must have been hidden in that pile of gear he had when we saw him.”
“How do you know all that?” Jessica asked as she ran to keep up with Grant on the way back to where they’d left the bikes and the canoe.
“I’m no expert, but in this sand the tracks are easy to read. All the rain over the last two days would have swept away any tracks other than new ones made in the last couple of hours since it stopped. Her footprints leading upstream are covered by his, which makes it clear he was walking behind her. Then hers completely disappear and only his lead to the canoe. I could see where his feet dug in as he was pushing it back in the river. And, besides, there’s no other explanation. She can’t be anywhere near here or she would have heard us calling out to her.”
“But wouldn’t we have heard her scream if someone grabbed her?”
“Maybe not. He must have gagged her somehow. This probably happened when we were still trying to get the canoe and gear together at that camp. So we might not have heard anything even if she screamed as loud as she could, especially over the sound of the running water.”
“What are we going to do? How will we ever find her? We’ve got to help her, Grant!”
“We are going to help her. We’ve got to try to catch that guy, and that’s why we’ve got to go now, no time to waste! Let’s just throw our stuff in the canoe and go! He’s got a big head start, but he has to stop to rest somewhere.”
“Why would he be going downstream anyway? Doesn’t that go back the way we came, towards New Orleans?”
“No, not to New Orleans,” Grant said as he steadied the canoe while Jessica got in and got situated in the bow seat. “It runs to the Gulf eventually, of course, but first it joins the Pearl River, which is the biggest river in this region this side of the Mississippi. The lower reaches of the Pearl split apart into three rivers and lots of branching bayous that spread out to be more than five miles wide. For about 20 miles it becomes a maze of waterways, and runs through a vast river-bottom forest that is the closest thing I’ve seen in the States to a jungle. The general area is called the Honey Island Swamp, but this forest covers some 250 square miles, most of it protected as a national wildlife refuge. If he is headed there and gets there with Casey before we catch him, it will probably be impossible to find them.”
“How far is it from here?” Jessica asked. They were now afloat, with all their belongings, including Casey’s, stowed in the middle of the canoe between them. The bicycles were left where they’d hidden them, in the dense canebrake.
“By canoe? I’ve only done the trip once, and I think it took us about four days to get to the Pearl River from my parent’s cabin. But we weren’t in a hurry and we were stopping a lot to explore and take pictures. Then we paddled another three days through the swamps and took out almost at the coast. From here, somebody paddling like this guy was doing could be in those swamps in two days, not to mention the help he’ll get with the river up like it is after all this rain.”
“The current will help us too, won’t it?” Jessica asked as she frantically dug into the water with awkward, choppy strokes of her paddle, doing everything she could to help them go faster.
“It will, but we’ve also got to be careful. We don’t want this guy to know we’re following him, but since he saw us going upstream in the canoe, he knows we have a boat and that we could try to follow. But he probably doesn’t think we would be able to figure out that he has Casey, unless we were just guessing.”
“Isn’t the gun still in Casey’s backpack? Maybe when we catch up with the creep he’ll give up when he sees that you have it, like those gang-banger punks in New Orleans did.”
“Are you kidding? Any guy like that who has loaded up a canoe to live out here on the river probably has at least a hunting rifle or shotgun, and likely several firearms and plenty of ammo. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because I don’t have the pistol anymore and he’s likely got it too. It wasn’t in Casey’s pack, and even if she was carrying it when she left her stuff on that log, he must have taken it from her.”
“What are we going to do when we catch up with them then?”
“I don’t know, Jessica. I guess we’re going to have to play it by ear and figure something out. That’s why we need to keep a sharp lookout ahead, down the river. I don’t want to run up on this guy all of a sudden if he’s stopped around a bend or something. And if he suspects we’re following him, it would be easy enough for him to ambush us and we’d never know what hit us.”
“You really think he would just shoot us like that?” Jessica had stopped paddling now while thinking all this over.
“Sure, why not? He obviously doesn’t care about the law or what’s right or wrong. He took Casey by force. Like a lot of other people we’ve run across since those guys tried to grab our bikes, this guy has decided that he can do as he pleases now that society has broken down and the rules cannot be enforced. I doubt he would stop at murder if he’s already gone as far as kidnapping with the likely intention of rape.”
“I’m scared, Grant. I’m scared for us and I’m scared for Casey too. She doesn’t deserve this. We’ve got to try to help her, even if it is dangerous.”
“Of course we will. And of course you’re scared. You have every reason to be. I’m scared of what he will do to her if we don’t find her soon, but more than anything, I just feel like a complete idiot for bringing you two out here and getting you in this situation to begin with.”
“You didn’t know, Grant. You did the best you could, and we saw how things were when we left New Orleans, just as you predicted they would be. I think you were right that we needed to leave. It could have been even worse if we were still there.”
“It would be hard for it to be much worse than it is now, Jessica. We may not even be able to find Casey, especially if he leaves the river somewhere and takes off with her on foot. And besides the problem of trying to help her, we’re almost out of food. Like I said before, I was counting on reaching the cabin by now, and we started out with about all the supplies we could carry on the bikes. Now we’re going to be in survival mode and we’re going to have to find more, but at least that will be easier on the river than it would be if we were still on the road.”
“I don’t really see how, unless we can find blueberries or something like that in the woods.”
“No wild blueberries here, I’m afraid. There are plenty of blackberries, but they won’t be ripe until May. It’s too early for a lot of things like that, but there are always cattails, and this time of year there are other edible greens in these bottomlands. But mainly, there are fish—fish and crawfish. Oh, and frogs, turtles, snakes, alligators, armadillos, beavers, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, turkeys, deer…. Everything that lives in these parts is either in the river or attracted to it because whatever it eats is in or near the river.”
“I know you’ve got the fishing rod, but I hope you’re not serious about eating some of that other stuff. I mean, really, snakes? Alligators?”
“All reptiles are good to eat, and easier to catch than real game like deer. Of course I’d only be interested in a small’gator, and then only if its mama weren’t around.”
“I’ll stick to those cattails you mentioned, whatever they are.”
“You’ll like them. But here, you need to eat something now, we need to keep our energy levels up for paddling.” Grant handed her a Ziploc bag with almonds in it. “Eat a big handful of those. That’s the last of them, but we still have some raisins, three more of the rice dinners, and a little bit of oatmeal. We can make it last at least through tomorrow.”