Voyage After the Collapse (The Pulse Series Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  Keep Reading

  Into the River Lands Excerpt

  More by Scott B. Williams

  About the Author

  Voyage After the Collapse

  The Pulse Series

  Book III

  Scott B. Williams

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are all products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Scott B. Williams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  Cover photograph: © Paul Fleet, file no. 28515651, fotolia

  Cover design: Bayou Cover Designs

  Interior layout and design: Scott B. Williams

  Editor: Michelle Cleveland

  05.20.16

  www.scottbwilliams.com

  For Reuel Parker: friend, fellow sailor, boatbuilder and author

  ONE

  TARA HANCOCK MADE HER decision and she intended to stick to it. Sure, it was risky, but everything she did in this new reality entailed risk and danger. By now she’d come to realize that she had to take chances almost daily if she and Rebecca were to survive. Today the risk was different though, because it was not about the two of them and she could have just as well chosen to mind her business and stay put. She and her daughter were relatively safe for now and she could keep it that way, leaving her less fortunate neighbors to fend for themselves. She had tried to help them after all, even if she had failed. But the Owens reminded her too much of her parents for her to leave them stranded. Like her mom and dad, they were too old and frail to hold their own in the midst of the violence they had escaped for now by coming here. Tara couldn’t do anything for her parents now, as they were impossibly far away, but there was one more thing she could try that might help Mike and Lillian Owens, and she was determined to do it.

  She knew that she and her daughter were lucky to have the means to be where they were, anchored safely off the north side of Cat Island. Several miles of water separating the chain of barrier islands from the coast provided a safety buffer between them and the madness ashore, but it would not do to stay here long-term. The distance from the mainland simply wasn’t enough, especially if the situation everywhere didn’t improve fast. At this point there was no reason to believe it would, so Tara knew that if she expected to keep her daughter safe, they had to keep moving.

  As long as they had the Sarah J., her parents’ restored Tartan 37 sailboat, they could do that. The small yacht was well stocked and meticulously maintained, and could take them almost anywhere while providing a comfortable place to live at the same time. The Owens were aboard a somewhat larger sailing vessel, and with their deeper draft and inadequate ground tackle, they had found themselves hard aground on the shoals near the island after a line of thunderstorms blew through the night before.

  Tara had tried to help them get off the submerged sandbar into which their keel was firmly buried, but the Sarah J. was only equipped with a small auxiliary diesel, and her attempts to pull the heavier yacht back to deep water were futile. It was going to take more horsepower to do the job, but in the wake of the collapse, there was no marine towing service to call, even if they still had a means to do so. They spent the morning trying various angles with anchors and the onboard winches to pull the heavy Catalina 42 off, but every attempt failed. Tara was completely out of ideas aside from attempting to contact the people aboard the other two boats that she knew were anchored around the point on the south side of the island.

  One had arrived a couple of days before the second one showed up, but it was this second one that gave her some hope of getting the Owens’ yacht afloat again. Though it appeared to be heavily damaged when it chugged past them on the way to the other side, the old wooden shrimp trawler apparently had a reliable engine. Like her parents’ classic Tartan 37, the trawler was clearly old enough and simple enough that its engine’s starting ability was unaffected by the electromagnetic pulse from the solar flare. Tara knew too that the engine in such a vessel would be many times more powerful than a little sailboat pusher. Named after her mother, the Sarah J. was a sailing vessel, after all; not a power boat. The engine was needed to enter and leave marinas and tricky inlets, but otherwise the wind provided the means for really going places.

  “I’ll be careful, I can assure you,” Tara told Mike Owens when he tried to talk her out of her latest idea.

  “You can’t be careful enough these days. You know that by now. You never know about folks like that. They went around to the other side of the island for a reason. It looks to me like they want to be left alone.”

  “Maybe they just anchored in Smuggler’s Cove because they could. I know catamarans don’t draw much water, and most shrimp boats don’t either.” Tara was familiar with Smuggler’s Cove, a shallow anchorage on the south side of Cat Island, because she had sailed there with her parents on the Sarah J. years before. While it was off-limits to many deeper-draft sailboats like the Owens’ Wind Shadow, the Sarah J., with her keel-centerboard configuration, drawing barely over four feet with the board up, could get in there just fine. Tara would have anchored there when she and Rebecca first arrived at Cat Island, but she knew the old paper charts on board were outdated since Hurricane Katrina and she was afraid the storm had altered the depths there. For all she knew at the time, there could be sunken wrecks or other manmade debris from the hurricane, hidden by the murky brown waters of the sound where many such obstructions awaited the unsuspecting mariner. Her parents had been using an electronic chart plotter for all their cruising in recent years, but like all electronic devices, that was useless to her now, so she had erred on the side of caution and anchored in deeper waters off the north side of the island. Maybe the strangers had better charts, or maybe they simply weren’t worried about it because their boats drew even less than hers. Whatever the reason they were there, Tara didn’t think it automatically meant they were up to no good. Maybe they were just as afraid as everyone else.

  “I won’t get too close if they seem threatening in any way,” Tara assured Mike Owens. “I’ll sail in close enough to speak to them and if they are unfriendly, I’ll head back out.”

  “If you don’t run aground first,” Mike said.

  “I’ll be careful, like I said. But I’ve got to try. That shrimp boat can pull you and Lillian off. I know it can, if they are just willing to do it. But if I do
n’t ask, it’s not going to happen. And who knows, they may leave any time.”

  Tara knew Mike and Lillian Owens were probably going to be in danger eventually anyway, whether the shrimp boat pulled them off the shoal or not. Mike had already said they weren’t leaving the immediate area, but Tara didn’t see how they could stay there. For one thing, there was no all-weather anchorage at any of the barrier islands, and even summer thunderstorms could wreak havoc, as had the one last night that caused them to drag anchor. A tropical storm or hurricane would be disastrous out there. But aside from that, Tara knew others would be making their way out to the islands one way or the other, and that might become a problem, especially if not all of them were simply seeking refuge. Some of them might see a big sailing yacht such as the Owens’ Wind Shadow as easy pickings—a source of food and supplies, shelter and transportation all in one. Looting, robbery and worse was already happening on the mainland they’d left behind. And Tara was certain it would soon be spreading everywhere, even to seemingly safe refuges like this. But she couldn’t tell Mike Owens and his wife what to do. All she could do was make this last attempt to help them get afloat, and if that worked at least they would have the ability to make a choice to stay or leave when the time came. If she could do that much for them, Tara knew she and Rebecca could sail away with a clear conscious.

  What she wanted to do was to go to a real island somewhere—an island surrounded by more ocean miles that would protect her and her daughter from the mobs and gangs that were running wild in the coastal cities. What island that would be and where, she wasn’t quite sure; but she thought maybe somewhere in the Bahamas would work. She knew she and Rebecca could get there, because her parents’ boat was capable of sailing most anywhere and since retirement they had cruised the islands each winter themselves. She just wished they could be here too, aboard the vessel they had worked so hard to refit and equip for those trips. But she tried not to think about it, because it only made her depressed. The truth was, she didn’t know when she’d ever see her mom and dad again, or if they were even still okay. She had escaped with her daughter in the nick of time and it was all because of their dream that she had the means to do so.

  TWO

  BEFORE THE WORLD TURNED upside down, Tara had been working as a teller at a local bank branch in Gulfport. While it wasn’t exactly her dream job, it was steady income that paid the bills after Brad Hancock left her for another woman and simply disappeared, abandoning both his wife and daughter. His selfish actions had devastated 13-year-old Rebecca. The bastard not only left, but he had avoided all contact and communication with his only daughter who had adored him since she was old enough to say ‘Daddy.’ It was as if he was dead to her, except that she knew the truth—that he did it on purpose and had gone away to live with a new woman who already had a daughter that could take her place.

  Tara had to pick up the pieces and take care of the two of them as best she could, and she didn't mind the work, because nothing in the world was more important to her than taking care of her child. The hours were relatively easy, allowing her to take Rebecca to school in the mornings on her way to work and pick her up in the afternoons with only an hour of after-school daycare to pay for. And now that Rebecca was in the eighth grade, there were often extracurricular activities she had to stay late for anyway, so she didn’t mind. Besides, in a couple more years Rebecca would be driving herself to school. Tara was already putting money aside for a down payment on a second car. Other than that, her living expenses were low. Her only indulgence was a membership to a gym within walking distance of their apartment. Tara needed that. Working out and venting her anger on the heavy bag during her kickboxing class was her way of dealing with what Brad had done. And besides, she liked the way it made her look and feel.

  Tara had just dropped Rebecca off in front of the campus a few minutes early on that fateful day when everything in their world suddenly changed again and even more drastically. She had pulled into the street and barely gotten to traffic speed when her Honda Accord suddenly became difficult to steer. It took her a second or two to realize that the engine had died, causing the power steering pump to shut down. She fought the wheel to direct the car to the edge of the road before it rolled to a complete stop. Tara glanced in her mirrors and over in the lanes beside her, thinking other traffic might run her down because of her sudden stop, but to her surprise she saw that many other vehicles were either stopping in the middle of the road or pulling to the side as well.

  That seemed strange, but her immediate concern was her own car as she shifted into park and turned the key again and again to try and restart it. The ignition switch did nothing. There was no click and no sound of the starter spinning; only silence. Tara looked around her and tried the key again. When it once again had no effect, she pulled the hood latch and got out to see if she could figure out what was going on. She knew enough about car engines to check for obvious problems, like steam pouring from a busted radiator or hose, or a broken drive belt and the like, but there was nothing obvious like that in evidence.

  Other people were raising their hoods and getting out of their vehicles as well, and it struck Tara as really odd that so many of them would have car trouble at the exact same time. Not seeing anything that might indicate the source of the trouble, she stepped back around the car to her door and reached inside to try the key again, but there was still nothing—no click—no sound at all. She fished her cell phone out of her purse so she could call for assistance, but when she tried to activate the screen to open a web browser and look up a towing service, she saw that the phone was completely dead. Pushing buttons and trying to power it back on did nothing.

  Looking around her, she saw that some of the other stranded drivers were apparently having issues with their phones too. She saw that the traffic signal at the next intersection ahead was out, and then realized the power was out in the stores along both sides of the street. Business owners and customers alike were pouring out of nearby doors to see what happened. It was that moment that Tara Hancock first suspected her problems might be much more than car trouble. A few quick exchanges with some of the other drivers closest to her confirmed that none of them had a working phone.

  Tara didn’t waste time speculating about it or trying to figure out what the problem was though. She instinctively knew that standing around waiting wouldn’t do any good. She locked her car doors by manually pushing the buttons and made her way straight back to the school, walking as fast as she could. She assumed that whatever happened, it was caused by some kind of disturbance in the atmosphere, like when thunderstorms interrupted TV and radio signals. How something like that could have affected cars though, Tara had no clue.

  Whatever it was, with no electricity to run the air-conditioning and lights in the buildings, she was certain all classes would be dismissed, and she didn’t want Rebecca waiting there frightened and wondering what was happening. She might not be able to drive her home, but at least she could be there with her, and that was what she did. And from the moment she got there and found her, she had not let her daughter out of her sight since. They left the school later that afternoon when she realized by then that the power was not likely to come back on before dark, and that her phone was still as useless as a brick. The six-mile walk to their apartment had taken nearly two hours, but they made it well before sunset. Because she had been living on the Gulf Coast for most of her life, Tara kept hurricane supplies on hand, so she and Rebecca had flashlights, candles and battery-powered fans to keep them comfortable in the darkness. And hurricane season or not, Tara always kept a decent supply of groceries in the pantry. They were not going to go hungry; at least not for a few days.

  When they woke the next morning to no change and no new information about what might have happened, Tara began to get seriously worried. People everywhere in the city were out wandering around on foot or by bike, talking to each other, trying to figure out what was going on. The power was still off, no one had a working p
hone, and the only vehicles running were the older models that some said were unaffected by whatever had happened because they lacked modern electronic engine controls.

  Tara was already hearing rumors of looting before the middle of the second day. Remembering how bad things sometimes got in the wake of major hurricanes, and especially after Katrina, Tara knew it wouldn’t be safe to stay in the apartment if the power stayed off much longer. Not everyone would have extra food, nor would they be willing to patiently handle the inconveniences and disruption of their prior lives of comfort and ease. When nothing had improved by the end of the second night, Tara knew she had to get Rebecca someplace safer.

  With the morning sun streaming in the windows of the apartment the next day, she began sorting through their belongings and picking out the clothes and shoes that would be most useful for walking. She packed them into small bags that they could carry on foot, and added what food there was room for, just in case. She was confident that if they hurried though, there would still be all they needed where they were going.

  The hike to the marina from her apartment was much further than the walk that first day from the school, and took them more than half a day, including several rest stops. Tara had placed all her bets on her parents’ sailboat, the Sarah J, still being tied to the docks there where they’d left it. Her folks would not be aboard, as they had been visiting her mom’s sister in Minnesota and didn’t plan to return until sometime in June. Tara had no way of knowing the true extent of the power failure, and she wondered if her mom and dad were frantic with worry, trying to call to check on her and Rebecca as they did most every day, or if they were somehow in the same situation up north. No one knew the extent of the blackout. At any rate, there was nothing she could do to tell them of her plans. Her dad especially, would agree that it was a smart move though, considering the situation. The boat would provide shelter and mobility, as well as most of the comforts of home, none of it dependent upon being connected to the grid.