Refuge: After the Collapse Read online

  Text Copyright © 2014 Scott B. Williams. Design and Concept Copyright © 2014 Ulysses Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized duplication in whole or in part or dissemination of this edition by any means (including but not limited to photocopying, electronic devices, digital versions, and the Internet) will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  Published in the United States by

  ULYSSES PRESS

  P.O. Box 3440

  Berkeley, CA 94703

  www.ulyssespress.com

  ISBN 978-1-61243-324-0

  Library of Congress Control Number 2013957314

  10987654321

  Acquisitions Editor: Keith Riegert

  Project Editor: Alice Riegert

  Managing Editor: Claire Chun

  Editor: Sunah Cherwin

  Proofreader: Renee Rutledge

  Production: Lindsay Tamura

  Cover design: Keith Riegert

  Cover photos: city © Bruce Rolff/shutterstock.com; ocean © chrstphr/shutterstock.com; building fire © fotostokers/shutterstock.com

  For Nancy, in appreciation for all that you do.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE ON THE GEOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  Larry Drager woke to large drops of rain splattering across his face and neck, interrupting a pleasant dream in which he was still a freelance delivery skipper sailing other people’s yachts between the islands in the trade winds of the Caribbean. But though he woke in familiar surroundings in his comfortable berth in the thirty-six-foot catamaran he’d built by hand on a beach in Puerto Rico, there was no gentle swell rocking the hulls beneath him and no sea breeze to stir the humid air. Larry rolled to one side and reached up to close the hatch over his bunk. In this windless swamp, miles from the coast, leaving it open did little anyway, other than invite inside more of the mosquitos that had been a constant nuisance since sundown the evening before.

  He wiped the rainwater away from his face and beard with a towel and slid out of his bunk to stand in the narrow cabin of the starboard hull. The rain was now drumming steadily on the decks above his head, so he opened the old Nalgene water bottle marked with warning X’s that he kept near his bunk and used it to relieve himself, closing the lid tightly when he was done and putting it back out of sight to be emptied later when he went on deck. The launching of the boat had been so rushed that installing a proper marine head was among the first items deleted from the to-do list. At sea a simple bucket sufficed and made more sense for this kind of craft anyway.

  It was only a couple of steps from the foot of his bunk to the galley area under the main hatch, and Larry yawned and stretched as he put the ball of his foot on the manual sink pump and worked the pedal up and down a few strokes to fill the kettle for his morning coffee. While he was waiting for it to boil, he pulled on his shorts and looked out through the acrylic port lights on both sides. The rain was slow, but steady, and clearly the gray of dawn would not give way to sunshine anytime soon. He lifted the companionway hatch just enough to vent the steam from the boiling water and spooned coffee grounds into a French press on the narrow counter space.

  Until the rain hit his face, Larry had slept well enough despite the mosquitos, especially after sipping a couple of shots of rum before going to bed. He always slept better on any boat than he did ashore, and even here, uneasy as he was anchored so far inland, there was no place he’d rather be than on board his vessel. But he couldn’t help being nervous at the thought of having to thread his way through miles of twists and turns to follow the river back downstream to the Gulf of Mexico. Larry was a blue water sailor, and the Casey Nicole was a sea boat, not some houseboat built to float on pontoons in muddy water. While this deep oxbow lake, surrounded by hardwood forests and out of the current of the river channel, might be an ideal refuge in a hurricane, Larry had little use for such places in any other circumstance. In the cloaking gray of steady rain, the riverside trees closed in even more. Larry felt trapped, and he knew that that feeling was not simply an illusion. It was dangerous as hell to be here. Even if his mast were not down and his sails stowed in the lockers below, they would be useless in such confined waters. But a locked-down drawbridge blocked his exit back to the Gulf. With his rig up, or even with it down, getting back to open water was subject to any number of unknown obstacles, especially considering how fast the situation was deteriorating.

  This was only the second night the catamaran had been anchored here, and he’d been alone since the morning before, when both members of his crew had taken off upriver after mounting the vessel’s only auxiliary engine to the transom of an old aluminum Johnboat they’d found half-sunk and abandoned in the swamp. Without that outboard, the Casey Nicole was virtually stranded. Larry consoled himself with the idea that in the worst-case scenario he could probably pole the big cat downstream to open water. But even with a draft of only two feet it would be a frustrating ordeal of running aground and winching off submerged sandbars and snags concealed by muddy water, and would take days at best. And attempting that would be difficult enough, even with full use of both hands and arms. Larry knew he was lucky to still have them both at all. A machete blow that was meant for his head had slashed clear to the bone of his right forearm, and though it would eventually heal, there still wasn’t much he could do with what had once been his stronger hand. The pain had gotten better but his frustration had increased. Larry Drager wasn’t used to limitations and he wasn’t used to depending on others; but dependent he was, and there was little he could do but wait for his crew to come back.

  He had high hopes that his brother, Artie, and his best friend, Scully, would be successful in their quest, which was the whole reason for his being here in the first place. If they were not, nothing else mattered much anyway. He knew his brother would not leave until he found his daughter, and Larry wasn’t going anywhere without all of them.

  Artie had taken a week off from his busy career as a doctor to visit Larry on the islands for a short vacation, something he rarely did. It was his misfortune that during that short time a series of solar flares unprecedented in modern history had sent an electromagnetic pulse to Earth that apparently destroyed the electrical and communications grid. Artie found himself cut off from any means of talking to his daughter or getting back to New Orleans by air, as inoperable electronic and computer circuitry effectively grounded any flights to the mainland or elsewhere. So on this very boat, that Larry and his friend Scully had been building by hand on a beach in Culebra, they’d sailed 1,500 miles to New Orleans unaided by GPS, lighted navigation markers, or communications of any kind.

  But they’d arrived too late. Larry’s niece had already fled the chaos that had gripped the blacked-out city, and though that meant she and her friends were likely still alive, not finding her in New Orleans had put a considerable kink in their plans to pick her up and quickly sail away again.

  But at least they knew where she was going, or intending to go, anyway. The note Casey had left in her father’s car in the parking lot at the airport had led them here. Somewhere upstream, where the water was too shallow for the big catamaran, was a sec
luded cabin. If she and her two friends had made it there, then Artie and Scully had a good chance of finding them. But there was no way of knowing how long it would take. The cabin was on a smaller tributary off the main river. They couldn’t tell from the map if it was navigable all the way by motorboat or not. Even if it were, there would probably be shoals and fallen trees and other obstacles to slow them down. But Larry was confident that if anyone could do it, Scully would find a way, and Artie would die trying before giving up on finding Casey.

  As he sipped his coffee, Larry unfolded the big chart that encompassed the entire Caribbean basin and Gulf of Mexico and retraced the route they’d sailed to get here. In the happy event of Artie and Scully returning with Casey and her friends, returning to his home waters in the vicinity of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands was out of the question. Even if the voyage back were not a bash against the prevailing winds, those well-populated islands could not offer a secure refuge or the resources they needed. Wherever there were sizable populations of people, those who were still alive would be desperate and becoming more so every day. It had been weeks since the solar flares. Without transportation to move supplies and communications to find out where, if anywhere, things were still normal, those stranded by the collapse of the grid were running out of options. A seaworthy boat powered by the wind and big enough for several people to live aboard gave Larry and those he loved a better chance than most, but there was still the question of where to go once they were free of the clutches of this river and back on the high seas. They needed an island refuge, ideally one that was totally uninhabited, but with a safe, all-weather anchorage and sources of fresh water as well as food from both the sea and the land.

  Looking at the chart, Larry again found himself wishing they were somewhere on the west side of the North and Central American landmass instead of the east. If they were anywhere in the Pacific, they would have far more options, from the reef-bound atolls of the South Seas that few boats of normal draft could access, to the wilderness islands of the Inside Passage in coastal British Columbia and Alaska. But the Pacific was not an option. Transiting the Panama Canal after the collapse was out of the question, and the catamaran was not the kind of vessel suited to sail around Cape Horn. They would have to find some place on the Atlantic side, and Larry knew of some possibilities far to the west of the touristy islands where he normally worked. He measured a route along the seedier shores of the Caribbean from the Mosquito Coast region of Honduras and Nicaragua south to the cocaine-smuggling hideouts of Panama and Columbia. Larry knew there were some good opportunities to stay out of sight in those places, at least for the short term, which in this situation was the most important consideration. He just hoped he wouldn’t have to wait here much longer. Larry was meant to be in motion, and the waiting was driving him crazy.

  He finished his last cup of coffee and put the chart away. The rain had slowed to a drizzle so he pushed the companionway hatch the rest of the way open and climbed the steps to the spacious cockpit deck that spanned the gap between the two hulls. He stretched and scanned his gray and green surroundings, looking for any sign the sun might break through, but that didn’t seem likely to happen soon. The hammering of a woodpecker echoed from somewhere in the expanse of hardwoods surrounding the river, and from where he stood he watched two squirrels chasing each other from tree to tree, their leaps sending cascades of falling rainwater from the leafy branches. Fish were striking the water with loud splashes, and Larry reached for his binoculars to scan the muddy banks for alligators; anything to pass the time. Seeing none, he returned to the galley below to put on water for oatmeal. After he had eaten, he passed the morning alternating between studying charts, reading, piddling around the boat, and making lists of small projects that could be completed once they were underway again.

  Bored with the waiting, Larry had crawled back into his bunk for an early afternoon nap when a faint, unexpected sound reached his ears from somewhere downriver. He strained to hear it better. After he listened for another couple of minutes, there was no mistaking it. He rushed to the deck to hear it better. The sound was the steady throb of a slow-turning diesel engine—the kind of engine used to push a displacement-hulled boat. He had to wait several more minutes to determine if the sound was getting closer, as the many loops and bends downstream would put any approaching boat on a parallel course as often as not. But the more he listened the more he was sure that a boat was indeed coming up the river. There was really nowhere else it could be going anyway, unless it turned back and went the other way before reaching the entrance to the dead lake.

  The engine sound was steady as it turned at a constant rpm. If the boat it was pushing kept moving, Larry knew he would soon have company. Whoever it was could not possibly miss the big primer-gray catamaran anchored in plain sight just out of the channel of the river. There was no way to hide it, even if he hauled in the anchor and moved further from the river into the oxbow. The dead lake was simply not big enough to provide an anchorage out of sight of someone coming up the river by boat.

  Larry was thinking fast. Maybe whoever it was would not present a threat, but he couldn’t make that assumption. With that kind of engine it was not a typical recreational fishing boat; maybe some kind of older commercial fishing boat, a small shrimper or oyster boat. They had to have a reason to bring a boat like that this far upriver. Boats like that were usually built of wood or steel and equipped with diesel engines so ancient and simple the pulse would have had no effect on their ability to run. Were they simply coming upriver seeking a safe hideaway, or maybe going to a hunting camp or cabin somewhere farther upstream? Maybe that was it, but Larry found himself wishing he still had his Mossberg 12-gauge pump on board. Naturally, he’d insisted that Scully and Artie take it; with the journey that lay ahead of them it seemed they were more likely to need a shotgun than he. As a result, Larry was left with nothing for defense but a flare gun and a couple of machetes.

  He glanced at the sea kayak still lashed across the forward decks and briefly considered the idea of launching it, paddling just far enough among the cypress knees and flooded trunks to stay hidden. It was an option, but not really a very good one, even if he hadn’t an injury that would make any paddling painful and difficult. If he left the catamaran apparently unattended, even honest survivors coming by might be tempted to board it and look for supplies they could use, and they might even be tempted to take the whole boat if they assumed it abandoned. Larry decided he couldn’t take that chance. It would be better to be seen on board. Maybe the strangers would wave and keep going, or simply stop for a short visit. The sound of the diesel was getting closer anyway, so there was no more time to consider other options.

  He stepped below to the nav station in the port hull and loaded the plastic 12-gauge flare pistol. It wasn’t designed to be a weapon, but at point-blank range a burning flare could be a powerful deterrent. He slipped it into the baggy side pocket of his cargo shorts and then placed one of the machetes close at hand but out of sight under a cockpit seat cushion. As he did so, Larry touched the stitches Artie had sewn to close the wound in his forearm and really hoped he would never get into another machete fight.

  Holding the binoculars with both hands, Larry stood on the main deck and focused his attention downriver, searching anxiously for whatever was coming around the bend. He didn’t have long to wait. Standing out in stark contrast to the green backdrop of forest and the muddy brown of the water, a blue-and-white painted wooden trawler, around thirty-five feet in length, finally made the last turn and steamed into view running the river mid-channel.

  Whoever was at the helm must have spotted the big catamaran immediately, as the engine speed was suddenly reduced to near idle and the boat quickly slowed to a drifting speed while the crew tried to assess what they were seeing. Larry stood unwavering as he watched through his Steiners. The vessel was indeed a coastal fisherman of some sort. It didn’t carry the tall outriggers of a shrimper, but there were trawling nets and ot
her gear, and the rub rails were festooned with old automobile tires serving as fenders. As he watched, two men stepped out of the pilothouse, one aiming binoculars of his own back at Larry, and the other carrying a scoped hunting rifle at the ready position with both hands, angled barrel-up across his chest. At the same time, whoever was steering allowed the boat to fall off to port and into a big circle, keeping its distance as the man with binoculars sized him up. Larry waved but neither of the men waved back. As the boat turned away from him he saw someone else come up on deck from the main cabin. This one was armed as well, carrying what looked like a shotgun similar to his own Mossberg, which he was missing so desperately now. This man and the one carrying the rifle moved forward as the boat came back around full circle, and when they were in position on the foredeck to cover any offensive action from the anchored catamaran, the helmsmen revved the engine back to half-throttle and steered directly toward him.

  Larry lowered the binoculars and waited, standing his ground on deck to project confidence, but also being careful to make no moves or gestures that would appear threatening. He still had one hand on the flare pistol in his pocket, but in the face of their weapons he knew it would be dumb to brandish it, much less attempt to scare them off with it. It was hard to tell if these men were merely being cautious or if they were up to no good. But one thing was for certain; he was about to find out. All he could do was wait and see.

  Though about the same length as the Casey Nicole, the old wooden fishing boat was a heavy displacement vessel that probably outweighed the ultra-light catamaran by several tons. As it drew nearer, Larry nervously moved to the side nearest the approaching boat to fend it off, as it was clear now that the fishing captain planned to bring his vessel alongside. He had shifted to neutral and idled down again, but the boat still carried its way and was approaching too fast for comfort.

  “Hey! Back it down! You’ll smash my hull in!” Larry shouted with his hands outstretched in a “STOP” gesture to the captain, whose face he could now see behind the pilothouse windshield.