by Rick Tippins
Jared struck out again, pedaling along the surface streets, his map propped up on the handlebars. He kept close tabs on the streets he was on as well as the ones he was passing. Jared was deep into the city of San Jose and had heard a lot of gunfire along with other sounds to cause him trepidation. Luckily so far none of the sounds of violence had caused him anything but slight detours and high levels of anxiety along with what felt like gallons of adrenaline being dumped into his bloodstream.
As Jared crested a small rise in the road, he saw several men in the distance standing next to a makeshift roadblock. The roadblock was no more than two cars, a Tesla and a Ford Fusion, pushed together across the road along with some racks and other unidentifiable items that afforded the men both cover and a road-blocking component. Jared stopped and tried to back up, but the men had seen him and began moving into positions behind the two cars.
Jared scooted the bike back out of sight before returning to the rise, peering down on the very disturbing scene below. The men were pointing, and he could hear one man yelling instructions to another. Two of the men had what looked like wicked-looking assault rifles, and one of these men stepped forward, waving at Jared, calling out for him to come on down.
Jared wasn’t about to do that and ducked back to where he felt he could still see the men, but they wouldn’t have a good line of sight on him. That was when it happened; several snaps near Jared’s head caused him to drop to the ground, panting, wrought with panic as bullets tore through the air near his head. A bullet smashed into the asphalt not two feet from him, kicking up debris, which splashed across Jared’s face. The sensation on his face acted like a slap, waking him from his state of frozen indecision. He was being shot at, and the realization slammed into his already overtaxed brain like a freight train. Holy fucking shit, why the fuck would they just open up like that?
Jared turned, grabbed his bike, and dragged it down the small rise in the opposite direction of the gunfire. Jared did not know a thing about guns. He had no idea of a weapon’s capability by looking at it and didn’t know if a pistol was just as deadly as a rifle or vice versa. What Jared did know was he had seen rifles like these men had in newscasts he’d seen in the past. The rifles were black and looked just like the ones carried by the troops in the Middle East. That scared him just a little more than if he’d simply been attacked by pistol-wielding madmen.
Jared pushed the bike for a short distance at a dead run before clambering on and pumping his legs for all they were worth. The rise had been about forty yards from the roadblock and Jared remembered running a forty-yard dash in high school in somewhere around five seconds. He took the first possible side street in the event the men had rushed to the top of the rise, trying to get more shots at him. He rode for nearly ten minutes before making his way to the rear of a warehouse, where he dismounted and just stood there for a few seconds, shaking and nearly breaking into tears.
The men hadn’t chased him. In fact, the men had seen some guy on a bike with no pack, and that wasn’t worth the energy it would have taken to sprint half the length of a football field just to kill him and go through his pockets. Had they known that behind that bike was a trailer stuffed to the gills with food and all types of other pertinent gear, the men would surely have gone to great lengths to kill Jared and relieve his dead body of his entire worldly chattel. Sometimes it was better to be lucky than good.
The rear of the warehouse was bordered by a chain-link fence separating the parking lot from a small creek. Jared held out his hands and watched as they shook, his adrenaline-soaked system trying to stabilize like a stricken World War II bomber. Jared felt like the bomber’s pilot trying desperately to stay the aircraft’s uncooperative yaw and pitch. Jared’s body was the aircraft and he was the hapless pilot, simply along for the ride at this point, a test pilot, someone not expected to make it.
It was quickly apparent the shaking was going to continue for some time, so Jared set about getting his bolt cutters out and slicing a large hole in the fence, shaking hands and all. Next he pushed the bike and all his gear through the hole. Jared lurched down into the creek bed, shoving the bike and trailer to the ground under a cluster of overhanging bushes. Once the gear was hidden, Jared picked his way along the creek, trying to keep his feet out of the water as he scuttled along the bank.
He found a nice growth of brush along the shoreline and concealed himself under the foliage. He was hot, breathless and scared half to death. He could see back up the creek to where he had come down the embankment, and he waited, hoping and praying he would not see men with rifles making their way down into the creek bed.
Jared huddled in the brush for a very long time, staring back up the creek, barely able to breathe for fear of making any noise that might attract the attention of the men who had recently tried to kill him. What was the reason for the violent outburst? What was the reason for the roadblock? What authority did they have to be closing down streets? They obviously were not cops—none of them had been wearing uniforms and, although Jared was not an expert on police uniforms and grooming standards, he knew what a cop should look like, and these guys did not fit the bill.
They had been dirty and wore facial hair, and not the well-groomed beards seen in the beer-brewing industry. They had appeared more than a little desperate and had carried an assortment of weapons. The police Jared had seen on the news, handling major incidents, always seemed to be carrying the same type of guns. The black rifle he’d seen in all the overseas combat footage piped through the news channels ever since September 11, 2001, was their weapon of choice. Jared never paid much attention to California’s nonstop war against the Second Amendment, but if this rifle was the weapon the politicians had been after, they had failed miserably in keeping those guns out of the hands of the men who had nearly killed him recently.
Jared reflected on the incident. Two of the men possessed rifles and had fired at him, while the rest of the pack had carried some sort of handguns. Either they were bad shots or Jared had been out of range; he didn’t have a clue. He could talk intelligently about a lot of complicated things, but guns, their rates of fire, and effective ranges were not among them. Jared wished he paid more attention when his father had talked about hunting and fishing during his adolescence. It was too late for that now, so he had to make sure he was more careful going forward
Jared shivered, cold now after his sweat had done its job in cooling his overheated body. His legs and back were stiff from the exertion and then the sudden long-term yoga position in the brush. Jared figured he’d been in hiding for at least two hours when he rose and slowly made his way back to where he’d hidden his bike and trailer. He looked down at his gear, the bike and trailer, the life-giving food and water, and the water-purification system. This bundle of possessions—which every living human he came in contact with would want for themselves—would either save his life or be the reason he lay dead on some cold street somewhere.
It dawned on Jared that the men had no real interest in him; they were interested in what he had. They probably didn’t even know he had food, water and shelter, and still they had tried to kill him just to find out. Had the world grown that desperate in just six short days? Had the population turned into savages in less than a week?
How could he keep dodging these people day after day if folks were going to turn into complete maniacs already? In two weeks, the area would be a war zone if people were willing to kill someone on day six just to see if they had food or water. By the second week, Jared figured the Bay Area would be a slaughterhouse, with men and women killing their neighbors for a mere morsel of food.
Jared shuddered as the thought assaulted his brain housing group, rattling him to the core. He wasn’t built to deal with things like this, physically or mentally. Sure, he was mentally tough and could stay up for days, forgoing sleep in order to meet a deadline. If he had to run or otherwise exert himself, he would always stop when he felt the lactic acid begin to build in his muscles.
&n
bsp; This new world was a place for those who knew things like how to fire a weapon, how to farm, and how to run even when your lungs felt as though they might burst. It was a new world, and Jared was a stranger to it all. Standing near his bicycle, he decided here was as good a place as any to call it a night, so he set about making camp in a flat spot alongside the little creek.
Despite the day’s wild events, Jared slept like a corpse, waking only when the sun began to bake the side of his face. He lurched upright, feeling sweat trickle down his chest as he fought his way out of the overheated sleeping bag, slowly rising to his feet and completing a 360-degree turn, listening and looking for anything that could be a threat. What have I turned into? In his former life, he wouldn’t be functioning at this level until well after his second cup of java.
Jared started what was becoming a new routine of preparing a light breakfast over a small gas stove outdoors. As Jared squatted next to the tiny creek, sipping coffee and eating a dehydrated breakfast out of a bag, his mind raced, thinking of his future and how best to survive the next couple of weeks without ending up in the middle of the road with dogs eating his rotting body. He shivered at the thought of the woman in San Carlos, despite the morning heat.
Jared went back through everything that had happened to him to this point. The supermarket beating was telling in that the men had not killed him, but were more protecting their goods. The men from the day prior had tried to kill him, but they might have done that because he fled, and that was their only option in stopping him from escaping with whatever meager assets he might or might not have had.
He pondered this for a moment, surmising this was both good and bad. If he dropped the bike and fled on foot, he had a pretty good feeling the men would have stopped shooting and simply taken his gear. Jared had no intention of leaving his life source behind unless it was a last resort.
He would need a smaller pack to carry on his back at all times. The pack would have the water-purification system and some food, just the essentials. If he was forced to leave the bike behind, he’d at least have something to sustain him for a short time.
Or maybe he was thinking about this all wrong, and the punks in the supermarket had not killed him because society had just begun to crumble, and the guys with the rifles had tried to kill him because they were part of this societal collapse at a much more advanced point. This scared the ever-loving hell out of Jared.
Jared knew he needed to find another sporting goods store before he left the Bay Area, and the thought troubled him greatly. He ate his breakfast in despair, finishing and repacking his cooking equipment. Once he was packed and the trailer loaded, Jared dropped back to the ground, staring up at the heavens, tears starting to stream down his face. He let the tears pour from his ducts, breathing, but not sobbing.
He simply leaked in despair, the sky offering no sympathy, but again posing no threat and, after a few moments, he wiped his face, rose to his feet, and was done. The cry had a cleansing effect, leaving him feeling refreshed and ready to tackle this next obstacle of locating a store.
Chapter Fourteen
Jared found the tallest building he could, hid his bike and trailer in some bushes, and set to watching the place. Over the course of two hours, Jared circled the building and thoroughly reconnoitered the immediate surrounding areas. The building was in an industrial part of town with no real food sources and, subsequently, Jared saw no other humans. As much as he hated doing it, Jared finally smashed the glass in the front doors with a rock
The building was an office building, four stories tall, dark and seemingly deserted. Jared entered the building, located the stairs, and wound his way up to the top floor, where he could scan the surrounding area with his binoculars. Jared moved from one office to the next, peering through his optics, searching the landscape below. His efforts were rewarded with the sight of a Target store about half a mile to the west.
Standing there in an empty office building, overlooking a dying society, Jared was nearly overcome with a longing for human companionship, which was quite the new feeling for him altogether. The binoculars drooped in his hands, and his jaw fell slack as he took in the city’s landscape. There were some people in his field of view, but they were a long way out and seemed to be darting from one building to another. Fires burned all over the city, their tendrils thin and evident for the first few dozen feet before being wisped away by the light breeze.
Empires rose and fell all throughout history, Jared had seen a good portion of the current rise, but never dreamed he would be witness to the fall. Mother Nature did not like accumulation; man did. Mother Nature was not fond of monocultures; man was. Mother Nature was a tremendous force; man, not so much. Jared was witnessing Mother Nature reclaim control of her body, which was the Earth. She would wrest control from mankind, wiping him out if necessary; after all, he was the problem. Mother Nature decided it was time to diversify, and she was about to level the playing field across the board. Jared knew this meant the human race was going to be reined in, the population cut drastically. The days of billions of humans and less than a half dozen white rhinos roaming the earth were quickly coming to an end. He desperately did not want to be reined in; he wanted to be one of the half dozen humans left when this whole thing stabilized. Jared let out a breath and closed his eyes. Man had been killing the world for a couple of hundred years and that reign of ecoterrorism driven by greed was about to come to an end.
Jared turned and started back towards the stairwell
The trip to Target was without event, and Jared was able to find a great location inside a building out of the sun and across the street, with a great view of the store’s front. Two hours into watching the store, Jared saw two teenage boys ride up on bicycles and enter the store. He held his breath, waiting for disaster to befall the two lads. Nothing happened, and silence was the only thing emanating from within the store.
Ten minutes later the two emerged pushing a shopping cart full of essentials like toilet paper, toothpaste and the like. Jared watched as the two placed the cart between their bikes and struggled to get going, each boy holding the cart with one hand and toiling away at the pedals while steering the bike with their other hand. Jared watched them through the binoculars and thought they looked like brothers.
The boys were a couple of hundred yards away, weaving back and forth, pushing the cart and trying not to fall, when three young men stepped into the street, seemingly out of nowhere, blocking the youths’ path. The two boys were forced to a stop, and they relinquished their hold on the cart and simply stood straddling their bicycles, as young kids so often do when not pedaling. The three men approached, strutting confidently up to the youths.
Jared adjusted his position, watching intently as the three surrounded the two and began rifling through the cart. Jared could see the two brothers were scared as the three young men went about relieving them of their goods. Jared watched, frozen, as the three young men began pushing the cart up into an apartment complex parking lot, leaving the two boys standing behind without so much as a rearward glance. The two brothers stood for just a moment before leaping off their bikes and starting after the three. It happened so quickly; Jared tore the binoculars away from his eyes.
One of the three apparently heard the boys, turned, and produced a pistol, firing at the approaching boys, hitting his mark and dropping both kids to the ground, where they lay motionless. The man strode right up to the boys’ limp bodies and, when he stood over them, he began firing again. The man’s weapon stopped firing, and he held it up as if inspecting it, the slide locked to the rear, chamber empty.
He pulled something out of his pocket and performed what Jared could only assume was a reload, after which he simply turned and rejoined his friends before disappearing into the apartment complex. The man’s face was burned into Jared’s memory, hate and rage written across it as he had stood over the young boys, stealing the life from their innocent bodies.
Jared peered through the binoculars
again, scanning the two lifeless forms lying on the sidewalk with dark red blood pooling out from under their bodies. Jared was breathing hard as if he’d been running. He felt sick, scared and more than a little angry. The boys could not have been more than fourteen years old, and this animal had murdered them both over some toilet paper and toothpaste. Jared also felt a pang of guilt for not helping these young boys. He felt claustrophobic as if the world were closing in on him.
All these human emotions were not meant to descend on a man at the same time. These situations were what caused a man to leap off a bridge, run naked down a public street, or put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. Jared needed to get a handle on himself before he descended any deeper into the abyss that seemed to have opened up and begun to swallow him.
Jared lay in his hiding place for the better part of an hour, trying not to look up the street at the two brothers lying in a heap like so much dirty laundry. As the fear began to subside, the guilt built, and this caused anger. Jared was not naturally an angry person, always striving to avoid conflict whenever possible, but this anger felt good somehow, strange and new as it was
Another hour passed and Jared simply felt wrung out, nothing left in the tanks, too tired to even pull the binoculars to his face and look at the carnage up the street. He thought about the tragedy he had just witnessed, and evaluated the incident like he would a project at work. The boys were outnumbered and outgunned, albeit they probably didn’t know that at the time.
They had also been outsized by the older and more sophisticated males. Three things against them and nothing going for them—why hadn’t they just let the guys have the toilet paper and gone back for more? Jared assured himself that would not be a mistake he made, and vowed to get that smaller pack and have it on his back at all times.
