by Rick Tippins
Jared vowed to be more aware and in touch with how Essie was acting and feeling, swearing to himself he would be there for her in more ways than just protecting her from harm. As he felt her small frame engulfed in his embrace, he realized he felt for her in a way he had never felt for a child before. Kids were cute and even funny sometimes, but he’d never thought about really caring about one in a fatherly way.
There had never been any kids in his life other than his co-workers’ children. Those kids seemed to run their parents ragged, making a lot of unnecessary noise when Jared was around them. He hadn’t much cared for any of them and, upon further reflection, he’d gone to great lengths to avoid these co-workers and their grimy, screaming, ill-mannered offspring. Now here he was with Essie, feeling like, well, like a parent, he guessed.
The following day was sunny yet cool with little to no breeze. Cirrus clouds hung high in the sky and were the only things breaking up the solid blue ceiling. Jared worked the pedals of the bike as their trio moved along the road. Bart was constantly grumbling about ambush points and the lack of visibility as the tiny group moved up the road. They didn’t have much of a choice with all the gear they were dragging along.
If they’d tried to move through the open countryside, they would have had to lose the bikes, the trailer and whatever gear they couldn’t fit in a pack. Essie would have had to either walk or be carried, and Jared didn’t think carrying the girl would have been a viable option. He also didn’t think she would have been able to keep up if the group was on foot. Come to think of it, Bart probably wouldn’t have been much better. This was most certainly the reason he was so bent about having to stay on the road. He was a liability, and Jared knew that irked the holy hell out of him.
Jared was also sure Bart had one of those math formulas worked out in his head, where he had calculated his worth into a percentage or, more accurately, his liability. By the sound of all Bart’s grumbling, Jared was about as sure as he could be that the numbers or percentages or whatever the old bastard came up with were not in the green.
The group came to a bend in the roadway and stopped. Jared knew now to stop, letting Bart haul out the binoculars so he could scan the straight portion of the road ahead. Jared was glad to take time to rest his tortured legs, get some water, and check on Essie. While Bart grumbled and scanned, Jared plucked a water bottle out of a pouch on his pack, offering Essie the first drink, which she declined. He drank long from the bottle, letting the fresh water run down his throat, cooling his insides.
Bart finished and stepped back to Jared. “Problem is, if someone is hiding or lying in wait up there, we probably wouldn’t even see ’em.” Bart shook his head, gesturing to the water and holding out the binoculars in exchange.
Jared completed the exchange, then peered through the lenses, searching the road along with the surrounding countryside. There was a drop on one side and the usual embankment on the opposite side. Jared stopped scanning, focusing on something up the embankment from the road. He adjusted the focus, but that only made it worse, so he refocused, trying to locate the oddity again. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen, a branch or maybe just an irregularity in the ground.
Bart finished with the water, nudging Jared while holding out his hand for the optics. Jared turned, still holding the binoculars halfway to his face.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“What?” Bart asked.
Jared slowly shook his head. “Don’t know. I thought I saw something that didn’t belong, but it could have been a branch or, really, anything.”
Bart looked serious now. “Did it move?”
Jared lowered the glasses, shaking his head, relaxing a bit. Nothing had, and, the more he thought on it, there was nothing to indicate he’d seen a threat. Hell, the first night on the golf course, he’d seen all kinds of things that were not real. The inky blackness of night coupled with the stress of the world coming apart at the seams could make a person see all manner of imagined beasts.
Bart took the glasses and scanned the road ahead. “Describe what you saw and where it was,” Bart hissed, keeping his voice low.
Jared pointed up the road. “Right side about halfway to the next turn, up in the bushes. Looked like a pipe or a darker branch or something; then I couldn’t find it again—probably nothing.”
During the entire exchange, Essie sat atop the trailer, watching the men occasionally glancing up the road, but she never climbed down and never made a sound. Jared turned back to her and gave her a reassuring smile as he stowed the water bottle.
“Have her vest up,” Bart barked.
Jared reached into the trailer, pulling out a ballistic vest, which he lowered over Essie’s head and shoulders till she was effectively mummified in Kevlar. The vest was so big she looked like a scrawny turtle in an oversized shell.
Bart took one last long look through the optics before letting them hang loosely around his neck. Bart climbed back on his bike and pointed it back up the road. He glanced back at Jared, who shrugged, and then they were off. Jared thought this was what Bart had meant when he said sometimes you just gotta fucking go and get it done, even if it feels wrong.
As they moved forward, Jared lost track of where he thought he’d seen the oddity, until a voice boomed out from above them like a cannon blast.
“That’s far enough, and don’t think about laying a hand on those rifles.”
Bart swore under his breath as both he and Jared turned their heads up the embankment, where a grizzled old man, about Bart’s age, was getting to his feet. The man was pointing the business end of a shotgun at the small group, and he had the high ground.
“Shannon, come on out. I got ’em covered.” From the slope behind them, a woman in her late twenties emerged, carrying a large silver revolver, which was also pointing at the group. “You all drop those rifles and pistols on the road and step back,” the old man shouted from on top of the embankment.
Bart had looked over his shoulder, but he never turned from the old man holding the high ground. “Not going to happen,” Bart said as he let the rifle slowly swing around to his front without ever using his hands.
The man tensed, shaking the shotgun at the group. “Don’t you touch that rifle, mister.”
Bart held his hands loosely at his sides, the rifle hanging from the sling well within easy reach should he feel the urge to use it. Jared watched; he’d seen Bart start from this position during training, and knew full well Bart could have the rifle up and in working order in less than a second.
Jared’s breath began coming in quick shallow gasps as his mind tried to keep up with their evolving situation. He knew he had to calm his breathing, Bart had talked to him about this, and he knew Bart would be counting on him for help when the shooting started. He fought the panic back and, in an effort that could have moved a house, he began to think rationally regarding his situation.
Bart was engaged with the old man who, in Jared’s opinion, was their greatest threat. Jared surmised Bart would shoot the older guy first and, if Jared didn’t get rounds on or at least at the woman, she’d shoot Bart in the back. If he remained frozen in place, he was fairly certain Bart would shoot him if this woman didn’t finish the old-timer first. He had to shoot the woman if Bart and the other cranky old fucker started slinging lead.
The thought of shooting a woman almost sent Jared into another of his supercharged overthinking sessions, but he spied Essie in his peripheral vision. Although the sight of Essie didn’t fully quash his qualms about killing a woman, it helped enough for him to focus on the dangerous situation they were facing.
Jared took a deep breath, exhaling so loudly everyone turned and looked at him. Shannon was an attractive gal in her late twenties, and she looked terrified as she clutched the revolver.
“Take it easy,” Bart soothed to no one in particular. “Ain’t no one gonna do anything crazy here.”
“Drop the guns,” insisted the old man, his voice cracking ever so slightly.
; Bart looked down, shaking his head slowly. “Yeah, you got the high ground, but you have a shotgun, and, yeah, you may put some lead in one of us, but we’re gonna kill one of you, that’s for sure.”
Jared was still breathing like he had run up a couple of flights of stairs, but now he was seeing things a little more in a tactical sense. He turned slightly towards the woman, relaxing his shoulders, allowing the rifle to slip around to his right side, where he could access it quite easily. The slight change was not lost on the old man, and he tightened his grip on the old shotgun.
“This is your last warning, drop the guns,” he almost begged.
Bart saw Jared let the rifle move to his front, saw the fear on the woman’s face, and heard the shake in the old man’s voice. He knew they were about to get into a gunfight. Bart wished to avoid this at all costs. A gunshot wound in the present world, however minor, could very well be a death sentence. Bart didn’t think they were being robbed, so the only thing left was these people were protecting their home. Probably a father and his daughter, Bart thought, wondering where the mother was. He hoped she wasn’t somewhere off in the distance with a scoped rifle, just waiting for them to make a false move so she could put a high-velocity bullet through one of them.
“I don’t take kindly to folks pointing guns at me, but I’m willing to give you all a pass, seeing as the world recently fell apart and you’re probably worried about someone coming out here and taking what you got.”
The old man stood silent, studying Bart as he spoke.
“We are not putting our guns down; we are also not here to take anything from anyone, so please point those weapons somewhere else before one of us gets shot.”
Bart turned his head and looked at where Essie was perched inside the vest. “Hell, we got a little girl, for crying out loud, and you all are scaring the goddamn hell out of her.”
The woman looked up at the old man, obviously taking her lead from him. There was a long pause; then the old man lowered the shotgun.
“What do you all want way out here?” With this, both groups visibly relaxed, the woman lowering the revolver while both Bart and Jared returned the rifles to their backs.
“We don’t want a damn thing,” Bart said with a half-smile. “We got everything we need right here, and we ain’t in the business of takin’ what’s not ours unless the owner isn’t around and wouldn’t miss it anyway.”
“We don’t rob people,” Jared blurted out.
The old man slowly made his way down the embankment, coming even with the group, giving the woman a reassuring nod before extending his hand to Bart first and then Jared.
“Name’s Calvin, and this is Shannon, and we were not robbing you folks.”
Bart shook the man’s hand, gesturing towards Essie. “That’s Essie; she’s Jared’s charge. He picked her up back in the city; both her parents are—well, not around.”
Calvin and Shannon exchanged concerned looks then stared at Essie.
Bart cleared his throat. “I’ll explain later. This is not the time nor place to be speaking about her—experiences.” He finished by giving Essie a reassuring nod before breaking into a broad and almost warm smile as he turned back to face the two standing in the road before him. “So, what’s with the ambush and the ‘lay down your guns or else’ routine?”
Shannon straightened, but remained quiet.
Calvin’s nostrils flared ever so slightly as he spoke. “Been a lot of bad things happening in the world over the past month or so.”
“Fair enough,” was Bart’s only response.
Feeling he needed to explain more, Calvin continued, “Not much happened up here at first; most folks are pretty self-sufficient and keep to themselves.” Calvin shifted, gazing back down the road in the direction Jared and Bart had come. “Couple of weeks back, we kinda figured something bad had happened, so I saddled up one of our horses and headed down the hill. Once I could see the city, I knew something terrible had happened.” He waved a hand across the sky. “Lots of smoke and fires down there.”
Calvin told them how he left the horse tethered, keeping out of sight when he realized there were a lot of fires and no firefighters doing a thing to extinguish them. He’d been around long enough and had a lively enough imagination to come to the conclusion that if there were no firefighters, there probably weren’t many cops either, and that meant danger.
Bart stopped him, asking if the group could move off the road into some cover so they didn’t get walked up on standing there in the middle of the street talking about old times. Calvin showed them to the top of a knoll close to where he’d been when the two groups came in contact. From their position atop the knoll, they could see the road in both directions. Bart gestured to Jared in the direction they’d been heading, while he turned, searching the road in the opposite direction. This wordless communication did not go unnoticed by Calvin.
“You two related?” Calvin queried.
Bart shook his head. “Never met the kid until after the party got started.”
“You a cop?” Calvin grunted.
Jared looked up for Bart’s reaction, which, not surprisingly, was nothing.
Calvin slowly nodded his head knowingly before turning to Jared. “You ain’t no cop though,” he said with just a little too much conviction for Jared’s liking.
Jared didn’t know why this bothered him, but it did. He’d never been worried about appearing tough before the event and wondered why he felt slighted now, when he was sure Calvin was not going to follow up his “you’re not a cop” proclamation up with “you in Special Forces?”
Calvin did not disappoint. “You a dispatcher or something?”
Bart chuckled at this as he gazed off into the distance.
“No, I worked for a tech company,” Jared said flatly.
Calvin let it go, turning back to Bart. “Where you work?”
“I haven’t worked as a cop for years.” Bart said, shaking his head. “I worked for San Jose PD when I did work, but that was a long time ago, and I ain’t no cop now.”
Calvin seemed to accept this. “Can always tell you cops, something about how comfortable you are around folks. There’s a little country in every cop, they’ll talk to anyone, and they always get twice as much information as they give.”
Bart smiled at this. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Jared moved to the trailer, plucking Essie from atop the gear, setting her gently on the ground. Next he offered her a small bottle of water, which she drank from before handing it back and taking the small packet of fruit snacks Jared held out. Shannon watched the interaction between the two with intent interest. Jared rifled through the trailer, pulling out a small stove along with some coffee. He prepped the water, making two cups, offering them to Calvin and Shannon. “Coffee?”
Both Calvin and the woman bobbed their heads eagerly, so Jared prepared two more cups before joining the group sitting in a small circle, hugging their mugs whilst sipping the steaming hot beverage. Jared wasn’t sure of the date, but it had to be early to mid-October, and the temperatures were starting to drop as the afternoons crept towards evenings.
Calvin continued his story, telling the group how he ventured on foot into the city, trying to find out what happened. He’d seen some folks, but no one spoke to him. Everyone looked scared, and the only folks he’d seen on the streets were the type he felt should be avoided.
Calvin made his way maybe a mile into the city limits when he ran into four men who were less than well mannered. Calvin was not armed and hadn’t even thought of arming himself before coming down to the city. To him, this thing felt like a large-scale power outage that would be remedied within a few days. He was looking for answers, not trouble.
The end result was a large cut over his left eye and a gunshot wound to his left forearm, which he received during his resistance to them taking everything he had on his person. He hadn’t brought much, except for the clothes on his back, and was glad he had the wherewithal to tether the horse
before he walked into the city. Beaten and shot was no way to make a twenty-mile hike back home.
Calvin had been left bleeding on the ground, confused, no cell phone, no police, no medics, no nothing. After a bit, he hauled himself to his feet and started back to where he left the horse. His arm pained him greatly and continued to bleed till he stopped and wrapped it with his shirt. He still had the use of his fingers and hand, so he figured the bullet hadn’t broken any bones as it passed straight through, exiting the arm on the opposite side.
The horse was right where he’d left it, and he wasted no time in getting the animal turned away from the city, heading back to his home in the hills. The ride home was miserable, but uneventful compared to when the ill-mannered folks bonked him on the head, shot him in the arm, and took his boots and wallet. What the hell were they going to do with his wallet anyway?
Once Calvin got home, he boiled water and flushed the wound on his arm, which nearly caused him to lose consciousness. Next, he cleaned both his arm and head wound, packing them with antibiotic ointment before wrapping his arm and covering his head wound. Jared could see the scar over Calvin’s eye, which had healed nicely, but would remain a fairly noticeable scar for years to come. Calvin pulled up the sleeve on his jacket, revealing a small scar on one side and a somewhat larger scar on the opposite side where the projectile had fought its way out of his flesh, taking a little with it.
Jared thought about bringing up the beating he’d taken in the grocery store, but decided it would only give Calvin an opening he didn’t feel like listening to. Maybe if he’d been shot or stabbed, he would have brought it up, but he hadn’t, so he kept his mouth shut.
During Calvin’s storytelling hour, Shannon had moved closer to Essie and was now sitting next to her, quietly whispering back and forth with the little girl. Jared pretended not to watch as Essie actually smiled as she conversed with Shannon. The two other men also noticed the newly formed alliance going on, which included females only. Suddenly aware, both girls stopped, locking eyes with the three men staring at them.
