“That’d be nice, Calvin—appreciate it, and I’m sure he would’ve too,” Jared breathed.
͠
Two hours later, all five people stood under the large oak tree, heads bowed, each person lost in their own thoughts about the man who lay four feet beneath their feet and to whom a couple of them owed their very lives. Calvin held in his hand a very old beat-up Bible. Once everyone was circled around Bart’s grave, Calvin opened the Bible.
“The book of John, chapter 14, verse 27 says, ‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’” Calvin finished and lowered the good book.
Jared stared directly at Calvin with a questioning look etched on his face.
“This is a message from Bart to you, young man, to you,” Calvin said, his voice a little louder now. “He left you a gift through your time together, and that gift is peace of mind and heart. This gift was something the world could not provide you. His influence, the training and his bringing you up Mount Hamilton, where we were all brought together,” Calvin explained. “Bart gave you as much as he could in the short time he had left on this earth, in order to ensure you would not be troubled or live in fear.”
“Amen,” John murmured.
Jared slowly nodded his head in understanding. It made sense now that Calvin had explained it. Bart had taken him in and prepared him in short order for what he had to face from that day forward. Bart had not left him without a net. He made sure Jared was with good people; whether by accident or design, it didn’t really matter, Jared thought. Tears welled in Jared’s eyes and then rolled out toward the ground.
“I loved him like a father, like a best friend. Without him, Essie and I would both be dead. I only wished you all could have known him longer,” Jared said through the tears. Despite the tears and sadness, his voice was strong and didn’t waver as he spoke.
John looked up, locked eyes with Jared, then nodded his head. He knew all too well what Jared was going through. He’d seen some of America’s most elite killers cry like babies after losing a close friend in battle. It wasn’t something to be embarrassed about, and he certainly wasn’t going to judge Jared for grieving over the loss of a mentor. Now if the computer engineer were still crying in a week, well, then John would have to put his boot in the boy’s ass.
One by one each person in the little group murmured something over the old man’s grave before heading back toward the ranch house until only Jared stood over the mound of dirt and rock. He thought back over the last couple of months after the event and how intensely he’d struggled, trying not to die, until he met Bart.
Jared remembered the abuse Bart had bestowed on him every day and understood now why. Bart was trying to prepare Jared for the abusive world in which he would have to survive. Now was the test. Bart was gone and he would be in charge of his own destiny going forward.
Jared’s head drooped, his chin nearly touching his chest as he quietly wept, tears dropping onto the mound of dirt covering Bart, staining the ground a darker shade of brown. Jared had nothing to leave on the grave, no ring or gadget that might mean something. No headstone bearing words describing Bart’s courageous nature. A new and fresh headstone would only draw attention to themselves and let others know they were surviving nearby. Coming from a world where feelings were publicized, Jared realized he must now express his respect for Bart silently and internally. Jared cocked his head and saw the stains from his tears on the grave and thought this had to be about the most personal thing a person could leave behind. A true remnant of how much the old man meant to Jared. He had cried in despair after the event, but had never cried out of grief until now. Jared recognized he was one of the lucky ones after what he had seen during his travels within the confines of the Bay Area.
After ten minutes, his eyes dried, and he just stood reminiscing about the brief time he and Bart had shared. At about the thirty-minute mark, Jared wiped his face with a dirty sleeve, took a deep breath, and stretched his shoulders as a way of resetting himself. He took one last glance at the grave, then turned back towards the ranch house.
After the intimate funeral was over, John went to man the OP. The OP had been vacated for Bart’s funeral. This posed a measurable threat to the group’s security, but no one wanted to miss their last goodbyes to a man whose impact on all of them was nothing less than profound. John chuckled to himself, thinking if Bart came back to life for just one minute, he would have lost his mind over the fact that the entire group was standing over his grave, crying and blubbering, while the OP was unmanned.
Once he reached the OP, he scanned the surrounding area for a full fifteen minutes before relaxing slightly. Although visibility from the OP was great, the new world was much quieter, which made sound as good or better than sight as an early indicator of danger. John strained his ears, listening to the countryside, which yielded little other than chirping birds and the humming of insects. In the early days after the solar flare, John had found the newfound silence eerie; now he welcomed it. There was a certain level of peace it brought, which helped with the balance of life.
Before the event, law and order brought people peace of mind while they dealt with the constant racket of airplanes overhead, cars on freeways, along with all the other man-made noises that suddenly came to a halt last September. John found he enjoyed the peace and quiet of sitting alone in the OP with nothing other than his thoughts accompanied by sounds, many of which he’d never heard before the lights went out.
Shannon, along with Calvin, took Essie back to the ranch house, where she began working on a reading exercise with the girl. Calvin went into Bart’s old room and stripped it of the bedding. He took the bedding to the rear of the ranch house and dropped it in a large metal barrel. Calvin then siphoned a small amount of fuel from a lawn mower in the shed and poured the liquid over the bedding. Using a small lighter, he lit the fabric and watched as it burned away to nothing more than ashes.
After the fire was out, Calvin returned to the ranch house and made sure there wasn’t any fluids on the mattress where Bart had passed away. To his relief, there were none. When Bart passed, they were able to get his body out of the house before any serious decomposition started. Calvin found additional bedding in a closet and remade the bed. The group was a little crowded in the house as it was, and Calvin couldn’t see wasting a bedroom just because there had been a death in it; that was a luxury of the old world. He wasn’t going to ask Essie or Jared to take the room and figured Shannon might not want it either, so he hauled all his belongings into Bart’s old room and set up shop.
Calvin had no problem sleeping where someone had died. He was old enough to understand people die while others are born; it was the circle of life. He shook his head, thinking that the evening Bart passed, there was, without a doubt, a mother somewhere giving birth to a baby. Even in these problematic times, couples would come together, and women would give birth to children. Children were undoubtedly being born all over world at this very moment by mothers who’d conceived before disaster struck.
Calvin thought about a ghost town he’d visited years earlier while on a vacation in the Eastern Sierras. The place was called Bodie, and it had a graveyard outside the town. Calvin made the short walk to the graveyard and was amazed by what he found there. The ages of all those buried inside the little graveyard were marked on their tombstones. Calvin found the graveyard was filled with children under the age of two and adults who averaged forty-five years old.
The Bodie graveyard had been filled mostly during the gold rush, which in Calvin’s estimation, might have had a few more machines working than the world had now. Overall, Calvin thought the time when Bodie was a thriving gold rush town represented a technologically similar time as he was now living in. He would have to find a couple of quality horses and ensure they were good riding animals. Then Calvin could teach his friends how to ride. If and/or when they decided, or were forced, to
move, horses would be a superior mode of transportation to the bikes.
Sure, they had the Beetle, but after you loaded the little German vehicle with people, there wasn’t much room left for survival items like food, water, weapons and ammunition. Having a horse or two laden with supplies would be a prudent alternative. Calvin had been on the final watch before the funeral and was now feeling the fatigue starting to take over. He closed the door to his new room and lay back on the fresh yet stale-smelling bedding. He had opened the window, so the room no longer smelled of death, as enclosures always do after harboring a corpse. He closed his eyes and breathed in the fresh morning air flowing through the open window and began drifting off.
Chapter 3
Barry was awakened by the light of a new day. He hauled himself out of his sleeping bag and wondered about the smoke he’d seen the day before. He reminded himself that being careful was most assuredly the only reason he was alive and not a prisoner of the federal government, or what was left of it.
Barry was a highly intelligent man who had worked in Silicon Valley before the solar flare had started a chain reaction that ended modern-day society. Although Barry had worked side by side with all the rest of the tech folk in Silicon Valley, he marched to a slightly different drum than most of his peers.
Barry realized the electrical pyramid scheme most of the world was teetering on had not been adequately reinforced to survive any sort of electromagnetic event. He’d begun preparing for its failure years before the solar flare stripped humanity of its beloved electricity and the host of gadgets, contraptions and machinery that depended on its precious electrical current. When the government came looking for him, Barry had been forced to flee his home, making his way into the hills just east of the South Bay.
After Barry stowed the sleeping bag in its own bag and replaced it in his pack, he made a quick breakfast, drank a cup of coffee, and began loading his motorcycle. The motorcycle was a BMW and had been modified and protected, so when the lights went out, the motorcycle didn’t cease to operate. When the team of government people had dropped out of a helicopter into his yard and demanded he come with them, Barry had used the motorcycle to escape. After the bike was packed, Barry started it and puttered his way back down the draw he’d chosen as his resting spot for the evening. The draw was a depression in the terrain between two parallel ridges, which offered Barry some concealment from the surrounding area.
As Barry gained back some high ground after exiting the draw, he searched for the smoke from the day before, but found no indication of anything burning. He picked his way across the hilly landscape, avoiding large patches of brush and cutting through fences when they interfered with his progress. The going was slow, but Barry thought it posed less of a risk than using paved road.
As Barry rode, the wind was in his face, bringing with it all the smells of the surrounding life. Every now and again he would catch the smell of rosemary, and then it would be gone, leaving behind only the memories of Hasselback potatoes, garlic, lemon and rosemary causing his saliva glands to activate almost violently. Before he could shake the thought of the potato dish, his nose caught the scent of an anise plant, and he was reminded of his distaste for black licorice. Barry had never acquired the taste for the confection, but now that the smell of anise was fresh, he quite enjoyed it.
Barry was amazed at how many scents he was able to isolate now that he wasn’t stuck in San Francisco or some other large metropolitan city with literally millions of different smells, ranging from human waste to a woman wearing a spritz of Clive Christian NO.1 Imperial perfume, which retailed usually for about twelve thousand dollars per ounce. The human nose was incapable of keeping up with all the scents much less sorting and identifying them in the world of old.
Now he felt like an animal with a clearer sense of what he was passing through based on sight, sound, and now this newfound ability to smell. He wondered if, after a hundred years of humans creating no foul air conditions, mankind would begin to evolve its sense of smell even further. As a smell of something not off the nature menu accosted Barry’s nostrils, he nearly crashed trying to stop the bike. He killed the engine on the motorcycle, his head swiveling side to side, searching for whatever was responsible for the smell. It smelled of—well, it smelled of man, and this scared Barry.
After Jared made his peace with his loss at Bart’s grave, he walked back slowly in the direction of the ranch house, but decided he didn’t want the human interaction quite yet and instead diverted towards the OP. He knew Shannon would probably ask how he was and, well, he didn’t want to lie to her. Jared gave a low whistle as he approached the OP and saw John’s head come around. John nodded, then turned his gaze back out across the surrounding hills as Jared walked up and sat next to him.
“I’ll take over for a while to let you get some sleep or whatever,” Jared said through a sigh, the weight of the past twenty-four hours evident in his voice.
John looked at the younger man and almost asked if he was good, but caught himself. He knew how Jared was, so there was no need to ask. “How long you want out here before you get relief?” he asked, his voice low and steady.
“Till everyone’s asleep,” Jared responded.
John nodded and was about to get to his feet when both men heard the low rumbling of an engine. They scrambled to their feet just as the sound of the engine disappeared. Jared shot a quick look at John, who had his face buried in his binoculars, sweeping them back and forth across the countryside. Jared placed a hand on his rifle and ensured the magazine was seated properly, which was something he didn’t even know was a thing until three months ago. Three months ago he would have been checking his phone’s battery level; now he was checking to ensure a rifle magazine was properly seated.
John stopped scanning and shoved the binoculars into Jared’s chest. “Stay alert and stay here. I’m moving out there to see if I can get eyes on whoever is out there.”
Jared grabbed the binoculars, keeping them from falling to the ground, as John released his grip and took off at a dead run, vanishing into a thicket of brush. Jared pulled the optics to his face and peered out across the green rolling hillsides in search of anything that looked out of place. He found nothing in his first sweep of the hillside, so he carefully repeated the process, with the same results.
Jared remembered Bart explaining how to search an area during their walk up into the hills. Bart had always insisted on searching the area closest to oneself first. He had groused on and on about the closest thing being the most dangerous thing, so finding it before it found you was paramount to surviving. If nothing is there, push your search out a little farther and repeat until you either find something or are sure there is nothing. Jared lowered the optics to scan the area within fifty yards of the OP and began to work his search out from there.
John ran for a short period in the direction he’d heard the engine. After twenty-five or thirty yards, he cut to the left and moved out and away from the direction he had originally taken. He intended to flank the person or persons with the engine. Once John was about one hundred yards to the left of his original line, he straightened out and moved forward, following his original direction of travel.
After moving three hundred yards out in a flanking maneuver, John slowed and transitioned into a more stealthy posture, rifle up, searching his surroundings, his body tense, coiled and ready to launch him into battle at a moment’s notice. Something odd to his right caught his attention, and he moved toward it. As John moved within seventy-five yards of the thing he’d seen, he realized it was a riderless motorcycle laid over on its side, and what he’d seen was one of the handle bars sticking awkwardly up slightly higher than the height of the grass. John immediately dropped to his belly, searching frantically for the rider, but saw nothing.
After Barry caught the scent of man or whatever it was, he left the motorcycle and moved on foot, creeping forward, his nose sniffing and twitching like an English foxhound endeavoring to locate the source
of what he had smelled. At a little knoll, Barry crawled on his belly until he could peer through the tall grass and see what was below. His heart leapt at the sight of Jared sitting in the OP. Barry froze as he stared at the other man, who sat not more than two hundred yards away and was armed with a rifle.
Barry was fairly certain that, had his bladder been full, he would have instantaneously emptied it in his trousers as soon as John pressed the suppressed tip of his H&K 416 against his temple.
“I’d stay real still for right now, my friend,” John snarled menacingly.
Barry buried his face in the grass and almost wept at the thought of his life being so utterly under someone else’s control.
John thought about shouting down to Jared but placed a hold on any loud exchanges until he was certain they were only dealing with one person. The motorcycle was a good indicator that they were dealing with one, maybe two at the most, but he wasn’t willing to take any unnecessary chances quite yet. John reached down, pulled Barry’s pistol from its holster, and tossed the weapon out of reach. Next John popped the sling attachment on Barry’s rifle and pulled the weapon off the prostrate man, tossing it next to the pistol.
“Now roll over real slow and keep your hands palms-up so I can see ’em the entire time,” John ordered as he took a step back, allowing Barry to roll onto his back.
The two men stared at each other for a second before John laughed out loud and lowered his rifle slightly. “Fucking Barry the tech guy,” John exclaimed in genuine amazement.
In the time it took John to recognize him, Barry went from being frightened to the point of peeing himself, to now being profoundly confused. How does this guy know my name? he wondered at the recent surrealistic chain of events.
Seeing the confusion on Barry’s face, John gestured back towards the motorcycle. “A while back a bunch of guys raided your house, and you took off on that bike, right?”
The Jared Chronicles | Book 2 | Tears of Chaos Page 2
