“What’s tack?” Jared asked.
“Yeah, what’s that?” Barry dittoed.
“Gear, saddles, bridles anything else you strap to the animal. You all will at least need bridles and saddles; ain’t no Indians I see around here. Plus, you tie a rope to a halter and try controlling some horses and—well, you may end up wherever you end up,” Calvin schooled.
Jared wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but it didn’t sound good, so he hoped John and Calvin found some tack when they went looking.
“I also want to bring a dog back here and feed it, make it hang around,” John inserted.
Everyone looked at him sideways. Food was not an issue yet, but everyone knew it would be. One more mouth to feed meant that time would arrive sooner than later.
“Listen,” John continued. “A dog can be an early warning device. There is no way for us to string up cans around this entire place, and the OP shifts are starting to wear on all of us. We need sleep in order to work during the day. If we had twenty people up here, it wouldn’t be that big an issue, but we don’t, so I think a dog could be a real asset—worth the food we’d feed it,” John argued, although no one uttered a word in protest. Their disapproving looks had propelled him into his current defensive posture. After a moment, John dropped the subject altogether.
The group decided John and Calvin would not take the Beetle since the car would either spook any horses they came across or attract unwanted folks. Either way, the outcome could be disastrous. The two left on foot the following morning, taking their packs, rifles and sidearms along with some rope Calvin found in the shed behind the ranch house. Calvin grumbled about the so-called rope, which was, in his opinion, a mere half step above twine.
Jared stood on the porch, watching the men leave, with Essie standing at his side, holding his hand. Barry and Shannon were out at the OP, perhaps saying their goodbyes as John and Calvin passed by. Things were much different now than before the event. Before the event, people would leave for the store and, half the time, there were no goodbyes. Nowadays, everyone knew a goodbye could be your last.
John and Calvin left, moving through the hills, avoiding the roads. Livestock was more likely to be encountered in the rolling California hills, where grass and water were more bountiful than in less rural areas of the Bay Area, so the men moved slowly, looking as they trekked along. John looked for any sign of a threat while Calvin kept his eyes peeled for any sign that horses were in the area.
Late in the afternoon and not that terribly far from the ranch house, they came across several horses. When the men got within fifty yards, the spirited horses snorted and fled. Calvin grumbled about needing a horse to catch a horse as John watched the last of the tiny herd disappear over a small knoll.
“If they’re left out here to pasture for too long, they get a little wild. We can’t use wild horses; they do us no good. The horses we need will let us get close.” Calvin sighed.
John shrugged. “Let’s go find some tame horses, then.”
After two days, the men had the horses they needed and started back for the ranch house. Calvin made sure two of the animals were saddled while the rest carried all the gear they would need. It was much easier on Calvin riding back than it had been walking out, and John saw a much happier and energetic Calvin now that they were on horseback.
Three days later, Jared was sitting in the OP when he caught movement several hundred yards out and brought the binoculars to his face. Calvin and John were astride two magnificent steeds with three more in tow.
“Holy smokes, they found five,” Jared uttered under his breath. He stood and waved as the men closed on the OP. When neither man waved back, Jared stopped waving and assumed a more professional posture. He knew the two would be tired and in no mood for the excited-puppy treatment from someone who hadn’t been out on the trail with them. As the men drew closer, Jared was able to make out more details and realized the three animals in tow were also saddled.
When the men were within earshot, Jared called out to them, “How’d it go?”
“It went,” was all John said.
Jared frowned, but didn’t press the men. Both looked worn out, and Jared was sure they would be half-starved as well.
“You boys are in for a rough ride,” Calvin said.
“How’s that?” Jared asked, his face growing dark.
John shifted in his saddle, looking back towards the Bay Area. “We got close two nights ago. Place is worse than before. Lot of fires, and at night, sound really carries, if you know what I mean.”
A chill ran through Jared as he thought about his short yet very violent time in the flatlands around the Bay before he and Bart made it into the relative safety of the hill country. Now the thought of venturing back down into the chaos was unnerving. Jared tugged at his jacket’s zipper, moving it an inch higher as if this might stave off any of the cold hard truth about what he would face down below.
That evening, Jared sat on the couch with Essie, brushing her hair. Shannon and Barry were at the OP while Calvin and John slept in the back bedrooms.
“I’m leaving tomorrow to go get your lovey and pony box,” Jared said as he drew the brush gently through her hair. “I want it to be a surprise for everyone here, so I need you to keep it a secret, okay?”
Essie turned her head to him. “Even Shannon?”
“Yes, even Shannon,” Jared said, smiling down at the girl.
Chapter 8
Two days later, Jared, John and Barry set out on horseback toward the Bay Area. Calvin had spent the day before familiarizing Jared and Barry with the finer aspects of horsemanship. While in the military, John had ridden in both training and overseas missions, so what Calvin was teaching the two men was easy for him to digest. Jared had never sat atop a horse, not even a pony when he was a child. Everything Calvin showed him was something he was seeing and hearing about for the first time. Barry was confident, as he had undoubtedly read a book on how to ride a horse, but when he crawled into the saddle, it was evident he hadn’t a clue how to actually ride one.
Calvin was unable to locate any gear for packhorse-type operations. The two riderless horses were saddled; what the men didn’t have in their packs was slung over the two horses and secured to their saddle horns to ensure the cargo didn’t slip from side to side. Shannon and Essie came out of the house to see the three men off as Calvin went over some last-minute instructions with Jared and Barry about how to handle the animals.
John gave Shannon a hug and mussed Essie’s hair before swinging easily onto the back of his animal.
Jared picked Essie up and squeezed her tight. “We shouldn’t be too long. You take care of Shannon and Calvin, alright, kiddo?” He pulled the girl in tight so his mouth was near her ear. “Remember our little secret. Don’t tell a soul.”
Essie drew back and looked like she might speak, but Jared slowly shook his head as he smiled at the tiny girl. He put her back on the ground and nodded to Shannon stiffly before turning and climbing aboard his steed. Barry somehow managed to get into the saddle while John and Jared were saying their goodbyes, and sat awkwardly as they climbed aboard their mounts. Barry dipped his chin to Shannon, who smiled back pleasantly.
“Calvin, are there any last-minute tips on these things?” Barry asked, looking a little uncertain for the first time.
Calvin wiped his brow and looked up at the man. “Don’t fall off, and if you do, don’t let him walk on you.”
͠
Nearly five hours later, the three horsemen reached a small ranch, which had a corral and barn.
“We leave the horses here,” John announced. “The rest is on foot.”
“What?” Barry exclaimed. “We can’t walk sixty miles on foot,” he argued incredulously.
“That’s redundant, man,” John said flatly as he dismounted.
“What?”
“Walking on foot…it’s redundant,” John repeated, not bothering to look back as he headed for a gate leading into the cor
ral.
Barry turned to Jared for help. “Did you know we would be walking?”
Jared shook his head. “Doesn’t really matter though. Might be safer walking on foot,” Jared answered, purposely using the same redundancy Barry had used.
“Damn straight it’s safer,” John fired back over his shoulder as he opened the gate. “We have to cross a dense urban area, and the horses would draw all kinds of unwanted attention. People will see them as food and a mode of transportation, if my guess is right.”
“That’s a long walk, man,” Barry said, his voice reflecting resignation, but still showing his displeasure.
John had already scouted the ranch while he and Calvin were out, and knew the corral had a three-quarters-full water trough and a feed station he could fill with hay stored in the barn. They secured the animals inside the corral before filling the feeding station with as much hay as would fit using a wheelbarrow John located inside the barn. After the feed station was full, John filled the wheelbarrow with hay and dumped it on the ground. He didn’t know how long this hike was going to take, and didn’t want to come back to five dead horses.
“How long are we expecting to be gone?” Barry asked, looking at all the hay they were leaving the horses.
“Dunno,” John answered as he heaved the wheelbarrow forward, dumping the hay onto the ground. “Calvin said if we aren’t back in a week, he’ll come down and feed them, but I’d rather that not happen.”
Jared frowned. “Does he plan on driving the Beetle?”
John smiled and glanced at Barry. “Naw, he’ll take Barry’s bike down.”
After the horses were taken care of, the men donned their packs, hefted weapons into place, and began to move slowly towards San Jose. John had studied some maps and decided on cutting straight through the city to the west side, where he and his companions would slip into the coastal mountains that separated most of the Silicon Valley from the Pacific Ocean. John felt their chances of avoiding trouble would be enhanced if they spent as little time as possible in the city.
He, like Bart and Jared, assumed people living in the city would have fled to the hills or out into the valley, but the lack of people they’d seen over the past month indicated otherwise, which worried John. This was a strong indicator that most of the people in the city were either dead or still in the city, meaning they would be more desperate than they had been when he and his team were forced to fight their way out of Barry’s neighborhood not more than a month prior.
After a few hours of walking through the countryside, which included negotiating fences and avoiding properties with structures on them, they reached the crest of a hill that overlooked San Jose and the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay. John dropped his pack and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He scanned the area below, looking for any sign of humanity, and found none. He spent a full ten minutes searching the area, and not once did he see any sign of life.
“See anything?” Jared finally asked.
“Nope, and I’m not sure what that means.”
“I think San Jose had, like, a million people living there before all this. Do you think they’re all dead?” Jared wondered out loud with a sense of disbelief.
“Nope,” John answered, still searching the valley floor with the binoculars. “Humans are a resilient creature. They’re down there—somewhere. We just have to be very careful ’cause my bet is they’re hungry, scared, and a lot of ’em are probably armed—at least the ones left alive will be,” he added as he pulled the optics from his face. “We’ll find a place close and get some sleep and move into the city after dark,” he stated as he stuffed the binoculars back into his pack.
“Why?” Barry blurted out. “Why would we go down there when it’s dark? That’s crazy.”
John finished stowing the optics and drew a breath. “Listen, man, I get it, you got away from me and my team, and you survived because you knew something may happen to a fragile electrical grid, and you prepared for what would come after that. What you haven’t prepared for is what’s coming after the ‘after that,’” John muttered almost under his breath, but loud enough for Barry to hear.
“After the ‘after that’?” Barry repeated. “What does that even mean?”
“After the ‘after that,’” John repeated himself. “After the event kills a hundred million people in the US alone, that’s when the real after starts. People will be dying left, right, front, and center, my man. That’s the after the ‘after that.’ That’s when the real death toll starts to gain momentum. The first hundred million was just a teaser of primarily affected people dependent on modern medicine or caregivers. Now things like starvation, dehydration, murder, disease—they start the real thinning of the herd.”
Barry snorted and shook his head.
“So we’re going through the city at night, Barry,” John said, emphasizing the man’s name. “If we get caught down there in broad daylight, it’ll be a hell of a lot harder to escape and evade than it would be under the cover of darkness. Jared and I have night-vision goggles, and I’d bet my left nut no one down there is sporting night vision. We own the fucking night, Barry,” he finished, smiling wickedly.
͠
Just after 2200 hours, all three men surreptitiously made their way onto the first paved street within the San Jose city limits. John led the small group, his head turning from side to side as he searched for any sign of danger. He had the night-vision goggles pulled down over his face and was wearing them without a helmet mount, which forced him to use the cranial cage over the top of a rear-facing baseball cap John wore.
The ballcap was black and had an orange San Francisco Giants emblem on the front. John wasn’t a fan of any baseball team, much less the Giants, but he’d needed a hat, and Calvin had offered this one.
Jared kept his goggles hanging against his chest. John knew Jared had never trained with the night-vision equipment and wouldn’t be ready to fight with them on. So he suggested Jared keep the goggles in a position where he could use them, but wasn’t married to them in case they got into a scrape. John, on the other hand, was more than comfortable fighting with the goggles on and chose to wear them full time in the lead position.
John’s rifle was outfitted with a PEQ that used an infrared (IR) laser to sight targets through his night-vision goggles. Once he switched the PEQ on, an IR laser was emitted downrange that, although invisible to the naked eye, allowed John’s goggles to see the beam. Jared possessed no such luxury and would struggle mightily in a gunfight with the goggles pulled over his eyes. In hindsight, John wished he had done a better job of scavenging his former team members for useful pieces of equipment after the helicopter crash.
He might have been able to find a working PEQ system from one of the team’s rifles and outfitted Jared’s rifle with it or just given the entire rifle to Jared. The PEQ was designed to emit an infrared laser only visible to someone wearing goggles designed to pick up IR signatures. To someone wearing the goggles during a raid, it would look like some strange laser light show, but to the person without goggles, the night would appear dark and completely normal.
The three men moved deliberately from street to street, stopping to check an area they planned on traversing. During one of their stops, rifle fire rang out somewhere in the city. The string of fire was fully automatic and, in John’s opinion, undisciplined. No one ever ripped off twenty or thirty rounds without taking a breath unless it was the Fourth of July. The men waited for several moments after the gunfire ceased, but heard no return fire, or any other sounds for that matter.
Barry’s eyes were wide with fear. The sudden eruption of gunfire scared Jared, but he was holding it together—well, at least to the casual observer, which Barry was not.
John scooted over next to the two men and whispered through pursed lips, “Don’t think it’s anything—probably just someone letting the rest of the world know they’re armed and ready to defend whatever they have. It wasn’t a fight, no return fire.”
; When John finished, he turned, hoping his narration would dial Barry’s freak-out meter away from the red just a bit. Truthfully, the cacophony of rifle fire could very well have been an ambush that killed its intended target, which would have explained the lack of return fire. Dead dudes don’t shoot back, John grimly thought to himself. He decided to remain tightlipped on that subject and move with extreme caution. John grabbed Jared and pulled him close. “Get those goggles on and help me check the streets ahead of us. Two sets of eyes are better than one, brother,” he breathed in Jared’s ear.
Jared nodded and pulled the goggles over his eyes. Both men meticulously examined the street in the direction they intended to move through. After a couple of minutes, Jared looked at John, who shrugged, got to his feet, and began moving forward. Jared and Barry crept along behind him, their nerves frayed beyond what they could have ever imagined possible. Suddenly John dropped straight down to a prone position. He never looked back as Jared and Barry stood frozen for a split second before also dropping to the cold hard sidewalk.
As his body contacted the cold cement sidewalk, Jared saw the cause of John’s sudden change from vertical to horizontal. It was a lone figure, who appeared to be a man armed with a rifle. Jared, feeling his old friend, Fear, grab his guts, fought off the urge to call out to John, who remained silent up to this point. The armed man was about a hundred yards up the street and seemed to be searching the ground and bushes for something. Barry, who lay behind Jared, grabbed Jared’s foot and tugged. Jared kicked his foot loose and turned to glare back in the darkness.
Barry must have seen the approaching figure, because he relented on Jared’s foot and became as still as a fallen statue. As the man came within fifty yards of the three prostrate figures, they could see him frequently bring his rifle scope up and scan different areas through the rifle’s optics. The strange thing was the lone stranger wasn’t scanning the road ahead or the rooftops, as Jared would have expected. He was checking in bushes and mostly down on the ground ahead of himself.
The Jared Chronicles | Book 2 | Tears of Chaos Page 6
