Everyone preferred to take the first watch since they were already awake and, after being relieved by the oncoming watch, could sleep for the remainder of the night and wake up like a normal person. Jared’s second choice would have been the second watch since he could fall back to sleep after his watch rotation and feel some semblance of normalcy waking when it was time to get up and start his day.
After the ritual, Jared drew the longest stick while Barry drew the shortest one. Human behavior was so predictable that no one even called a watch; they all three already knew who was taking which shift. Jared assumed his first-watch position near the bend not more than forty feet from where the other two men spread out two sleeping bags before crawling in. There was no issue with insomnia after the event, especially on a long trek like the one they were currently experiencing.
As soon as a man’s head hit the pillow, so to speak, he would be fast asleep within seconds. There was no consumption of alcohol out on the trail, so the snoring was pretty much kept to a minimum, which helped in the health and safety department. At midnight, Jared nudged John, who, without a word, climbed out of his sleeping bag, leaving it for Jared to climb in before John assumed his post. Jared slipped into the bag and felt the warmth left behind by John’s body and was asleep almost immediately. The warm sleeping bag factor was the only luxury out here in the wilds of California, which made it all the more pleasurable.
Chapter 14
Barry rousted the two sleeping men just as the sun was beginning to cast a few scouting rays of light across the dark landscape. The three men went silently about their morning routine of heating water over small stoves to make instant oatmeal. There hadn’t been coffee for some time now. If there was an official list of coveted items post-solar flare, coffee would have a position among the top three items. They could grow crops, raise chickens, and even kill deer and other animals for meat, but what they couldn’t do was fly down to Central or South America and bring back a load of coffee.
Once their gear was repacked and on each man’s back, they silently moved down the draw to where they had entered, then hiked back to the military crest and resumed travelling north. By midday, Barry began to complain about his feet. John stopped the men and had Barry take his shoes off. His feet were showing signs of falling apart from walking on the side of the mountain for the past day and a half. The constant angle was playing hell with Barry’s feet, and John knew that if the man became unable to walk, they were all dead in the water.
They couldn’t very well leave Barry and just go on. They also didn’t know where this Dwight cat lived and weren’t sure he would make himself known to a couple of armed strangers even if Barry was able to give them usable directions. John pulled out a small first aid kit and went to work on Barry’s blisters. He used good old Dr. Scholl’s moleskin to protect the affected areas of Barry’s feet before directing the man to don a new pair of socks. John instructed Barry to string his sweaty wet socks on the outside of his pack to allow them to air dry.
Next, John told Jared and Barry to sit tight while he checked on something. John moved to the top of the mountain, which was no more than sixty yards straight up the uneven and slippery slope. There he found what he was looking for—a trail. Californians loved their hiking trails and, for that, John was thankful in his current predicament. John didn’t like the thought of moving along the open trail but didn’t see he had a choice if he wanted to keep Barry on his feet. To John, combat and basic survival were so instinctual the decisions were easy to see, just not always easy to make. If something was damaging him or his team, he could do one of two things: remove the cause, or remove himself from the cause. John knew what he needed to do; he just didn’t like the choice he was about to make.
John scouted the trail for a short distance, checking the ground for any sign of recent human activity, and found none. He slid off the trail and back toward Jared and Barry, grinding his teeth at the thought of walking straight down a well-established trailhead in broad daylight.
Barry had his shoes back on by the time John returned. “You can’t let your feet get wiped out, man,” John started. “You too,” he said, shooting Jared a quick look. “Everyone has to stay healthy, and your feet are probably the most important thing to pay attention to out here.”
“I’m good,” Jared said flatly.
“Good, ’cause he ain’t, and that can be a huge problem. We can’t leave him, and we can’t carry him all the way back to the house, so what are our options if he can’t go?”
John studied both men, but neither offered a solution. “Yeah, you’re right, there is no solution. This stuff gets guys killed, fellas. We’re now on Barry’s timetable. We move only as fast as he can, and if he can’t go, we all stop and wait till he can. From now on, if you gotta stop or something hurts, tell me and we’ll go from there.” John seemed done, but then started in again. “Don’t wait till you’re falling apart. It’s too late then,” he added, as if for good measure.
John stared at the other men for a moment, and when no one spoke, he turned and headed up towards the trail. Barry fell in behind him, with Jared assuming the tail-end Charlie position. When Barry reached the flat surface of the trail, John gave him a serious look.
“Bro, are you good? I mean really good to keep going, or do we need to take a day off? I’m not belittling you on this stuff, man. I am dead serious. We will all lie down for twenty-four hours and let you heal if that’s what it takes.”
“I’m good for now,” Barry said, his voice breaking slightly. His usual arrogant attitude somehow eluded him now. Barry felt weak, scared, and like he was going to need help, which were all new feelings for him.
John glanced at his watch, then around the countryside, biting on his lower lip as his anxiety started to peer through. He was used to working with other highly trained personnel, and after the event, he’d pulled his hair out with the line-level people he was forced to work alongside when he’d worked for Carnegie, but at least those soldiers were trained, albeit poorly. Barry and Jared were not only civilians, but Silicon Valley civilians used to skinny half-caff lattes, getting their hair cut at work, and riding around in the comfort of a Tesla or some other equally sophisticated mode of transportation. John accurately doubted either man had even been much of a hiker before the event. Although, Jared seemed to be holding up physically so far.
John recognized he had been dealt a shitty hand. He’d won card games with worse hands, but card games didn’t give him this level of angst. John released his tortured lower lip and exhaled. He knew very well he had no choice but to be a strong leader, strategize for their success, and get these two thinking with a warrior’s mindset.
“Okay, we go for a little longer; then we lay up till tomorrow. We can’t have any of us getting hurt this far away from Calvin and the girls.”
When neither Jared nor Barry commented, John turned and trudged up the trail. Part of him enjoyed how easy it was to travel on a paved trail, but the Special Missions operator side of him felt uneasy about walking right out in the open. Another positive aspect of being on the trail was they made far better time than they had been making stumbling through brush and unstable rocks along a thirty-degree slope.
An hour into their trail walk, the group began to smell rotting corpses again. John held up his hand, indicating the need for the group to halt. Jared moved up next to John and dropped to one knee, his eyes darting about as he sniffed at the air, trying to determine the direction of the awful smell. The terrain consisted of the usual rolling hills, fingers and draws that made up much of the geographical features between the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay. These earthly lineaments made it impossible to see too far ahead of one’s direction of travel. Jared’s untrained nose was unable to pinpoint the odor’s direction.
“You and Barry lie low while I go out and see what I can see,” John whispered.
Jared nodded his head, turned, and motioned for Barry to get off the trail and into some of the higher we
eds. They each went to a prone position facing opposite directions as John got to his feet and moved down the hill and off the trail.
John moved slowly and quietly through the milk thistles as the strong odor of decaying human flesh continued assailing his sense of smell. As the stench grew in strength, John saw an area up ahead where a finger stretched away from the main slope of the mountain running down in an easterly direction a hundred yards before flattening out. In the middle of the flat area was a large oak tree, and under the tree, John could see tents and other signs of human inhabitants.
John slid down to his belly and fished his binoculars out of his pack, using the optics to closely inspect the camp. He saw ten tents with a ton of camping gear strewn about, but no humans. John watched for ten minutes before deciding to go down and have a closer look. John moved over the side of the finger and flanked the encampment using a classic military envelopment move in order to close the distance to the tents without being seen. Heading straight at any threat in an assault maneuver was simply stupid these days. John’s movement placed him off his objective’s centerline and brought him to his target from the side.
Once John was inside the camp, he froze at the sight of boots sticking out of one tent. When the boots didn’t move and John remembered the God-awful smell he was standing in the middle of, he approached the tent and, using his rifle barrel, drew the flap back. Inside were two dirty, bearded dead men. Next to the men were two AR-15-style rifles. John stole a quick look over his shoulder before grabbing both rifles and dragging them from the tent.
Crouching, John dropped his pack, then fieldstripped each rifle. He opened a zippered pouch on his pack and dropped both bolt carrier groups along with their charging handles into the pouch. He wished he had the tools to remove the triggers, but, sadly, he lacked any armory tools, so he dumped the useless upper and lower receivers and moved to the next tent.
The moment John saw the cadavers’ rifles, he realized he wouldn’t be able to stockpile weapons as easily as he could stockpile weapon parts. Extractors wore out, as did firing pins and other little essential parts of these guns. Now the rifle he possessed did not share parts with the rifles he’d just scavenged, but until his weapon failed him, he would use it. In the meantime, he planned on gathering parts for his future weapon, which would need to be a standard AR-15-type platform.
The next nine tents yielded several more AR-15-platform weapons along with an assortment of handguns and a few Soviet-style AK-47 assault rifles. The tents were also home to seventeen more dead bodies—all men. They’d suffered no apparent sign of trauma, causing John to assume they either died of starvation, dehydration, or an illness. Once he finished scouring the camp for food or water and finding none, John grabbed a large North Face bag used to house a six-person tent. John loaded several assembled weapons into the bag and hefted it onto his back. He took one last quick look around the camp and then headed back to where Barry and Jared lay waiting.
Jared got to a knee and looked questioningly at John as he struggled with the large yellow bag.
John reached the two and dropped the bag in the dirt. “Guns and dead dudes.”
“Glad you chose the guns,” Jared quipped with a smirk.
John snorted in amusement and began pulling the weapons from the bag. “We take what we can and destroy the rest so no one finds them and uses ’em on us or some other poor bastard. I’d bet those corpses down there were part of the gang who killed all those people we saw yesterday. Seems they died of starvation or lack of water, but not all of them died. Some of the tents were empty, which I think means the ones who left were too weak to pack up and carry anything except their weapons. None of these guns came from empty tents.”
Jared looked around as if this new information might mean they would be overrun at any moment.
John started removing weapons from the bag, then looked at Jared, his head tilted to one side. “Are we just lucky, bro?”
“Lucky?” Jared asked skeptically.
“Everyone around us is hanging on by a thread, and here we are fairly well fed and not doing all that bad considering the shape the rest of the world is in.”
Jared thought about this for a moment before replying. “Maybe it’s because we haven’t allowed ourselves to become animals in order to survive.”
John smiled tightly and resumed the task of unpacking their newly acquired arsenal. To John’s astonishment, Barry knew how to fieldstrip both the AR and AK platforms, while Jared was only familiar with the AR-15 weapon system. If it hadn’t been for a whiskey-loving grisly old man named Bart, Jared would have ascertained zero knowledge of the firearm. John chose to keep a short-barreled AR-15 rifle, or SBR for short, as a backup to his primary rifle and parted the rest of the weapons out, stashing them in pouches distributed between him and the other two men.
When Jared, John and Barry were finished, they took one fully intact SBR and nine AR-15 bolt carrier groups along with their charging handles, buffers and buffer springs. John wasn’t too terribly worried about triggers breaking down anytime soon. He’d seen every imaginable malfunction a weapon could have, and found they usually occurred to parts of the weapon put under the most stress. This did not usually include trigger mechanisms.
John pocketed a snub-nosed .38 Special along with a box of fifty rounds just for good measure. The three men took all the AR magazines and split them evenly between each other. They gathered all the ammunition and loaded all of their magazines to capacity before pouring the rest of the loose ammunition into their packs, making sure to keep the 5.56-millimeter ammunition easily accessible and separate from the rest of the ammunition, which they haphazardly dumped into whatever pouches had room in their packs.
“What’s with the little piece?” Barry asked as John stuffed the .38 Special into his cargo pocket.
John ignored the man until the pistol and box of associated ammunition were secure in the pocket. “Two is one, one is none, so three is two,” John quipped with a wicked smile.
Barry looked confused while Jared smiled inwardly. He’d heard Bart preach that “two is one, one is none” sermon and knew exactly what John was getting at because Murphy’s Law always appeared to be alive and well in a crisis moment. If a person had two flashlights on the battlefield, one of them was almost certainly going to break, and then they would have one flashlight. If a person took only one flashlight into battle, well, they would almost certainly at some point be forced to go without.
John pointed at Barry’s blistered feet. “You got two, and now you got none, so if you had three, you’d have one—and you could hop.” John snickered with a mischievous grin.
“I don’t get it,” Barry said, perplexed by John’s riddle.
“Oh, for the love of everything holy,” Jared interjected, unable to take it any longer. “It means bring an extra one.”
The light bulb seemed to switch on as Barry slowly bobbed his head. John chuckled as he hefted the heavy pack onto his shoulders and wriggled it into position. Jared and Barry donned their packs as well, and the men began moving north again. At 1600 hours, John changed course, heading east down the side of the hill they’d been traversing. He led the group into a heavily vegetated area till they were essentially inside a giant thicket of brush and vegetation.
Whereas the ground was mostly hard-packed earth on top of the hill, down under the vegetation, the ground was softer. John began digging with his hands in the soft earth, trying to flatten out an area he could lay a sleeping bag in. Jared and Barry did the same, and within an hour, the men had an area roughly ten feet by ten feet where they could sleep without rolling down the mountain in the middle of the night.
When they were done excavating their bed for the evening, Barry looked at John. “I hate to say this, but we are all fucked tomorrow.”
“How’s that?” John asked, not really in the mood for any of Barry’s “I’m smarter than you” bullshit.
“We just pushed our way through a hundred yards of coastal poiso
n oak,” Barry divulged, a grim look plastered across his face.
This caught John’s attention. He wasn’t from the area and, although he was briefed on a great many things about the Bay Area, none of the briefings had included any information germane to operating in the bush. He wasn’t familiar with anything past being careful of rattlesnakes, and these hadn’t really been a concern since it was getting colder, and he knew snakes would not be out and about as much as if it were mid-July.
“What does it look like?” John asked.
All three men looked around as Barry pointed to the thicket surrounding them, which seemed to be growing everywhere. “Just look around,” Barry said, sweeping his hand in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc.
The poison oak was dormant in a leafless state during most of the winter months. The sticky urushiol oil could still be collected on a person’s clothing, skin or anything else that came in contact with the plant’s stems. The winter months were oftentimes considered the most dangerous period for poison oak exposure due to the plants lack of identifying leaves.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” John barked in an irritated voice.
“I just had my head down and was following you,” Barry lied. The truth was Barry was very familiar with poison oak and knew he wasn’t greatly affected by its oils. He might have a tiny rash in the morning on his wrist where he’d pushed through the plant’s vines, but it wouldn’t be any great imposition. John, on the other hand—like most people, Barry hoped—would feel the plant’s wrath, and Barry could sit back and enjoy John’s misery.
Jared knew of poison oak but was never much of a hiker, so he hadn’t even realized the plant was present until Barry pointed it out. He also had a feeling Barry had seen the poison oak and intentionally failed to warn them about it, which angered him greatly. The thought of Barry exposing John and him to the plant’s irritating symptoms was not only reckless, it was an intentional assault. He opened his mouth to question Barry but then stopped because Barry would certainly never admit to engaging in nefarious conduct. Then there was the John factor. If John thought Barry did something to him purposefully, the former Marine-turned-soldier might kill the son of a bitch.
The Jared Chronicles | Book 2 | Tears of Chaos Page 10
