After John laid waste to the three criminals, he sprinted out the back of the house he used for his ambush position. He circled quietly around the block, giving the area around the dead bodies a wide berth. He stopped every few seconds to listen for any sign of additional threats, but heard none. He was stunned at Jared’s improvisation in regard to the whistling. At first hearing the whistling, John and the others took up defensive positions, preparing to defend their stronghold should it be discovered.
Once the whistler passed their position, John went out into the early morning darkness and performed some scouting. That was when he identified three potentially unfriendly men moving past Solar Green. They were uninterested in the business, which was when John remembered the signals the group the day before used against them. Once John transitioned to three whistles of his own and Jared started back towards him, John was dead sure he knew who was doing the whistling.
When he’d seen Jared and Stephani pass his position, he was elated. He hadn’t long to wait before the three men came skulking through the early morning darkness, and based on the manner in which these men moved, John had no problem ending their lives. The recon mission took a little longer than John anticipated, causing him to think twice about just walking up to Jared’s position. Jared was almost certainly wound up after whatever he’d been through, and John wasn’t in the mood for a blue-on-blue shootings this morning.
When John finished and was thoroughly satisfied the only threats were lying in the street dead, he whistled three short blasts. He was back at the house he’d shot the three men from when Jared stepped cautiously out onto the sidewalk and waved a raised rifle. John stepped out and motioned silently for the other two to move to his location.
Jared had to refrain from hugging John as the two came together.
“What the fuck, bro, that was genius.” John beamed at the younger man.
“I was hoping you’d understand. They’d been following us for a while, and I didn’t want to bring them back to the solar store, so that was all I could think of doing,” Jared said through pursed lips.
John was smiling as he shook his head in disbelief; then his eyes caught Stephani’s feet. “Ha, someone got themselves some new scoots,” he exclaimed.
“We got a bunch of stuff, not just for us girls—toothpaste, stuff like that,” Stephani said as she looked down at her already dirty shoes.
The group was silent as Stephani and Jared stared down at the fallen men’s bodies. John glanced nervously at Stephani, not wanting to be judged for this horrific act of violence. The woman did not seem bothered by the carnage in the way John was worried she would be, so he set about emptying the men’s weapons. Two of the men carried handguns, while the third man carried the shotgun. John emptied all the firearms, then smashed the shotgun by placing it against the curb and stomping it with his boot.
The weapon’s stock snapped, and the action was left moderately warped. Next John disassembled both handguns and began throwing the smaller pieces into the surrounding area. A firing pin and spring went onto a nearby roof, while the slide off the same pistol was flung down the storm drain. The process took John all of about two minutes before all three weapons were rendered useless. After disposing of the weapons, John stowed all the ammunition the men carried in their packs. There wasn’t much or he would have asked Jared to carry some.
The bodies were covered in blood, stopping John from pillaging their belongings too much more than for weapons and ammunition. He figured if the men were out in the middle of the night preying on the weak, they probably didn’t have much to begin with. Sifting through these men’s blood-soaked clothing and then having to smell the coppery scent of their blood until he was able to find a place to wash did not appeal to John much.
“Let’s go. I want to get back and hear what the hell happened to you two. Jeez, man, you guys were only supposed to be gone for a few hours. I thought they got you.” John shot the two a devilish look and smiled.
“Who is they?” Stephani questioned in puzzlement.
“Them, sister, the assholes out there doing all the bad. There’s us and there’s them.” John chortled as he pinwheeled before moving up the street.
“Not all of ’em,” Jared quipped. “We actually had dinner with a nice family last night.”
John stopped in his tracks, then whirled on his heel. “You what?” he asked, craning his neck in an overexaggerated motion like he hadn’t heard Jared right and was trying to place his ears closer to the source of this inconceivable information.
Jared didn’t stop walking, continuing right past John, a smirk creeping into the corners of his mouth. “Yeah, home-cooked dinner, really unbelievable—and we had some sort of punch, red punch, maybe cherry or—” He turned to Stephani. “You remember what flavor it was?”
Stephani heaved her shoulders up so they nearly made contact with her ears. “It was red, that’s for sure, maybe raspberry or mountain berry—you know, it might have been watermelon. I can’t remember. The meat was what I focused on mostly,” she answered innocently.
John’s mouth opened slightly as he hurried to stay abreast of the two lest he miss one second of this mouthwatering talk of food and drink. He wasn’t starved by any stretch, but also hadn’t benefitted from a real cooked meal in a while.
“Meat? You guys ate cooked meat? Are you sure it wasn’t human?” John asked, his mouth watering at the thought of actual cooked meat, not human meat of course.
“No, it was venison, and they smoked it or roasted it in the ground,” Jared explained, loving the look on John’s face.
“Who were these people?” John finally asked, feeling like he’d missed out on an opportunity of a lifetime.
“Tongans, a whole family. Maybe twelve or more. They stayed in their house, and as people left or died, they expanded their yard by knocking over fences. They also have a pretty good security situation. They have enough people to pull watch all night and day, and they scavenged barbed wire from somewhere, strung it all around the place. Anyone trying to get in would make enough noise to get those guards on them, and then, well—they all had rifles, so it didn’t seem like they were getting messed with too much,” Jared finished.
Chapter 35
John knew Jared’s story and how Jared had somehow managed to survive when everything John knew of the world screamed people like Jared should all be dead. John was acutely aware of the fact that Jared thought his way through most of the first month before falling into company with Bart, who taught Jared how to take decisive and sometimes violent action in order to continue his existence on earth. Knowing all this, John was still bewildered by the other man’s ability to drift through life unscathed.
John marveled at Jared’s ability to think on his feet, as he had with the whole whistle-code thing, not to mention Jared’s story of how he got a group of Tongans to invite him to dinner when food was more valuable than diamonds. John was liking Jared more and more, but was careful with their friendship after the Shannon episode. John was the newcomer to the group, and when Shannon took a liking to him, Jared had made it clear he hadn’t liked it. John had nearly a decade more life experience than Jared and knew better than to make any more out of Jared’s being upset than it deserved. They were trying to survive, not pick up women in a club. John had plenty to do without chasing skirt in a post-apocalyptic world.
For now, John would keep his admiration of Jared to himself, and maybe he’d keep it that way forever, he didn’t know. John was also aware of Jared’s insecurities when it came to John. They got along fine for the most part, but John knew Jared strived to impress him with his ability to shoot and take care of the group. It was as though John were a measuring stick based on his past profession. John almost laughed out loud when he thought about how much of his former self didn’t work in this new world.
He was perfectly fitted for the shooting and battle part of the new world, but the rest was pretty new to even him. He liked hot showers, home-cooked meals, beautiful
-smelling ladies and cars when he wasn’t on a mission. Now he was perpetually on a mission. He walked everywhere, ate little, and it sucked.
“Okay, sounds like you two got damn lucky. You didn’t by chance bring any of that meat with you?” John asked, already knowing the answer would be a resounding no.
Jared shook his head, a grim look on his face. “’Fraid not.”
Back at Solar Green, Stephani and Jared dropped their packs while Claire crowded in after seeing Stephani in a new pair of shoes. Jared left the women to sift through the packs while he and John went to the back of the warehouse to see what Barry had been doing during Jared’s absence. They found Barry in a corner, tinkering with a large piece of electronic equipment. Jared guessed it was some form of inverter by the looks of the thing.
Barry told Jared that the day before, he and John had dragged a smaller section of solar panels outside and positioned them to face the sunlight. Barry connected the panels, then ran the connective cables back inside the warehouse, where he worked to get a current running through a charge controller and into a battery.
Barry further explained his plan was to suck power from the sun, run it through the charge controller, then into a battery. Barry planned on running the power from the battery through an inverter and then on to whatever appliances they could find that remained operational. Barry told Jared, just because a piece of electrical gear didn’t work didn’t mean it was useless. Barry told Jared and John he felt he would be able to repair many of the items affected by the event.
Barry showed Jared where he’d staged six Powerwall batteries. Jared pushed on one and found the thing weighed a ton.
John smiled with his brows raised as Jared struggled with the heavy battery. “Each one is, like, two hundred pounds. We ain’t carrying them all back to the house,” John cautioned.
“How are we getting all this stuff back up into the mountains?” Jared questioned as he released the weighty battery.
“Haven’t worked that out yet. I want to stage all the stuff we need here, then secure this building and come back with whatever we figure out to move it all,” Barry interjected.
Jared turned to John as if the man would have a ready-made answer for the problem. John scratched at his beard, but said nothing. Jared’s mind drifted back to a time not so long ago in an apartment in Belmont. At the time, he had no idea what had caused the loss of all the electronic gear and was beginning to see the telltale signs of a society coming apart at the seams. He’d grabbed a Sharpie and written down a plan of action. It was a technique he’d used in his job before the solar flare, only there had always been a giant oversized whiteboard to scribble his ideas on.
That day in his apartment had felt strange at first as he scrawled out a loose plan he hoped would lengthen his life in a world that at the time seemed to be dying. In the end he realized writing on that apartment wall not only saved his life, but saved the lives of others, like Essie, Stephani and Claire just to name a few. Looking at all the solar equipment Barry had staged in the warehouse, Jared began sketching out a plan in his mind based on the equipment they needed to move coupled with the assets they had at their disposal.
They had a few thousand pounds’ worth of large equipment pieces to move back to the ranch house, which was miles away. There would be no sneaking around with this much equipment. Jared fostered the idea of taking one piece at a time over a long period, but quickly abandoned the idea as counterproductive based on a fast-approaching winter and the need for at least a few creature comforts from the time before the solar flare.
As Jared’s brain raced, a strategy for moving all the solar equipment up to the ranch house came into focus. Barry and John remained mute as they watched Jared study the solar equipment. Jared’s brows were furrowed as the logistics of moving so many things of such great weight were realized and slowly overcome. The other two men’s silence finally caused Jared to look at John.
“What?” Jared said, seeing John was studying him with a quizzical yet expectant look painted on his face.
John frowned. “What are you thinking?”
Jared breathed in deeply. “We need to bring the Beetle down here and use it. The horses won’t do, we need a trailer, and we’ll need the Bug to tow it.”
“That’s gonna make a hell of a lot of noise getting down here,” John chided gently.
Jared shook his head. “No, we tow it in, drive it out.”
John wasn’t keen on using the only operating vehicle he knew existed in the greater Bay Area, but he’d also seen the military use aircraft so secret and valuable, many of the country’s top politicians didn’t know of their existence. The bottom line was, if you didn’t use it, there was no use having it.
“We tow it down here with the horses. We need the lightest trailer we can find that will accommodate all the equipment. Once we start the bug and leave this place, anyone who hears it is going to want it, so we’re not coming back anytime soon,” Jared stated, nodding his head as his brain completed putting the finishing touches on his course of action.
John chuckled as Jared concluded his scheme. “I like it. We can implement a security element to your plan, and I think Calvin can help with how we’re going to attach a horse to a VW Bug, but other than that, I think you got us headed in the right direction.” Finishing, John turned and gave Barry a questioning look.
“Ah, yeah, sure, sounds great,” Barry stammered.
John laughed out loud, knowing full well Barry probably hadn’t even listened to Jared’s entire plan; instead he had almost certainly been going over his own plan for the solar setup once they dropped it in the dirt next to the ranch house.
Having completed his outlining of how they would get the panels and batteries to the ranch house, Jared looked around the warehouse and realized Devon was missing. “Where’s Devon?”
John jerked his thumb upwards. “On the roof keeping an eye out. He likes the solitude, I think.”
By 0900 hours, Jared and John had everyone packed and ready to move out towards the ranch house. Claire was wearing her new shoes, which thankfully fit perfectly, while the feminine supplies disappeared into the women’s packs. John and Jared assisted Barry in moving every piece of solar equipment they would be dragging back to the ranch house inside the warehouse, where they prayed it would be waiting upon their return.
John thought about trying to rig one of the doors for easy access, but Jared and Barry were against this. In the end John relented, surrendering to the idea of picking the mechanism upon their return. If he were unable to pick the lock the next time, they would force entry through the front glass doors and be on their way.
When the group finally left for the ranch house, John moved out ahead of everyone, sweeping his rifle left and right as he searched for any sign their position had been discovered. He wasn’t overly worried since Devon had remained on the building’s roof all of the day before and then again ever since John went out to help with Jared and Stephani’s safe return. The six people moved through the city, heading east and using as many side streets as possible.
Shortly before noon, they arrived in the area of the San Jose Country Club. Jared surveyed the brown fairways and remembered the night he’d spent on one of them. He had imagined all kinds of things that were not real and had been beyond relieved when the sun finally came up the following morning. Now he moved through the area a different man, changed by life’s harsh lessons learned through blood, sweat, and some tears.
John led the group straight to where they’d left the horses and was delighted to find them still cordoned off in the corral. There was no hay left in the feeder, but the animals seemed none the worse for wear. As John looked at the corral, he had the idea to bring some feed with them. He would also search the property for anything he could use to pen the horses inside.
Two hours later, all the horses were fed and saddled. John and Jared secured two bales of hay to one horse, using parachute cord John pulled from his pack. A third animal was loaded w
ith several rolls of fencing wire hung from its withers. Claire rode behind Jared while Stephani climbed on behind John. Devon refused to ride behind Barry, instead choosing to walk. This lasted about four miles before the kid climbed on after a short break to rest the horses. Neither Jared nor John said a word as Devon wordlessly climbed onto the animal and situated himself behind Barry. When the lad was aboard, the group moved off toward the ranch house.
Chapter 36
Late in the afternoon, the group approached within half a mile of the ranch house. John called for a halt and dismounted. He led the horses, along with their riders, to a clump of oak trees, where he secured his mount and gestured for Jared to secure his as well. Jared dismounted and tied the horse to a low-hanging branch. John turned and walked a short distance away from the rest of the party, checking once to ensure Jared was following him. When the two men were fifteen yards from the rest of their friends, John stopped.
“I’d like to scout the house before we ride straight into something bad,” John stated.
Jared’s mouth felt dry at the thought of something bad happening to Essie. “I’m going with you,” he said without hesitation.
John gave him a drawn smile. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
An hour later, Jared lay a hundred yards from the ranch house, watching a complete stranger walk across the front yard of the property until the stranger disappeared around the side of the ranch house and was lost from Jared’s view. A moment later the man reappeared, carrying a roll of black irrigation hose. As he passed by the front of the house, the door opened and Shannon stepped out.
Jared rose slightly, hefting his rifle up, pointing it at the unsuspecting man, but John hauled him to the ground. Shannon and the man were within ten yards of one another, and John didn’t want to create a hostage situation. Jared struggled in John’s grasp for a moment before rolling on his side to face John.
The Jared Chronicles | Book 2 | Tears of Chaos Page 27
