by Rick Tippins
In the window, not four feet from his head, was a man’s face staring out at him. The man looked terrified. Jared had turned his head only slightly, keeping the Glock trained in the general direction of the three men, when the man in the window began slowly shaking his head as if warning Jared not to go through with his deadly intentions. Jared nodded ever so slightly, lowering the Glock to a low-ready position.
The man’s head changed from a shaking motion to a nodding motion, his eyes darting back and forth between Jared and the men. Slowly, Jared lowered himself and began backing away from the men until he was in the backyard. Jared stood and was about to start for the fence when the back door creaked open and the man stood there assessing Jared.
“Thanks for not starting a war here in our neighborhood,” the man whispered. Jared didn’t respond as the man continued, “There are more inside the house. They would have come out and killed you and probably me and my family.”
Jared nodded. “I saw ’em kill two kids a few days ago.”
The man just blinked and stared back at Jared. The two men studied each other for a few seconds before Jared holstered the Glock and vaulted the rear fence, disappearing from the man’s sight. Jared moved quickly as he made his way back to the Safeway. He grabbed his bike and trailer from behind the dumpster and wasted no time getting back to his mission at hand.
Jared entered the store a bit more recklessly than he would have had he not known the murderers were drunk and at the small cottage. He hoped they were a territorial animal and would have run off any other unsavory types, laying claim to this store. The interior of the store was a mess, and the stench of rotten dairy was so bad Jared covered his face with his shirt in order to stop from vomiting.
Once he secured all the nonperishable items he could carry from Bart’s list, he pedaled in the direction of the gun store. As he pedaled, the realization of what he had done back at the cottage caved in on him like a broken dam. First, he felt cold and wet, then he began to overheat, and that was when the sweat began cascading from his pores.
He wasn’t crying, but he felt like he was as he pedaled the bike with all his energy, his emotions roiling and bashing at his very sanity. He was hanging on by a thread, his vision slightly blurred with a complete absence of any sort of peripheral sight. As Jared spiraled towards an abyss of blackened uncertainty, he pulled the bike to the curb, retching the contents of his belly into the gutter. When he finished, he dry heaved a half dozen additional times, bent at the waist, streams of mixed bile and saliva hanging from his gaping mouth.
What the fuck had he been thinking getting that close to those guys in order to satisfy his want for revenge on behalf of the dead boys? He was so far out of his comfort zone, and now he was tossing his breakfast all over the ground, sweating and generally a ripe mess, for what? He hadn’t even confronted the guys, he spied on them and this was how his body was reacting. He was having a goddamn nervous breakdown over nothing. What he had done equated closely to viewing a lion at the zoo, which he’d done in the past and never lost his lunch.
Jared’s anger began creeping to the surface as he wiped his mouth and spat in a futile attempt to purge the horrific taste of puke from his mouth. Never before had he been so aware of his deficiencies as a man, and it angered him. He felt impotent in this new world, because he was unable to thrive like he had in the world of old. The anger boiled inside him, caused by the shame manufactured by his cognizant realization of where he lined up in this current and seemingly ever-evolving food chain. He previously stood at or near the top of the old food chain, and now he wasn’t even sure he qualified as substantive nutrition on the scale of this new food chain.
After pulling himself together, Jared began pedaling back towards the gun store, slower than before simply because he didn’t have the energy to push himself hard after his little episode. His stomach was empty and he felt dehydrated. A short time later he pulled to the rear of the gun store, dismounted, and knocked three times on the back door.
Bart cautiously opened the door, peering past Jared, scanning the rear parking lot as if expecting trouble. Jared sighed, pushing his way inside. He left the bike in the hall and went straight to the workshop, where he flopped into a chair and let out a long breath, trying to wrap his head around everything he’d just seen and done. Bart stood in the doorway, staring at him, not saying a word. Jared ran his hands over his face, feeling the beard that had begun to grow.
“I’ll finish up tomorrow; I’m not going back out today,” Jared rasped as Bart moved across the room and grabbed two plastic cups along with the bottle of bourbon. Both men drank in silence, Bart refilling their cups when they were dry. Jared drained his third cup and held it up, rotating it in front of his face.
“You know, Bart, I didn’t drink before I met you. I think you’re a bad influence.” With that, he slid the cup across the table, and Bart refilled it without uttering a word. “Well, I mean, I had a beer every now and then, but I didn’t keep booze in the house and never had more than one drink at a time. Didn’t care for the taste and how it made me feel the next day.”
Bart finished freshening up his own cup. “Well, my boy, if you’re gonna run around town with a loaded gun in your waistband, getting shot at and pretty much living in a dying world, you should have a drink every now and again, ya fucking owe it to yourself.”
Jared hoisted his cup towards Bart. “Salute, ole boy,” he said, feeling kind of silly before drinking it down in one swallow.
Chapter Eighteen
The following day found Jared inside the Safeway, with his last load of the day. As an afterthought, he grabbed a little extra, more than could fit in the trailer, but he had an idea. He placed the extra food into two bags, made sure his bike and trailer were well hidden, and struck out on foot towards the house where he’d seen the man in the window. He carefully moved through the neighborhood, approaching the house from the rear, hoisting the bags over the fence. He wasn’t going to knock or make any sound, he’d just leave the food on the back porch, where he prayed they would find it and hopefully make their lives just a little easier.
Jared had chosen two strong bags with plastic handles. Once he reached the fence leading into the rear yard of the house where he had seen the man, he secured a short length of rope to both bags’ handles and scrambled over the fence. He pulled on the rope, hoisting both bags of food over the fence, turned towards the back door, and froze. The door stood hanging open, only connected to the doorjamb by a single hinge. The home was very dark inside, and it was apparent the door had been forced open.
When Jared was able to collect his thoughts, he found the groceries lying on the ground at his feet, the Glock clutched tightly in his hand. When did that even happen? he thought. Before another thought passed through his head, he was moving forward to the back door, offset to the left, making it easier for his right-handed shooting style to cover the dark entrance to the house and still stay out of any direct line of fire as he approached. Bart was changing him and doing it drastically in a very short period of time. One thing jumped out at him as he reached the door. The brass doorknob had what looked like bullet holes in it. Someone had fired rounds into the door and then kicked it off its moorings in order to enter the house.
Seeing the bullet holes gave Jared pause as he stood as still as a statue, looking into the inky darkness of the house’s interior, the primal animal in him rearing its head as he sniffed the air near the back door, searching for any evidence of what lay just inside the door frame. It all smelled of death and decay; hell, the whole fucking world was dying, why wouldn’t it smell like that?
Jared was pretty much as scared as he had ever been and couldn’t really imagine being any more scared. Had he reached his max in the scared department, like a car reaching its top speed? Well, if he had, he was still able to function, think and make decisions. This must have been what Bart had talked about, controlling your fear and falling back on your training.
He decided right the
n and there he was going in and helping these people. If they were alright, he’d leave them the food and, if they needed help, he would do what he could. He’d go back to the store and get bandages, medicine, or whatever they needed.
He braced himself for the unknown and squirmed through the smashed doorway, entering the interior and making way more noise than he would have liked. Once inside, he stood and swept the Glock in a 180-degree scan of the room, keeping close to the wall.
Bart had showed him some simple ways to get into a less than friendly room with the least amount of exposure. Bart was adamant that Jared not over-penetrate a room he was entering for the first time. He explained to Jared that if he had a partner, that rule applied to them both, but if he was alone, that rule was golden. If you ran into the middle of a room, Bart had explained, now you had potential threats at 360 degrees on the compass.
If you entered, moved out of the doorway and to the left or right, and kept near the wall, you kept all the threats in front of you, 180 degrees, fucking half the headache. Bart had him practice this a hundred times and used as many different rooms and furniture configurations as he could come up with while confined to the gun store. He showed Jared how he could read a room from outside the doorway and enter it accordingly based on structural design and furniture placement
These lessons came flooding back as Jared scanned the small washroom. He waited for a solid thirty seconds as his eyes began to adjust before moving through a doorway on his left and into the kitchen. From there he could see the living room and the body of a man lying face down near the front door, which was also slightly open. Like the back door, the front door was forced open and hung limply on its hinges. Jared could not be sure the man on the floor was the man he’d seen in the window, but he was sure the man was dead.
Jared moved to the man’s side and inspected him closely. The man was shot in the body and possibly the legs and arms, but he’d also been shot several times in the back of the head. As Jared rolled him over, bullets actually fell out of his mouth, eyes and who knows what other holes, natural or manmade. Jared dropped the man back to the carpet and stepped back, breathing heavily, a shiver running quickly through his tense body.
There was blood everywhere near the front door and, as Jared’s eyes continued to adjust, he was able to make out in more detail the scene inside this little single-family dwelling. The tiled entranceway at the front door was soaked in bloody footprints. Jared studied the footprints like he knew what he was looking at. He almost smiled as he thought how utterly ridiculous this endeavor was, almost turning away, when the humor left him and he began to see a pattern, a story in the mess on the tile.
There were larger footprints, obviously belonging to a man or men, Jared checked the deceased man’s shoe tread and determined the footprints in the blood were not his. There was a smaller set of footprints, then that changed, and Jared could see why. There was a woman’s shoe, saturated in blood, off to the side of the entranceway, and then there was a small barefoot print on the tile along with one small shoed footprint and the other larger footprints.
Jared found himself staring out the front door; they’d come over here from next door, killed this man, and taken his wife or daughter. Rage washed over Jared; he never felt this way before and hoped he would never feel this way again. A slight noise behind him nearly caused him heart failure as he spun, bringing the Glock’s sights up in the direction of the sound. It was a cupboard in the kitchen ten feet behind him. He immediately moved off centerline to the left of the cupboard’s door. Jared pointed the gun down at the small door and thought whatever was inside had to be a cat or some other pet; the cupboard was too small for a man.
He pulled the door open, careful to keep his finger off the trigger. He didn’t want any frightened accidental discharges that would bring that horde from next door over. What Jared found in that cupboard changed the rest of his life, and it wasn’t a cat. A small girl sat huddled inside the cupboard, feet pulled in, knees drawn to her chest, eyes wide with fright and wet with tears, but otherwise silent.
Did she witness her father’s murder? he wondered as they both stared at each other. After a few seconds, Jared lowered the Glock and then slid it into the holster, after which he leaned back, resting on his hands, then sinking the rest of the way onto the floor, where he sat looking at this tiny little human. She looked to be somewhere between five and seven years old; Jared couldn’t be sure, as his experience with kids was right around zero.
Her small frail body was shaking, yet no sound came from her. She was crying, but doing it quietly. Had Bart trained this kid? Had the scene inside the house been a fraction less horrifying, Jared was sure he would have laughed out loud at the thought. Instead, he stared slack-jawed at the girl, chest tight, barely breathing, knowing full well the person taken by the gang next door had to be the little girl’s mother.
As he sat there in a stranger’s house, face-to-face with the family’s recently orphaned child, a slight, but very powerful change began slowly seeping into Jared’s very being.
“Wait here. I’ll be right back.” Jared hefted himself off the floor and moved to the backyard, where he left the groceries on the ground. He grabbed a bottle of water and some granola bars before returning to the house. He laid the items at the little girl’s feet and stepped back.
“Stay here. I’ll go get your mother.”
The little girl just stared at him, crying silently. Jared stood, closed the cupboard door, checked that all four magazines he carried were in place, and then drew the Glock. He moved to the rear door and checked that the yard was clear. He listened and waited for five full minutes before exiting the small house and vaulting the fence the way he’d come. He moved to the yard directly behind the murdering horde’s house and peeked through the fence boards, trying to discern any movement inside the house.
He wanted to walk up to the back door and just go on a shooting spree. Problem with that was he didn’t know how many others were in the house, and he had to assume they were all armed. If he got himself killed, the little girl next door would die, hiding in a cupboard, starving, dehydrated, and probably covered in urine and feces. Worse than that, she’d die waiting for him to bring her mother back.
Jared shook the thought from his head as he caught sight of a lone man through a window in the back of the house. He saw the man for just a second before the recalcitrant human spilled out into the backyard through the back door. Jared ducked low and watched the man lower his zipper, relieving himself of the liquor he’d undoubtedly consumed earlier in the day. After he was done, the man returned to the house, slamming the back door closed.
To the right side of the rear door, Jared saw an access point to the crawl space, leading under the house. An idea began to take shape in his head, and he smiled in spite of the situation. Jared quickly returned to the small house the tiny waif was hiding in, and moved to the back porch, where several plants hung from hooks attached to the awning beams. Jared was able to remove the plants and unscrew five of the hooks, which he pocketed before returning to the rear of the horde’s yard.
Jared took one last security check of his surroundings and then climbed the fence, entering the horde’s yard. He wasted no time slithering across the yard to the access point. He pulled at the small piece of plywood, which succumbed to his actions with little effort. He rolled onto his back, grabbed the underside of the house’s wall, and hauled himself feet first into the crawl space. Once he was inside, Jared reached back, drew the plywood back over the entrance and effectively blocking all outside light, leaving him in the semidarkness, but also leaving no indication of his presence.
Jared fished around inside his cargo pants pocket and withdrew a light stick, which he cracked and was immediately rewarded with the soft green glow of light. He could hear people’s voices above him and could hear the floorboards creak when they moved throughout the house. Jared did not care a single bit about any of that right now, he had some work to do first, and then h
e would worry about where people were inside the house.
One hour later, Jared was finished with the first part of his plan. He crept around the entire crawl space, found every access point that led into the house, and marked it with a light stick. Based on his rudimentary understanding of plumbing and what he’d seen of the house next door, Jared guessed that the three access points were in two of the bedrooms and a coat closet near the front door. What Jared had also done was slowly screw a hook into the bottom of each access panel so that if the panel was removed and he wished to replace it, he’d have something to pull the panel back into place with.
He sat back, going over his plan. The access points were marked, the panels had the hooks securely in them, his weapon was ready, and he had more than enough ammunition. Now what? he thought. Crawl out like a rat and start shooting? He sat back and realized this plan was well thought out, just not completely thought out. He rested, drank some water, and even ate a power bar as he ran all the possible scenarios through his head over and over.
Something Bart always said came back to him. It had been when they were doing room-entry training and he was overthinking how to get into a room. Bart had stopped him and said, “At some point you’re just going to have to do it. At one point you’ll have to get off your ass, go through that door, and face the beast. You’ll either make it or you won’t, it’s as simple as that, my friend.”
Jared felt motivated by a myriad of emotions after seeing the girl, but now the adrenalin was beginning to fritter away, leaving him feeling gutted. Nothing in the tanks, the fatigue crashing into him so hard he nearly retched. Then fear bombarded his brain like a hailstorm, mixing with the fatigue and causing him to feel weak and ineffectual. What was I thinking? Why did I even come back to the family’s house? I’m going to get myself killed messing with these people.