by Rick Tippins
Essie looked shyly at Jared. “What?”
Jared shook his head, pursing his lips in a tight smile. It pleased him to see her interact with another female. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it felt good to see Essie happy and in the company of the softer gender. His father had always told him kids needed a mom and a dad. He told Jared a mother infused a humanitarian element in a person, and a father infused a survival element. When the two were properly blended, you’d have a fine human version of thirty-year-old blended Scotch. Now sitting there watching Essie and Shannon whisper back and forth, he understood what his father meant.
As Calvin finished telling as much of his story as he planned on telling without getting a little in return, he nodded at Bart. “What’s your story?”
Bart took a deep breath. “Not much to tell. Lights went out, Jared there showed up, and we decided to get out of the city before the whole place came crashing down.”
Calvin crossed his arms and cocked his head to the side. “You really gonna feed me that line after telling me you’re not a cop anymore and hearing my story?”
Bart exhaled the breath he’d drawn and was about to speak when Jared leaped to his feet and froze, facing the direction of the city. A second later, the entire group heard the same sound, a sound none of them had heard in more than a month.
Bart leaped to his feet. “Everyone down,” he hissed, bringing the binoculars to his eyes and scanning the road as Jared moved to Essie, scooping her up and planting her firmly in the trailer. He deftly dropped the ballistic vest over her and softly patted her head till she lowered herself into the vest like a turtle.
Jared crouched as he moved to Bart’s side, peering off into the vast countryside. The sound was an older Volkswagen Beetle puttering its way up the road not more than half a mile off and closing.
“Just don’t move and they’ll pass right by,” Bart said, his eyes still fixed to the binoculars.
Calvin scrambled to his feet, but Bart grabbed him. “Stay down, man.”
Calvin tugged out of Bart’s grasp. “They’re headed straight towards our place and, if they take everything, we won’t survive,” Calvin snarled.
Jared watched Bart purse his lips for a split second before shaking his head.
“Where’s your place?” Bart asked.
Both Calvin and Shannon gave each other a look as the sound of the approaching Beetle became louder and louder.
Bart put the glasses back to his eyes, taking in the approaching vehicle. “Got four bad-looking dudes in this car,” he said, dropping the binoculars from his face. “You got stuff at your place worth fighting for?”
Neither Calvin nor Shannon answered.
“How far is it?” Bart snapped.
Both remained silent, but Shannon looked terrified. Bart unslung his rifle, placing the butt end in the dirt. “Listen, there are four guys, and all of them are armed.” He pointed to Calvin’s shotgun then the pistol Shannon had. “And they’re armed a hell of a lot better than the two of you are.” Bart looked at Jared as if he was going to seek approval for what he was about to do, then turned back to Calvin. “You and missy go up there and get in a gunfight and I bet you either lose or get hurt so bad you might as well have lost.”
Calvin hefted the shotgun. “I can’t just let someone come onto our property and clean us out.”
Bart stood, straightening his old and very stiff back. “Leave Shannon here with Essie. Jared and I will come with you. Three on four is a lot better odds than two on four.” Bart nodded at Shannon. “She can look out for the girl, and we can go to wherever your place is and make sure they don’t clean you out.”
The sound of the Beetle was close now, and Jared was beginning to get that borderline panicky feeling he seemed to have to wrestle with almost every day lately. He hated the feeling, mostly because when something happened, he felt Bart became calmer. He so wanted to have a calm wash over him when things fell apart, but he hadn’t spent a lifetime preparing his mind to act that way, so he suffered. Maybe it was because it made him feel less of a man when he was coming apart at the seams and the man next to him was talking nonchalantly about taking a little walk and getting in a gunfight. He took a deep breath, trying to steel himself, fighting for control of his body as adrenaline gushed through his veins, threatening to wrest all control away from him.
“You good?” Bart barked.
Jared snapped his head up, eyes wide, giving a terse nod.
Bart raised his eyebrows, turning ever so slightly towards Shannon. “Want me to take her instead?”
Jared’s face flushed as he shook his head. “I’m fucking good,” he blurted, causing Bart to frown disapprovingly at Jared’s vulgarity in front of Essie.
The Beetle was nearly even with them as Bart stood, moving to Calvin’s side. “Which way and how far?”
Calvin took one last look at Shannon, who moved to Essie’s side and began moving her along with the gear towards a thick clump of bushes. “Just over that hill, maybe a quarter mile or so. It’s a bit farther using the road, so we should be able to get to the house about the same time they do.”
The Beetle passed their position, continuing up the road, the engine noise slowly dissipating as the three men moved through the knee-high grass in the direction Calvin had indicated. No one spoke as they huffed and puffed their way up the gradually inclining slope, listening to the faint sound of the Beetle. As the three neared the top of the slope, the sound of the Beetle stopped.
Calvin spoke back over his shoulder without stopping. “They’re at the front gate. It’s locked, so they’ll have to either walk in or cut the lock.”
As if to answer him and prove him wrong all at the same time, the engine could be heard as it revved, engaged and powered the Beetle into motion. The noise that followed was a scraping metallic sound. It was obvious to all three that the Beetle had simply run through the gate.
Once at the top of the hill, a small house could be seen nestled next to a small creek near some old oak trees. The Beetle still had not made it up the driveway, which looked to be several hundred yards in length. Bart halted the group, surveying the scene below, his eyes narrowed to mere slits, rifle clutched in old but still strong hands.
“Jared, stay up here and hold the high ground. If we go loud down there, do what you can to cover us. The minute you start taking fire, get the hell out of here and back to Essie. We’re going down and, if we get ourselves killed, you will have to be there for those gals.” Bart looked back at Calvin. “You and I are going down and seeing what these boys are up to. Jared, show no mercy; put ’em down if it goes that way. We get into it with them boys and they’ll most likely try to get back to the car; that’s when you clobber ’em. They won’t expect it.” Bart winked at Jared. “We’re outnumbered, but we got the element of surprise on our side and, by God, that adds five or six guys’ worth.”
Without another word, Bart turned, moving off around the hill in the direction of the small house, with Calvin in tow. Jared settled in and watched the two older men make their way through the scrub brush to the rear of the house just as the Beetle came into view.
As seemed usual lately, his heart began to race. He breathed in deeply, trying desperately to calm his shaking hands. He had so much adrenaline coursing through his body that his senses were queued to levels he’d never felt before. Lying on his stomach, he could literally smell the decomposing leaves beneath him as if he’d buried his face in the earth and drawn a long deep breath solely through his nostrils. Just knowing he was on the edge, coupled with some deep breaths in through his nose and out through his dry mouth, helped calm his shaking nerves ever so slightly.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The driver stopped the Beetle in front of the small house, and four men spilled out onto the gravel drive, surveying the property. Jared watched as they glanced this way and that, moving towards the front porch, in what appeared to be a very disorganized and disjointed group. He watched everyone in the group swe
ep another team member’s back with their weapon no less than three times before they reached the front porch, and Jared had to smile, thinking if Bart were in charge of these lunatics, he likely would have shot all four simply for the weapons-safety violations Jared had witnessed in the last thirty seconds alone.
All four men appeared to be some Hispanic race, and all were heavily tattooed, some even showing ink as far up their necks as the jawline. Jared wasn’t up on gang tattoos before the event, and he hadn’t studied up after, but he was pretty sure these guys were gang members before the event and hadn’t converted after the power went out.
Salvador stood on the porch, peering through one of the front windows. His brother, Jose, and their two closest friends, Raymond and Steve, peered through windows on the other side of the front door. Salvador was born in San Jose to parents who’d illegally crossed the border somewhere near San Diego and had moved north through California before settling in the Bay Area, where they both found work. Salvador’s brother was born a couple of years later, and both boys had pretty much raised each other while their parents scratched out a living, working two and sometimes three jobs each.
The streets were where the boys grew up, meeting the older brothers of friends, and eventually getting mixed up in running errands for these older brothers, and finally being accepted into a gang. Gang initiation had come in the form of a beating by other gang members.
Salvador remembered being beaten to the ground, where he was beaten and kicked some more. He tried to cover his head while lashing out at his assailants when the opportunity presented itself. Salvador remembered wondering when or if the beating would ever end. Then as quickly as it all started, the assault ended, and he was helped to his feet, hugged and even kissed by the very boys who had seconds before been beating him nearly unconscious.
When Jose’s time came to be jumped into the gang, Salvador was first in line and had beat his brother harder than any two of the other gang members. He had also been the proudest when Jose had fought back, but eventually gone down without a sound, taking the beating with silent honor. Salvador was crying after the beating, holding his brother and welcoming him into the gang.
From that time on, they had not depended on their parents, but instead looked to the gang for everything. The gang had provided food, entertainment, women, counsel, and anything else one of its members needed or wanted. Salvador couldn’t remember ever having another meaningful conversation with his parents after he’d been accepted into the gang.
If both boys hadn’t been so hardened by the streets, they would have seen what good people their parents were. They would have seen how hard their parents had worked so the two brothers could grow up in a safer country. Instead they unwittingly worked to make their new home as dangerous as the home their parents had left behind.
When Salvador was sixteen and Jose was only fourteen, they were tasked with a drive-by shooting on a rival gang’s stronghold. The then gang leader, a man of twenty-four years, had assigned two other gang members to assist, but Salvador had refused their help. Instead he and Jose had gone to the house, but as an alternative to driving by and spraying the structure with indiscriminate gunfire, they knocked on the door and fought their way through the house, killing every male they came across.
They wore masks and were never identified in the murders of seven rival gang members. Looking back, the cops were so stupid; they’d talked to everyone in Salvador’s gang except him and Jose. Everyone else had kept their mouths shut out of loyalty to the gang and probably a little fear of these two maniacs who’d single-handedly wiped out nearly an entire rival gang in one incident.
This act alone drove the two brothers up the chain of command within the gang in no time. Members from other allied gangs stopped to pay respect after the killings, while both brothers reveled in their newfound stardom. When Salvador was eighteen, a shootout left a void in his gang’s leadership. There was no argument from a single member as Salvador took the reins of the gang and went to work. Within three years, his gang was a force to be reckoned with in the South Bay. Salvador controlled nearly seventy-five percent of the San Jose drug and prostitution scene; then the power went out.
At first it seemed like a godsend, no cops, no law, no one to stop them from doing whatever they wanted, but within the first week Salvador realized this was a whole new world where he would have to reprioritize what he thought was important. Drugs were still important to those junkies so hooked on them they had only a vague realization of what was happening, but they made up the minority of his customers. They were sketchy at best, rarely had enough money for what they needed, and were generally more hassle than they were worth. The working class, on the other hand, were by far his preferred customers; they had money and weren’t as desperate and unpredictable as the junkies.
Within that first week, those predictable customers had other things on their minds, like family and food, so Salvador began holding grocery stores hostage. Salvador lost six men in the first two days he started controlling stores. He realized quickly that if he made his men visible, there was far less likelihood of a gunfight, or any fight for that matter. People actually would walk up and ask questions about the store, along with the availability of goods. When the situation was explained to them, they would leave, either returning with something to trade, or they’d never be seen again.
One problem Salvador faced was he needed ammunition, meaning rifle ammo, 9 mm and .45-caliber ammo. Surprisingly enough, even in California, there were quite a few people who owned firearms. Unfortunately, most of them were .38 Specials or .380-caliber jobs. Some brought shotgun ammo, which he took, but he needed ammunition for his gang’s rifles and most of these Californians didn’t have what he needed.
What Salvador didn’t know was that people who had rifles and stockpiled their own ammunition would likely never trade it and most assuredly would not trade it with the likes of Salvador and his gang. Four of the gang members killed in those first two days were shot by someone from a long way out. None of the gang members saw or heard anything other than the shot. Two had been head shots, and the other two were center mass body shots. Although Salvador had experienced being shot three times himself, he was no ballistics expert, but by the size of the wounds in his fallen brothers’ heads and chests, he was sure they’d been killed with a rifle round.
After the sixth man was killed, Salvador led his remaining men through the surrounding neighborhoods and did things he would never have been able to do before the power went out. When they were done, smoke rose from fifty homes and bodies littered the streets. He left someone from every home alive, making sure he let them know why he was killing.
The second week brought more desperation to the streets, and his stores were actually attacked on a regular basis. He lost more men struggling to adapt to the ever-changing world. By the third week, the stores were empty, and now he was in jeopardy of starving, so he rallied his gang, setting out across the city in search of food and supplies. He’d seen Jose kill a man over a four-pack of toilet paper and remembered feeling relieved, since the stuff was becoming harder and harder to find.
On one occasion, a man claimed to have a working motor vehicle and offered to trade it for food. Salvador talked a little turkey with the man before agreeing to a deal. When the man left and returned with an old VW Beetle, Salvador almost called off the deal, but his better judgment told him cars were not a thing to pass on in the new age.
After the end of the fourth week, the city seemed nearly dead, both in the people sense and food-supply sense, so he adapted yet again, setting out into the countryside in search of food. The first little ranch house they set upon was occupied by an old woman with a shotgun. Three of his men had killed the old woman before she got a shot off. They’d searched the house and a barn, leaving with an assortment of canned veggies, fruits and probably fifty pounds of beef jerky.
They were about to leave when one of Salvador’s men located a cellar off to the side of the ho
use, where they hit pay dirt. They weren’t more than fifteen miles up into the hills, but these folks seemed to be preparing for the end of the world. Salvador vowed to keep plundering these country folks, and they loaded the bounty into the Beetle before returning to their neighborhood.
This was Salvador’s second trip into the hills, and he hoped they would be half as successful as he had been on the first trip. The place looked lived in, but he didn’t get the sense anyone was home. All the better, he thought. Salvador tried the door, but it was locked. No problem, he stepped back and kicked the thin door right off one hinge, leaving it dangling by the remaining hinge. The four men moved into the structure, guns raised, looking through each room before reconvening in the kitchen. The recalcitrant four began tearing through the cupboards, searching for food or anything of value.
In the bushes to the rear of the small house, Bart and Calvin could hear the muffled voices combined with the banging of pots, pans and cupboard doors.
Calvin struggled to get up. “Sons of bitches,” he snarled.
Bart hauled him back down. “Easy, killer, let ’em do their thing. They aren’t leaving with a thing.”
Calvin sank back to the ground, nostrils flaring, shotgun gripped tightly in his hands, angry rage roiling through his old boney body.
Bart patted his arm and smiled. “We got this, my friend. Look at ’em—no one even watching the car,” Bart whispered, thinking a car was one of the earth’s most prized positions now, and these nitwits hadn’t even put a guard on theirs. Bart shook his head as he pulled the old handkerchief out of his pocket, muffling a couple of coughs with it. As he pulled the rag away from his mouth, he could see the bright red splatters his ailing body had expelled. He quickly stowed the bloody evidence, bringing his rifle back up and sighting on the house.