A World Slowed

by Rick Tippins

  Jared followed Bart into the house for the second time in less than ten minutes. Bart was inside, scanning back and forth, looking for the thing he’d missed. He turned, squatting down so he could look through one of the windows in order to orient himself with where Calvin was standing outside the residence. Bart slowly returned his attention to the inside of the house, searching the walls, floor and even the doorjambs.

  He moved deliberately into the dining room, getting down on his hands and knees. Jared watched as the old man pulled the carpet back, exposing a thin crack in the floor that could only be part of a trapdoor. The carpet had been laid over the top, hiding the door from view, while the heavy table was placed on top of the carpet, further discouraging anyone from the effort it would take to expose the bare floor. Bart moved to the window nearest Calvin, forcing it open.

  “Hey, we got a trapdoor in here, and it doesn’t look like they could have accessed it from inside unless someone covered it for them, so heads-up out there. We’re gonna open it up in here.”

  Together, Jared and Bart moved the table before throwing back the carpet to reveal a rather large trapdoor. There was a place for a lock; however, no lock was attached. Bart attached a piece of cord to the handle and gave the other end to Jared, motioning for him to pull the door up and open. Bart quickly moved to the top of the door, training his weapon on the opening as Jared began to draw the door open.

  Before Jared could stop it, the door flopped open with a loud bang. Bart simultaneously swept the muzzle of his rifle down and across the hole in the dining room floor. There was a set of steps leading down into the basement area, where shelves could be seen on both sides of the bottom.

  “Toss me a light stick,” Bart barked.

  Jared grabbed a light stick from a pocket and tossed it to the older man, who snapped the stick before dropping it into the darkness below. He slung the rifle to his back, feeling it a bit cumbersome for the dark and likely confined space he was about to enter. Bart drew his pistol and started for the opening.

  “Fucking be nice to have a weapon’s light right about now,” he grumbled before slowly lowering himself down the staircase, pistol up and at the ready.

  Jared stood at the top of the stairs; the whole staircase was just too small for two men to be on in case there was gunplay, so he waited till Bart was clear of the last step. Once Bart reached the basement floor, Jared scrambled down the narrow wooden steps, sweeping his pistol left and right across the dirty shelves of the basement.

  The two cleared the rather smallish basement in a few seconds. Jared dropped additional light sticks as they moved about the basement, effectively bringing its interior to a dull green glow. Bart walked to a far corner, banging on the door Calvin was covering. There was a latch on the inside of the door, which kept anyone on the outside from opening it.

  Bart pulled the latch back, locking it into the open position. “Hey, Calvin, don’t shoot, but open this door so we can get some more light down here.”

  The door rattled in protest as Calvin heaved it up and into the open position, allowing light to cascade into the dank basement. Both Jared and Bart caught their breath at the same time; Bart was the first to react, letting out a low whistle. Calvin squinted down into the dark hole, backlit by the bright afternoon sky, completely unable to see what had evoked the whistle from Bart’s old weathered lips. Jared stared at the surrounding shelves, which were laden with canned and jarred goods from the floor to the ceiling. They were labeled and organized in a manner that screamed obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  Jared was no clinician, but he knew enough to thank God that whoever had lived on this little piece of property had suffered from both the obsessive and compulsive behavior. He wasn’t sure if a person could suffer from just one, but was glad for this poor tortured soul’s dual disorder. He or she had obsessed over some sort of impending fate where food would be gold, and had then compulsively stockpiled food in this basement. Why would they leave it? he wondered.

  Bart must have been wondering the same thing, because he flew past Jared. “Coming to you, Calvin,” he barked, clambering out of the basement, directing Calvin to take to the high ground in order to watch all conceivable routes of ingress to the ranch house.

  Jared stood in the food cache, mind racing, wondering who had done this and where they had gone and why? When Bart didn’t immediately return, Jared began poking around the basement, doing a visual and mental inventory of the food stores covering the shelving.

  As he made his way towards the entrance leading to the interior of the house, he cracked another light stick, bathing the shelves in the dullish green light. On the floor, he noticed a couple of broken jars of some unidentifiable matter. He moved closer, directing the light towards the mess on the floor. Jared looked at the nearby shelves, noticing they were the only bare shelves in the entire basement.

  He began to piece together a picture of what had gone on with the owner of the house. They had hurriedly taken what appeared to be a decent amount of the food stores and, in their hurry, dropped a jar or two, leaving the mess he was now standing over. The spoiled food on the floor was dried, giving the mess the appearance of having been spilled at least two weeks prior. Jared moved back to the opening leading to the yard and pulled himself out just as Bart returned from the barn, meeting Jared in the middle of the yard.

  “Someone left in a hurry. Broke a couple of the jars trying to get them up into the house,” Jared said. “Don’t know why they left in a hurry, just seems like they did ’cause of the broken jars.”

  Bart scratched his unshaven beard, turning to look at the barn. “They might have had a running tractor—there are tracks leading from the barn, but I haven’t seen a tractor on the property.” He shrugged. “Who knows, man.”

  His shoulders seemed to droop ever so slightly as he scanned the yard. For the first time since they left the gun store, Jared realized just how old Bart was. He seemed so stalwart in his preparation efforts before and as they’d moved out of the city and into the mountains, but now Jared looked upon the aging man, seeing a very old and very weary human being who seemed to be barely hanging on at the moment. Jared had a brief moment of sorrow and empathy for the old man, but this was instantly replaced with near panic.

  The thought of being out here with Calvin, Shannon and Essie alone nearly caused him to release his bowels on the spot. He clinched his stomach, fighting the actual feeling of pissing himself. He paused, taking stock of his body, and realized his breath was coming in short choppy gasps, and he felt chilled. Jared was suddenly cold down to his bones, the way only a cold fall California day can do with its wet chill.

  He had traveled some before the event and spent time on the east coast during the winter months, experiencing some fairly low temperatures, but he always felt colder in California. Wet cold versus a dryer cold, he thought, and the wet cold was just damn miserable. While Jared wrestled with his fear beast, Bart turned away, pulled the bloody handkerchief from his pocket, and muffled several coughs before replacing the handkerchief without his usual blood inspection.

  Bart could feel it, and it was starting to win, taking hold of his life with its icy claws. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep up the charade and didn’t look forward to Jared’s reaction when the truth was finally out in the open. He felt sick all the time, the smallest amount of physical exertion left him spent and, since every day took the effort of ten days in his old life, well, he was pretty fucking beat most of the time now. The blood, well, the blood meant the end was coming, and coming quicker than he thought a few weeks ago.

  Once Bart set up a watch, he got to inventorying all the food stores in the basement. He lamented on how to secure the basement from an intruder forcibly entering from the outside. Bart didn’t want to permanently block the entrance off in case they needed to escape through the basement. Jared came up with the idea of lining the inside of the staircase leading to the outside with two-by-fours just under the ground’s surface level.


  They could then tear out all the wood aboveground, placing the door a couple of inches below the ground’s surface onto the newly fashioned wooden frame. After the door was in place, Jared suggested they shovel dirt on top until the surface was level with the rest of the yard. They could then use branches to wipe away all signs of their excavation. The basement would not be any more physically secure than it had been before, but if someone didn’t know it was there, it was actually better than the biggest lock in the world.

  Bart listened to Jared’s plan then nodded his approval. “Let’s get to work, but we need to dump the dirt in another part of the yard so there’s no way to tell we’ve been digging around here.”

  Calvin scavenged the wood, hammer and some nails while Shannon sat on a small knoll near the house, keeping watch on the road in both directions. Essie nestled close to Shannon, clutching her small jacket around her neck as the wind kicked up a little, seeming to drop the temperature by twenty degrees. Within an hour, they were shoveling dirt onto the door, careful not to put so much that they wouldn’t be able to push their way out from inside should the need rear its ugly head. Jared was pretty sure that, with the adrenaline dumps he’d been getting lately, he could have lifted a car off the trapdoor if needed.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  John was thirty-six years old and had been in the military the same amount of time he hadn’t been in the military. He joined when he was eighteen, going straight to Marine Corps boot camp to suffer for the thirteen weeks it took to earn the title of United States Marine.

  After he finished boot camp and while he was at the Marine infantry training school, he heard about a specialized unit called Recon. The unit was rumored to be home to the best of the best and, since John thought the Marines were the best already, he felt driven to be part of this Recon community. It sounded like what he was looking for based on the newbie rumor mill, which never stopped swirling with tales as tall as the Sears Tower.

  So, when a hardened Recon Marine came around looking for volunteers, John and eight others raised their hands; the rest of the pussies had just stared down at the ground, too ashamed to look the Recon Marine in the eye. John was embarrassed to be part of this group who stared at their boots when asked to volunteer for a man’s job. John didn’t realize till years later the guy had walked into the barracks and essentially washed out fifty guys without wasting a single tax payer dollar or man-hour, using only his hard-ass demeanor. John and the eight other unfortunate souls would find out just how hard this guy really was in the coming weeks.

  The next four weeks nearly killed him, but as they kept saying to him, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. John felt the jury was out on that load of shit. The twin towers came down the following year, and John found himself first in Recon, then Force Recon. He was deployed constantly. He fought, came home, rested, started training, then would go back to fight. Once while back from deployment, two men from the Army came by his unit, asking about him. He was called off one of the ranges and met with these men in his Sergeant Major’s office.

  The men were professional and to the point. They were from the Army’s most elite tier one unit, known by some as Delta. John knew it by its latest name, CAG, or Combat Application Group and, although the Unit had many names, this was the current name in fashion at the time. They asked if John was interested in applying to “the Special Missions Unit.” Now there was a new name John hadn’t heard. They quickly explained the selection process would take place in six months, and they would provide a workout regimen for John to use to ready himself for the selection’s grueling demands.

  In the end, John applied for the selection process, working hard for the six months leading up to the date. When the day came, he simply packed, hopped on a flight for Virginia, and left his Recon community behind…forever. He was picked up at the airport by a man who looked more like a truck driver than a military man. During the ride, John didn’t say much and the man said less. The man never offered his name, and John never asked. He would later come to know the man as Vince, and they would be lifelong friends, fighting side by side on many missions.

  The selection process started the following day, demanding more from John than the Recon community ever had. He had considered his old unit a very professional unit and, by most standards, it was, but this group was by far the most closed-off and professional bunch he’d ever worked around. It was downright fucking spooky how quiet they could all be. Nothing excited this group; he’d never seen a unit so close with so few words.

  John also considered himself a very physically fit Marine, but these quiet professional warriors weren’t impressed, always talking about the importance of being mentally fit over being physically fit, not that they weren’t physically fit—they all were. It was a common belief that one of these elite soldiers could requisition the body of a lesser human, like a civilian, and still operate at tier one levels based on their mental toughness. The deeper John made it into the selection process, the less he doubted this little proclamation.

  John’s final test was a thirty-mile movement called black time. No one told him how much time he had, nor did they give him any updates on how he was doing. For all he knew, he was way behind schedule the entire thirty miles. He had a full load out and knew it would be hard, but he pushed hard in the beginning when his body was fresh.

  He knew there would come a time when he would be forced to push hard using his mind more than his body, so he decided to use his body while he could. He basically treated it like a sprint. He ran when he could and he always walked fast. He stopped every hour for two to five minutes to change his socks and check his feet. He knew if his feet went, so went his chances at finishing this nightmare of a selection process.

  Just about the time John thought he was at his limit, he rounded a bend in the dirt road and saw a single man standing next to a Polaris off-road vehicle. The man saw John and glanced nonchalantly at a stopwatch, then just waited.

  John ran the last bit, reaching the man, but not dropping his pack.

  The man held out his hand. “Welcome to the Unit.”

  John had made it. The next few months were no easier for John as he was pushed through all the in-house training the Unit put its new operators through. In the first few weeks he started to think he would never reach the level these guys operated at. They would take down a building, moving and shooting at speeds that made John’s head swim. For the first time in his life he was not able to keep up and this aggravated him. At one point one of the instructors must have sensed John’s frustration and came by after they’d finished up on the kill house.

  “Hey, man, we all went through this. You will get better, believe me.” That was all anyone said to him.

  Sure enough, John did get better, a lot better. He became one of the Unit’s better shooters with both the H&K 416 and the Glock 21 he carried. By the end of his training cycle, he felt more at home in the kill house than in his own home. He went to every conceivable school and training one could think of and then a few more he’d never even thought of. If the training wasn’t already offered and someone came up with the idea and could justify its usefulness to the Unit’s operators, they went. They learned to ride horses, canoe, kayak, ski, skydive, dive, swim—you name it, they learned to do it.

  Then John deployed with the Unit and, wow, they worked day and night and did some of the most dangerous missions in some of the most hostile areas of the world. The Unit did not baby its members, but it did take care of them. They got the best gear and even had a branch of the Unit whose sole job it was to seek out new equipment and put it to the test. If an operator got hurt, they were sent to some of the best medical facilities in the country and then rehabbed alongside professional athletes: “Hey, my name is Adrien Peterson. I play for the Minnesota Vikings, and I’m here rehabbing a bad knee. What’s your name?”

  “Oh, my name is John,” end of conversation. Not, “Hi, my name is John and I’m part of an elite unit and, well, I was
out killing the holy-loving dog shit out of some bad motherfuckers and you know how dangerous that can be and, well, one fucker took a rifle and shot a hole in my leg, so here I am. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you the best part, we were in North Korea when all this happened, how fucking insane is that?”

  Today John was on another mission, riding in a Black Hawk like all the other times, except this time things were different, very different, and in a bad way. John was stateside when the event occurred. Many of his comrades were in other parts of the world and hadn’t been heard from since.

  The Unit had far more men deployed to the far reaches of the earth than it ever had back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. John and a dozen operators huddled in the war room, with the dim backup lights making their faces look greasy. No one knew what had happened, and their tech people worked to find answers. Questions flew like confetti in the room. In the end they were briefed on what had happened and what the US had done to its enemies and allies alike.

  There were exactly thirty-two Unit operators accounted for in the country, and they were all being tasked with gathering national assets. Those assets turned out to be people. The thirty-two operators were split into thirty-two different groups, acting as advisors for the gathering teams. The gathering teams were a hodgepodge of Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force, Reservists and even a few police officers with prior military backgrounds. It hadn’t all gone smoothly, and some of the teams had even lost people during their missions.

  John leaned back against the helicopter’s inner skin, eyeing the six-man team he was tasked with keeping alive during these gathering missions. Two of them were airmen, while the other four were soldiers from noncombat units. Two cooks, a mechanic and a clerk—a fucking clerk for fucking fuck’s sake. They weren’t bad people; it was just that John was fairly sure not one of them could have found his own ass with both hands a lot of the time.