A World Slowed

by Rick Tippins

  Not one time did he or any of his mates question why they were kidnapping this guy or killing that guy. John and people like him were put on a task and they completed it, end of story, no questions asked. Sure, some of the good folks he’d sent to Allah, or whomever they were being sent to, had it coming, and at times he’d seen firsthand why they deserved to be sent, but many times he had not a clue about a target’s worth in the world.

  Now lying on his back in the warm California afternoon sun, watching these people struggle to survive, it began to dawn on John that what he was doing was not only futile, but also a little selfish and possibly just plain wrong. He hadn’t thought about it on any other mission since the people he’d been sent to retrieve were more than happy to jump in a working helicopter and take a ride to a place where they could get back to work, be fed, and have someone else worry about their safety and security. Essentially, they’d be putting their heads back in the sand, where they had most likely had them buried before the event.

  Maybe Mother Nature had just hit some reset button and wanted some time to heal and cleanse herself of the human scourge who had really taken her to task over the past one hundred and fifty years. Who was he to go against that? He thought with a sly smile.

  John took in a deep breath, leaning his head back till it touched the rock he was resting against. He stayed there clearing his mind, relaxing his body, attempting to void out any tension, stress or other negative elements from his mind, soul and body. When he opened his eyes, he felt so relaxed that he was a little concerned his bowels wouldn’t hold. He took another breath, allowing his body to tighten ever so slightly, restoring faith in his ability to control his bodily functions, and then stared back at the group below him.

  The younger man sat at the lookout post, his head sweeping side to side as if he was sure he’d be attacked at any moment. John thought back, trying to remember if he’d done something to alert them to his presence. No way they could know he was here, he’d been far too careful and, although these folks were on the right track in regard to taking care of themselves, they were not the pros he was used to tracking and hiding from.

  On the other hand, a ten-million-dollar military helicopter had fallen out of the sky right in their backyard, killing nearly everyone on board, so they might have a sneaking suspicion someone had survived and was lurking about. John kicked himself for not contacting the two men at the crash site. It would have been easier than trying to walk into their base camp, where he was sure they would want to protect the woman, child and whatever supplies they had. Yes, it would have been far less dangerous had he just called out to them and done a good ole-style Special Forces meet and greet right there at the downed helicopter.

  John stared hard at Jared as the younger man left his seated position, making his way along a small ridgeline not far from the OP. What is he looking for, or is it just the crash that has them on edge? John wondered.

  He made a mental note to be careful, the human was a very difficult animal to deal with, and he had been amazed more than a few times at what his enemies had known, assumed, or been able to achieve through either luck or sheer willpower during battles he’d been involved in.

  John knew the driving force in all human adversaries was the will to live, and that drive was stronger than any other except maybe the will to procreate. He’d seen some guys do some absolutely stupid shit in the past for a piece of tail. John remembered a mate of his who’d gone through a door in some hovel thousands of miles from home, been confronted by an armed man, and shot the man five times center mass.

  They all watched the man crumple like a neglected marionette, and began searching the rest of the residence. John’s mate who shot the guy should have been the one to make sure he was either very dead or secured. Instead, he took his eyes off the downed man and stared at a nude photo of a woman hanging on the wall. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the doomed man on the floor for more than two seconds when the man produced a small pistol and shot the operator in the neck.

  John understood how fucked up life could be, and that incident always leapt out at him as a life lesson. His mate, Francis Connor, was a beast of an operator, a mentor to John, and a close friend, and had died right then and there on the dirt floor of some shitty-ass mud hut, with only the man who killed him lying next to him. Their team medic worked on Francis while a second medic from their Ranger support element came in and worked on the downed Hajji. The bad guy lived and Francis died, a hard lesson but not one John ever forgot. Never underestimate your adversary and never overestimate your own capabilities.

  John had lost other mates, but losing Francis hit him and stuck like glue throughout his tenure in the Special Missions Unit. He shook his head, clearing it of these thoughts from a time so long ago and so far away with respect to where the world was today. John pondered Barry for a moment. Why hadn’t the guy jumped at the opportunity to be rescued from that hornet’s nest he was living in? John marveled at how resilient humans could be, wondering if the guy had figured out how to survive in that environment only to have it demolished when John and his former team showed up. He swept the binoculars across the land for as far as he could see and had an epiphany.

  The base he came from was tasked with all the work being done in Northern California, parts of Nevada, Oregon, and up into southern Washington State. The only reason they didn’t have more territorial responsibility was due to aircraft limitations and, that was it. John knew there were likely more than forty million people in California, or at least there had been before the event, while the total number of personnel working out of his base was about one hundred.

  His tier one mentality of “I can do anything, anywhere, anytime” began to crumble at this thought. They had two Black Hawks—check that, one Black Hawk and a hundred people—check that, ninety-five people, most of whom acted in support roles, trying to pull together the resources to get forty or fifty million people back online. America was gone and the foolish bureaucrats refused to see reality for what it was.

  John came out here to pick up Barry, whether he went willingly or not, so basically, he’d been sent to kidnap a man from his house on orders from someone who didn’t have the foresight to stop something like the event from happening in the first place. Instead of working to hoard societal assets like Barry, the government should have been working to distribute these assets along with food throughout the land in order to give people the best chance at surviving the fast-approaching winter that was sure to kill millions of his countrymen.

  John’s head hurt as he mulled over this new, yet moribund, world he existed in. He better start thinking like a new world man and not a man from the past. He did well and had talents that few men possessed, but he was still a novice at living in the post-apocalyptic world. John wondered where Barry was right now and if he was still alive, hoping his dislodging the guy hadn’t resulted in Barry’s death.

  John looked back down towards the little house and saw the woman, accompanied by the little girl, sitting outside on the front steps, eating something. What am I doing here? These seemed like decent people who, out of curiosity, had come out to the crash site, found his dead teammates, and actually taken the time and energy to bury the poor souls. Turds wouldn’t have done that; only decent people would go that far out of their way for the dead.

  John wiped his hands across his face and almost stood up and simply walked down to the house. The old tier one operator side of him reared its head, keeping him from something that could have resulted in getting shot or having to shoot someone who, at the present time, he had no interest in shooting.

  John relaxed a bit, trying to come up with a way to make contact with these people. He had worked with Special Forces guys who specialized in linking up with locals, providing aid, training and actual on-the-ground fighting assistance, but he had never been cast in that forum. As a Ranger, he had pushed into plenty of villages and ended up talking to the elders, but it had always seemed to be preceded by some sort of ra
id or force of some type. Once he arrived at the Unit, he was assigned as an assaulter and, well, they didn’t do a lot of PR work. They weren’t who were called upon when the situation needed a humanitarian touch.

  It wasn’t that they were incapable of being people persons, it was just that the government spent so much goddamn money training him and his mates, that when something came up that no one else could handle, John and his friends handled it. The people they dealt with weren’t the types to respond to the white-glove treatment, so they left the winning-their-hearts-and-minds stuff to the SF boys while he and his friends slaughtered those whose minds couldn’t be won over by logic, reason or the notion of being a positive force in the world.

  John lay on the ground as the sun passed overhead, commencing its slow descent into the west. He watched as the older man relieved the younger man on the OP and then, a few hours later, was himself relieved by the third man. John had come up with a plan on contacting these people in a way that would likely scare the holy-ever-loving shit out of them but hopefully wouldn’t result in anyone getting shot.

  As the sun was about to slip behind the hills, John saw the younger man emerge from the house, walking in the direction of the group’s observation post. John pulled the binoculars to his face and cursed under his breath. The younger man was carrying a pair of night-vision goggles in his left hand as he trotted up the slope to relieve his partner. John watched the man relieve the third guy and then settle into the OP as the relieved man strolled back towards the house.

  John was going to have to be extra careful with what he had planned that evening. He hadn’t planned on these folks having the same night-vision capabilities he had and, quite frankly, didn’t like the pendulum tilting in anyone’s favor but his own. The use of NVGs by this little group concerned John, although he saw by the way the younger man handled the piece of equipment, it was foreign to him.

  John made sure he wasn’t clearly in the line of sight with the OP as night blanketed the countryside. He snapped his own goggles down over his eyes, scanned the area, then began cleaning his rifle. He did this by feel alone, like he’d done thousands of times in the past.

  John and his Unit mates found they had battlefield needs that had to be met no matter what the circumstances. One of these needs just happened to be weapons maintenance. Like everything they did, it came after trial, error and a ton of round tabling within the Unit. Every man in the Unit carried a rifle and at least one sidearm. Many carried more than one sidearm along with an assortment of knives, small swords and hatchets.

  John and his fellow operators oftentimes worked in small teams in very dangerous areas of the world. Several times John had worked in either two-man teams or even as a solo operator. In a two-man team operation, John would clean his rifle while his partner kept watch with a fully functional rifle. If the proverbial shit hit the fan, the two men would have a rifle and a pistol in the fight straight out of the gate.

  This was all great, but the men took it to the next level, teaching themselves to clean weapons by feel so there were always two sets of eyes on alert, watching for threats. This became even more important when John found himself working alone like tonight. If he simply broke his weapon down and cleaned it like most other military personnel did, he would have been taking a great risk, with no one watching his back, and relying only on his ears as early warning detectors. By cleaning his weapon at night, he triple-tasked by listening, watching with the NVGs, and cleaning his weapon by feel alone.

  This little weapons-maintenance strategy was just one tiny way in which the members of the Unit were different from every other unit in the world. They constantly debriefed, critiqued, strategized, rehearsed, and then repeated that process. They went outside the Unit in order to see how others were doing things in an effort to find better and more efficient ways to accomplish their missions.

  The sightless weapons-cleaning trick had actually been discovered by one of his mates who had been at a civilian range and seen a blind man who was visiting the range and, under close supervision, been given the experience of firing a handgun. Afterwards, John’s mate had described how the man was taught one time how to break the pistol down before he did it on his own, using only his hands.

  Members of John’s unit round tabled the idea, contacted a representative from the Society for the Blind, and set up a meet and greet. They were put into contact with a former Air Force pilot who lost his sight after his plane was shot down in 1971 over Vietnam.

  The man taught the operators in the Special Missions Unit more than a few things about operating in the blind, so to speak. The weapons cleaning ended up being the tip of the iceberg. They learned to pick locks while blindfolded, and one of John’s mates even taught himself to read Braille. So, on a night somewhere in Northern California, Jared sat in an OP fiddling with the night-vision goggles, rifle lying next to him on the ground, while John sat, head moving back and forth searching stygian surroundings, his hands gliding over the surfaces of his rifle like Helen Keller reading a Stephen King novel.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The following morning, Jared opened his eyes to the early morning light streaming through the bedroom window. He stretched and wished so hard for the world to be back to normal that his head hurt. Alas, the world was still a fucking mess, so he threw his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up with his head in his hands.

  After rubbing his temples for a couple of seconds, he stood, slid his feet into the Salomons, grabbed his rifle, and stepped out into the hallway. He heard the soft murmur of voices emanating from the kitchen and headed in that direction, hoping for a cup of coffee. Bart and the two girls were seated at the kitchen table as he walked in, immediately sensing something was going on.

  Bart slid a piece of paper across the table in Jared’s direction. “This was on the front door this morning,” he said as Jared stared down at the paper.

  The note read: “I WAS IN THE HELICOPTER CRASH AND FOLLOWED TWO OF YOU BACK HERE. DIDN’T WANT TO SCARE ANYONE, SO I’VE STAYED AWAY. I WOULD LIKE TO TALK. NOON TODAY I WILL COME DOWN. PLEASE DON’T SHOOT.”

  Jared read the paper two more times, then looked at Bart. “When did you find it?”

  “When I came in this morning after Calvin relieved me.” Jared’s mouth fell slightly open and Bart held his hand up. “There was no reason to wake anyone up. We get precious sleep as it is, and I sure as hell wasn’t going out to look for some ghost who was able to get to the house without me seeing him.”

  At 1130 hours, Bart and Jared sat on the front porch in two chairs side by side, rifles leaning within easy reach of each man. At Bart’s request, Shannon and Essie remained inside the house, and Calvin went out to the OP while they waited on the porch for the mystery person to come waltzing down the road. As the two men sat in silence, waiting for God knows who to pop out and surprise them, a man appeared on the road leading to the little house. He was about fifty yards out and dressed in full battle kit, including a rifle, which he held loosely in his right hand.

  “Easy,” Bart whispered. “Let him come to us, act relaxed, but be ready.”

  Jared shifted ever so slightly as the man began walking towards the house. He had an ease about him, a long stride, but a relaxed one as if he were stopping by for a beer and to watch a ball game.

  Bart slowly rose to his feet, rifle in hand. “Follow my lead and, if any shooting starts, spread out so he has two distant targets to deal with.”

  In response, Jared got to his feet, his rifle in hand as well as he stepped off the porch and to the side.

  John walked up the dirt road, seeing the two men sitting on the porch. He knew the other man was out on the post and the women were inside the house, so it didn’t appear they had any funny business planned for him. Still, he kept his rifle ready in his right hand, but not in a threatening way. He watched both men rise, weapons in hand, preparing themselves for his arrival.

  John didn’t like this, but he also didn’t blame them for being cautio
us. They had a woman and a child, so he gave them a pass on being armed. Plus, why couldn’t three armed red-blooded Americans meet and get to know one another without there being any shooting? As the man drew within ten yards of the house, Bart stepped off the porch.

  “Why don’t we all sling these rifles so no one gets hurt during the get-to-know-each-other period.”

  The man stopped and cocked his head; a half smirk reshaped his mouth. Then as suddenly as he had appeared in their lives, he slung the rifle to his back, shrugging his heavily muscled shoulders in order to situate the rifle comfortably. Bart immediately did the same, with Jared following a second after. Once the weapons were slung, Bart walked straight out to the man and shook his hand.

  “Name’s Bart and this here is Jared,” Bart said.

  The man shook Bart’s hand and nodded to Jared before answering. “Name’s John,” he said as he looked around the yard, scanning yet fully engaged with Bart and Jared simultaneously.

  “Well, John,” Bart continued, “why don’t you come inside and meet the ladies. Then we can get to talking about where you came from and what the hell has been going on in this country.”

  Bart turned on his heel, walking straight into the house, where Shannon and Essie were huddled on a small love seat. Essie clung to Shannon, giving Bart the impression they had been watching through a window, and fled to the love seat when the men turned towards the house.

  “Shannon, Essie, this here is John,” Bart said by way of introducing everyone with a single sentence.

  John stepped through the door, nodding his head to the woman and child. “Nice to meet you two. Hope I’m not intruding.”