“Grab your sword, friend,” Calvin barked, waiting on the porch so Carlos could arm himself.
Carlos hesitated for a moment, then snatched the machete from inside the doorjamb and followed Calvin off the porch. Calvin showed Carlos to the creek, where he filled the bucket. Carlos insisted on carrying the heavy load of water back to the house, and Calvin reluctantly relinquished his hold on the bucket’s handle. When they returned to the house, the children were finished eating and sat on the couch in an uncomfortable silence while Shannon straightened up the kitchen.
“Hey, can I steal a little water for the dishes?” Shannon asked as the men came through the door.
Carlos poured a portion of the water into a large mixing bowl Shannon used to clean the dishes with. After Shannon got the water she needed, Calvin showed Carlos to the bathroom and explained how the sewer was still working as long as they had water to dump into the toilet. Calvin told the man they used the toilet throughout the day and only flushed it if it were in danger of being clogged with too much toilet tissue or human waste. Otherwise after everyone had washed up, the dirty water from the bucket was used to flush the day’s refuse down the sewer.
Finished explaining how the bathroom operated, Calvin left the bucket of water next to the sink and returned to the kitchen, where he and Carlos took a seat. Shannon completed her tasks in the kitchen, then ushered the two children towards the bathroom, asking Carlos if it was okay to clean the boy up along with Essie. Carlos nodded his agreement, and away Shannon and the children went. Carlos and Salvador brought no belongings; therefore, the boy possessed only the filthy clothes he was wearing, which troubled Shannon.
While Shannon helped the children wash, Calvin raised his glass to the other man and took a satisfied draw. He grimaced as the whiskey burned its way through his taste buds and then down his throat, warming his insides. He hadn’t drunk much lately, especially since the time Bart passed, so now it felt good and conjured a few good memories of a man he’d only known briefly, but had formed a great deal of respect for. Carlos sipped the whiskey gingerly at first before taking in a mouthful. Calvin could immediately tell the man was not a heavy or even casual drinker by the way he fought the liquor.
Calvin finished with his first mouthful and leaned back, rubbing his bearded chin. Before Shannon finished washing the kids and putting them both down in separate beds, Calvin began telling his story to Carlos in hopes this action would ease any reluctance on Carlos’s part to share his tale of woe. Calvin drank and talked for fifteen minutes, only just finishing as Shannon appeared at the table, a soft smile creasing her pretty face.
“They’re both asleep,” she said in a soft voice as she took a seat next to Calvin.
“I have to, ah, check my son,” Carlos said hesitantly.
“Sure,” Calvin said, gesturing to the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
“He’s in the second bedroom on the left. He was asleep when I left him,” Shannon added as Carlos stood from the table, nodding his head incessantly as he backed away, as if leaving some royal’s chambers.
When Carlos had gone, Calvin frowned. “What was that all about?”
Shannon breathed in and cocked her head to one side, thinking about the man and his peculiar behavior. “We should hear his story, and then maybe we can understand him better,” she offered.
Carlos slipped into the room Shannon said his son was in, and found Salvador wrapped in a giant comforter atop a queen-size bed. The boy was fast asleep, his breathing coming in long even breaths as the blankets rose and fell in rhythm with his intake and exhalation of air. Carlos felt his eyes began to well with tears as he thought about how close his son had been to dying before these people took them in. He reached out and laid a callused hand across the boy’s face and head and just felt his son’s body heat for a full thirty seconds. Salvador didn’t so much as stir during the thirty seconds.
When Carlos was finished saying his wordless goodnight to Salvador, he returned to where Calvin and Shannon sat expectantly waiting to hear his story.
“I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but we feel it’s important to know your story so we know a little about you, where you came from, who you were before all this, and what you’ve been through since,” Calvin coaxed.
Carlos didn’t want to talk about his life with these people, but they had taken him and Salvador in without so much as a shot fired or a terse word, so he guessed he owed it to them. Carlos started from the time he was a young teen living in Michoacán, Mexico. As a teen, Carlos had been recruited by the drug cartels to run errands and watch for the Federales, as had many of the poverty-stricken boys in his village of El Limon.
It soon became apparent to Carlos that the men he ran errands for would soon be expecting much more from him and his friends. The men would be expecting Carlos’s services in access, and Carlos knew he wouldn’t have the stomach to deliver, and this frightened him. The cartel men did not like being told no, and those who opposed them usually found their way into a ditch somewhere alongside a lonely road.
Carlos was not a killer, nor was he a bad person. His mother had been fiercely religious, and his father was to date the hardest working man Carlos ever knew. When Carlos was twenty-one, he married a woman named Rosa from his hometown. The two lived with Carlos’s parents and soon after the wedding had a baby girl. Rosa was adamant about naming the baby after her grandmother Maria, so Carlos had a daughter named Maria by the time he was twenty-two years of age.
Soon after the birth of Maria, one of Carlos’s friends turned up one day at a cantina the boys frequented, sporting a wad of pesos larger than Carlos had ever seen before. The others asked where he’d gotten the money, and he just smiled and told them their time was coming. The rest of the boys were eager for their time, while Carlos had a bad feeling about what his time would demand of him. He heard rumors of the need for young men to cross into America and tend the marijuana farms the drug cartel grew, and this was what Carlos thought could save him from a life of violence in Mexico.
It took him four attempts to get into America. Three times he was smuggled across the border and dropped near San Diego, left to make his way north to San Francisco, where he was to meet up with his handler. Three times he was captured in Camp Pendleton by Marines and turned over to the Border Patrol. The fourth time he was able to pass through the vast military base undetected and continue moving north. Once he arrived in the Bay Area, he was immediately put to work in the mountains surrounding the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. He worked hauling all the necessary equipment in before planting season and then camped inside the marijuana grow during the season, tending the crop.
He remained undetected in this capacity for five years before he began longing for a more stable situation. Most of the money he made, he sent home, since his living expenses consisted of whatever he needed to survive six months in the woods, which wasn’t much. No rent, no PG&E bill, no bar tab, no nothing other than food. Then at the end of his fifth season, he walked away and never came back.
He started as a day laborer, which cut the money he could send home substantially. Rosa complained, but what could he do? He worked as a laborer for two years, living in a small corner of a garage in San Mateo. Carlos hadn’t seen his wife in more than seven years and yearned for the chance to return home and reunite with his family. His daughter was in the first grade and would write him letters, but sadly he knew Rosa forced Maria to do these things. There was no way Maria could have remembered Carlos, she’d only been an infant when he crossed into America.
One evening after he was finished with work, he went to a local bar, where he would drink a few beers, listen to music, and knew two or three people. As he sat talking to a friend, a woman he’d never seen before walked into the bar. She sat alone for perhaps fifteen minutes, and when Carlos’s friend left to use the restroom, the woman approached Carlos. The two struck up a conversation, and soon they were laughing and drinking. Carlos drank far mor
e that evening than he ever had in the past. He wasn’t a man to lose control and surely wasn’t a man to overindulge.
Carlos woke the following morning and found himself in the woman’s bed in East Palo Alto. His head throbbed and his mouth felt dry as talc. Soon she swept into the room and told him frankly he had to leave. He gathered himself and didn’t see the woman again for ten months until suddenly she appeared at the same bar he’d met her at the first time, only now she carried a car seat with baby Salvador securely strapped inside.
The woman told Carlos Salvador was his son and that she was moving and could not care for the boy. With that, the woman set Salvador on the tabletop and vanished into the night. Carlos had almost stopped beating himself up for being unfaithful to his wife when all this happened. He was now not only wrought with guilt brought on by his infidelity, but panic stricken over how he was going to provide for the child, not to mention what he would tell his wife, Rosa.
Carlos shared the garage with three other families, and through those relationships he was able to leave Salvador with the women while he and their husbands went out and eked out a living. Salvador’s mother left Carlos with the child, but she also provided Carlos with the child’s birth certificate, which made registering Salvador for school much easier when the time came. The year Salvador began first grade, Carlos started his own landscaping business. Most of the labor he performed to date, including his time in the marijuana fields, had been horticulturally based, so focusing on a landscaping business was a natural transition from his employment as a day laborer.
Soon, Carlos was able to move himself and Salvador into a small studio in a nicer part of San Mateo, enabling Salvador to attend a school rated much higher than the schools in the neighborhood they previously lived in. All went well for the two, and as Carlos grew his business, he was able to send more money to Rosa. Regrettably Carlos was not able to bring himself to tell Rosa about Salvador. He also never mentioned to Salvador that he had a stepmother and a half-sister; it was a burden that haunted Carlos every day of his life.
Chapter 22
When the bad thing happened, he and Salvador were eating dinner in the studio. Neither thought anything of it, as power outages were not something out of the ordinary in California. Vehicle accidents could cause them; overloaded grids during hot weather were another cause. Carlos didn’t know and didn’t really care since every other time the electricity went off-line, it had been no more than two hours before PG&E restored power and everyone got back to doing whatever it was they’d been doing.
The following day, Carlos found his truck would not start. He was about to begin tinkering with the engine when he noticed several of his neighbors were also under their vehicles’ hoods. This caused Carlos a degree of concern, wondering if some nefarious vandal had been up to no good the previous night. He could ill afford to spend money on unscheduled repairs with his budget stretched to near breaking as it was.
By the third day, Carlos knew something very bad was happening, but wasn’t quite sure what to do. He’d walked Salvador to school the first day, but no one was there other than a few other confused parents with their own children. After the third day Carlos stopped taking Salvador to school and began trying to think of a way to return home to Mexico. The thought of walking over two thousand miles with a ten-year-old boy did not appeal to his sense of survival.
Many Mexicans and South Americans Carlos knew had decided to leave America and return home by the end of the second week. The absence of emergency services was an indication that whatever was happening was far graver than any disaster the country had previously experienced. When food ran out in their neighborhood, Carlos and Salvador set out to find work, which was what he’d always done in order to survive. Look as he might, he only found danger along with others sharing the same predicament he and his son were in.
There were no wealthy Americans to work for anymore. In fact, these people seemed to be dying by the thousands, which scared Carlos immensely. He was robbed, but no one was ever violent, and he attributed that to his having young Salvador along. Within the first month the two had moved across the San Mateo Bridge, traversed Hayward, and were in the countryside, looking for anything to eat. They slept on the ground, lost everything they’d brought from their studio when they were again robbed, and were constantly thirsty and hungry.
Carlos found the machete he carried while scavenging and figured he could use it as a self-defense weapon if the need should arise. Carlos’s time in the marijuana fields helped him to understand there was food and water to be had in the countryside if one was able to cope with eating things a normal person before the event wouldn’t have even considered touching.
Two or three weeks before they happened on Calvin and Shannon, Carlos heard a shot as he and Salvador were walking through the hills, looking for food. They later came on two men and a woman who just killed a small doe with a rifle one of the men held. It was clear to Carlos the trio killed the animal, but had no idea what to do next. Carlos made his presence known to the group, wasn’t shot, and offered to help dress the animal for a portion of the meat.
The three agreed, and Carlos set about doing what he’d regularly done while stuck in the marijuana fields. He dressed the animal and laid the meat out for the three hunters. In the end he cooked his portion right then and there, feeding Salvador and himself. They hadn’t eaten anything of any great nutritional value in days, so the venison was like hitting the lottery. Deep down, Carlos felt he would never see Rosa or Maria again and would die along with Salvador out in the countryside, eating lizards and worms. Carlos was used to suffering and living a life full of hardships, but seeing his son in those conditions filled Carlos with a great anguish.
Then Carlos happened upon Calvin, and here the former landscaper was on his third glass of whiskey, his face beet red and his body feeling more relaxed than it had been since he left Mexico all those years ago. Calvin and Shannon sat staring at their glasses, thinking about the life Carlos just described. The man had been living a life of terrible hardships, and just when he’d pulled himself from the depths of that former life, the solar flare smashed him back to an even worse situation.
Just after 0300 hours, the four men silently crawled out of the sandbox and crept across the openness of the park. Once they reached the residential area, they snuck through front yards, which not too long ago had been a rich green, but were now dead and brown. This made for slower moving since the dry vegetation threatened to wake the dead with every step.
John was sure his neck would need Icy Hot after their morning walk based on the number of times he turned to give dirty looks to Barry and Dwight for crashing through the dead landscape like a couple of wounded boars. The looks didn’t seem to help, so in the interest of his own health, John kept to scanning the neighborhood in front of the little group.
Jared walked behind Barry and Dwight and could see John was not only perturbed with their inability to walk with even a remote semblance of stealth, but he was also worried that their clumsiness might bring unwanted trouble. Even in the semidarkness of the early morning, Jared could see the results of the event. Yards were barren, grass and flowers dead, while the trees were the only plant life that seemed unaffected by the lack of irrigation.
The world was dying a slow and steady death, it seemed, but then Jared thought rationally about what was really happening. The death and decay they were seeing at the present time was just the scab on a wound. After the death rotted away, returning to the earth, Mother Nature would devour the nutrients from this, and the world would flourish again. Humans may or may not be part of the flourishing segment of events, but if they were, it was becoming more apparent they would have a significantly reduced role on planet Earth moving forward.
The four men continued for several hours into the morning before John stopped and withdrew a city map from one of his cargo pockets. He studied the map, squinting in the direction of the two nearest street signs. After committing the directions
to the iron shop to his memory, John rose and moved quietly down the street. It was shocking how a city with a population of roughly one million people could be so deserted and quiet. John figured most would have died by now from causes like dehydration, starvation and medical issues, but their absence nevertheless was unnerving.
If folks succumbed from lack of food, water and illnesses, this would explain to a large degree why the streets were not littered with dead bodies. People died at home, or they were part of the large numbers rumored to have struck out for the coast in hopes of finding food in the form of crops or sea life. John finally spotted the front of the ironworks building and turned to let the others know they were close. He gestured to his eye before pointing up the street. Jared and Barry saw the building immediately, leaving Dwight to wonder what they were gesticulating about.
Barry leaned in and let the man know they had arrived at the ironworks shop and with any luck would soon link up with the teen and two women. John redirected their route so they arrived by way of the rear, like Devon had showed them into the shop. They crawled under the fence, replaced the dirt-covered board, and moved to the rear door of the shop. Jared grabbed the wire and pulled, causing the door to open. He didn’t lean his head in, but gave a low cheery whistle to let Devon know they were back.
The last thing anyone needed was a .22-caliber bullet bouncing around inside him. Due to the sudden departure of modern medicine, this could very easily mean death to the unfortunate soul who’d been shot.
John nudged Jared out of the way. “Lucy, I’m home,” John chortled in his best but possibly the worst imitation of Ricky Ricardo Jared ever heard.
Jared frowned and shook his head at the terrible attempt at impersonation, which John ignored, pushing his way inside, gun leveled in case there was trouble. As Jared followed John inside, they heard a light tap above their heads. Both men jerked their eyes skyward and saw Devon perched on a rafter nearly twenty feet above their heads.
The Jared Chronicles | Book 2 | Tears of Chaos Page 17