When he emerged from the brush leading the horse, he heard Jared give a low whistle from the trees. “Good work,” he said.
They stayed off-road as much as possible, only venturing onto black-top when they spotted dead cars. Then it became a nerve-wracking business of removing the airbags while Jared kept watch. Even though most cars were pushed to the sides of the road, it still felt vulnerable because many roads were surrounded only by open fields.
“We ought to find a car lot—more places to hide, and lots and lots of airbags we can get at,” Roper suggested.
“Yeah, well, car lots are closer to population hubs, and I prefer to stay out here by the farms, thank you,” said Jared.
“A repair shop, then. They’ve usually got cars sitting around.”
“And a mechanic who probably figured out he could use the airbags just like we want to.”
They’d retrieved six initiators when they came across a farmhouse that looked ransacked and abandoned. It had two small sheds, both with doors hanging open, but worth a look, according to Jared.
It turned out to be their first big break. One shed had two gallons of stump remover, a gallon of fungicide and two empty jerry cans. Jared called it a windfall, grabbing the stuff while Roper packed it on the horse.
The second shed housed a dead tractor. Jared examined it and said, “This thing’s got gas in the tank!”
“Are you telling me we can ride that tractor?”
“No. It’s got electronic parts. But we can siphon the gas.”
Roper coughed lightly. “Did you happen to bring a siphon?” His raised brows and tone of voice intimated that he thought not.
Jared eyed him evenly. “It just so happens, I did.”
Roper laughed and said, “Gotta hand it to you, buddy. You do know how to pack for a road-trip after an apocalypse.”
Afterwards they munched on jerky and hardtack, taking water from a stream on the property. Both men had portable water straws—miraculous filtering devices, according to Roper, who’d been on the road in the past without a good means of purifying water. He’d used snow to keep from dehydrating but he would only do it when he’d made a fire to melt it—otherwise it would’ve just froze him faster.
They waited for nightfall, dozing by turns during the afternoon hours. Having supplies not only slowed them down but also made them a bigger target, so Jared figured moving by night was their safest course. Being on the road at any time was dangerous—but being there with useful stuff was courting disaster.
Roper napped first and then stood watch while Jared, who had covered his eyes with Roper’s bandana, slept. He’d been watching for an hour when five tough-looking men came over a hill, a few hundred feet from the shed where they were. The horse was tied on the other side of the shed, grazing in the brush, out of their sight—for now. Roper knew they would soon see the horse, even if they didn’t look in the barn and discover him and Jared.
If he went out to get the animal, he’d be seen. If he didn’t, they’d lose their horse. He scanned them quickly for weapons and his heart sank when he saw two rifles. That meant there were likely more hidden weapons that he could not see. He jabbed at Jared with the butt of his rifle.
“We got company,” he whispered. Jared tore off the bandana and sprang to his feet. He joined Roper near the single window where they stayed out of sight. The five men were now close enough to see their features.
“What’re you waiting for?” Jared hissed. “This is why I told you—shoot on sight.” As he spoke, the men, talking among themselves, turned to follow the downward slope of the property. They weren’t interested in the sheds. And if they kept going they’d miss seeing the horse! Jared lifted his rifle, ensuring it was locked and loaded, ready to fire. He flipped off the safety.
“Wait,” Roper said. “They turned away.”
“Perfect. This is our chance,” said Jared. He charged out the door and, right before Roper’s horrified eyes, gunned down the five men. There were shouts, cries, and then—silence.
Their backs were to the shed—it had been nothing but a slaughter. Shocked, Roper dropped to the floor, his back against the wall. He sat, trying to process what he’d just seen, heart pounding wildly in his throat. When Jared came back, Roper could only stare at him.
“I’m gonna reload,” Jared said. “Then let’s see what they had on them.” He set his rifle down and removed the magazine as if nothing out of the ordinary had just gone down. He drew a new one out of his pocket and shoved it in; and looked expectantly at Roper.
“C’mon, they had guns. We can use them.”
Roper stared at Jared. “You had no call to do that. You just killed someone’s father, and brother, or cousin, or uncle. You just murdered those guys in cold blood. For no good reason.” He spoke in a subdued tone as if still trying to accept that it had really happened.
Jared frowned, shaking his head. “You just don’t get it! If we let those guys go, I guarantee you, half a mile down the road, they’d be taking us down. They were heading in the same direction we have to follow. I just made our passage home five men safer.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t KNOW that!”
Jared looked like he wanted to spit. “Forget it, I’m not arguing with you. This is war. You ain’t a fighter, I get that. But I’ve been on the front lines. I know how it goes. You eat your enemy or they eat you.”
“This is not Iraq!” Roper picked up a stray stone on the floor and threw it at the wall opposite him. “This is not Afghanistan!”
“This is worse than both those places,” Jared answered, now wiping down his rifle with a rag. “Over there, we had command; we had officers in charge! Now we got nothing! Just our brains. We gotta do what we gotta do.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Get over it!” Jared snapped. He peered back outdoors. The sky was just beginning to show signs of a coming pink and orange sunset. “We need to check the bodies and get going.”
“I’m not checking their bodies, man,” Roper said. “You killed ‘em, you check ‘em.”
Jared shook his head in disgust. “You are—like—useless! You know that?” He picked up his pack, slung his rifle over his shoulder and left the shed, still muttering to himself. After he’d gone, Roper suddenly wondered if there might be survivors. Maybe Jared had only wounded some of them! He scrambled to his feet and hurried after Jared. He would not leave if there was a man alive but suffering. He’d give him the gospel and pray with him.
To his dismay, all five men were dead.
Jared certainly knew how to kill a man from behind.
Neither man spoke for hours. Roper had nothing to say to Jared and apparently Jared felt the same way, for they trudged on in silence, only breaking it now and then for one to say, “Wait,” if they came upon a dead vehicle. Roper would remove the airbag mechanisms and then they’d move on, still in silence.
As the night wore on it began to look like they’d make it back to the compound. They were passing through the outskirts of a small town, only miles from the Martins’ farmstead when Jared, looking over at Roper with an unreadable expression, said, “You’re still planning on heading back to your home state—California, right?”
Roper glanced over at him but couldn’t make out his eyes. There was something about Jared’s tone, almost too casual, that set him on edge. Then suddenly he saw the gleam from his eyes shine out in the dark like an unholy light.
He decided to ignore the undertone, if in fact there was one. Maybe he was imagining things. “California’s a long ways off. I don’t know when I’ll get back there. I’d like to return but I don’t know.”
Jared was silent a moment. “You know we don’t really need you at the compound, right?”
Roper gave him a wary look. “I get that you don’t; but the Martins want me and my trumpet. I’m the new alarm system.”
Jared snorted contemptuously. “Your trumpet! Do you have any idea how lame that sounds?”
“Look,” Roper said. “Car batteries are powering our alarms. When they run out, my trumpet will sound the alarm. Like in the Old Testament, God used trumpets lots of times for important things. He had the people blow trumpets to take down the walls of Jericho, man. They circled the city and circled the city and they blew the trumpets—and only then did the city fall.”
Jared shook his head. “So you think your trumpet is some kind of weapon?”
Roper smiled, a slight crescent of a smile, though it went unseen by his companion. “No, no, I’m not saying it’s a weapon. It’s just an alarm system. When there’s danger, I blow the trumpet.”
“So what’s the Jericho story for?”
“I’m just saying—God likes trumpets. Way back in Genesis he saved Isaac with the horn of a ram, right? A horn. That’s what early instruments were made from—horns. And later instruments were based on them. Horns are wind instruments—like the trumpet.”
Roper knew that Jared’s point—that he wasn’t needed at the compound, couldn’t be leading to anything good. So he kept talking, hoping to stave off a confrontation. He’d keep talking as long as Jared let him. “Jericho falls after the Israelites circle the city and the priests blow the trumpets. Then you have Leviticus where God tells them the trumpet blasts signify liberty throughout the land. In fact, there’s a Feast of Trumpets in the Old Testament.”
“You gotta be kidding me! You are putting me on!” Jared sounded more annoyed than disbelieving.
“I kid you not.” He took a breath. “So this Feast of Trumpets was a memorial of the blowing of trumpets. That’s pretty cool! You don’t have a Feast of Lyres, or Feast of Harps, as beautiful as those instruments are, but you got a Feast of Trumpets. I like that, man!”
“That’s dumb. A Feast of Trumpets!” Jared shook his head in disgust.
“Well, the high priest in Israel would blow the trumpet to signal people to stop working and come worship. It’s a way to point to God, see? The trumpet, whether to signify freedom, or worship, or victory—it’s always about God and what he’s doing for his people. Freedom comes from God, man, and worship is all about God!” Roper spoke lightly but with great conviction. “There’s no reason to blow a trumpet if God isn’t in it. When Jesus returns—guess what you’ll hear?”
Jared’s tone was sour and getting sourer by the minute. “Don’t tell me. A trumpet?”
“You got it! The ‘trumpet shall sound; and the dead shall be raised!’”
Jared sniffed and sent a searing look at Roper. It would have been missed in the dark except a beam of moonlight broke through the clouds and suddenly the men were facing each other, eye to eye. Jared said, “We don’t need no trumpet on the compound. We don’t need you on the compound.”
So this was it. Jared wanted a showdown. “I got it; you want me out.” He paused. “It’s about Andrea, isn’t it?”
Jared balked and snapped, “It’s about feeding someone who doesn’t earn his keep!”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m telling you, that’s what it is.”
“Does your mother earn her keep?”
Jared flushed. “She’s a woman. That’s different. Leave the women out of this. It’s about you—a man, and you ain’t pulling your weight.”
“I just pulled those initiators. And I seem to recall you saying you couldn’t do that.”
“Yeah, so you served your purpose!” he shot back.
Roper said, “I think this is about a woman. It’s about Andrea. You’re worried that I’m getting in your way, aren’t you?”
“You are in my way, okay? You ARE in the way. But I want you out because we can’t take in dreamy troubadours; we need soldiers, men who can fight.” He paused. “You proved to me earlier that you can’t hold your own.”
“That wasn’t fighting, that was slaughtering.”
“What do you think fighting comes down to?” Jared’s voice was strident.
“For terrorists. I’m not a terrorist! And neither are you!”
“We’re all terrorists,” Jared said. “We have to be. Like I said, either you take them out, or they take you out. That’s what it’s about. And you don’t get that. You’ll never get that. That’s why we don’t need you.” He paused, his eyes blazing at Roper out of the darkness.
“So I’m going to give you a choice. Either you go your own way right now, or I’ll have to do something to make you do that. I am not bringing you back to the compound with me.”
“Who asked you to bring me back?”
“Right,” he said, hotly. “So get lost.”
Roper slowly nodded. “Fine. How do I know you won’t shoot me in the back the minute I turn around?”
“I guess you don’t know.”
“I’m not turning. I’m not running. If you want to get rid of me, do it. Do it now, while I’m facing you.” Both men were sweating, and it wasn’t only the heat of the night that caused it.
Jared fingered the gun at his waist, eying Roper steadily. But he dropped his hand and then went to take the reins of the horse from Roper.
Roper tried not to give them up but Jared said, “You don’t get to keep our stuff.”
Their eyes locked in a contest of wills. Roper finally allowed Jared the reins. “Take it. Build your bombs and protect the compound.”
Looking somewhat mollified, Jared took the reins and began leading the horse forward. He tossed his head back to say, “Don’t follow me.” His words were heavy, final. Roper watched him going off for a moment and then called, “How do you know I won’t shoot you in the back?” Jared didn’t even turn around.
“You won’t.”
Roper wiped the sweat off his face and brow, watching Jared as he got smaller in the distance. He had to decide on his next move. If he followed Jared, he had no doubt the stoic ex-soldier would shoot him. If he didn’t follow, where could he go? They’d seen a refugee camp but there was no way he’d willingly enter one. They reminded him of Nazi prisons despite being fly-by-night ensembles with more canvas and tarps than brick or stone.
Suddenly he heard a muffled voice. He froze, listening. He heard the unmistakable sound of rustling branches and footsteps—approaching from beyond a low rise not far behind him. Roper hurried to get in the shadows of bushes that were lining the nearest sidewalk against a fence that housed a tiny front yard. He went inside the fence and crouched behind the shrubbery. He’d wait for them to pass. The sounds grew louder. Seemed like another small band of survivors –but this one included female voices. He almost wanted to jump up and warn them to change course because they were going in Jared’s direction—and that could be deadly.
He knew what Jared would do if he felt the least bit threatened. But he had no way of knowing if these people could be trusted not to treat him the same as Jared treated strangers. As they came alongside the sidewalk where he lay on the other side of the fence and bushes, he huddled there, quiet and still. And waited.
Chapter 26
JARED
Jared followed a main road keeping to the side, and came across no one. He stopped briefly with the idea of resting and grabbing a bite to eat—and then remembered Roper had been carrying the rest of the food. Muttering beneath his breath, he started out again and covered miles as the night wore on. When he was only a few miles from the compound, dawn lightened the sky. He peered steadily down the road but saw only dead cars now and then on one side or the other. Suddenly he wondered why they hadn’t thought to move all these cars to form a great road block? Using the horses or even enough manpower they could line them up, row upon row, and form a serious delay barrier. If they did it both north and south of the compound, it would give them enough time to be good and ready when the enemy broke through. In fact, using the cars’ batteries, they could even fill a vehicle with fertilizer and set it up to explode with a pressure plate. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner? Jared felt suddenly that he wasn’t thinking clearly, or hadn’t been. His mind was so full of one method of defense that he�
�d missed the forest for the trees.
This conviction grew worse. For, continuing on, he realized if they’d simply gone out for airbag initiators to begin with, they could have had all they needed right here within a few miles of home! His mind had been fixed on searching out things like fireworks or gunpowder, or farming chemicals. They’d passed all these vehicles on the way out—how stupid he’d been!
Most air bags worked via sodium perchlorate—it was what made them pop—and, seeing all these vehicles, he suddenly realized what a windfall of an arsenal he could make if they accessed them all. The cars were just sitting here waiting to be picked clean. He saw himself as the future hero of the compound like he was after they deflected that last attack with his grenades.
Except Roper was gone. Because he’d chased him off.
Stupid! I should have waited. He should have let the man hit all these cars before getting rid of him. Suddenly it seemed impossible to move on, while here were airbags for the taking. It was so convenient—so much easier than getting the other stuff—and why not get as many as possible? Roper had pulled a bunch of the things while he’d watched. It was as good as getting lessons on how to do it, wasn’t it?
He’d considered getting rid of Roper permanently—and probably should have. Now that wuss would go back and complain about him to the leadership team. But, despite having no qualms about killing an enemy, he couldn’t deny Roper wasn’t quite that. He disliked him, saw little reason to respect him, and he was jealous of Andrea’s obvious preference for the man. But Andrea was still a child-woman. He’d have preferred a real woman if the compound had any that seemed like prospects. Other than Cecily who was older than he liked and way too religious, there were only married women. Anyway, he hadn’t been able to do away with Roper.
The Pulse Effex Series: Box Set Page 75