The Jared Chronicles | Book 3 | Chains of Tyranny

by Tippins, Rick

  “Well then, what do you want?” the man countered hostilely.

  Jared hefted his shoulders while raising his hands out slightly. “Information, I guess. We haven’t heard a thing since all this started, and the only government presence we’ve seen seems to be in a taking mood more than a giving one. Also, we have things to trade if you’re interested,” Jared added.

  The women whispered something in the man’s ear, but Jared was unable to make out the woman’s words. The man’s face told Jared he was evaluating whatever the woman said, so Jared sat quietly astride the horse and waited.

  “We might be interested in some trading. Depends on what you all have,” the man said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

  Jared and his party moved forward and dismounted. Introductions were made, and they found out the three were indeed family members. Clarence was the man’s name, and Bonnie was his wife. Their seventeen-year-old daughter was Suzy, and they had lived and worked the property since before Suzy was born. Clarence raised cattle along with all the usual farm livestock. He and Bonnie also grew a garden, but water had become a problem, so fresh vegetables were scarce. Jared didn’t want to start the conversation by asking about the military, but he couldn’t wait any longer. Before Jared asked, he turned and whispered to Devon to go and bring the packhorse up, then turned back to Clarence.

  “We saw the military here a little while ago. Didn’t seem like they were doing you guys any favors,” Jared noted quizzically.

  Clarence snorted, then wiped a dirty hand across his mouth before looking Jared over as if studying a piece of auction livestock. “You had dealings with them yet?”

  Jared gave the man a curt nod. “We have, and it wasn’t good,” Jared answered, not completely detailing his own bad experience.

  “Figures,” Clarence huffed. “They started coming around about a month ago, telling us they were going to start collecting taxes like before, only they would have to physically pick them up since there aren’t any electronics working now. Gave us some song and dance about the taxes being predicated on how much we had. I got the feeling that meant the more we had, the more they were going to take.” Clarence wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Sounded a lot like we were getting right back to where the sons of bitches left off before the power went out.”

  “Did they say what the taxes were being used for?” Jared asked.

  “Nope, and I wouldn’t have believed anything they said anyway. They don’t have much more than we do. They can’t maintain the roads or mount any level of first-responder presence. They are as dead in the water as we are, maybe worse. I say worse because they’ve resorted to stealing from all of us in the name of taxes.”

  “How often do they collect taxes?” Jared queried in honest curiosity.

  “They initially said it would be every month, but this is the second time in a month they’ve come out here and taken livestock from us. First time they flew in with a Black Hawk and took a lot of our canned goods along with half of the fresh vegetables we had at the time.” Clarence’s shoulders sagged; then he waved his hand weakly around the property. “What are we supposed to do? They come here armed to the teeth and declare some sort of martial law is in effect, and take what little we have that’s keeping us alive. It can’t go on much longer before we either starve or have to relocate.”

  Devon returned leading the packhorse, which he left next to the rest of their horses, and joined the group. Jared glanced at Devon for only a second before continuing.

  “Do you know where they are coming from?” Jared pressed the man.

  “Stockton, there’s a base there at the airport, and I hear they have the area locked down pretty tight. One more thing, I think they are taking able-bodied people to work some fields around the base. They asked if we had any sons, which I found strange at the time, but I’m hearing from other farmers that people are being forced into labor under the guise of labor for aide.”

  Jared looked around the little property, which was nestled between the hills that jutted up on two sides of the house, which sat next to the road he’d ridden in on. A thought began to form in Jared’s mind as he studied the terrain. Pivoting the conversation slightly, Jared turned back to Clarence.

  “Hey, when they fly in, which way do they come in to land?” Jared inquired.

  Clarence gave Jared a puzzled look before answering, “Same way you came in. I’m not a pilot, but I know those boys like taking off and landing into the wind, and since the wind is almost always blowing up this canyon”—Clarence pointed back the way Jared and company had ridden in—“they fly past the house, circle around, and come straight down the road and land in the yard here. Why?”

  Jared drew a deep breath, glanced at Shannon, then turned to Clarence and his family. “You can’t stay here, and if you do, they’re going to bleed you dry. Those same guys who came here collecting taxes kidnapped a very good friend of ours. We were headed out to Stockton to try to get him back when we stumbled across you all.”

  Bonnie inhaled sharply, clapping her hand over her mouth. “Kidnapped?” she murmured, the word muffled by her hand.

  Jared bobbed his head in her direction before resuming. “Yeah, they flew in with a bunch of soldiers and just took him.”

  With that, Jared spun on his heel and walked to the packhorse, where he stopped and began pulling items from the animal’s back. Once Jared was finished, he held several coveted food items in his arms. Canned corn, a bag of pancake mix, and a few other savory bits of heaven.

  “Wanna trade, share, or at least eat something? We are all starving,” Jared said with a broad smile.

  This boyish act seemed to disarm Clarence, and the two groups shared a meal inside the family’s home while talking about the post-solar-flare happenings with the local government, or at least the entity calling itself the government. Jared, along with Clarence, wasn’t convinced the Stockton military element maintained the proper authority to collect taxes nor that they were doing it in the best interest of the local population. Jared conveyed to Clarence and his wife again his feelings that their future was bleak as long as they were within the reach of the tax-collecting goons from Stockton.

  Jared went on to tell the family he intended to get his friend John back, but admitted he didn’t have the slightest clue how he was going to marshal a rescue mission consisting only of himself and a teen boy. During a lull in the conversation, Clarence asked Jared what he’d done before the solar flare.

  “I worked in tech.”

  Clarence was visibly stunned for a moment. “You were a computer geek, and you’re still alive?”

  Jared smiled grimly. “Yep. I mean, I had help along the way.”

  Clarence gestured to Jared’s rifle leaning against a wall. “You know how to use it?”

  Jared smiled ruefully. “Sadly, yes, and have had to use it.”

  Bonnie shot Clarence a concerned look at the mention of Jared having used his rifle, but Shannon cut off any misunderstanding about why or who Jared had used the rifle on.

  “He’s used that rifle to protect Essie and this group when certain people thought they could take advantage of us,” Shannon advised them in a tone that told Clarence and his wife Shannon was not about to allow Jared to be judged for what he’d been forced to do after the solar flare stripped society of its civilized veneer.

  When no one spoke for several seconds, Clarence went back to eating, dropping the subject entirely. After they finished the meal, Clarence and Jared walked the property while Clarence showed Jared what he and Bonnie were able to maintain. He told Jared how difficult it was to manage it all in the absence of nearly all the amenities he’d enjoyed before the solar flare. Clarence did have an old John Deere tractor and a chainsaw that had not been affected by the solar flare, but that was about it other than hand tools.

  Jared’s mind whirred as he listened to these things, all the while working through the intricate details of a plan that was slowly taking shape in his mind. When Clarence con
summated his orating on how difficult life had become, Jared stopped and faced the man.

  “I want to bring one of their helicopters down.”

  Clarence also stopped short and stared incredulously at the younger man. “How in God’s name would you do that, and what would you do when the rest of them came looking for you?”

  Jared clasped his hands together. “Don’t you get it. The more we lie down for them, the stronger they become. From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t want to live under their rule. They steal your animals, food, and they’d take family members if you had sons. Someone has to fight back, or they will keep taking until there is nothing left.”

  Clarence toed the dirt with his worn boot, his mouth scrunched into a wrinkled knot. “I hear ya, but I have the two ladies to worry about—”

  Jared cut him off. “I have three.”

  “Fair statement,” Clarence mused thoughtfully. “You said earlier you didn’t have a plan for getting your friend back. Is it fair to say you don’t have a plan for this either?”

  “It’s all one giant plan,” Jared verbalized earnestly. “We need to weaken them while at the same time causing a diversion, something that will bleed them of resources while they search for the people responsible for downing one of their helicopters. Don’t worry about getting you and your women away, that’s the easy part. Tracking people these days can’t be done through phones, computers or cameras like it was before the solar flare. Now they have to actually use men and equipment to go out and search. We have two things working in our favor, the size of the land and their limited resources, and we can move, hide, and know the region better than they do.”

  “I’m listening,” Clarence announced with raised eyebrows.

  Jared took in one last three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the area before explaining to Clarence his burgeoning plan.

  John became more restless by the day, which was manifesting itself into an agitated edginess he was having trouble suppressing. He was not a man used to being locked in a cage with only an old man for stimulation. It wasn’t that John didn’t enjoy and even like Luther, it was the fact that he was being controlled. John had hoped Carnegie would have made a decision on what to do with him by now. John’s escape planning stalled when he realized he wasn’t committed to killing any of the men or women who were tasked with making sure he didn’t leave. John was, however, committed to killing Josh and Carnegie if he were ever afforded the opportunity. He wondered what correlation killing Josh and Carnegie would have on his standing within the camp. He wasn’t sure if the camp’s members would kill him for the act or crown him their new leader as if they were in some Australian post-apocalyptic film.

  John continued his workouts, talked to Luther about sundry topics, and performed the best intelligence gathering he could when he was walked to and from the showers. In the beginning he’d worried Carnegie was bugging the shed in order to listen to his and Luther’s conversations. Because of this concern, he tore the shed apart on several occasions in an attempt to thwart any eavesdropping, but in the end, he found no microphone. Now when he returned from the shower, John performed only a perfunctory search, making sure certain items hadn’t been disturbed in his absence.

  Today, however, John sat on his cot, feeling more than a little melancholy as Luther napped on his own cot. When the rumble of a Humvee’s diesel engines sounded in the distance, John rose and peered through a small crack in the boards where he enjoyed a limited view of the main hangar. Two Humvees swung around the front of the hangar and stopped. Attached to the rear of the second Humvee was a horse trailer.

  John knew from his being marched to and from the showers that the base had recently installed several pens for animals along with a couple of shed-type buildings John assumed were chicken coops on the far side of the base away from the hangar. As John craned his neck sideways to see through the little slit, he saw Carnegie march out of the hangar and up to the horse trailer. There was a short exchange between Carnegie and one of the men, none of which John could hear, and then the colonel pivoted and returned to the hangar.

  The Humvees roared back to life and pulled away in the direction John knew the animal pens to be. So now they’re taking livestock from the local populace, John thought to himself. Such was life, nothing really changed after the solar flare in regard to how people exploited others. When tragedy struck and people were dying or at the very least struggling to stay alive, other men found ways to capitalize on the situation. Carnegie was one of those guys. He had weapons of war at his disposal, and he was using them to further whatever it was he was doing out here in Stockton.

  John knew what the mission guidelines had been just a few short months ago, and this was not it. He’d sat in on video briefings between Carnegie and NORAD, who never once read either man in on a mission that included going out and stealing food and other goods from Americans. John remembered living with Jared and how precious food or a food source was.

  John was no farmer, but he knew goats and cows were milk producers while chickens laid eggs. Whoever the previous owners were would be pressed into a harder life after Carnegie relieved them of inestimable items that were most likely barely keeping their heads above water as it stood. Carnegie could have sent a team in and just shot the people, and it would have had the same inevitable affect. By taking a man or woman’s possessions now, you were essentially killing that person.

  John’s neck ached from the unnatural angle he held his head at to see through the small crack, so he backed away and stretched. John had already finished a grueling ninety-minute workout earlier in the morning, and his muscles were in need of a rest. He took one more look through the crack, didn’t see anything worth the pain in his neck, then moved quietly to his cot and stretched out. John knew he could escape if he were willing to hurt and even kill people, but he didn’t want to go down that road, so he focused on an alternative strategy. John felt certain he could overpower a guard during shower time and get to a Humvee. What John wasn’t so sure of was how Carnegie would react to his escaping.

  John felt Carnegie’s resources were such that staging a manhunt or reallocating fuel and vehicles to pursue John would be a tactical blunder. John was of no value to the colonel, and simply letting him run seemed to John like a no-brainer. The flip side to this was Carnegie had evolved into something of a dictator. John knew any form of resistance directed at Carnegie would be crushed in order to maintain control. John was fairly sure Carnegie would bring to bear everything he possessed in his arsenal to kill John and retrieve the Humvee if John took this course of action.

  If the Humvee he took wasn’t gassed up, John recognized the chase would be short and deadly for him. He would be armed, but the guards didn’t carry more than three magazines, so John’s bullet count would be low. He couldn’t get into a prolonged gun battle with only ninety rounds of rifle ammunition. John lay on his cot, vetting scenario after scenario in his head that didn’t require him to kill anyone, or end with him lying facedown in the dirt at the end of the day.

  As John lay there on the tiny cot, he came to the realization that Carnegie had to go. John and the rest of the people within the colonel’s reach would never be safe or free with the colonel running this base. John was sure the colonel had the organizational skills to keep the base running on the backs of the local farmers and labor he either coerced or outright forced on people. There would come a day when Carnegie was so powerful in the region, he would be untouchable, so the time to remove the man had to be sooner than later in John’s opinion.

  John first needed to solve a few other problems before he began thinking about removing Carnegie. First off, he needed to get out of the base and into the countryside, where he would head back to the ranch house and retrieve the note Jared had previously agreed to leave him. Once he found Jared, then the two could devise a plan to get rid themselves of the cancer that was Colonel Carnegie.

  Chapter 14

  As Josh suspected, four of the SEALs were in on
e of the two Humvees sent to retrieve Josh and their fallen comrade. Before the vehicle came to a stop, all four serious-faced men were out and stalking resolutely in Josh’s direction. Master Chief Petty Officer Matt Carver was the senior man in the team after Kemper’s death, and he spoke first.

  “Where’s Dan?”

  Josh tried to put on a solemn face as he jerked his chin toward the barn. “He’s in there.”

  All four men rushed to the barn and disappeared inside. A moment later one of the SEALs emerged and went to the rear of the Humvee the SEALs came in. Josh saw the man retrieve a body bag and return to the barn. Another five minutes and the SEALs came out with Kemper zipped up nicely in a black body bag. The men hefted their comrade into the back of the Humvee before Matt returned to where Josh waited.

  “What the fuck happened? His weapon wasn’t even off safe,” the SEAL growled in an accusatory tone.

  Josh hadn’t even thought of this little fly in the ointment. “We cleared the house, and I was clearing the shed over there when I heard the shots. I called out to Dan as I was running over here, and when he didn’t respond, I just hit the door, saw the other guy with the shotty, and shot him.”

  “Was Dan alive when you came in?” Matt countered. “I mean, it doesn’t look like you did much for the guy.”

  “Jeez, man, look at him. He was dead before he hit the deck, bro,” Josh fired back. “I left him and the other dude right where they dropped.”

  “So why didn’t Dan tell us he was coming out here, and why didn’t we get an invite?” Matt rifled back angrily.

  Jesus, this guy isn’t giving up, thought Josh. “The colonel sent us out here to pick up a tractor. He told us no one was supposed to be here, and he wanted us two out here quick before some local farmer snagged it. We flew out here and started clearing buildings and—” Josh pursed his lips as he shot a glance at the Humvee where Kemper’s body now lay.