“Why?” Barry blurted out. “Why would we go down there when it’s dark? That’s crazy.”
John finished stowing the optics and drew a breath. “Listen, man, I get it, you got away from me and my team, and you survived because you knew something may happen to a fragile electrical grid, and you prepared for what would come after that. What you haven’t prepared for is what’s coming after the ‘after that,’” John muttered almost under his breath, but loud enough for Barry to hear.
“After the ‘after that’?” Barry repeated. “What does that even mean?”
“After the ‘after that,’” John repeated himself. “After the event kills a hundred million people in the US alone, that’s when the real after starts. People will be dying left, right, front, and center, my man. That’s the after the ‘after that.’ That’s when the real death toll starts to gain momentum. The first hundred million was just a teaser of primarily affected people dependent on modern medicine or caregivers. Now things like starvation, dehydration, murder, disease—they start the real thinning of the herd.”
Barry snorted and shook his head.
“So we’re going through the city at night, Barry,” John said, emphasizing the man’s name. “If we get caught down there in broad daylight, it’ll be a hell of a lot harder to escape and evade than it would be under the cover of darkness. Jared and I have night-vision goggles, and I’d bet my left nut no one down there is sporting night vision. We own the fucking night, Barry,” he finished, smiling wickedly.
͠
Just after 2200 hours, all three men surreptitiously made their way onto the first paved street within the San Jose city limits. John led the small group, his head turning from side to side as he searched for any sign of danger. He had the night-vision goggles pulled down over his face and was wearing them without a helmet mount, which forced him to use the cranial cage over the top of a rear-facing baseball cap John wore.
The ballcap was black and had an orange San Francisco Giants emblem on the front. John wasn’t a fan of any baseball team, much less the Giants, but he’d needed a hat, and Calvin had offered this one.
Jared kept his goggles hanging against his chest. John knew Jared had never trained with the night-vision equipment and wouldn’t be ready to fight with them on. So he suggested Jared keep the goggles in a position where he could use them, but wasn’t married to them in case they got into a scrape. John, on the other hand, was more than comfortable fighting with the goggles on and chose to wear them full time in the lead position.
John’s rifle was outfitted with a PEQ that used an infrared (IR) laser to sight targets through his night-vision goggles. Once he switched the PEQ on, an IR laser was emitted downrange that, although invisible to the naked eye, allowed John’s goggles to see the beam. Jared possessed no such luxury and would struggle mightily in a gunfight with the goggles pulled over his eyes. In hindsight, John wished he had done a better job of scavenging his former team members for useful pieces of equipment after the helicopter crash.
He might have been able to find a working PEQ system from one of the team’s rifles and outfitted Jared’s rifle with it or just given the entire rifle to Jared. The PEQ was designed to emit an infrared laser only visible to someone wearing goggles designed to pick up IR signatures. To someone wearing the goggles during a raid, it would look like some strange laser light show, but to the person without goggles, the night would appear dark and completely normal.
The three men moved deliberately from street to street, stopping to check an area they planned on traversing. During one of their stops, rifle fire rang out somewhere in the city. The string of fire was fully automatic and, in John’s opinion, undisciplined. No one ever ripped off twenty or thirty rounds without taking a breath unless it was the Fourth of July. The men waited for several moments after the gunfire ceased, but heard no return fire, or any other sounds for that matter.
Barry’s eyes were wide with fear. The sudden eruption of gunfire scared Jared, but he was holding it together—well, at least to the casual observer, which Barry was not.
John scooted over next to the two men and whispered through pursed lips, “Don’t think it’s anything—probably just someone letting the rest of the world know they’re armed and ready to defend whatever they have. It wasn’t a fight, no return fire.”
When John finished, he turned, hoping his narration would dial Barry’s freak-out meter away from the red just a bit. Truthfully, the cacophony of rifle fire could very well have been an ambush that killed its intended target, which would have explained the lack of return fire. Dead dudes don’t shoot back, John grimly thought to himself. He decided to remain tightlipped on that subject and move with extreme caution. John grabbed Jared and pulled him close. “Get those goggles on and help me check the streets ahead of us. Two sets of eyes are better than one, brother,” he breathed in Jared’s ear.
Jared nodded and pulled the goggles over his eyes. Both men meticulously examined the street in the direction they intended to move through. After a couple of minutes, Jared looked at John, who shrugged, got to his feet, and began moving forward. Jared and Barry crept along behind him, their nerves frayed beyond what they could have ever imagined possible. Suddenly John dropped straight down to a prone position. He never looked back as Jared and Barry stood
