Barry remained quiet as John shrugged his muscled shoulders. The group stood waiting to see if anyone wanted to weigh in on the matter any further, and when no one did, John turned, and the group followed him towards the coastal range.
Chapter 13
The three men marched for nearly three hours, sometimes using old hiking trails, but oftentimes they broke brush, moving straight up the face of the coastal mountain range. John’s intention was to reach the top and then pick their way north, staying off the roads and even trails if they could. During a rest stop, the men noticed a large presence of several buzzards overhead. They could look back and see the built-up urban area, which was San Jose, Cupertino and several other towns, and there were no buzzards circling these areas.
An hour later all three men’s sense of smell was accosted at the same time. The smell of death wafted in the air and grew stronger as they climbed. No one spoke, but each of them scanned the area ahead, looking for the source of the foul stench. As the three men crested a small rise, they saw the source. There were bodies scattered across a trail that had been used for hiking less than three months ago, but was now the final resting place for what appeared to be nearly fifty corpses.
Bodies were on the trail and in the open grass around the trail. The scene was spread out over an area roughly the size of three football fields.
“What the fuck?” John muttered as he took a knee and pulled out his binoculars.
Jared followed suit, trying not to breathe through his nose due to the horrific odor. Both men searched the grisly carnage and only saw rotting bodies with no indication as to how they became corpses. Jared could see men, women and children amongst the dead. They all appeared to have bags or packs of some sort as if they were moving in a large group when tragedy struck. The scene below began to make sense after what Devon told them about people leaving the city and heading to the coast in an effort to be near crops and the Pacific Ocean for fishing.
Barry knelt behind John and Jared with a look of horror written on his pallid face. He licked his lips as he stared at the death and destruction ahead of them. His throat felt tight and his mouth was dry. He’d felt these same symptoms before he’d fallen out at the bikers’ place, and now he fought to control himself. He didn’t need John seeing him topple over in the grass at the sight of what was becoming a fairly common thing to see these days.
“Look around and breathe,” Jared said as he noticed Barry’s downward spiral. “Don’t focus, keep your eyes moving, and take some deep breaths. Bart used to say you have to control that beast when it appears and tries to take control; otherwise, you will be useless in a fight.” Jared jerked his head towards the bodies. “Control it or end up like them.”
Barry spent a few minutes gathering his wits while John and Jared waited.
“They were ambushed,” John said.
Jared nodded his agreement. These people were most likely ambushed and stripped of anything they had in the way of food and water by another group who had made the decision to dispose of their moral compass. Jared couldn’t imagine just sitting on a trail and waiting for a bunch of families to happen by, then shooting all of them just so he could fill his belly with food and drink.
John glanced at his watch, did some quick math in his head, and realized it had been just about three months since the electricity went out. That was all that had happened—the electricity stopped working, nothing more. No pandemic, no nuclear bombs, nothing on a large scale had touched humanity the day of the solar flare. The people who’d died in the first couple of weeks after the solar flare didn’t have the skills to survive in a world that digressed 150 years overnight. Their deaths were nothing more than nature culling the weak and arranging them in their proper position in life—a grave.
John studied the size of the group rotting in front of him and wondered how large the offending group of Marauders was in order to be able to wipe out fifty people in the open. John took another pass at the group with his binoculars and didn’t see a single firearm carried by any member of the doomed assemblage. He had studied many different types of violent encounters in his previous unit and knew how hard it was to amass large body counts in an open area with a limited number of shooters.
John had also seen the results after a single shooter corralled a large number of unarmed people in a closed-off area such as a school or church. Those body counts were always far higher than some maniac who walked into an open park and started shooting. The people who did this had to be traveling in a pack of at least twenty or thirty, by John’s estimation. This meant organized criminal leadership, which sent a tingle up his spine.
“We gotta be careful out here, boys,” John whispered. “Whoever did this was well armed, organized, and numbered around twenty or thirty people. We walk into that and we all die, so keep your heads on a swivel.”
John’s statement did nothing to quell Barry’s feeling of nausea and unease. The second near panic attack had been brought on by the mere presence of the dead lying out in the grass, and now John just identified the real risk of being ambushed and killed, which was something Barry had not considered as anything other than a theoretical outcome until now. Seeing bodies turned
