Jared got to a knee and looked questioningly at John as he struggled with the large yellow bag.
John reached the two and dropped the bag in the dirt. “Guns and dead dudes.”
“Glad you chose the guns,” Jared quipped with a smirk.
John snorted in amusement and began pulling the weapons from the bag. “We take what we can and destroy the rest so no one finds them and uses ’em on us or some other poor bastard. I’d bet those corpses down there were part of the gang who killed all those people we saw yesterday. Seems they died of starvation or lack of water, but not all of them died. Some of the tents were empty, which I think means the ones who left were too weak to pack up and carry anything except their weapons. None of these guns came from empty tents.”
Jared looked around as if this new information might mean they would be overrun at any moment.
John started removing weapons from the bag, then looked at Jared, his head tilted to one side. “Are we just lucky, bro?”
“Lucky?” Jared asked skeptically.
“Everyone around us is hanging on by a thread, and here we are fairly well fed and not doing all that bad considering the shape the rest of the world is in.”
Jared thought about this for a moment before replying. “Maybe it’s because we haven’t allowed ourselves to become animals in order to survive.”
John smiled tightly and resumed the task of unpacking their newly acquired arsenal. To John’s astonishment, Barry knew how to fieldstrip both the AR and AK platforms, while Jared was only familiar with the AR-15 weapon system. If it hadn’t been for a whiskey-loving grisly old man named Bart, Jared would have ascertained zero knowledge of the firearm. John chose to keep a short-barreled AR-15 rifle, or SBR for short, as a backup to his primary rifle and parted the rest of the weapons out, stashing them in pouches distributed between him and the other two men.
When Jared, John and Barry were finished, they took one fully intact SBR and nine AR-15 bolt carrier groups along with their charging handles, buffers and buffer springs. John wasn’t too terribly worried about triggers breaking down anytime soon. He’d seen every imaginable malfunction a weapon could have, and found they usually occurred to parts of the weapon put under the most stress. This did not usually include trigger mechanisms.
John pocketed a snub-nosed .38 Special along with a box of fifty rounds just for good measure. The three men took all the AR magazines and split them evenly between each other. They gathered all the ammunition and loaded all of their magazines to capacity before pouring the rest of the loose ammunition into their packs, making sure to keep the 5.56-millimeter ammunition easily accessible and separate from the rest of the ammunition, which they haphazardly dumped into whatever pouches had room in their packs.
“What’s with the little piece?” Barry asked as John stuffed the .38 Special into his cargo pocket.
John ignored the man until the pistol and box of associated ammunition were secure in the pocket. “Two is one, one is none, so three is two,” John quipped with a wicked smile.
Barry looked confused while Jared smiled inwardly. He’d heard Bart preach that “two is one, one is none” sermon and knew exactly what John was getting at because Murphy’s Law always appeared to be alive and well in a crisis moment. If a person had two flashlights on the battlefield, one of them was almost certainly going to break, and then they would have one flashlight. If a person took only one flashlight into battle, well, they would almost certainly at some point be forced to go without.
John pointed at Barry’s blistered feet. “You got two, and now you got none, so if you had three, you’d have one—and you could hop.” John snickered with a mischievous grin.
“I don’t get it,” Barry said, perplexed by John’s riddle.
“Oh, for the love of everything holy,” Jared interjected, unable to take it any longer. “It means bring an extra one.”
The light bulb seemed to switch on as Barry slowly bobbed his head. John chuckled as he hefted the heavy pack onto his shoulders and wriggled it into position. Jared and Barry donned their packs as well, and the men began moving north again. At 1600 hours, John changed course, heading east down the side of the hill they’d been traversing. He led the group into a heavily vegetated area till they were essentially inside a giant thicket of brush and vegetation.
Whereas the ground was mostly hard-packed earth on top of the hill, down under the vegetation, the ground was softer. John began digging with his hands in the soft earth, trying to flatten out an area he could lay a sleeping bag in. Jared and Barry did the same, and within an hour, the men had an area roughly ten feet by ten feet where they could sleep without rolling down the mountain in the middle of the night.
When they were done excavating their bed for the evening, Barry looked at John. “I hate to say this, but we are all fucked tomorrow.”
“How’s that?” John asked, not really in the mood for any of Barry’s “I’m smarter than you” bullshit.
“We just pushed our way through a hundred yards of coastal poison oak,” Barry divulged, a grim look plastered across his face.
This caught John’s attention. He wasn’t from the area and, although he was briefed on a great many things about the Bay Area, none of the briefings had included any information germane to operating in the bush. He wasn’t familiar with anything past being careful of rattlesnakes, and these hadn’t really been a concern since it was getting colder, and he knew snakes would not be out and about as much as if it were mid-July.
“What does it look like?”
