Jared was not an environmentalist, but he was fairly certain one or two million people standing on the beaches of Northern California, fishing, could only turn out bad. Firstly, there would not be millions of fishing poles, so from what Jared had already seen, there would be bloodshed. Once the fishing pole situation was sorted out through violence, Jared doubted there were many city folks who really knew how to fish the ocean from shore. Jared personally had not the slightest clue how to set up a fishing pole for anything like that. What bait would they use, and where in the hell would they get it?
One thing Jared was sure of was the people who left the city were likely all or mostly dead by now. They were all well into the third month and closing on the fourth fast. No one could survive without life’s essentials for much longer than a single month, much less four months. The thought of the majority of the Bay Area’s population being dead should have scared the hair straight on the back of his neck, but it did the opposite. He was glad there weren’t as many people around as there had been when he left Belmont. It was dangerous enough back then, but now with food and other supplies essentially gone, people were more desperate. Jared learned that desperate people were dangerous people, so while he wasn’t happy millions of dead bodies lay scattered from the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, he was relieved.
Although there weren’t the number of people as in past scavenging operations, Jared stuck to his old tried-and-true method of searching an area with his binoculars before passing through it. The streets were eerily void of people; however, there were wild animals everywhere. The first time Jared spotted a herd of five deer, his heart nearly stopped. His eyes registered the movement first, activating an initial surge of adrenaline before he realized they were harmless herbivores.
Jared and Stephani saw three coyotes and a dozen more deer as they moved in the direction of the shopping center on Story Road. Jared was thankful for the landscaping architects of times past. He used all of it to mask their movement, staying away from as many open areas as he could. Jared finished one of his frequent stop-and-scan details and was stowing his binoculars when Stephani’s feet caught his eye. They were black, the nails in need of a bath and a pedicure.
Jared studied her feet and then her dirty leggings and finally up to her eyes, which were staring at him. He gulped.
“You need shoes,” he stammered in a feeble preemptive strike.
“No shit. You aren’t one of those foot guys, are you?” Stephani whispered.
“No, no, no, not a foot guy.” Jared stammered. “Fuck, Stephani, your feet are filthy, you need shoes, and it made me think maybe I need to shave. Maybe we all need to focus on some hygiene, I don’t know. Why do you always have to be so damn defensive?” Jared wasn’t a foot guy, as Stephani had so blatantly put it; he just sometimes had these moments where his present life was so far removed from his former life, it staggered him. He’d never seen women’s feet as dirty as Stephani’s were, and, well, they were kind of like a train wreck he couldn’t not look at.
Stephani dropped her shoulders and bit her lower lip. She had been a ballbuster recently to these guys who so far had only been a little insensitive, but not abusive by any definition. She realized she was angry at the world for falling apart. She continued to remember being scared nearly to death for the entire time she was chained to the wall in the bikers’ clubhouse. Now these men were actually nice guys, which made them easy targets for her to lash out at without fear of retribution.
Jared and John made her feel like she was back in times before the event, and here she was abusing them. Sure, John possessed absolutely no situational awareness when it came to dealing with a woman, but at least he remained a perfect gentleman in many ways others had not. Admitting she was wrong had always been a personality flaw that haunted Stephani. Being an attorney had helped in that she was never wrong, and if she was, she’d argue to the contrary.
“You guys are so sensitive,” she said, immediately regretting her words.
Jared blew out through his nostrils. “You shouldn’t take advantage of people’s kindness; it shouldn’t have happened before the event and sure as hell shouldn’t happen now,” Jared fired back.
The strong proud attorney inside Stephani wanted to argue her point, which was she was reacting because she’d been through hellish experiences and they’d made her sensitive to certain things. When those things were infringed on, she reacted negatively. The litigator inside her thankfully saw the big picture, staying her sharp tongue. Conversely, Stephani sat and stewed in silence.
Jared saw she wanted to argue, but had gained some manner of control over her emotional impulse to bring it strong and hard. “I’ve probably said this before—every one of us has had a real bad time since all this started. John lost, like, four of five of his friends in a helicopter crash. I almost got killed within the first week, and my best friend, a man named Bart, died less than two weeks ago, so we all have a sad tale to tell. My self-help opinion is we have to all look at the cup as half full. I didn’t die; you didn’t get raped; John’s friends died, but he lived. Bart died, but I met John, Barry and now you ladies. It’s all in how you look at it. I’m no Dr. Phil, but I think we can agree that people who only see the bad in the world are much
