Devon dipped the optics toward the shore and caught something out of place at the water’s edge, causing him to focus intently on the abnormality. Devon’s breath caught in his throat as he stared at a large cat—not a cat, a mountain lion. In all the walking around Devon had done since the solar flare, he hadn’t seen an animal he deemed a threat. Now he was watching a predator that posed a real-life threat to his health and safety. Devon remained fixed on the animal, wanting to know which direction it left in when it finished drinking.

  Part of Devon wished he hadn’t seen the damn lion since this new danger would undoubtedly rob him of sleep and make his nighttime movement much less pleasurable. The beast drank its fill before turning its back to the reservoir and inspecting its surroundings. The mountain lion’s tail lashed about, its movement echoing the movement of a slithering serpent or the gentle unfurling of a flag. Content with its inspection, the mountain lion moved slowly up the bank to the north on large padded feet Devon knew housed razor-sharp claws. The beast glided more than walked as it moved to the north, seemingly unconcerned, as if knowing it was the master of this domain.

  Devon sat for a spell, thinking of how to proceed. He wouldn’t start a signal fire over an animal, but he was a little shaken by the presence of such a large, capable meat-eating predator living and hunting on a sector of land Devon needed to transition through. Originally, Devon planned on moving through the sparsely vegetated north end of the reservoir under the cover of night, but suddenly this little lion wrinkle had him rethinking his strategy.

  John’s face flashed into Devon’s mind, serving to put everything he’d been thinking on pause while Devon reassessed his situation. The sniper or any of the soldiers would without hesitation kill Devon were he to run afoul of them, while the mountain lion might just run off if their paths were to cross. Devon knew nothing about mountain lion behavior other than the attacks he’d read about on the internet before the solar flare.

  One thing that stuck with Devon was that nearly every article he could remember reading about lion attacks in the Bay Area was tailored to bring forth the news while appeasing the animal activists at the same time. The appeasement portion had indicated humans were encroaching on the mountain lion’s habitat, making these attacks an eventuality. Maybe, Devon thought, since there were significantly fewer people, the lion would leave him alone. Possibly they could share the land as two apex predators hunting the same region, but not infringing on one another’s way of life. Devon would not harass the lion, and in turn the lion should have no reason to bother Devon.

  Devon wasn’t one to lie to himself, but in this case, he was going forward based on half remembered news articles meshed with baseless speculation on mountain lion behavior. Devon would continue on his mission rather than return and tell John he saw an animal, got scared, and came back. Devon would rather be mauled a hundred times by that lion out there than have John disappointed in him.

  Devon knew Jared would understand, but John would be that father who would look at Devon, perplexed, wondering where he went wrong in raising the teen, and Devon would not be able to deal with that. Done psychoanalyzing his situation, Devon replaced the binoculars in his pack and got to his feet. He’d taken to wearing a small pack and abandoned the rat bag he’d carried during the first few months after the solar flare. The longer he was with John, Jared, and the rest of the group, the more he wanted to fit in.

  This had never been the case before the solar flare. Devon had created a hardened shell, not allowing anyone in or giving them the power to dictate how he felt. The shell came after years of being shunned, bullied, and left out of school games, birthday parties, and all the other things children do for social gratification. Devon found he’d been a square peg in a round-hole world, and it finally drove him inside himself. What he didn’t realize at the time was it would save his life, while all the kids who enjoyed parties, sports, dances and everything else were positively dead while Devon still lived. The solar flare had altered—no, not altered, remodeled the world, turning it into a square-peg-friendly environment, where men and women like Devon and even Jared could live and even thrive.

  There remained a few round-hole people, but they were not acting in a fashion Devon thought lent itself to a long-term existence on earth. Even the mighty colonel was slowly being whittled away from what he’d been directly after the solar flare. Devon hefted his shoulders, feeling some level of confidence returning after putting the mountain lion sighting into perspective.

  Devon pushed north, using the cover of the trees for another hour before altering his course and descending through the timber. When Devon reached the edge of the tree line, he stopped and used his binoculars to ensure his safe passage across the north end of the reservoir, only there was a dam with nothing more than a few blades of grass as cover. Devon picked at the peach hair stubble on his chin, trying to come up with a new route.

  In the end, Devon continued north past the dam and all its outbuildings, pump houses and other associated structures needed in the management of controlling the large amounts of water released through the dam. Devon briefly thought about snooping around and seeing how the whole thing worked, but quickly divorced himself from anything that would sidetrack him. The trees and brush were abundant along Devon’s path until he was required to cross the road that led to the dam. Night hadn’t fallen completely, but Devon felt sure he was the only human in the area.

  Once Devon gained cover on the east side of the road leading to the dam, he moved quickly through the green grasses coating the hillside, trekking in an easterly direction. The fact that the grass was green helped Devon move quicker and quieter. Had he been on this assignment in August, his movement would have been dramatically slower in order to reduce his sound signature in the dried grasses of that time of summer. Devon pushed forward toward a high point in the area he intended to use to better evaluate his next direction of travel. On his way up the hill, which was steep, he passed two deer carcasses, bringing back the haunting images of the mountain lion.

  Devon pushed the carcasses from his mind, driving his legs like pistons, propelling him higher and higher up the side of the mountain. By the time Devon reached the top of the mountain, the countryside was shrouded in darkness. Devon stopped, dropping to his knees, chest heaving from the recent exertion of climbing several hundred feet in elevation, and took a moment to collect himself. The wind was coming from the west, bending the grass to the east as it blew across the top of the mountain, carrying Devon’s scent inland.

  Devon and John had spoken in the past about hunting and the importance of hunting into the wind so the animals didn’t catch your scent. Unfortunately, Devon had seen the mountain lion east of his current position, meaning the lion was downwind from him. Devon hoped the animal had fed and wouldn’t be out seeking its next easy meal. The thought of being stalked by the animal caused Devon to grip his rifle just a little tighter while his head and eyes oscillated back and forth, scanning the darkness.

  After seeing the mountain lion, the rifle hadn’t been slung across Devon’s back or even casually over a shoulder. He’d kept the weapon in his hands and at the ready the entire time, starting the moment he found he wasn’t alone out in the countryside until the present. Devon breathed in the fresh clean air, turning his face into the wind for a moment, enjoying its therapeutic touch like that of a down feather across his face, making his eyes water slightly.

  Wiping his eyes with a dirty sleeve, Devon turned back to the east, where he scanned as best he could, considering the lack of ambient light. Devon also strained his ears in an effort to augment his lack of sight, but the light breeze was all Devon could make out as the wind made its noisy way through the grass and small bushes all around him. Devon felt as though he were atop the world, sitting in the dark, roughly fourteen hundred feet in elevation, which was in reality not more than five hundred feet above the water level below him.

  After catching his breath, Devon moved off the top of the mountain, where he found a large clump of brush. He sat, placing his back to the brush, facing east, and pulled out what would be his dinner. If someone were to approach from his rear, they would be compelled to walk around the bush and would likely walk right past him without knowing he was there. Devon hoped if someone were coming up the hill, he would see them before they saw him so he could simply slip away, disappearing into the night.

  Chapter 27

  Devon ate and watered himself without being molested by anything other than a few mosquitos he swatted away before pulling the collar of his light jacket up higher. When he had eaten far less than his fill, Devon moved off the mountain, angling his path toward the water, where he intended to refill his depleted water bottles. Coming to within fifty yards of the water’s edge, Devon stopped and pulled out his water-purification system, stuffing it into his jacket pocket so everything would be ready when he reached the water. He didn’t want to spend any extra time out in the open at the shoreline, searching for and unpacking gear.

  Taking one last look around, Devon moved to the water, squatted, laid his rifle across his thighs, and began pumping filtered water into the first bottle. Devon carried two thirty-two-ounce Nalgene water bottles wherever he went. When he’d met Jared and John, he’d only carried a single sixteen-ounce store-bought bottle of water Devon had refilled from pools and backyard ponds. After meeting Jared and John, he changed the type of container and amount of water he carried.

  Devon kept his head on a swivel as his arms pumped the drinkable water into his bottles. When the last bottle was full, Devon stuffed the filtration system back into the jacket pocket, took his rifle by the stock, and hurried away from the openness of the reservoir’s bank. Suffering from overwrought nerves from the pit stop, Devon knew it was a much better choice to procure clean water under the cover of night than during the day, when he could be seen from a mile away.

  Devon continued east through the rolling countryside while his nervous system slowly came back into compliance with some level of normality. Three hours later, Devon had rounded the northern end of the reservoir and was headed south through the hills in a southerly direction. Knowing he was entering the region most likely to harbor Josh and the soldiers, Devon moved with extreme caution. Devon had found no indication of Carnegie’s men to the north or west, leaving the eastern side of the reservoir an almost certainty for contacting these forces. It suddenly occurred to Devon that starting a fire at night would bring immediate attention to himself. He tried thinking of ways to start a fire with a sort of fuse or some way to delay the actual fire until he could safely evacuate the area.

  This was a problem he only partially solved over the next hour. Devon told himself when he located the soldiers, he would bypass them before setting any fires. This would ensure he wasn’t cut off from John and the rest of his friends. The delayed-fuse part remained unsolved, which distressed Devon greatly. The more Devon thought about John’s edict to start fires in order to mark the soldiers’ positions, the more he wondered if this hadn’t been something John had recklessly tossed out with no thought of how Devon would complete the task.

  At close to 0200 hours, Devon found a thick area overgrown with brush high in the hills and nearly half a mile east of the reservoir. Devon crawled inside the thicket, pulled his jacket tight around his neck, and was asleep within less than a minute. He slept fitfully until the sun lit the interior of the thicket, making it impossible to sleep another second, no matter how exhausted Devon was. As was his waking ritual, Devon lay perfectly motionless, listening, smelling, and trying to see if anything had changed since he’d laid his head to rest earlier that morning.

  After ten minutes Devon found no indication his surroundings had suffered any biological changes in the form of hostile humans, he rose and peeked out the top of the brush. To his relief, Devon saw nothing but green hills, brush, and the ever-present oak trees that grew everywhere. Most of the oaks were adolescent by oak tree standards, being less than fifty years old, but every once in a while, an old oak could be found standing nearly eighty feet in height.

  The different species of oak grew quite well in climates with warm dry summers and wet cold winters. This described Northern California nearly perfectly, and thus—its landscape was littered with the great oaks. Devon used the larger trees for shade during his frequent stops to scan and search his intended path. John had previously showed Devon how to use the low-hanging branches of the larger oaks as concealment while enjoying the rest of the tree for its shade.

  It was under one such oak that Devon sat when he heard the distinct clang of metal on metal. Rather than scramble behind the tree trunk, Devon froze, his eyes the only part of his body moving as they darted back and forth in search of the source of the sound. When his naked eyes failed to produce the causation of the noise, Devon slowly withdrew his binoculars from a side pocket on his pack.

  Hardly daring to breathe, Devon brought the optics to his face and began a detailed search of the landscape in the direction he felt the sound emanated from. One hundred yards directly to Devon’s front, he located a dirt road that had been cut into the hillside. The road ran from his left to right and curved away from Devon and followed the natural contour of the hill, disappearing to the south. When Devon failed to locate anything he could definitively say made the clanging sound, he decided to circle around the area to the east, searching the entire way while avoiding walking directly into the middle of a platoon of Carnegie’s soldiers.

  The human eye is attracted to movement, and John had taught this little piece of sneaking-around trivia to Devon. An onlooker casually observing a field would see a well-camouflaged man crawling quickly across the field’s surface, whereas they might not spot the same man if he was to move across the same field no faster than a snail. Devon was about to become a snail as he lowered himself to the grassy surface of the ground and began wriggling back the way he’d come.

  Devon continued either crawling or walking stooped over like an old man until he was free of any direct line of sight from the spot where he’d heard the clanging sound. Devon pointed himself east and moved through the hills, intending to envelop the region he suspected soldiers to occupy. It was nerve-racking knowing someone was out there and not being able to pinpoint their exact location. Two hours after hearing the clang, Devon reached the road leading to Del Valle Regional Park. He could cross the road and put more distance between himself and the potential danger, or he could slide down the ditch that ran along the west side of the road, working his way south, trying to catch a glimpse of the offenders.

  Another thirty minutes of crawling through the mostly dry ditch brought Devon to a dirt access road, which split from the main paved road and appeared to lead down toward the reservoir. Devon wasn’t sure of his exact location in relationship to the park entrance, but felt he wasn’t all that far from the little guardhouse. From the ditch, Devon surveyed the rolling landscape to the west, but saw no sign of men or vehicles.

  What Devon didn’t want was to run into the Humvee with its turret-mounted machine gun. He’d heard the stories of John and Rip’s running gun battle with the soldiers, and Devon wanted no part in any such adventure. He wasn’t equipped for any sort of incursion with heavily armed soldiers. Devon just wanted to find the soldiers’ staging area, light his fire, and beat feet to the southwest. When his search of the immediate area yielded no indication of danger, Devon climbed out of the ditch and made his way to where the two roads came together.

  The moment Devon reached the dirt road, his heart thumped a little harder. Fresh tire tracks were plainly visible on the road’s surface. Devon didn’t need a course in tracking to know a vehicle had recently moved down the road to the west. Devon also noticed the mangled fence and realized the soldiers had run through it in the absence of a key to the locked gate. Devon knelt to inspect the tire marks and now looked up, studying the dirt road in the direction the tire tracks appeared to lead in. The road was cut into the side of a hill with a steep drop-off on the north side and an incline to the south of the road’s edge.

  The dirt road wasn’t wide enough for two vehicles to pass, so whoever drove in would have needed to find somewhere to turn around, and Devon couldn’t see anything even closely resembling a turnout from where he knelt. His mind whirled like a processor, evaluating what he could see, what he knew for sure, and then adding some not so educated guesses to his next plan of action’s equation. In the end Devon decided he would climb the south side of the hill and keep the dirt road below himself.

  If the soldiers were here with the Humvee and they employed a machine gun, Devon would be in a heap of trouble were he to be caught on the downhill side of the road. In the same scenario, but with Devon on top of the hill, he could flee to the south, placing the mountain between himself and any incoming fire the soldiers might send his way. Having made his decision, Devon walked most of the way to the top of the hill before lowering himself to the ground and crawling through the knee-high grass.

  It wasn’t long before movement off to Devon’s right froze him in place. A soldier was walking casually up the slope, moving from Devon’s right to left, no more than a hundred yards from where Devon now lay pasted to the earth’s surface, his breath held, but his heart pounding like a war drum in his chest. Devon maintained the ability to stop his breathing in order to become quieter, while at the same time he enjoyed no such control over his beating heart, which Devon would have loved to slow during times like this.

  At the crest of the hill, the soldier turned and walked straight out until he disappeared, dropping down the front side of the hill. Devon inched his way backward fifty yards and then began slithering forward again in a more northerly direction. He wanted to see where the soldier came from, and then he would circle around and find out where the man went. Devon didn’t have far to go, finding the Humvee parked on the dirt road not more than two hundred yards from where he’d spotted the soldier on the hill, and much to Devon’s chagrin, the vehicle was outfitted with a turret-mounted machine gun.

 

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