A World Slowed Read online

  A World Slowed

  Book One - The Jared Chronicles

  Rick Tippins

  Dedication

  TO MAHSA

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Jared sat at a table, sipping a cup of tea, staring out a window, and taking in the expansive campus of his employer. He and his fellow employees were not for want while at any of the numerous campuses scattered throughout Silicon Valley. They had catered food trucks, laundry service, even a designated nap area. Jared always felt this was way over the top and took away from what he was trying to achieve in his chosen field of work. If his employer redirected those millions of dollars into his projects, he would be light-years ahead of where he was now. The problem was all the people who worked alongside him demanded these things that bled the company of funds it should have used for research and development.

  Jared exhaled as he watched a woman ride past on one of the bicycles the company kept stashed all over its campuses. The bikes were used instead of walking since some of the campuses’ buildings could be quite a good distance from one another. Jared knew where the woman worked, and although he wasn’t sure of her exact yearly compensation, he knew the company’s pay scales well enough to know that she could afford several bicycles of her own. Jared never wanted to be part of the problem, so he brought tea bags from home and only took hot water from the company.

  He watched as the woman rode off, thinking he didn’t even know her name. Why would he know her name? Although they’d been to the same meetings on countless occasions, neither had ever spoken a word to the other. The fact was, Jared didn’t speak to many folks at the company. He wasn’t socially screwed up; he was simply focused on his tasks at the company and didn’t have time to be hanging around the break room making idle chitchat.

  Jared turned away from the window, looking at the wall-mounted television tuned to CNN and spewing nonstop news. Jared cared little for the news unless it had to do with the tech world or weather, the latter serving more as a guide, letting him know if he should wear flip-flops or sneakers, a T-shirt, or a T-shirt and a sweat jacket. The news anchor spoke about violence in the Middle East. He rolled his eyes, thinking CNN could have simply looped the same video footage and gone home for the next five years and no one would have been the wiser. The story switched gears to POTUS and the fight on global terrorism. Jared had voted for the current president, as had most everyone in the company. The company had also donated to the president’s campaign. He liked to have had the time to research all the candidates, but he didn’t. Consequently, he voted his party, which was Democrat.

  While sipping his tea, Jared sat silently watching the people outside, his mind immersed in thoughts of his current project. Jared was irritated with the issues preventing him from completing his current project, which was a small piece of a much larger venture. The issues for the project reminded him of the wasted funds being used on frivolous expenditures. Making matters worse, other people assigned to the project were holding him back.

  He knew he would be staying late tonight, working on things that no one else would do. I need my own project assigned only to me. A project with a reasonable budget and realistic deadlines. No group of people to have to placate during my creative process, no boss breathing down my neck, wanting to be cc’d on every single project-related email. A project that will test me. He hated working in the company’s so called “project groups.” The concept made him feel like being an Olympic athlete and being asked to run a relay with old fat, people. Jared could not understand why the company failed to recognize the obvious, cut the fat, and work more efficiently. Finished with his tea and his internal gripe session, he stood and headed back to his lab.

  The September sun continued to bask the Bay Area in its waning warmth well after 6:00 p.m. At 7:21 p.m., Jared’s computer abruptly shut down and all his office lights went off. This happened instantly and at the exact same moment. He rose and walked to the doorway, peering out into the empty hallway. Nothing, the campus was shrouded in an eerie blanket of powerless silence. Down the hall, Jared saw two people step into the hallway from their offices, searching for the source of this interruption, just as he’d done. Jared ducked back inside, not wanting to be trapped in a conversation about the power outage. He returned to his desk and sat down, figuring he’d wait for the backup generator to restart the building’s power. He sat there for several minutes before looking at his watch. The screen was blank.

  “Give me a break,” Jared blurted out loud, immediately fishing his phone out of a pants pocket and depressing the home button. Nothing happened. He pushed the button again and a third time before getting back to his feet and returning to the doorway. He looked down at his watch and then to his phone before stepping fully into the hall. The same two people were quietly conversing about thirty yards down the hall, as they repeatedly depressed buttons on their own cell phones. Jared could tell they were experiencing the same glitch from which he found himself suffering. They looked his way then went back to their discussion.

  Jared ambled back to his cubicle, still perplexed by the sudden loss of power to the campus, his watch and his cell phone. He stuffed his phone back in his pocket then stopped and stood like a statue, halfway between the door and his desk. He couldn’t work without power, and he had things to do. Truth be told, no one waited for him at his home in Belmont some fourteen miles to the north, so he would work late into the night in order to get these things done.

  He decided to go outside and check the other buildings. If the power’s off everywhere, I’ll head home and start up again tomorrow morning, he told himself. Jared knew this meant he would have to stay late all week and more than likely come in on the weekend, which wasn’t completely out of the ordinary for him. He grabbed his Cal Berkeley zip-up sweat jacket and headed out the door, purposely turning in the opposite direction of the two who were still standing in the hallway like a couple of zombies, unable to make a decision.

  Jared burst out the front doors of building 43 and again stood extremely still. Instantly, he noticed the lack of artificial light and an eerie absolute silence. He surveyed the campus, taking in the silence and the absence of manmade light along with several other people milling about. The people were clustered near the buildings on the campus as if discussing some important companywide project. Jared looked at the bicycle rack and quickly pushed away the urge to use one for the rather lengthy walk to where he parked his car on the far northeast side of the property.

  Jared walked with his head down, avoiding any eye contact with the clusters of people as he made his way across the campus grounds. No one attempted to speak to him as he walked. The campus was usually full of people who walked with earbuds inserted, for all intents and purposes in an alternate world. Today was different, no one had ear
buds in and people were actually talking to one another, so he kept his head lowered and just walked.

  Jared arrived at his car, pulling his key fob out and depressing the unlock button. Nothing happened. He pressed it again, moving closer to the car, but still it seemed the fob refused to communicate with the vehicle. Jared flipped open the key, inserted it in the lock, and pulled open the door. He lowered himself into the vehicle, pushed the key into the ignition, and turned. Nothing happened, not even a dying battery click. He turned the key in the ignition several more times, then checked to make sure the car was in park and hadn’t somehow slipped into drive, which would have caused the vehicle to fail in its starting sequence. There were no dash lights, no clicking sounds; the vehicle was dead.

  After his car failed to start, Jared returned to building 43, where he saw more utility workers than regular company employees. Where in the hell did all these guys come from? He’d never seen this many on campus and pondered the idea that maybe they stayed hidden somewhere and only came out like firefighters when something needed fixing.

  He returned to his desk, where he sat down and thought about what was going on. Had someone on the campus done something that had knocked out the power and damaged everyone’s personal electronics? If so, they would be finished, unless the company could find a way to make money with their mistake.

  As Jared sat there thinking of what to do next, he realized a landline sat directly in front of him. He’d never used it in all the time he’d been at the company. Although it had rung quite a lot in the first few months of his employment, he never answered it, and people soon grew to understand that if you wanted to reach Jared Culp, you’d better have his mobile number. He snatched the telephone receiver from its cradle and put it to his ear. He heard no dial tone. Jared just held the handset for a moment, trying to process the last few sequences of events. Slowly he returned the handset to its cradle. He didn’t know for sure how much time had passed since the outage, but he figured it had to be about an hour or so.

  He returned to his office’s doorway again, peering down the hallway; this time it was empty. He stepped out farther from his cubicle and scanned the campus outside, seeing all the bicycles were now gone from the rack. He could see security moving around along with the utility personnel. The company, although it had many faults, took great care of the employees and was probably already putting together some sort of plan to get everyone home safe. Busses, cabs, or maybe a town car—somewhere someone had to have a working vehicle. Jared wished his phone worked so he could call an Uber and be done with this mess.

  “Hey, you there,” a security person said after spotting Jared and starting toward him from outside building 43. The man seemed agitated as he waved his hands and yelled several times.

  Jared moved toward the front door and met the man near the now empty bicycle rack. The man appeared amped up and out of breath.

  “What’s going on with the power?” Jared asked before the security man could start in on him.

  “Dunno, man. Just know that we’re clearing and securing every building on the campus.” The man moved past Jared and entered building 43.

  “Hey, my car won’t start, is the company going to get us home?”

  The security man shot a look over his shoulder, stopped, and turned back to face Jared. “Are you serious? Take a look around, man. All the power’s out, your car won’t start, and there’s a small plane parked in the east lot because it lost power and had to make an emergency landing.”

  Jared looked to the east, staring blankly in the direction of a small plane he couldn’t see from building 43.

  “So no, man, I don’t think the company is going to give you a lift home.” With that, the security man turned and moved into building 43, calling out to any stray employees.

  Chapter Two

  Darkness forced Jared back to his car, the only place he could think to go at the present time under the present circumstances, whatever they were. Once seated in his car, Jared locked the doors. He didn’t know why but he just knew he felt better with the doors locked. At this point, he found himself hungry, confused, and getting a little scared. He looked at the hulking outline of the other cars in the darkness and couldn’t tell if they also harbored evicted residents of the company buildings.

  His surroundings appeared pitch black, and Jared couldn’t remember being in a darker place in all his life. The only light was the ambient light from the heavens. The human eye adapts to loss of light in about thirty minutes. Jared’s eyes began to adjust to this new kind of darkness as he sat alone in his vehicle. A short time later he began to make out shapes in the inky blackness. Nothing was moving or making noise in the parking lot as the car began to feel stuffy. Jared turned the key and depressed the window button before being reeled back to the present reality, which didn’t foster power windows. Jared cracked the door open and was nearly scared into a premature grave when a man’s voice erupted from the darkness directly to the rear of his vehicle.

  “Yo, you got room in there?”

  “No, we’re full,” Jared blurted out as he pulled the car door closed, locking it with trembling fingers. Where did that guy come from? Jared turned in his seat, staring into the black night, tracking the shadowy figure as the man checked car doors and called out to people.

  Jared reached back and started to put on his seatbelt, but stopped short, letting the belt return to its taut, unused position. He was more than a little rattled right now, and that guy had done nothing to calm his deteriorating nerves. He felt vulnerable, thinking nothing he’d done in life had prepared him for spending the night in his car with no power, no cell phone, no food, no water. Jared glanced over his shoulder at the more spacious back seat of his car. With more effort than he would have thought necessary, he climbed between the two front seats and into the rear of the little car.

  Finally, Jared began to drift off into a less than deep slumber when he was literally ripped from his troubled dreams by a woman’s bloodcurdling scream. He didn’t move a muscle except to open his eyes. Jared lay absolutely motionless for nearly five full minutes before slowly raising himself to gaze out the car’s windows into the black and seemingly inhospitable night. His body was like an overtightened piano string, the stress well on its way to affecting his ability to form any likeness of a clear thought.

  Had he really heard a woman scream, or had he dreamed it? He was pretty sure it had been real, but began to doubt himself, just a little. Either way, it had woken him, causing even more chaos in an already hectic night of broken sleep, hunger, and thirst along with an unhealthy dose of instability in his world. Slowly the fatigue won over and Jared slipped back down in the back seat, his breath deepening and his muscles relaxing just a hair as he drifted into a fitful sleep, dreaming of shadowy figures and screaming women.

  Chapter Three

  Sunlight streamed in across the dash as Jared sat bolt upright, jerked into consciousness by the emerging day’s light. His mouth tasted like he hadn’t brushed his teeth in a week, and he was both hungry and thirsty. He looked around the parking lot and saw nothing but empty cars. Slowly he shifted his gaze skyward and took in the many different sources of smoke on the horizon.

  “What the hell?” he muttered as he sat fully upright, opening the car door. He stumbled out of the car and stretched before turning three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in all the smoke drifting across the skyline. What was going on? What was burning and why? Jared could hear no sirens and, come to think of it, he hadn’t heard a single siren all night. In fact, the day was void of all the normal ambient manmade noise usually assaulting one’s senses in any urban setting. Jared could hear birds chirping and that was about it. No, wait, he could hear insects. He could actually hear bees, or some other flying insect, humming about the parking lot.

  Jared struck out across the parking lot towards building 43. He had a toothbrush and could freshen up while he figured out what was going on. He again tugged his phone out of his pants pocket a
nd depressed the home button—nothing, fuck. He returned the phone to his pocket and glanced at his watch, which was also in a state of disobedient hibernation. Once Jared reached building 43, he found the doors locked with no indication of life inside. He walked the campus, looking for open doors to other buildings, and found none.

  As Jared made his way back towards his car, he saw a security man walking across the campus. Jared hesitated and then, simply out of desperation for an answer, waved at the man. Jared adjusted his course to intercept the man just before the guy would have cut between two campus buildings. “What’s going on with the power, man?”

  The security man stopped and looked Jared up and down before answering, “Don’t know.” The man turned and gestured back the way he’d come. “Everything went down last night, and the boss says to button it all up and keep everybody out till they can get it fixed.”

  “Yeah, you guys kicked me out of 43 last night and I had to sleep in my car,” Jared said, with more than a little edge to his voice.

  “Don’t know what to tell you, man. Can’t find the boss today, and I slept in some cat’s cubicle in 45 all night. Worst night’s sleep I ever had.” The man suddenly looked tired as he continued, “I’m tired, hungry and I’m going home. Gonna walk, I guess.”