Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

The 5.56x45mm is a flat-out devastating round… provided it has enough ass behind it when it hits you. If the bullet strikes you with enough energy, it tends to yaw inside of you, fragments into shards, and dumps every bit of its energy into your soft tissues. As it passes through you, it creates a temporary cavity inside of your body that expands rapidly out from the center; there is basically a little kinetic bomb going off inside of you when it impacts. This temporary cavity can and will expand to the size of a bowling ball; even larger than a bowling ball, in some cases, if the bullet strikes bone, which seems to sharpen impact and transfer energy more violently. Anything in the path of this expanding bubble (your muscle, organs, and any other soft tissue) is ripped to shreds in the violent displacement and will bleed out rapidly after the temporary cavity collapses in on itself and everything slams back into place.

The catch is that the bullet has to really be moving for this to happen reliably; about 2,500 feet per second or better. Bullets lose speed over time. They start losing speed, in fact, as soon as they exit the muzzle of the rifle. When you have a longer rifle barrel, muzzle velocity is maximized, and the bullet will travel for farther distances at a faster rate.

When you’re dealing with an M4 style carbine having a barrel length of fourteen and a half inches, you’re giving up a tremendous amount of muzzle velocity over distance. You’re basically creating a situation where the bullet isn’t getting the energy it needs to do its job, cutting the effective range from around five hundred meters down to maybe three hundred or so. This was the primary criticism of the 5.56 round by the way, which I always felt was foolish. If a bullet requires a certain barrel length to perform properly (twenty inches, in this case, for best results), you don’t cut five and a half inches off the barrel and then claim the round is a piece of shit when it doesn’t behave the way you’d like. That’s just moronic.

Wang’s new rifle, incidentally, had an eighteen-inch barrel. I’d personally seen Wang perform better than everyone else in our group at distances in excess of three hundred yards on open iron sights; he was the right man to carry the long gun.

Amanda had her ever-present Israeli salad shooter with her as well as her Glock 17 in a leg holster. Along with these items, I was wearing my plate carrier and rig while the others had some sort of concealable ballistic vests which I had been informed would stand up to at least a .38 round at close range. I hadn’t seen this myself nor was I aware of them being tested for any higher caliber, but I still felt better with my buddies wearing them. They were bound to be more effective than just t-shirts and good intentions.

Before we left, Oscar offered the tip that any large scale construction site would most likely have a collection of two-way radios. They had apparently used them all the time when he was in the business. Some of those buildings he worked on got up into the tens of thousands of square feet with the work crew spread out over the whole area, so it made more sense for the guys to communicate over radios than it did for them to hoof it from group to group to have a chit chat. We all thanked him and later cursed his name when we drove all over Jackson and the surrounding area looking for anything that resembled a moderate to large scale construction site.

In the grand scheme of things, Jackson is goddamned small. A Kmart is about as big as it gets in this town.

Now, I don’t know how it happened, but at some point (a point that transpired some two hours after rolling all over the place) we realized that we’d completely forgotten why we were out there. We were looking for radios. We’d ended up searching exclusively for anything that looked like a large construction site.

“Look around for heavy equipment,” I said after Amanda commented that it didn’t appear as though we would find something anytime soon. “Earthmovers, cranes… a backhoe.”

“I think it’s time we give up on the construction angle, guys,” Wang said from the back.

“What?” I said, turning in my seat to look at him.

“Oscar was being helpful by giving us options, but construction sites aren’t the only place we’ll find radios. Where’s the closest bank? Banks had security guards, remember? They probably have a whole stack of radios wherever it is those guys had their break room.”

I faced forward and sat for a moment with my mouth open, crafting a sufficiently toxic insult to apply to myself while Amanda began to laugh. “Well, I’m glad we brought him!” she said.

“What is it? What’d I do?” asked Wang.

“Nothing, man,” I said. “She’s just laughing at how stupid we seem to be. Amanda, do you know where the closest bank is from here?”

“Yeah, there’s a Wells Fargo just off Buffalo Way. I’ll have us there in ten.”

“Good deal. Hey, Wang?” I said.

“Yeah, Gibs.”

“Thanks for setting us straight. Not to be an ass or anything, but do you think you could do that before two hours go by next time?”

“Sorry, man. It had only just occurred to me, really. I had tunnel vision, too.”

“I suppose that makes me feel better,” Amanda said, still laughing.

“God, I sure don’t,” I said. “Remind me to slap Oscar the next time I see him.”

“It’s not his fault,” Wang said. “He was just being helpful.”

“Stop being reasonable, damn it. I really want this to be Oscar’s fault.”

Wang laughed at this and didn’t bother to answer with anything further. We all felt like idiots by then. There wasn’t much more to do but laugh it off.

What followed was one of the most bizarre, circuitous routes I had yet experienced since settling in the valley. Wells Fargo was probably the biggest personal banking location in the area, but it happened to be buried deep in the center of the city, far removed from any block we’d managed to clear out so far. We were lucky that Amanda was with us; she seemed to have a gps map of Jackson programmed into her head. We drove through all manner of side roads, switching back and forth block by block, often giving up one block of progress to make up two blocks later.

I used to keep my eyes open on these little excursions hoping to spot military outposts or checkpoints along the way but had long since given up all hope along those lines. Apparently, there had been little to no government presence in Wyoming at all during the fall, owing to the state’s low population and vast expanses of nothingness. The guys in planning and logistics evidently decided that it made more sense to ship people from Wyoming into nearby states that were more populous (and thus had emergency infrastructure already in place). Aside from the obvious drawback of having no gear to pillage, the city’s never having any military presence meant that the streets had never been cleared off at any point outside of what the local government had managed to accomplish before the total breakdown. To my knowledge, any road clearing around here had been accomplished by our people.

This was evident as we made our way further north. I became convinced that Amanda had finally been defeated by the ubiquitous snarl when she rounded a corner onto a street so tightly packed with cars, trucks, and other vehicles that we couldn’t have made it to the next intersection without jumping from roof to roof. Just as I opened my mouth to tell her that it was no big deal and bound to happen at some point, she pulled a hard right up onto the sidewalk and drove through the front yard of a single-family home, veering off to the left to miss the house itself and plow through an opening in the backyard fence. As we passed through a surreal landscape populated by yard toys, a couple of pitched tents, and a swing set, I noticed a line of tire tracks already imprinted into the ground in front of us, indicating that someone had driven through here already.