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

“Wang! How copy?”

“It’s Greg! Wang’s too fucked up to talk! I couldn’t even move him; I’m driving from the center in here!”

“Fine!” I shouted. “Listen to me: pin that peddle into the floorboard, do you copy? I don’t care if the engine explodes and the transmission is shat out the back end! You get me every bit of speed out of this bitch that you can find!”

“Understood!” he shouted back, though his voice sounded small in the earpiece, and the truck lurched forward under us again.

I dropped the SRS in favor of the H&K, pawed at Davidson’s shoulder to haul myself back into position, and put my muzzle back over the wall. I heard the snap of bullets passing by in the air; saw the pursuit behind us falling back due to our unanticipated surge forward. They were falling back, but then that increase in distance began to slow as they fought to keep up with us. There was shooting in the air all around us, shield wall rattling against our chests like a living, aggravated animal.

I went to work, then, and a blood lust came on me the likes of which I’d never before experienced and have not encountered since. The rifle came alive under my hands, and the world went black around the edges of my vision as I shot at everything that moved before me. I suspect a lot of it was the adrenaline, which had surged up again in response to my exposure.

James Mattis, the patron saint of all Marines, once said, “There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed.” Well, I’m here to tell you that wasn’t a bunch of machismo bullshit on his part; anyone that’s come out of a firefight alive will tell you the same thing. There is no feeling, not even sex, that’s as sweet as coming face to face with Death and cheating that son of a bitch. When you’re in a fight and the enemy’s missing, when the bullets are sliding off of you, and your buddies are standing beside you alive and angry…

There are two circumstances under which you’ll ever feel invincible in a gunfight: you’re either dominating the battlespace, and everything is going your way, or all means of retreat have been closed to you. When the choices are either to prevail or die, and you’re maybe unsure about which way it’s likely to go, but you’re okay with either outcome.

I don’t know which it was for me at that exact moment; don’t know if I was kill drunk because things were starting to look good again or because it didn’t matter how they looked at all. I remember how hard I screamed—just this long, endless outpouring of rage and frustration. I screamed to drown out the rushing wind and the revving engines and the constant rumble of gunfire. I wanted the ones I was shooting at to hear me howl; to know that I was going to keep on killing them for as long as they’d let me and that I loved them for letting me do so. I was grateful to them for being there to receive what I had to offer.

I don’t remember what Davidson was up to by that point; only remember that I could still feel his presence next to me, that I still felt the percussion of his weapon firing at all angles. My vision blurred and I blinked angrily, squirting tears from both sides of my eyes, and I don’t know if those tears were from wind or fury. I quit yelling at them only when I had to change out magazines; all I got for a breath was that little window before I was hollering and shooting again, as though my screaming were a requirement to the weapon’s function.

We stood like that, Davidson and me, and I killed more people in the space of a few minutes than all the other days of my life combined. For that instant, when the concept of “five minutes later” didn’t even feel like a remote possibility, I was fine with it.

The mountain wall rose up out of the ground before us on the right after not too long, and we quickly closed the distance. Our pursuit was fighting to make up some distance again; one last push before we plunged into the safety of the Hot Gates. They’d had a hell of a time keeping up as Davidson, and I had killed enough drivers and engines that vehicles had either rolled to a stop or crashed into those adjacent, peppering the length of the highway with pile-ups and jumbled bodies. I’d taken some rounds to the chest in the confusion of it all, the wall beginning to truly fail despite our best efforts to keep it serviceable.

At one point I looked over at Davidson, who had been laughing, to see that the bottom half of his left ear was gone with a sheet of blood running down his neck. There was a big, grey scrape running up the middle of his helmet accompanied by a visible crack that threatened to make me feel queasy if I spent too long thinking about what caused it.

Before I knew what was happening, the shadow of the desert-brown mountain walls loomed up on either side of us, abrupt as a thundercloud passing in front of the sun, and we plunged into the narrow pass that cut through the Virgin Mountains. The 15 was reduced to two lanes in either direction through these parts, divided in the center by a gorgeous concrete wall. Those bastards could get on the wrong side, sure, but they couldn’t get back over at us after they did.

“Greg… copy?” I shouted into my mic.

“Yeah?” he came back.

“How we doing up there, kid?”

He tried to respond, but the signal was broken up by interference. I cursed the piece of shit civilian radio and fiddled around with the display to confirm I was still on the right channel.

“Repeat your last, Greg!”

“I said Wang is seriously fucked up, man! I got a sweater crammed up against his ass, but it’s soaked throu—”

More static in the earpiece.

“—pale! We gotta get away from these guys and fix him up!”

“Okay, okay, copy all!” I lied. “Listen: slow us down again!”

“The fuck, man? I just said—”

“I know what you said. Slow us down anyway. We’ve got to stop these cocksuckers now, or there’ll be no fixing up Wang ever.”

The column rounded the bend into the cleft behind us and began to gain again; we were crawling along at something like thirty miles per hour. They came at us three abreast, unable to spread out any wider than that in the cleft, each row composed of a couple of vehicles on the road and one on the soft shoulder. Every so often, the passage narrowed enough that the ones on the shoulder had to merge back onto the pavement. Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly; the number of vehicles behind us had been reduced significantly over the last little while), they slowed down as soon as they saw us, once again hanging back to see what we would do.

“What’s our play if they don’t come at us?” asked Davidson.

Instead of answering, I asked, “How many of those grenades do you have left?”

“Eight.”

“Mmm,” I nodded. “Crouch down behind that wall where our friends can’t see and line us up a few more rifles. Get them all set with full mags, then start refilling all the other empty mags on the floor. Shit, fill a couple of those Mossbergs with slugs as well.”

“You got it,” he said and dropped to his knees to get busy. He was at it for several minutes while that whole army of cowards hung back behind us, my contempt for them growing the whole time. It seemed they’d been stung enough by then that they were more interested in waiting us out than having another go. When he was done, there were several loaded rifles at our feet, a couple of shotguns, the pouches on both of our rigs were filled near to bursting, and there was a 40 mm grenade waiting in the M203.

“You ready to make an end of this?” I asked.

Davidson reclaimed his position next to me and said, “Hell yes.” He knew what was coming next, I think; he had his rifle pressed up against the wall with his knee and hung empty hands out in the open where they’d be visible.