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

His vision narrowed down to a pinhole and he became incredibly angry; he felt as though he was just beginning to get a handle on things and now here he was, apparently passing out again. He focused on the little dot of light in front of him, willing it to widen out into a full-view picture, straining with everything he had. He couldn’t tell if he was groaning or not but Christ almighty, was he ever straining! When his eyes shot open, he almost croaked out in alarm, having fully expected to lose that battle. Something was wrong, though… the light had shifted away to another part of the room, and it was nowhere near as bright as it had been just a second ago.

There was a greenish blob in front of him making a bunch of noise. He blinked hard and was shocked at the tenacity his eyelids demonstrated in sticking together when he tried to open them; he was afraid he might need to separate them again with his fingers before they finally pulled apart. It felt to Wang like trying to unstick Velcro. He blinked a few more times, just to prove to himself that he could do so reliably, and saw that the greenish blob was really a person in fatigues. Blinking some more, he saw that it appeared to be a woman; she held a clipboard in her arm, and there was a stethoscope incongruously draped around her neck. Her mouth vibrated inhumanly, which scared the hell out of him. He shook his head and tried to speak but failed.

The woman came closer, and now he could see that her mouth wasn’t vibrating; she was just speaking, though she sounded as though she was very far away. Confused, he only shook his head.

She moved her hand and then there was that piercing fucking light again, boring a hole through his eyeball into his brain. He tried to close his eyes and failed; there was something pulling up on his eyebrow. The light went away, thank God, and he learned the thing pulling on his eyebrow was her latex-covered thumb.

“One more time,” she said, her voice husky yet still pleasingly feminine. “Can you tell me how you’re feeling, Mr. Zhao?”

He tried to speak again, but all that came was an alarming clicking noise. Before he knew what was happening, a straw was placed up against his bottom lip. Without having to think about it or even having to command his body to do anything, his mouth began to suck involuntarily, pulling mouthful after mouthful of clean, blessedly cool water down his throat. He pulled and pulled until there was nothing but the hollow, echoing slurp at the bottom of the empty Styrofoam cup.

He dropped his head back and panted. “Oh my god, you’re an angel. I don’t know who you are, but you can stay as long as you like. Just keep giving me water, for the love of all that’s holy!”

She laughed freely, the rasp in her voice more pronounced than when she spoke normally, and said, “Okay, I can get you more of that, but you have to answer my question first.”

“I’ll feel however you want me to feel if you give me more to drink. Holy crap!”

That laugh again. “I’ll get you more, of course, but first…?”

He gave the question serious thought, not wanting to disappoint her and lose out on getting more of that glorious water. His head felt as though it had been packed with cotton; when he rotated it, the insides seemed to swish around against the inside of his skull before coming to a stop. Ultimately, he decided that honesty was probably the best policy.

“I feel like I’ve been crammed into a steamer trunk and thrown down a staircase. Twice.”

She smiled and took a brief moment to examine the back of her purple-gloved hand. “That sounds about right.”

“What the hell happened to me? Where am I, even?”

She pulled a chair out of the tent’s corner and sat down at his bedside. “One thing at a time. For starters, I’m going to call you Wang, if that’s okay with you. I’m Olivia. I’d rather be on friendly terms, and frankly, I think I’m butchering the hell out of your name’s pronunciation when I call you ‘Mr. Zhao.’”

Wang pshawed and flapped a lazy hand at her. “Fine. I’m hardly old enough to be a Mister, anyway. I’m only twenty-one.”

“What do you remember?”

He rested his head back to look at the ceiling of the tent. It was round with ribs at regular intervals, like he was lying inside a giant bisected soup can that had been tipped over on its side. “I remember driving like crazy, trying to get away from a gunfight. Gibs and the others… oh, shit! Where’s Gibs? Is his leg okay?”

“He’s fine. He’s totally fine,” she assured him. “He left shortly after we got you stabilized; just long enough to be sure you’d be okay, and then he, Tom, and Greg hit the road for home.”

Wang sighed. “Thank God.” He lay there a moment, slowed brain working things out, and then asked, “Hey, uh, how long have I been… wherever this is?”

“Three days,” Olivia said. “You’re in recovery.”

“Three days,” Wang repeated in shock. “Do we know if they made it back okay?”

Olivia shrugged one shoulder and said, “I assume so. We didn’t send them back on their own; Otter sent a few guys back with them. Most of them were Guard, but Jeffries insisted on going along too. He said he wanted to see the job done. He’s a tough bastard for a wrench-head; I’m betting they made it home just based on his stubbornness.”

Wang’s laugh turned into a singular aborted cough, and he said, “Yeah, Gibs is a bit of a pain as well.”

“I met Gibs briefly. I liked him,” she said.

Wang squinted thoughtfully. “Did you say, ‘ Otter ?’”

“Ah, yeah, I did. That’s Commander Warren. His name is actually Otto, but his nickname has been Otter since forever. The story is that he got it in Buds because he basically strolled through all of the underwater portions of the course.”

“Buds?”

“Basic Underwater Demolition Seal training.”

Something about the chain of words Olivia recited tickled a memory deep within Wang’s brain, perhaps from a childhood spent absorbing every Friday-night action movie that was played on cable (the mid-range channels where you could still see some decent blood and violence but where they also still edited out all of the fucks , shits , and nipples). At first, he couldn’t quite pull it together, instead getting entirely hung up on the similarities between an Otter and a Seal.

A… seal.

“Holy crap, the dude’s a Navy Seal?”

Olivia nodded and said, “Well, he’s kind of The Seal. As far as any of us know, he’s the last one.”

“The last? There were whole teams, weren’t there? What happened to them all?”

“Well, let’s consider that…” Olivia said. “Think about how many people we lost after everything happened. How many people were there in America before the Flare? Three-hundred million? Now, let’s say after it was all said and done, one percent was left. That’s three million, right?”

“Sure,” Wang said, taking what she said completely on faith. Finding one percent of three-hundred million usually would have required no thought at all from him but, in his current state, even adding four and six was iffy.

“Okay, so for the people who died as a result of the Flare, there was a lot of commonality. It was mostly the very young, the very old, or the sick, for obvious reasons. But the Plague was totally indiscriminate, remember? It killed off everyone equally, so the minorities became even more… well, minor, I guess? Ugh, that sounds horrible out loud.” She said the last part self-consciously, concerned over how Wang (a minority himself) would take the statement.

He either failed to notice or simply did not care. He said, “I see what you mean. Less of everyone… and those people that we didn’t have a lot of to begin with are even more scarce.”