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

Elizabeth stood and, without a word, crossed the room to join him. They exited, leaving Rebecca to sit quietly in the dimly lit room. She sat on that couch, thinking about things for a long time.

Clay’s people broke through to inner Colorado Springs in mid-March of that year. They came in a vast column consisting of vehicles spanning a variety of shapes and sizes, from the small, fast-moving bikes all the way up to the three, giant supply semis dragging hundreds (perhaps thousands) of pounds of foodstuffs, water, diesel tanks, medicines, tents, clothing, bullets, oil crates, chests full of tools, cook pots, stoves and gas grills, and just about every other damned thing under the sun to have been built or dreamt of by man. At the head of the column was Clay Barton himself, riding passenger in Pap’s old GMC. The going was slow, now, progressing at less than a crawl as the wrecker crews cleared the path ahead into the heart of the city.

They were traveling north up the 25, the plan being to eventually break off along the 21 and pick up Bradley Road as it traveled out due east. Swinging up north, it would eventually take them to their target: Lead Devil Drive, and ultimately to the home of the infamous man of the same name.

Clay snorted as he looked out the window, fighting off a wave of boredom. From behind the wheel, Pap grinned and asked, “What’s funny?”

“Lead Devil…” Clay laughed, shaking his head. “Who the hell goes around calling himself that, anyway?”

Pap giggled happily, scratched at his crotch, and said, “Well, sir, I reckon a man like that coulda called himself whatever he wanted, and have not a damned one say boo to him. Crazy ol’ coot had more hardware than you’d believe.”

Clay grunted but said nothing further. He found he didn’t want to spend a great deal of time thinking about where they were heading; didn’t want to believe they’d find what they were looking for. On one hand, there was the chance they’d find nothing, which would be a fucking tragedy. But then, on the other, they might find it all. And despite his drive to get what some of the younger guys were calling “Superjacked,” he wondered if he’d find himself regretting this later. The crew was growing so damned fast. Christ if they hadn’t packed on another thirty people during their long, meandering winter exodus through the desert; keeping ahead of it all felt like trying to bail out the Titanic.

He was distracted from his thoughts by the hollow, metal crunch of another collision up the highway. Twenty-five feet ahead, Horace stood out on the pavement waving his arms in careful, sweeping arcs over his head as his man in the lead vehicle (Clay forgot the guy’s name), an Army Hummer they’d picked up some ways back, edged forward towards another bunch of dead cars. They’d modified the hell out of that Hummer, half-welding, and half-bolting a big snow plow onto the front of it so that it stuck out low to the ground like a bulldozer scoop. It wasn’t articulated, of course—they couldn’t move the thing up or down—but it had an irresistibly persuasive low center of gravity; it could get underneath just about anything and shove the fucker on by, except for the really big stuff.

Slow and steady pressure was the key. That and patience.

“How’s the fuel lookin’, Pap?”

“’S fine, Baws. We’re really only rolling at idle right now.”

Clay rolled his window all the way down, grabbed the pull handle anchored to the GMC’s roof, and leaned up out of the side of the truck, getting as much elevation as he could. The boneyard of fallen trucks and cars appeared to stretch on for another couple of miles. He dropped back into his seat, grimacing, and then looked into the side-view mirror. The column following him didn’t stretch back nearly as far, but it was starting to be a close goddamned thing.

“This is some of the worst I ever seen,” said Pap thoughtfully.

“Yeah. I’m starting to regret not taking that backroad we passed.”

Pap remained strategically silent; it had been his suggestion to take the side road five miles ago, which Clay had dismissed with a wave. No need to bring that up, as far as he was concerned.

Clay sighed, dragged his hand over his face angrily, and cursed.

“Huh?” grunted Pap.

“Well, we’re just gonna be here until the next fucking winter comes around, Pap, that’s all there is to it. This cocksucking traffic… it’s like someone decided to hold a “Who’s the Biggest Cunt?” contest on the day the world died, and every miserable fuck in Colorado decided to show up all at once and go for the fuckin’ gold.”

He sat in his seat a few more minutes, stewing, before he spat, “Fuckin’ traffic…” He grabbed the handset from the CB mounted under the dash, hit the talk button, and said, “Ronny, Elton. Get up here.”

“What’s it all about, Baws?”

“Meeting. Go on ahead and kill the engine, Pap. I figure the fucking Caltrans flunkies up there’ll be at it a while, huh?”

They hopped out of the truck and spent a few minutes stretching their legs and backs while they waited for the others to show. Pap planned on it being a bit; Elton was along the middle of the line, but Ronny was stacked all the way in the rear with the remainder of his marauders. He twisted back and forth a bit, a series of cracks bursting forth from his spine like a string of Black Cats, and then stood behind the privacy of the driver’s side door to relieve himself. By the time he was shaking off, he heard Ronny pull up in that agile, little desert buggy of his—Clay was already bawling at Pap to step over and make a quorum.

They stood in a tight circle on the side of the road, one of them poking his head up periodically to look up and down the highway, and had a bit of a meeting.

“So, what’s the deal?” Ronny asked.

“This is gonna be a while,” Clay said, jerking his head towards Horace, who was shouting angrily at the Humvee’s driver. “I figure we break some people off and go ahead to secure the area, huh?”

“You wanna leave everyone else here?” Elton asked. He sounded uncertain.

“We won’t take all the shooters with us. Just enough to get the job done.”

Ronny scratched his chin and asked, “How many you figure?”

Clay looked back down along the column a moment, chewing his bottom lip, and mused, “Oh… I suppose… eight of yours, eight of Elton’s, and eight of Pap’s’ll be enough. That’s twenty-eight with us four. What do you think, Pap?”

The bulky Texan pulled the formless old straw cowboy hat from his head, mopped his brow with a forearm, and said, “Reckon if we can’t do it with twenty-eight, we got no business tryin’ at all.”

“You’re fellas see anyone out there on the road?” Ronny asked Elton. Clay noted he was being awfully deferential to the man, these days. He didn’t know if Ronny was trying to smooth that shit with Beau over or if there was some other new shit in play. He sighed; the whole goddamned affair made him exhausted.

Elton only shook his head. “Like a graveyard.”

Ronny looked back at Clay. “Well, I think if we do it, we better do it now while there’s still plenty of light. I guess we’ll run into people in the city, like we’ve been so far.”

“Well, I think we go around it, like we planned,” said Clay.

“Yeah, but after…”

Clay smiled and felt some measure of satisfied warmth when that look of certainty faltered from Ronny’s face. “Assuming all this works out, Ronny, ‘after’ won’t matter.”

They took two trucks and loaded the overspill of people into the beds, which had caused a bit of a hassle as those beds had needed to be emptied to make room for them. This hadn’t posed too much of a delay, though; twenty-four guys (well, men and women, strictly speaking, but they were always just “guys” to Clay) could unload a couple of trucks fairly quick.