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

The roads became miserable as they went further north, brutalizing the smaller vehicles—the wood-powered four-cylinder imports with low-slung chassis and unforgiving suspensions took a significant beating. They had to pull the whole column aside sometimes when a rigid syngas feed was jarred entirely loose from an engine manifold—sometimes even two or three vehicles at once—and Ned’s team had to run out for repairs. It became an order of magnitude worse when they started running into derelict vehicles again. Horace’s old snowplow Hummer had broken down on the way and, lacking the parts necessary to fix it, they’d been forced to leave it behind on the roadside. The lack of that old machine was a pain most acute in Clay’s ass.

They bottlenecked hard through such choke-points; cars and trucks piled up like blood cells, clotting dangerously as time passed, soon to dislodge and perhaps kill what followed by means of some mechanized stroke. Clay looked out at the clusterfuck of merging vehicles twisted into riots before him and thought again of the tank back in Colorado, that old war machine that had once held so much promise… so very much promise before they’d learned that the transmission had been pulled from the body like a sick organ, no doubt sent off to some specialty shop for a rebuild. What a bitter, heartbreaking discovery that had been.

He looked out at the vast assembly of people traveling with every worldly possession they still owned—many of them having left much of what they’d built behind—listened to them as they cursed each other and honked as though they still lived in a place and time where honking was a sensible behavior and wondered again if he’d not shit the bed in a galactic blunder. Every hope and thought was pinned on the city ahead, on Jackson, and he feared that once they arrived, that would just be it. He’d never get them moving again, even if he had to, and that he had no real right asking them to move again even so.

He made a fist with his right hand and sighed and slumped his shoulders… and prayed for a pot at the end of the rainbow; a pot filled with food. Food, security… safety. A home. A place to settle.

Fucking God, how he wanted a drink.

They hit the line of cars before they saw the city, pushed over to the shoulder as they were, sporadic at first like a broken line of Morse code bordering the hillside. Then the roofs of the first buildings faded into view, all of them on the west side of the road; the east side butted up to scrub brush hills capped by tree-covered peaks—the tapering head of Snow King Mountain. The dead cars began to stack bumper to bumper just beyond High School Road, but they were all still pushed well clear of the path. The line was orderly and thoughtful.

“There she is, Baws,” said Pap from the driver’s seat. “This’ll be Jackson.”

“Ronny was right, at least,” mused Clay. “Someone’s been through here and cleaned up. I suppose that’s a good sign, huh?”

“How so?”

Clay shrugged. “Well, they’re making the roads fucking passable, aren’t they? Seems welcoming, is all. Leastwise we don’t have to spend a bunch of time waiting for Horace’s fucking crew to clear out a road with machinery we don’t have—you want to spend some time looking at the positive shit, huh, Pap?”

“Looks like a damn ghost town to me…”

“Yeah, these days every town looks like a ghost town.”

“Ain’t what I mean.”

“Well then say what you mean, fucking Pap, before my heart succumbs to the suspense.”

“I’ll say what I mean when I know what I fuckin’ mean!” He yanked his hat off, dragged a forearm across his brow, and then mashed his hat back on. He muttered and twisted the steering wheel of the truck, ranch hand palms creaking like old leather.

Clay eyed the agitation of his friend from the corner of his eye, waiting for him to come back down to a simmer. “All right, Pap, all right. We’ll do it your way. If we get into some shit, I’ll say you were right. And if not… I won’t say a damned thing at all, huh?”

“’Preciate it.”

“Uh.” He drew out the CB handset. “Hey, O.B.?”

A moment’s wait followed by a lively crackle.

“Copy.”

“Let’s you, me, and another gun crew roll up to the head and blaze us a fucking trail, okay?”

Another crackle, followed by, “Roger. Meet you up front in a few.”

Clay hung up the handset and nodded to Pap, who pulled out from behind the column and began to pass the vehicles by, running up the center of the road. As they went, Clay rolled his window down, waved to Pap to slow up a bit, and called to Ronny: “All’s well—just maintain back here!”

Pap goosed the gas and Clay watched Ronny’s thumbs-up from the side view mirror.

They were the first to reach the tip of the column; a land-eating monster composed of cars and trucks of every shape and size, some of which were powered by old-world fuels while still others ran on even older stuff; simple blocks of wood processed by extreme heat down to flammable synthesis gas. When they reached the front, Clay turned in his seat to look out behind them and experienced that same mild blast of shock at the realization that he could no longer see the end of the line.

Two other trucks pulled up to either side of them soon after they’d established their position. The truck to their left had a crew of three men up in the bed, one of whom leaned into a machine-gun laid over the cab roof. On the right, also standing up in the bed, was O.B., a grizzled relic from the Vietnam era. Dressed in jeans, a flowery Hawaiian shirt nearly as loud as the M60 he held, and a busted-out pair of Red Wings work boots, he moved eyes obscured by giant black wrap-around sunglasses over the landscape—the younger kid who pulled duty as his gunner bitch called them “glaucoma shields.” He wore the disinterested smirk of a man who by that point planned on seeing nothing new at all and, after the fall of the world, he was more than likely correct. Thick curls of bone-white hair fluttered over the tanned leather skin of the wrinkled, ropy muscles of his arms. He looked at Clay as they pulled up into position and then looked away again without acknowledging him.

Clay liked O.B. (initials that might have stood for “Old Bastard” or any other number of things; he wouldn’t give his name). He was one of Pap’s guys, just like all the rest of the fellas in those trucks, which meant he’d been hand-picked, and the only reason he wasn’t actually running the show instead of Pap had to do with a question of loyalty. Pap’s was absolute and unquestioning. O.B. reminded Clay of an old spaghetti western cowboy; he might shoot you as soon as look at you if you managed to say the wrong thing to him. He spoke only when he judged the act of speaking to be needful, which wasn’t often at all, and sometimes Clay wondered if the man didn’t hold back out of some dark amusement, as though he chose to allow the rest of them to spin their wheels for the sake of his own personal entertainment.

Clay had met the man on the firing line at the Lead Devil’s, back when the machine-gun crews were being selected and trained. He explained to the younger guys, really only kids in O.B.’s estimation, that the M60 was a weapon that favored short, controlled bursts of fire, and then leaned back to smirk as those kids sneered and laughed at the idea of such a thing. One of these had racked his weapon, deciding he’d had enough instruction, and began to pepper the whole berm out in front of them. Something like a hundred and fifty rounds of the belt must have fed through the weapon before the little idiot became panicked and started to shout, “Hey! Hey, HEY!” He’d pulled his finger completely off the trigger, but the weapon just kept chugging along dumping ball ammo into hillside.