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

Jake took them back across the creek to keep out of sight of the guard at the south end of town, but he then cut right along the foot of the mountains rather than plunging up the sharp slope and over the easy saddle from which they’d originally emerged. It was a calculated risk. Trekking overland as they were, there was a chance of being detected by that same guard they sought to avoid, and on a clear night, they would have been forced to avoid the route entirely. The cloud cover was their saving grace, obscuring the light of the moon and stars to such a degree that they felt the risk of detection was manageable. When they’d traveled south along this track for some fifteen to twenty minutes, Jake cut east, plunging directly into the mountain range. His legs pumped without mercy to eat up the heaving ground, grinding up the steep slope of the low mountain—low enough at this point that it might almost be termed a “hill”—and Rebecca began to puff under her combat load to match his pace.

Halfway up the slope to the abbreviated summit, just before it became steep enough that they would have had to lean forward and proceed on their hands as well as their feet, Jake diverted south again, picking out a narrow, jagged trail that made for easier going despite the fact that the uneven, patchy ground threatened to turn the ankles of careless travelers. They followed this for a time, Amanda grinding her teeth in frustration at the slow progress until they crested the rise and began to descend the other side. Here they found an old dirt road, rutted and overgrown in places but still clearly wide enough for full-sized vehicles, and though the rain that evening had been heavy, the ground here was densely packed and the downward grade was steep, such that the rainfall had run over it quickly with no chance to linger or saturate. The surface was therefore darkened and granular with moisture, but no true mud patches had developed. It made for fast travel and Jake exploited the dirt road for as long as he was able before cutting off down a game trail. It wasn’t long before Amanda was hopelessly lost, although she could tell by some innate sense of direction that they were still on the right track.

“Where the hell are we? What is this?” she finally asked.

“It’s one of the back ways,” Jake said as he hiked out ahead of her, chewing up the ground with the strides of his blocky legs. “It’ll get ugly again before long, but it’s good for shaving a few miles off the return trip.”

“A few miles?” Rebecca asked. “Why didn’t we take this on the way in?”

“I didn’t like how exposed it was where we would have emerged. Time is a bit of a factor now, more so than earlier, so I decided a little additional risk was worthy, yes?”

They cut into the Bowl from the south rim sometime later, where the ground was low and manageable and took their time coming down the slope, shuffling from tree to tree to arrest their momentum. Eventually, they emerged from the tree line, and each one of them produced flashlights, turned them on, and began waving them wildly up in the air as they came. When they hit open, level ground, they broke into a jog.

They found Gibs standing out in the center of the common ground when they pulled past the greenhouses, encumbered under a fighting rig with his rifle hanging at his side, and when he was sure it was really his people that had returned, he waved his hand overhead in three fast circles. As Jake, Amanda, and Rebecca reached him, the rest of their people came out of concealment from various dark nooks and crannies looking armed and vicious. The area went dark when they killed their flashlights, and the familiar faces that crowded around the communal gathering place were reduced to dark, inscrutable presences with bodies made blocky and misshapen under armor and gear. Amanda felt more than saw Rebecca rush over to join with one of them (Tom, of course), the two islands of dark matter merging into a single indistinguishable mass.

“Where are the children?” Jake asked.

“We got ’em locked up in the garage with Patty. They’ll either be playing pool or watching old movies on the TV,” responded Gibs’s disembodied voice.

“Good. There’s no one else in there with them? Nobody armed?”

“Patty’s got a couple of rifles in there with her, ready to rock ’n roll. I didn’t want to stick too many in there. Wanted everyone out here to fight if it came to that.”

“Where’s Elizabeth?” It was Barbara, standing out there alongside everyone else. Judging by the direction from which her voice had come and the shape of the bodies barely visible under the lightless, clouded sky, she was just as armed as the rest of them.

“She’s still in Jackson,” Amanda said in a flat voice. There were hisses and mutterings at this, and she quickly added, “We know where she is. We hit the theater as planned and wiped it out. Jake managed to take Riley alive and question him, so we know where she is. It sounds like there’s a number of people watching her right now, which is why we came back. We need more people to go get her.”

“Is Riley still alive?” asked Gibs.

“No,” Jake said.

There was a brief moment of silence, then, “Well… that’s at least one hemorrhoid that won’t be flaring up anymore.”

“Gibs, we need to get back in the cabin and do some planning,” Jake said. “We need to organize a coordinated attack, and I’ll need to rely on your assessment to decide who goes into town and who stays back to defend the Bowl. Someone should go update Patricia as well…”

“I’ll go,” Barbara said. “I’ll come straight to the cabin as soon as I can.”

“Thank you. Is… is that Fred out there?”

“Yeah, Jake, right here.”

“Did you find… George and Lum?”

“Yeah. They’re, uh… shit, man, they’re in the truck bed right now. Got ’em covered up.”

“That’s fine,” Jake said. “We’ll take care of them soon enough. Let’s everyone get in the cabin, please. There’s a lot of planning to cover.”

Ronny twisted around on the rickety, old mattress, struggling in vain to find a position from which he might derive some form of comfort. The goal eluded him obstinately, as though the concept of rest were some slippery, wayward animal that must be corralled, jammed into a pen, and strapped down under rope and harness. The mattress itself was of no assistance in his efforts; it was true that he’d learned to sleep on all manner of surfaces both inviting and foreboding in the passing years, but… it was also true that sleep was a state usually attained after a baseline level of psychological ease was achieved. He’d become comfortable with greater levels of… discomfort … over time, certainly, but every man had his limits. After having spent so much of his time scheming, covering bases, tying up loose ends, and always, always keeping one step ahead, it finally seemed that his long efforts were coming to fruition.

The tumblers were finally dropping into place, whether he was ready or not, and he wasn’t so sure how he felt about this. It had been so incredibly easy—so comfortable—to lurk through the spaces in which he could not be seen, to play both sides against the middle, and wait. Now that he was here, now that the beast he’d manufactured from the ground up had taken on life and was moving with a terrible momentum, now that his only recourse was to sit back and watch and hope that he’d calculated for all possible outcomes, he was forced to concede how unsettled he truly was.

The girl was locked up in the room adjacent to his; some sort of secretary’s office to the main office he now occupied. He wasn’t sure if it was properly termed a Priest’s Office or Father’s Sanctum… or perhaps the Pastor’s Solar; he’d never been the religious type nor had his family. If there’d been any signs or labels stating the rooms’ proper names at one time, such things were certainly absent now. He knew that his room had come with a large executive desk that had at some point been jammed up against a corner among some piles of shredded book leaves and other debris, that the adjoining room had been in a much similar state, though it was smaller with a less impressive desk, and his mind filled in the considerable blanks with what little information he’d managed to glean in watching old religious-themed horror movies throughout his life.