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

“Try the handle first. Quietly!” Gibs whispered.

A moment’s hesitation followed by the flutter of a thumbs-up, and then a continuous line of backs and shoulders tensing under anticipation, the low whistle of woofed breaths, and then they were plowing through again, spilling into the next room to spread out like a cancer, dominating corners, darting lights into all points of darkness. The situation in this room was much the same as before, though the area was smaller; a smaller meeting place of some sort, perhaps. Along the back way, two more bodies and another door.

The heat was on both fire teams now, each empty room they encountered ratcheting the pressure up even further as they anticipated and were refused immediate release. It was, for them, standing before the firing squad and hearing the click of cycled actions; toeing up to the edge of the open hatch before tumbling out into open air, rolling end over end until the chute caught, billowed out, and preserved life in its operation. It was the anticipation of catastrophe, followed by catastrophe’s denial. By the time they were stacked up behind the next door, the muscles of their bodies thrummed like steel cables.

They blew through into a kind of side-office. The air was closer here; cloying. More articles of furniture in disarray; papers spread along the floor; debris of shattered particle board pulverized down into dust. Across the room: a metal framed bed on top of which reclined a man.

They spread out and encircled him as they entered, Gibs alone remembering to check rear corners and blind spots. Weapon light spot beams played over his body like starving, rapine fingers, exposing him fully in shades of white, grey, and black shadows that lengthened and stretched spasmodically along the wall against which he rested. Amanda drug her own light down his chest to his hand and saw that he’d been handcuffed to the bed frame; looked down further and saw where the feet of the bed frame had been bolted to the floor.

Jake stepped into the room behind them, to the prisoner’s eyes a looming void vomited up out of the darkness; a faceless presence hovering, undeniable and irresistible. It seemed to pause out in the darkened wilderness beyond the sweeping lights, immobile as a statue and then turned to walk past the others with the rifles. The mass of his back stopped before the room’s single window as if its owner sought to look out into the sky in hopes of scrying the weather through the scummed glass.

One of the lights lowered, reducing the agony of his retinas from panic to sustained brutality, and a gruff voice said, “What the fuck happened here?”

The man on the bed coughed, held a free hand before his eyes to ward off the rest of that blinding whiteness, and said, “That’s not Gibs, is it?”

Gibs straightened and looked around at the others. “Do I know you?”

The jagged tittering of exhausted laughter shook forth from behind the upraised hand, shoulders quivering against the wall. “Jesus,” the thin voice wheezed, “Jesus Christ. Fucking perfect…”

Gibs’s fist tightened around the grip of his rifle, producing a thin leathery creaking to match the paper-crackle of the man’s laughter. “And who are you?”

The man continued on as though he hadn’t heard. “This is hilarious. A little ahead of schedule, I guess; just my luck. Fuckin’… hah! Well, fuck me…”

“Hey, asshole…” Gibs intoned.

From his spot at the window, Jake said in a thick voice, “Oscar. Rebecca… Tom. This place is empty. Please position outside and keep watch. Check in with Wang and ask him to remain vigilant. This may yet be a trap.”

The man on the bed snorted.

The three who had been addressed glanced uncertainly at Gibs, who stood staring at the prisoner. After a moment he glanced back at them and shrugged. “Well? The hell are you looking at me for? Step lively.”

They floated out of the room silently, and Amanda shifted out away from Gibs to take advantage of the extra space. As they left, the prisoner continued to cackle to himself.

“Goddamn it… after all the planning…” he looked up at Gibs and said, “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been looking forward to this? Only to have it come and be chained up dickless on a bed?”

“What?” Gibs croaked.

The man leaned forward and hissed, “Free advice, GI Joe. Put one in my head.”

Gibs’s eyes narrowed at this, and the barrel of his rifle began to rise, almost of its own accord, muzzle coming into line with the man’s chest. He leaned forward and squinted at his face, and then his eyes widened. “You’re that Ronny twat, aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer; only bared his teeth and strained against the cuffs.

Gibs drew breath to say more, but Amanda stepped forward before he could speak.

“You know where my daughter is, Ronny?” Her eyes had become saturated in a haze of still panic, dilated pupils locked in place.

“I might…”

She came closer, pressed the barrel of her rifle into his eye, and slowly shoved inward until his head was pinned against the wall. She continued to shove, flattening out the soft organ within the socket by fractions of degrees, her own eyes quivering like caged animals until Ronny began to expel grunts of pain through clenched teeth like a rutting piglet.

“Where is my daughter?” she whispered slowly.

“Amanda…” Gibs warned.

“Tell me.” Still that calmness, like the explosion of a grenade frozen in a single instant by the cessation of all time; the universe poised on the head of a needle before falling back in on itself in calamitous heat death.

Gibs’s hand encircling her bicep, pulling gently but firmly. “Amanda… he needs to be alive to answer questions. Pull back… come on, now…”

The barrel pulled away from Ronny’s eye, its malign light exposing the action of the wet, rolling bulb pushing back out into form; exposing the obscenity of his returning smile.

“If it’s that important to you,” he crooned, “you’ll find your answers down the hall. Look! Go see! And then come back and tell me what you think!” He began to laugh again.

An icy, roiling intelligence turned over within the core of Amanda’s body. She felt the strength ebb from her legs as her face and hands fell numb, and she was making for the rear door on the other end of the little room before she knew what was happening. From what seemed like a hundred miles away, she heard the rumble of Gibs’s voice following behind her; the tread of his footsteps echoing inside her mind. Then she was through the door, looking into the wide expanse of a large office. Failing to take in any details of her surroundings, she saw another open door looming up before her in the distance, gaping wide open like a bloody maw. She moved toward it, feeling Gibs’s presence behind her and not caring that he was there.

The man at the window remained behind when the other two left to go see Ronny’s work. In the absence of light, he was visible now only as a mass of darkness within the expanse of greater darkness, and Ronny began to stretch his left foot down to the floor in search of the flashlight Clay had left him as a parting gift. It had rolled off the bed at some point during Ronny’s last rage, when he’d stood with one leg braced against the wall yanking at the cuffs with all his might, expelling a froth of furious curses as he jerked against the chain, rattling the bed but coming nowhere near pulling it loose. The flashlight had rolled off the bed in the midst of his convulsions and gone out when it impacted the floor, a loss he noticed only sometime later after he’d exhausted himself and collapsed upon the mattress. Now he searched for it carefully, probing over unseen ground with a hovering foot. Was that it? Or, no… that was just a book, maybe. Where the hell was it? He had a general idea of where it landed, but then it had been round, too. It may have rolled.