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

He thought he saw a fluttering out in the distance over the cab of the truck. It was awfully hard to tell with that morning sun glaring in his eyes. Something about the movement, though… it nagged some dim thought out of sleepy memory.

Other voices over the radio, now; Fred’s: “They’re signaling, looks like…”

Greg clenched his teeth and pulled the rifle back. He leaned it against the wall, held out a hand and, without taking his eyes off the truck, said, “Let’s have the hunting rifle, Ali…”

She placed it in his hand silently and then stood close behind him; a presence he perceived as a precious weight at his back. He settled the bolt-action game rifle into the cradle of the window, eased his eye up to the high-powered scope’s monocle, and tracked until he found the truck again.

He saw the man standing up in the bed waving a great, white flag over his head in sweeping arcs and the volley of chills that passed over his body was so intense that a detached section of his mind finally thought it understood the origin of that old cliché about a person’s blood running cold.

“Ali, get down!” he hissed, still watching the truck. She immediately lowered to the line of couch cushions they’d laid on the floor, arranged behind a double-barrier of sandbags stacked up against their living room wall. They’d had a long discussion about that arrangement, once Greg understood how likely things were to come to a head between their people and the newcomers. Alish had been resistant at first, insisting that she would fight beside him when the time came. He explained the intent; that she was to wait until he fell before picking up the rifle to continue fighting so that there would be no lag in downrange fire… and she understood. She understood very well.

She lay down on her side, cradled an arm over the growing swell of her belly, and wrapped the fingers of her free hand around the grip of her own rifle.

Greg keyed his radio and spat, “This is a setup! We need to act now!”

“What? Are you sure?” It was Otis’s voice. He sounded near panic. “They waving a white flag, son!”

“I know! It’s a setup! It’s the exact thing we did!”

“You did…?”

“Gibs and Tom lured those raiders in by waving a white flag! Out on I-15? I’m telling you: this is bad.”

Silence for a few moments, all the while the truck trundled forward with the man up top waving his flag like he was in a parade. Greg felt the skin of his back and under his arms break out in a clammy sweat. He stretched his mouth wide open to keep from grinding his teeth.

After an aggravatingly long interval, Otis came on again: “Y’all see anyone else out there, ’sides that truck?”

“No,” Fred answered. “I been watching back down the trail. It’s just these guys.”

“You ready with that battery?” Andrew’s voice talking over Isaiah’s radio.

“Yeah,” Fred said. “I don’t think we wanna set it off, though, right? It’s just that one truck, and all…”

“Naw, sit on it for now,” Otis said. “Be ready if a bunch more come rollin’ in.”

“Well… say a bunch do? How do we know that—”

Unable to contain himself, Greg interrupted, “We know, okay? Jake, Gibs… all the rest of them, they were supposed to be back a while ago. They’re not coming back right now, are they? It’s just those other assholes. Doesn’t that mean something to anyone else? Don’t you guys see what’s happening here? If this was cool, and that’s a big damned if , wouldn’t some of ours be coming back with them?”

The channel fell silent again as the others considered his words. Greg had just a few seconds of hope where he thought they’d come around to reason; thought he wouldn’t have to waste any more time explaining why you never did stupid shit like try to pet a venomous snake or invite strange door-to-door vacuum salesmen into your house for a “free demo” (“ They could be casing the place to rob you… ” his father had once explained carefully). He flexed his hand, which was beginning to tingle, and waited to be turned loose.

“Anyone else?” asked Otis.

“Fucking Christ!” Greg muttered to himself. “Play Rock-Paper-Scissors while you’re at it…”

“Nothing along the north wall…” Isaiah sent.

“No movement, our end,” said Alan.

He heard Otis sigh over the channel; an odd, thin noise nearly reduced to static. “They wavin’ a flag, Greg. What if you’re wrong?”

He had the crosshair trained on the windshield of the truck. It rocked back and forth as it came, and though the sun was a son of a bitch, he was sure he could make out at least three heads.

“I’m not wrong,” he ground out. “They’re coming to fuck us, I tell you. You guys haven’t seen this kind of shit. You haven’t seen how some people have gotten out there. Trust me. It’s a… fucking… sham !”

He felt the pounding of his heart along the length of his index finger now; the steady thump-thump that sent pulses of nature’s own hydraulic fluid down the pipes, pressure building until he felt the finger twitch against the rifle trigger in time with that angry organ, and he rubbed the pad of his finger along the trigger’s inner curve almost sensuously.

The white flag passed back and forth unceasingly in lazy, curving arcs. “ We’re peaceful, we’re safe!” that flag seemed to call with each passing wave. In his memories, he saw himself sticking his head through the passenger’s side window of the Ford, seeing the jumble of cars creeping up on them, the waving of the bone-white shirt and the croaked rasp of Gibs’s shouted command.

GET SOME!

He thought of an old cowboy movie he had loved to watch with his brother and father, once upon a time, called The Outlaw Josey Wales. There was an old Indian in that film, the name of which now escaped Greg in years gone by, who had explained how it was when Josey finally turned loose his fury and killed everything in sight. He’d said, “Hell is coming to breakfast.”

That was how it had felt to Greg up in the cab of the truck when the shooting resumed; when he’d yanked Wang’s unresponsive form down over the seats and shielded him with his own body and the rattle-clank of bullets again spooled up on the spring steel, and the screaming erupted, and the oozing blood from Wang’s hip seeped into his hands and stained the cracks of his skin rust-brown for days after.

Hell had come to goddamned breakfast. Just as it had again. Right now.

“Think we’ll wait,” Otis said, voice so shaky that Greg thought the man might laugh or cry at any moment. Greg stifled a curse back into the radio at this pronouncement, pulled his head away from the rifle stock, reared up toward the ceiling of the home he’d built with his family for his family, and screamed down deep in his throat through sealed lips. His esophagus burned like fire under the assault of his frustration.

“Greg?” he heard Alish ask from the floor.

He looked down at her and froze. Just there, stretched out over a smattering of inadequate cushions, lay the most important thing in his world. He’d not yet begun to think of her as a wife—not for lack of commitment so much as for a general disbelief in the idea that he might be old enough or good enough to marry anyone—but the love he felt for her had grown to something profound over their time together. It had morphed of its own volition, seemingly when he’d not been paying attention, growing from the heart-pounding infatuation of lust to an easy maturity.

When Alan had finally left them to go his own way, and then later still when they’d come out to the rest of their friends and had been accepted, they were free to be themselves. To let things progress naturally. Openly.