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

Greg knew a peacefulness with Alish he’d not felt since before the world had ended. Sometimes at night, when she was asleep and snoring softly, he would inch down in the bed, gently place his ear upon her back, and listen to her heart. He would listen to her heart and try to listen for the heart of their child.

His love and their child, who both lay on the floor over a shabby line of cushions; mother cradling child and rifle in each hand. Her eyes were locked onto his, and he saw a thing that threatened to break his heart.

Trust.

“Fuck this…” Greg spat, disgusted with himself that he’d waited so long. He pulled the rifle in tight, found the truck, and began to slowly lead the man with the flag. They were still coming at a relatively straight path to the commune, though the truck appeared to be drifting to the right by a foot for every ten or twenty it traveled forward.

He would not have to lead his target by much.

Clay leaned forward in his seat squinting into the punishing glare of sunlight reflected off what appeared to be giant picture windows slapped into the side of old shipping containers if you could believe that shit, scanning over surfaces and hard angles for movement when the first shot was fired. He saw it first before he truly realized what it was; a bright flare erupting from the bottom corner of the window he had been looking directly at, gone so fast he might almost have believed it was just another glimmer of sunlight off an uneven surface, but then they heard the boxcar smash of Perry’s body collapsing into the bed behind them, and things only proceeded to get worse from that point on.

Pap stomped down on the brake instantaneously with both feet like he was trying to boot-heel a yard of shit from a drunkard’s ass, and Clay, who was already leaning forward, experienced the unsettling sensation of his chin whiskers lightly grazing the edge of the dashboard before the shoulder strap of his seatbelt jerked up short and grooved a line down his chest. He had enough time to contemplate what a full impact might have done to his top row of teeth when Pap’s meaty hands disengaged his seatbelt and then began to fold him over like a rusty slinky, jamming him bodily into the footwell.

A crash sounded throughout the cab of the truck as though a heavy brick had been dropped on their roof from a tremendous height; Clay heard something like scattering marbles and felt a cascade of pellets run all down his back. Pap’s hands were on him again shortly after, rubbing along his back and neck, and he saw jagged little pellets of safety glass raining down all about him on the truck’s floor.

And with the window gone, he was able to hear the Fourth of July show outside; the combined report of a copious number of firearms.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Clay shouted.

“Just stay down, Baws!” Pap grunted above him. He sounded short of breath, probably fighting that ridiculously oversized belt buckle digging into his guts. “We got the engine block in front of us; we’s prob’ly okay fer now!”

“These people are fucking animals!” Clay shouted, incredulous. “There’s a fucking kid in here!”

“Hell if’n they knowed that! Stay down, gawt-damn it!”

The CB radio under the dash began to crackle at them—for a wonder, the fucking thing hadn’t been disintegrated yet—but before Clay could reach for it, another gunshot went off, this time right on top of them. Clay jerked hard in surprise at the sound; felt Pap jerk above him as well in sympathy.

“What the Christ?” Clay groaned. “That came from the back- GAH! “

He’d been inching up to look into the rear of the cab as he spoke, only to be met by the long, dark, gaping maw of a pistol barrel thrusting toward his face like a freight train driving forth from a tunnel. Clay felt his bowels run down to a churned froth as he saw it coming; wondered briefly if he’d end up shitting his pants after he was dead, when Pap’s ruddy mitt shot out, grabbed the pistol by its slide, and yanked it from the hand that held it. He thought he heard a childish squawk issue from the back seat, though it was impossible to tell for all the goddamned gunfire, but the hand that had held the pistol had been small and brown, and Charlie was about as white as they came.

“Char…?” Clay began and stuck his head back further. He was rewarded with a view of Charlie’s remains; his back pressed up against the door with his arms splayed out, his eyes staring off in disagreeing directions, and the sum total of all he’d ever been painted over the interior of the rear passenger seat in pink, meaty chunks and bubbled, red blood. Clay’s eyes tracked to the right and landed on the girl, who stared back at him in wordless murder. The butterfly bandages had popped loose from her top lip, allowing the split to open wide again in a pink-red gash that wept equal parts blood and a kind of yellow-clear fluid, trickling down past the corner of her mouth. She smiled back at him, the jagged edges of the cut spreading apart even more, and this seemed not to bother her in the slightest.

“ Jesus Christ… ” Clay whined; almost whimpered, really.

The CB cracked again. Pap and Clay stared directly at each other as the lazy voice of O.B. filtered into the cab amidst the chaos of hailing bullets.

“Well?” it queried.

Clay yanked the handset over, pulled the trigger, and shouted, “Yeah, you self-satisfied, Viagra-popping, cunt flap, we get it!”

“Shall I fix this for you, now?”

“ Yes… fucking… please! ”

He dropped the handset and lowered his head, waiting. There was nothing more to do after that, not even to try and reverse the truck. The engine block was probably composed more of jacketed lead than steel and aluminum by that point, anyway. There was nothing else to do outside of waiting for O.B. to respond with his crew.

“Yes… fucking… please!”

O.B. snorted a laugh at the panic in Clay’s voice before lowering the radio and looking down into the valley. He wasn’t quite high enough for the scene below to resemble a kicked anthill, but it came fairly close. He was crouched down on his hams within a thicket of trees and a sparse smattering of brush on the northeast wall; almost directly ahead of him—say a little less than a klick or so—was Pap’s GMC stapled in place by rifle fire of various origins. Off to the right; a motley assortment of buildings, hovels, campers, a decent looking cabin, giant garage, a school bus for Christ’s sake, and what appeared to be four rows of legitimate all-weather greenhouses. O.B. clucked his tongue in mild surprise when he first saw those. He’d been almost positive that the existence of such had been a horseshit story and that they’d all traipsed cross-country on a wild goose chase.

As he calmly observed the goatfuck spiraling out of control, his eyes detected regular muzzle flashes among the haphazard collection of buildings, and his mind began to construct a map of potential nests, organized by level of threat.

“Hey, uh… O.B.?”

He glanced over his shoulder at Ralph Somethingorother (he’d be diddled if he’d bother to remember anyone’s surnames in that outfit; the way they acted, they were about as good as a fresh battalion of legs—as likely to shoot themselves or friendlies as they were any hostiles).

Two things I hate , O.B. recited idly in his mind. A bow-legged woman and a straight-leg man…

Ralph squatted behind him on the slope, elevated about a foot over O.B.’s own head so he could see down into the eye of the shit storm. There were a few bandoliers of linked 7.62 slung over his shoulders as well as a couple of filled cans in the dirt beside him. His eyes flicked between the firefight and the old man crouched on the hill beneath him, drawn perhaps to the loud, hibiscus-riddled Hawaiian shirt O.B. always insisted on wearing.