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

“Did… did you wanna, you know, help those guys down there, or…?”

O.B. smiled back at him and extended an index finger in a “ just one moment, my boy ” gesture. He looked back down the hill a moment longer before he handed the little toy radio over to Ralph. When the radio was taken away, he kept his hand extended out in space, palm up, until he felt the heavier VHF radio slapped into his palm. He lifted it up close to his whiskered mouth, hit talk, and said, “Bush Babies, copy?”

The radio cracked immediately, and a tinny, distant voice responded, “Loud and clear, over?”

“I make four nests down in the compound, spread out between those portables, the cabin, and then up in the trees behind the cabin. Sound right to you? Over?”

“Yeah… yeah, pretty close, but be advised that we think there’s another crew active on your slope, over.”

O.B. nodded thoughtfully. He’d figured he heard some action down there.

“Got a position on ’em? Over.”

“They’re either spread out or moving east to get a flanking position on our truck. Over.”

“Okie-doke. Tell you what; I’m gonna start walking rounds onto targets. You’ll see me when I do, along with everyone else that isn’t blind. When the fellas below me open up again, you send me a direction, understand?”

“Copy all. Light ’em up.”

O.B. cleared his throat into the radio and added, “No one else is to engage any targets to start, are we clear? Over.”

The line was silent a moment while those on the other end considered his instructions, all the while the small arms fire down in the valley continued to rattle away at that isolated truck. Then: “Um… why?”

“I don’t want them to know how many of us are up here and I don’t want to just drop the hammer on them outright. We’re gonna turn the heat up slow and allow them to see the error of their ways. You boys just wait on my mark.”

O.B. set the radio back on his hip without waiting for a response.

“We’re not really gonna kill all those people down there, are we?” Ralph asked. His voice was weak with the onset of nausea.

“Eh,” O.B. shrugged. “I’d really rather not but… gotta make ’em stop, right? I don’t guess a ‘ pretty please ’ does the job. Besides…” he stood from his crouched position with a groan, his knees crackling like frying bacon. He adjusted the M60 on its sling and said, “…they started shooting first. I tend to suffer fewer moral crises when folks start shooting at me. Kind of simplifies things…”

He hobbled a few careful steps to the closest tree, doing his best to give his still-aching knees a reprieve while holding out a hand to catch the trunk and slow his progress downhill. The grade of the mountainside and the position of his targets out ahead in the lower valley were such that dropping the bipod would be useless. He might have been able to rest the weapon on a low branch, only the lowest branches through these parts seemed to start well over his head, so no-go on that score as well.

O.B. smacked his lips, braced his rear leg, and wrapped his index finger around the trigger. The really nice thing about tracers , he thought, is that you can just let the weapon hang at your hip, chug along, and move the line of fire where you want it .

He began squeezing bursts down the mountainside, pleased that the initial volley had started so close to his intended target, and began to walk the darting lines of fire to the right in an easy arc, kicking up clods of dirt and eventually shredding through the metal wall of one of those brown containers.

O.B. kept his hip in contact with the tree trunk as he worked, using it to absorb some of the M60’s jarring recoil, sure, but also to give himself something to duck behind if anyone started firing back at him.

He fired at intervals, repeating the old litany in his mind like a nursery rhyme, unaware of the fact that he mouthed the words silently each time the rifle juttered to life and shivered his aging body in a violent tremor.

“ Fire-a burst of six… fire-a burst of six… fire-a burst of six… fire-a burst of six… ”

Otis and Brian both hit the deck when the first shot rang out and, as a result, neither had seen Perry and his flag collapse backward into the invading truck’s bed. More gunfire followed after that initial shot; a quick burp that sounded almost embarrassed followed by emboldened screaming, not unlike the mounting attack of an indecisive mob. When the follow-on firing heated up, Otis realized all that racket surrounded him , where before his shocked mind had insisted it came from the direction of the truck. He lifted his head out from under the cover of his crossed arms and squinted along the width of the valley, seeing finally that the flag-waver had disappeared. He assumed that the man had gone for cover as he and Brian had done, and as he looked out at the truck, his strained eyes saw the distant puffs of spraying glass shards almost hovering over the cab like a haze of smoke.

Then his eyes detected the muzzle flashes to his nearby left and right and realized what was happening.

“Otis! Otis, are you hit!” Brian hollered over the din.

He shook his head, unable to look back at Brian and confirm the young man’s own safety. His eyes remained pinned on the truck being mutilated in the middle of the field.

He slid his radio along the deck planks until it lay just beneath his mouth, hit transmit, and bellowed, “ What the hell happened? ”

He lay there a few seconds, and when no one responded immediately, he screamed the question again into the mic. He heard the crack of static and confused shouting, all of it unintelligible. This continued on for a few seconds more and then cleared up for the briefest of moments like a hot ray of sun burning through a layer of murky rainclouds. He heard Fred’s voice rolling over the line like thunder.

It said, “Greg started firing! I saw the first shot!”

Otis felt a sickly kind of vertigo at this simple pronouncement and was glad he was already laying down; he might have collapsed onto his ass, otherwise. He shouted into the radio, intending to say, “Greg, stop firing! Everyone stop firing! For the love of God, just stop!”

He only got as far as saying, “Greg-!“ The ground out in front of Greg’s home began to drum and vibrate like the world’s largest bass speaker throbbed away beneath the surface, and he saw great puffs of dirt pelting into the air. His eyes caught phantom wisps of red-hot pinpricks originating from the trees hugging the side of the north wall, floating down toward the commune slowly at first, almost lazily like an optical illusion. As he watched, they seemed to accelerate along their trajectory before impacting the ground, kicking those clods of dirt into the air. The impacts drifted from the ground toward Greg’s home and then began to rip through its metal walls in a rapid, ringing clangor.

To Greg, the first rifle shot had come from a place of deep calm; an action taken lightly, like tossing a pinecone into a fire pit. He squeezed, the rifle kicked into his shoulder, the tiny man in the distance disappeared. He delayed for an infinitesimal period of time after scoring that first kill, his mind running out on its own thread for a bit as he compared the feeling of that kill to the lives he’d taken on the highway in Vegas, finding the two experiences to be wholly dissimilar in their similarity. Before, the killing had been frantic with no time to think, no time to worry over what might come after the last bullet.