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

Standing up on the mountain wall in a remote land he’d never thought to encounter, watching a complete stranger carry away his female wounded from the barrage he’d just inflicted, O.B. wondered if Tyson would have been around to share a beer if his life had depended on a woman to pull him out of the shit when everything went to hell some fifty-odd years ago.

He thought not. He thought maybe that he would have seen Tyson’s name up on that wall in D.C. along with the rest of the boys who didn’t make it home. The boys he couldn’t carry out.

“Why the fuck would you keep your women where the fighting was apt to be?” he mused.

Those people down in the valley—they’d been the aggressors, according to Clay’s rushed report. The word hadn’t come directly from the man himself, of course; just one of his lackeys sent along as a runner. Just some ruddy-faced, freckled kid in his thirties—a man named Carol, good God—who’d run out to the house while O.B. was still enjoying his morning drink (tea, thank you kindly, since coffee was becoming so goddamned dear), slapped a scribbled-upon map down on his table—a map, O.B. noticed, that had a few drops of dried blood down at the corner—and a terse set of instructions.

Round up the crew, get out to the position indicated on the map without being seen (it might as well have been marked in fucking crayon), and await radio contact.

And then, when said radio contact occurred, the details only got juicier.

Clay’s voice had unrolled over the channel, needle-thin and rapid fire, explaining how a small team had infiltrated into the city, killed a bunch of their people in a surprise attack up at the theater, and lit out just as quickly as they’d come, middle fingers most likely extended out their side windows. It now fell to them (O.B.’s crew) to head off any further aggression before things could escalate, the initial plan being for Clay to drive out to meet with them, olive branch in one hand and a white flag in the other.

Which was just bovine levels of stupid, as far as O.B. was concerned, but he wasn’t going to get in Clay’s way if the idiot wanted to play Gandhi. In O.B.’s view, people had a God-given right to their own fuckups. If these fine mountain people wanted to drive a wedge into their territory down in Jackson and start some shit, they could damned well get the hammer. Let them be plowed under like a bad crop if such was required to achieve a little security.

The point, though, was that these people had to know there was going to be some sort of response to their attack; how could there not be? Kick the door in on someone’s house, kill his family members, and then disappear into the night like a smoke cloud? What could possibly be expected as a result of such behavior? They were lucky Clay hadn’t lead with the Howitzers, as O.B. certainly would have done had it been his call.

Those people knew what they were starting. Had to have known. So why the Christ hadn’t they moved their women off to a safe area before pitching a rock at the hornet’s nest?

A thought suddenly occurred to O.B. as he watched the little people-shaped smudge disappear behind the cabin: were there children down there? If they were that fucking dumb, and he now had no reason to suspect otherwise, would they still have their children down there as well?

The expression on his face was a combination of confusion and distaste, as though he’d just eaten a sandwich composed of peanut butter, kale, and pickled cabbage.

Jesus son-of-a-bitching Christ, but he thought they might.

He keyed his radio and said, “Bush Babies, copy.”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Nobody fires on those buildings down there without my say-so, is that understood?”

“Uh… yeah, we know. Nobody pulls the trigger until you say. Over.”

O.B. nodded absently. “Good. Something’s not right. I don’t think I want to take any further action until I have this figured out.”

“Roger that.”

He lowered the heavier military-grade radio and nodded to Ralph for the smaller one. As he adjusted it in his hand, Ralph asked, “What’s not right?”

O.B. only shook his head, glaring down into the valley. Holding the radio up to his chin, he said, “You there, Clay?”

“Yes, no fucking thanks to you! You might be distressed to hear that we’re still taking fire down here. Goddamn it.”

“Indeed. I’ve temporarily paused the assault. There are a few things here that aren’t lining up just right. I’d like to request a little clarification.”

The channel was silent for a moment; then, “This isn’t the best time to ask for a pay raise, O.B…”

The gnarled old veteran smiled despite the situation and said, “I know for a fact that there are women down there, Clay. I saw one myself being carried away after I shot her. I have reason to believe there might be children down there, too.”

“You’ve seen them?” Clay asked.

“No, but… in my experience, where there’s women, there’s likely to be children. And if there’s even a possibility that such is the case below, I’m not interested in tuning them up.”

“Oh, well Christ’s younger brother on a saltine cracker, isn’t that a fucking shame? We do happen to be a little stuck out here, you fucking dinosaur. This truck has run its last mile; a slight case of lead contamination and such, huh? We can’t exactly throw her in reverse and drive out of here, can we?”

“Yeah, I’m working on that,” O.B. nodded. “You boys just hang tight while I get them settled down. It’ll be tricky to bring ’em down easy, and it’ll take some time, but I’ve got the people out here to do it. Just keep small and try to squeeze in behind that firewall. I know that’ll be a bitch for that giant slab of ham in a cowboy hat but… make the best of the situation.”

Clay’s infuriated voice came rattling back as soon as O.B. released the transmit button; he’d clearly been cursing into his handset before the line was open. “—ucking obstinate twat! Your laid-back attitude is neither fucking prized nor fucking asked for! Shit down here is hotter than you goddamned realize! In fact, how about this? Does it in any fucking way help you to extract your thumb from your ass to know that we have a confirmed kid right here with us in the goddamned truck? Never mind who you think might be in the valley—I have a kid taking fire in this fucking truck!”

O.B. tensed at this, clockwork gears of his mind grinding away as he calculated and then recalculated how this new information affected the overall situation. A detached partition of his awareness—the deeper animal brain that warns of things like bad weather and creeping predators—detected Ralph shifting nervously behind him. Abbreviated bursts of gunfire continued to belch down below. Hearing this, O.B. felt a new kind of urgency of which he was not fond. It was the dimly-remembered impression of a firefight turning in the worst possible direction; the experience of the jungle squeezing in to surround; of options being reduced. It made him irritable.

“What kid would this be, Clay?” he asked. His voice was thin and conversationally perilous. “What haven’t I been told?”

“We don’t have time for this, goddamn it…”

“I have all the time in the world, Clay. I’ll take a siesta up here and just wait until you’re bleeding out on the floor mats.”

“FUCKING… alright, the goddamned short version, huh? Un-fucking-beknownst to me, Ronny and some of his people came into knowledge concerning the location of this little campsite, okay? He sent some of his people up here, killed a few of them, and brought this girl that I have here back to town for leverage. We’re trying to bring her back and make some kind of fucking amends right now before things get any worse, huh?”