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

“Fine, we’ll get him anyway,” Andrew muttered. “Vic; stay down here and keep watching him. If he looks like moving away, let us know.” He absently patted the radio on Victor’s chest as he spoke, then pointed at his own earpiece. He turned, slapped Isaiah on the shoulder, and made off up the hill. They were gone from Victor’s sight within fifteen yards, which he noted only tangentially. His eyes remained pinned on the stranger up the slope.

Andrew and Isaiah moved as quietly as they could, which wasn’t nearly as quiet as they would have preferred by half, digging long, pumping strides into the steep slope, scrambling over spars of jutting granite where it poked through from the underlying mountain as necessary. They circled these as much as possible to avoid standing out among the foliage, always trying to minimize silhouetting where they could. They’d lost sight of their target soon after striking out due to the topography of the mountainside, the surface of which heaved and fell deceptively as they went until they were soon no longer sure if they were even looking at the right spot for the man they hunted. Andrew eventually gave up on trying to reacquire the location by sight, accepting the idea that the layout of the trees relative to his changing position had most likely altered so completely that he wouldn’t recognize it if he was looking right at it. He focused instead on moving forward in a relative straight line, using a formation of trees all the way up at the mountain wall’s ridge that stood out sharply in the sunlight as a bearing marker.

When he felt as though they must be near enough to their target that a good sneeze would give away their position, he whispered into the radio, “Victor; can you see him?”

“Yes…” came the subdued reply.

“Can you see us?”

“Not now. I just saw you a short while ago. You appeared to be on a track that would take you past our friend by about thirty feet or so; you’d pass over him.”

“Okay, thanks. We’ll adjust our track.”

If Gibs had been there, he would have been able to correct Andrew’s intent; would have told him to keep on as he was, to get higher than the target and start edging down the slope. He would have been able to explain what any experienced infantry grunt understood naturally, what they understood as easy as breathing.

Terrain is key in a firefight. Superior terrain almost always predicts the outcome, and fighting from high ground is always the desired way to go.

Gibs would have told them this if he was there but alas… he was not. In fact, at that precise moment in time, Blake Gibson sat in the passenger seat of Jeffries’ old Humvee as it barreled down the highway, following Jake, Amanda, Oscar, and Rebecca in the Super Duty. Davidson drove the Humvee, which was good because Gibs was having a hell of a time focusing his attention anywhere. He stared absently out the passenger window of the vehicle, seeing none of the passing landscape as it scrolled by. His eyes moved internally over the memory of what he’d experienced back at the church; the leftovers of Edgar pinned to the workbench; the sound of his life’s end punctuated by the terse gunshot of Amanda’s pistol. The shadowed mass of Ronny’s remains as they pushed through his little prison alcove—his arm had still been handcuffed to the bedframe, though his body was somehow outside of it, the chest driven into the floor with the legs spilled up over the foot of the bed, dangling over the mattress like lowering tree trunks straining against failing root systems. Gibs had no idea what he was looking at initially, the head was nowhere in sight as he passed, which confused him and made it nearly impossible to reconcile the rest of the image. When he passed through the next door into the following room, he’d turned back again to look at the body, seeing from this new angle that the head had been folded back against the spine entirely, such that it hid behind the torso. The shoulders were posted into the floor so thoroughly that he suspected the spinal column must have been completely severed from the impact.

Gibs fought with this imagery as they rushed home, praying they would not be too late. He fought to resolve the remains of that man—fully alive and cogent when Gibs had passed into the hallway, then obliterated like a wax sculpture melted under the intensity of a heat lamp when he returned—with what he knew of Jake. Before that morning, Gibs would never have believed his friend capable of such an act of brutality. The aftermath of that act was horrifically personal, not at all as clean as the bullet the Marine would have employed, assuming he found such a thing necessary. However, the man had accomplished… what he’d done… it had been an up-close thing, performed with his hands. The act had involved a terrible intimacy that made Gibs feel sick to his stomach and somehow terribly alone.

And now, while Gibs wrestled with a reality that shifted sickeningly beneath his feet, Andrew and Isaiah adjusted their track a few degrees to the left, such that they climbed up-slope on a direct path to O.B., a man who had once been referred to by the other guys in his unit as the virus that had killed more men than smallpox.

Andrew slowed their progress as he sensed them nearing the target. Shortly after taking this precaution, the foliage seemed to separate, and there before them up the hill was the man they sought, obscured partially by the tree he leaned against. They saw the other one with him, apparently acting as a spotter; he sat a little further up the slope exposed completely.

Andrew whispered to Isaiah: “I’ll shoot the one out in the open. When he goes down, the other should be surprised. He’ll poke his head out to see what happened. Then you take him. Ready?”

Isaiah drew his rifle up and nodded. Andrew nodded back, poked a thumbs-up in his buddy’s direction (his buddy, who had been with him ever since the Elysium Fields), took aim, and killed the man standing out in the open.

As soon as the rifle shot split the air—perhaps before it split the air, it seemed to Isaiah—the obscured man with the machine gun ducked behind the tree entirely, disappearing from view. Isaiah cursed, having already fired a half-dozen shots uphill, and began sweeping over the area with his optic, seeing only dirt, bark, and leaves.

“Did you get him?” Andrew hissed.

“He’s up there!” Isaiah spat back. “Son of a bitch ducked bef—”

Machinegun fire ripped down the hill. Before his body hit the dirt, four rounds from O.B.’s M60 had blown through Isaiah’s chest, shredding channels through the man’s lungs, liver, and kidney, splintering his ribcage into a loosely-connected webbing of bone fragments, and further destroying his soft tissues with the concussive force of their passage. His body tumbled end over end down the mountainside to the floor below, picking up speed and catapulting into the air as it rebounded and pin-wheeled off rock formations.

As the body disappeared from sight, Andrew looked on in horror, frozen in place by the sudden erasure of his friend’s existence. His destruction felt impossible, like something so abrupt and irreversible could not possibly have happened.

He pivoted to begin shooting back up the slope, but more rounds came screaming in his direction, ripping through his thighs before he could pull the rifle stock up to his cheek. He didn’t feel the pain of being shot so much as he felt the impact of the bullets; the sensation of his legs being knocked out from under him by a linebacker, after which he was tumbling down the hill as well. He rolled some twenty feet before his body collided with a pine tree. He’d lost his rifle in the fall, somehow, but he wasn’t thinking of such things anymore. He was slapping at his chest with shaking hands trying to find his radio and then began to scream, “Victor! We’re down! He’s comiiing! He’s co—”