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

Andrew’s world switched over to black nothingness, as abrupt as a switch knocked carelessly to the off position. He never knew what hit him.

Victor began a frantic climb up the slope as soon as the machine gunner disappeared from view, realizing the man was preparing to dig in and knowing his friends would need some additional crossfire to keep him under control. When he heard Andrew begin to scream, and then later when Andrew’s screaming abruptly stopped, Victor gave up all pretense of a controlled climb and proceeded to flail at the mountainside; digging in with fingers and toes every inch of the way, grunting angrily as the ground slowed his progress. His rifle clattered against his body, getting bound up in the swinging ferocity of his limbs. The ring finger of his left hand impacted the handguard of the rifle as he clawed, breaking cleanly beneath the knuckle, and he didn’t even notice; he just continued to dig and crawl and snarl his way up the hill.

When he came to the disturbed patch of bare dirt where his friends had once crouched in hiding, he cast about for signs of their passing, seeing only a few spatters of blood. He saw the scrapings of tumbling bodies leading down the hill and followed these markings with his eyes, eventually landing on Andrew’s body folded up against the trunk of a young tree. He took two shambling steps toward him before he noted that half the face had been blown away. Then he stopped dead in his tracks and whimpered in dismay, “Oh… fuck… Drew…”

Up the slope from some point behind him, he heard the crunching sound of a single footstep as it scuffed through the dirt, almost tentative, as though the person to which it belonged struggled with the conflicting and perverse desires to both be discovered and to pass by unnoticed.

A gunshot erupted—the last to be fired that day in Wyoming—and Victor embarked on the final journey of his short life, traveling into the darkness to find his friends.

Alan and Monica arrived at the cabin at approximately the same time as the skirmish on the north wall completed. They’d been rushing back along the southwest wall, moving just behind the tree line to keep out of sight, having abandoned their position as soon as O.B. began to rip up the valley floor. By the time they’d arrived to provide support for their embattled friends, downrange fire on the truck had dropped to absolute zero, and no effort whatsoever was made to spool it back up again. They arrived on the scene to find Greg and Alish wedged into the cabin’s log wall, the latter’s legs bound up with bloody bandages, while Brian lay in the dirt watching the truck in the distance through his rifle optic. Otis knelt over Alish with one hand rested lightly on Greg’s shoulder; the other held the radio to his mouth. He barked Andrew’s name into the mic repeatedly but received no answer.

They drew up short at the sight of their friends; when they understood the state they were in. Monica dropped to her knees immediately at Alish’s side intent on finding some way to help, learning after a moment’s inspection that not much more could be done for the woman without access to Olivia’s office. She shuddered at the angry bruising apparent beneath the knees and began, “Alish… what—?”

“Gunshot. Both legs,” Greg hissed in a strained voice. His hands were locked in a death grip over the bandages.

Brian had pulled away from his rifle at the sound of Monica’s voice and looked back at the newcomers. Noting their arrival, he reverse-crawled from his position at the cabin’s front corner, shifting from knee to hip to elbow until he’d joined them. “Hey,” he whispered as he settled into the wall beside Otis. “It seems to have quieted down out there. No more shots, anyway.” His words seemed to agitate Otis, who began snarling the names of Andrew, Victor, and Isaiah into the radio repeatedly. His hands had begun to shake.

Alan only stood there looking down at his brother, eyes wide. After a moment, he whispered, “Greg… the baby…?”

Alish answered for him, grunting through a mouth twisted with pain, “Okay, I think. I got hit as far away from anything important as I could have been… thank God!”

Alan continued to stare down at them, rubbing his palms nervously over his hips and thighs while Otis continued to call into the radio repeatedly. This eventually drew Alan’s attention, the way a droning voice unconsciously tuned out can sometimes jump to the forefront of a person’s focus, all-consuming in its sudden clarity.

“Otis!” he shouted. The man jerked mid-sentence and glanced up at Alan wide-eyed. Alan pointed down at the radio and said, “You have to release the button to get a response, man! What are you doing?”

Eyes still intent on the youth, Otis released the button. The radio barked to life instantaneously in his ear when he did so, and Fred’s voice filled the immediate focus of his world with the new and horrifying revelation: the men had exited the truck and were running back toward the cleft exit. They appeared to have Elizabeth in tow.

Otis sprang up from the ground as if all the wear and tear of a modern life inflicted on his joints had been magically reversed. The others ceased all chatter immediately and began to call to him in mounting alarm as he first discarded his rifle and then strode out from the protection of the cabin into the common area. He ignored them, directing all of his will toward looking out past the newest homes, past the greenhouses, out into the wide open patch of unused land in the Bowl. He looked at the GMC resting low and crippled out in the field like a rusted-out farm tractor that hadn’t seen work for a hundred years; blown out windows and shattered chrome fittings. He looked for the hazy shapes of running people, and after he swung out wide enough past Gibs’s legendary bus (now the home he shared with his son, Ben), he saw them out there, making all haste to get away to cover.

Three of them—and one appeared to be a small girl.

Otis wasn’t sure if that girl was or was not their Lizzy, not yet, but he did know that there was a girl out there, that she was small and young, and that she was goddamned lucky to be alive after the hail of gunfire his people had just rained down upon them.

He broke into a run, driving well beyond the boundary of the greenhouses now and into the open field, voices of his friends wailing in his ears to come back, to get under cover before the watcher on the mountain wall cut him down. Their voices were all so very small over the radio channel. Small and easy to disregard. He ran while the left side of his body broke out in gooseflesh at the anticipation of a sudden barrage of bullets, stumbling at points over the uneven ground. He ran, threw his arms up into the air, and hollered out to the people running away from him. He hollered like catching their attention was the most important achievable thing in the world, like they were the last possible path to salvation and all he had to do in order to know his own inner peace was to get their attention and make them turn around.

Fred’s words in his ear, telling him new things he could not hear; couldn’t possibly hear over the breaking of his own voice—a woefully inadequate instrument incapable of conveying the message he needed to project. It was all wrong, we were wrong. We didn’t know. We can still avoid war.

The distance before him was all-defeating, an impossible gulf made torturous by his eyes’ ability to see those people as they shrank away. He came to a stop, panting, gasped a final time—the gasp of a drowning man—and used every ounce of strength gifted him by God.