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

“How did I figure it out so quickly?” he asked, rephrasing my question. “Could it be that it just took you a long time to learn?” he asked while smiling.

I laughed and said, “I’m serious, asshole.”

“You’re right, I apologize,” he said, nodding. “Basically, I was studying architecture in college and worked at this firm as an intern. They typically don’t let you do anything as an intern outside of being involved in the proofing process—usually assisting a senior designer. You sit in on a lot of meetings, mostly taking notes for the senior guy, but I noticed early on that a lot of people were never willing to speak up or make decisions in meetings. It was like they all just sat around waiting for somebody else to stick their neck out.”

“Sounds familiar,” I grumbled.

“Yeah, I think it’s universal human behavior. You can find it anywhere, really. So anyway, I’ve always had a bit of a mouth on me—“

“Oh, no shit? You don’t say?”

“—and I would speak up in the meeting every so often to suggest a course of action, mostly because I just wanted to move things along. Those guys would waffle back and forth forever. I wasn’t even saying anything brilliant; just stating the obvious in most cases. They were all a little shocked by an intern speaking out at first, but when it turned out that I was just saying stuff that they all basically knew anyway, they started to relax. After a while, they started asking my opinion in these meetings. I think a key part of all that was that I never opened my mouth if I didn’t know what I was talking about and if they asked for my input, I made sure to tell them when I didn’t know the answer. It helped to build trust in the relationship.”

I nodded my agreement and walked on silently. He had made it sufficiently clear why the folks in his group were following his lead. He wasn’t describing anything that an effective person in a leadership position didn’t already know at a basic level, but then again, he was really damned young. I was duly impressed.

It took us over a half hour to get to the bus because of all the time we had to spend searching around and doubling back for passable streets. I was confident in my ability to find my way back to the cars from memory; a skill I had picked up in my previous deployments where I often found myself traipsing through unfamiliar cities populated by unreadable signs and markers (where there were signs and markers, that is). That’s the bummer about being a Marine: outside of Okinawa and the Philippines (which I enjoyed the hell out of) you didn’t get to go see the nice parts of the world when you were deployed. Any place that needed the attention of the United States military was, by definition, already a shit hole.

The bus had been abandoned in the middle of the street. We approached from the rear, swinging out wide to the right to get a good look down its length. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the vehicle; it was your standard big goddamned yellow school bus. The only thing that made it stand out for me was the blue-green letters running along the top side saying “cool springs dist 11.”

I traversed the length of the bus from back to front while trying and failing to get any kind of a glimpse through the windows; their tint job made it impossible. Past the front, there was a minor vehicle block that would prevent us from traveling forward. It didn’t look like any of the cars in front of us had crashed; they were only crammed in bumper to bumper. The knot of vehicles ran four deep at its worst point, but beyond them, the street opened up enough that we would be able to navigate through if we used every square inch of it (along with a bit of the sidewalk).

“We’ll have to move all that shit out of the way,” I said to Wang, indicating the mess with a nod.

“Do you think it’ll take long?” Wang asked glancing down at his watch. I looked down at my own watch on the inside of my wrist. It said 1412 (or 2:12 pm).

“It shouldn’t be bad,” I told him. “What are we looking at, six cars? No, seven. We can get them moved in twenty minutes if we hustle—the ground is nice and flat here. Why don’t you go have a look at the next cross street and see if there’s room enough to store them all? I’ll check this bus out.”

Wang trotted off in the direction I suggested. It made me a little twitchy to have him head out like that without any kind of a weapon, but we were never going to get anything done if I insisted on keeping him in my back pocket. I kept reminding myself that this wasn’t Iraq, there weren’t any Muj up in the buildings waiting to light us up, and that anyone we did run into were more likely to start with talking than they were with fighting. Regardless, it all felt very familiar.

I shoved open the accordion door of the bus, stepped on, and made a quick circuit of the aisles. The interior was blessedly abandoned—if there had been any dead things inside I would have given up on the whole project. I’d cleaned out corpses before. I wasn’t interested in doing that shit again without a really good reason or, at the very least, the promise of bacon. I can be bribed with bacon.

Returning to the front, I checked the driver seat, visor, and the little compartments in the immediate area. There were no keys anywhere, but I wasn’t terribly worried. I heard Wang approach from behind and step onto the bus.

“Damn, it looks even bigger on the inside,” he said as he looked towards the rear. “Do you think you can drive this thing?”

“Me?” I said, mildly shocked. “How the hell did I get signed up for this?”

“Well, I can’t drive it.”

I looked down at the instrument panel on the dashboard. There were more buttons than I was used to seeing in any vehicle along with a big yellow push button for the parking brake next to the ignition.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. Nothing like a little ojt (on the job training).

“Did you find a key anywhere,” Wang asked.

“No, but it’s not a problem. I think Oscar can hotwire it.”

“Oscar—he was the guy with that little girl?”

“Maria, yeah,” I said.

“Huh. He was a mechanic?”

“Nope, construction. He was a foreman. But, he was also a bad boy before his daughter came along,” I said and smiled at him. I nudged past him to exit and called back to him over my shoulder. “Come on, let’s head back and pick everyone else up. It will help to have everyone here; we’ll be able to work in parallel. I’ll need a tire iron to break out the windows on these cars, at least.”

“We still don’t know if there’s any gas in it,” he warned as he followed me.

“I know. It’s a calculated risk,” I told him. “The thing was in park and looked like it had the break set. Whoever drove it took the key when they left. There’s a pretty good chance it didn’t idle down to empty. How did those cross streets look?”

“We’re good,” he said. “There is at least enough room to get the worst of the cars moved out of the way.”

“Outstanding,” I said and looked at my watch again: 1418. “Okay, it’s almost 2:20. Let’s keep up a good pace and try to shave some time off that return trip. I want to be driving out of here before we lose our light.”

Ireally, really hated that cock sucking bus. Driving that fucking thing was like trying to steer a fat, drunk woman away from the last slice of cake—you’d better start turning her early and if your judgment is off, plan on running into things. It was basically a real-life version of one of those crappy, frustrating smartphone games that made you want to tear your hair out.