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

“That’s assuming we find what we’re looking for,” he said.

“Yeah, I know, there’s a lot of ‘if’ involved,” I told him. “But even if we don’t find mres or other goodies up there, we’ll be in the same boat there as we are here; only Denver is just a touch bigger. It’s just another seventy miles or so. I think it’s worth a try.”

He nodded and leaned back against the window in his bench seat. “Okay, Gibs. Denver, then.”

I didn’t tell him the other half of my reasons. Driving to Denver gave everyone a goal—gave them that next task on the list that they had to look forward to. It gave them some green grass on the other side of the fence to stretch their necks out for. Morale was very much on my mind back then, specifically the ways in which it could be preserved. Everyone was working well together so far, but all it was going to take was a slight shortage of food and a few setbacks before they all started eating each other alive. It was bad enough when I only had a crew of six people to worry about along with myself. Now with fifteen, I had to worry about getting up to speed on the personalities of Wang’s group and how they would work alongside mine, not to mention managing Edgar’s bouts of self-important assholery. Keeping a carrot dangled out on a stick for them to chase after was my main secret weapon; the trick was making sure none of them noticed. This would be a problem in the long run—plenty of them were probably smarter than me (George was for sure, and I suspected Wang was, too). They’d be calling me on my bullshit soon enough.

Getting a permanent establishment with reliable food and water was critical.

The Denver tent city had not been what I’d hoped for.

The best information we had on its location had it positioned right next to the airport out in the surrounding fields. None of us actually had any clue where the airport was located, so the first thing we did on arrival was pull over to a gas station to burn an hour sifting through a riot of garbage until we found a local map. Davidson eventually got lucky and we brought his find back to the bus to get out of the smell of the market area (the food had stopped being offensively ripe long ago, but a general odor of corruption still hung about the place; it made me want to limit my breathing to my nose and take an alcohol bath).

Looking over the map, we learned that the 470 essentially made a giant, sloppy loop around the entire city; we could take that road due east to the 70, hang a right, and be by the airport in no time. This had the additional benefit of keeping us on the outskirts of the city. After the shit show we had been through in getting the bus out of Colorado Springs the day before, none of us were in a hurry to drive into the heart of Denver.

As the airport came into view, I suffered a moment of confusion, thinking I was actually looking at the tent city. The main “building” looked like an enormous row of white circus tents with tall, sharp peaks stabbing up into the sky—more than I could count at a glance. I’m serious; there must have been something like thirty or forty individual spires. They were arranged in a long row and were dwarfed on one side by a gigantic, glass building that reminded me of a shiny “W.” Once I came to my senses and saw the parking lots surrounding the area I figured out that I was looking at the main terminal of the airport. Having been a Marine, I’ve done some traveling in my life but I’d never had occasion to come to Colorado in all that time, and I’d never seen anything like this airport.

I felt a presence over my shoulder and looked to see who it was. Wang stood next to me, holding onto my seat back for balance with his eyes locked on the airport. I made the mistake of asking him what was up—he must have spent the next fifteen minutes pissing in my ear about the history of the airport’s design. He just went on and on about the original designer of the place (I’ll be goddamned if I can remember the guy’s name now) and how he had this whole artistic vision of a profile that was suggestive of the snowy tops of the Rockies while paying homage to the teepees of the Native American Indians, blah, blah, blah. He really went on forever; I tried to get a word in to calm him the hell down, but he transitioned from discussing the artistic aspects of the joint straight into the internal structural design without even taking a breath. I guess the inside of the building was based on some sort of bridge design or something, which didn’t make any sense to me at all. Why would you base an airport on a bridge? Just base it on a goddamned airport.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the whole mess looked like a big-ass circus tent to me.

As we got closer, we realized that what had been the actual emergency tent city that the Army set up was on the outskirts past the southeast runway. It made sense to me from a logistical standpoint; that airport would have been a major supply hub for the forces encamped in Denver, and they would have used it for emergency supplies as well. The place was well positioned in the middle of a wide-open flat area where it would have been relatively easy for our pilots to take off and land using Visual Flight Rules (vfr), which was a necessity back then due to the loss of gps and ground-based radio beacons. Placing the tent city right next to the runway would have effectively turned resupply into a simple unloading op. Smart dogfaces.

We rolled slowly by the main terminal roads, taking the smaller streets in an ever more zig-zagging pattern towards the east runway (which appeared to have also serviced all of the shipping aircraft back in the airport’s heyday; I saw some FedEx aircraft still parked out by the smaller hangars). As we approached the turn off that would lead us to the runway security gate, Wang leaned in and said, “Can we stop here for a minute?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I have to see the horse at least once.”

“The… horse?”

“Yeah,” Wang nodded. “Come on with me, and I’ll show you.”

“Well, okay, I guess.” I put the bus in park, not bothering to pull over to the side of the road, opened the door, and separated the power wires like Oscar had shown me to kill the engine. I looked back down the length of the vehicle to see some very curious faces. “Uh, rest break, guys. Take a minute to refresh yourselves—maybe smoke if you got ’em.”

Wang bounded off the bus like he was hurrying to be first in line at the ice cream parlor. I slung my rifle and followed.

We didn’t have to walk very far to get to “the horse.” Now, I call this thing “the horse” but that really doesn’t do it justice. A more accurate description would be “Giant Soul Devouring Hell Demon.” First of all, it was huge—it had to stand thirty feet at its highest point. Second, the goddamned thing was blue. It was a giant, Smurf-blue horse rearing up on its hind legs like it was setting up to kill something.

I’m really not getting my point across. I mean, this thing was obscene. The mane stood up from the neck like a punk mohawk, and its whole stomach was crisscrossed in a web of dark blue (almost black) veins. The veins across the stomach and the stylized, elongated body reminded me of a big blue dick; yet for those people with a less active imagination, the artist had chosen to include an actual dick complete with a set of dark blue balls just hanging out in front of God and everybody. The damned thing looked like a cock slapped on top of a cock.

The kicker to this whole mess was around the back end. This was something you wouldn’t see at all unless you walked up to the thing and really got in there among the sheer animal glory of this monstrosity. In the back, the tail was lifted well up and out of the way to expose an intricately (nay lovingly) sculpted anus pushed out to the point of near prolapse in expression of the animal’s fury. More dark veins originated from the base of the creature’s scrotum to wrap out symmetrically around the bottom of the ass cheeks; a vascular cradle for the inflamed shit pipe.