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

This horse made The Elephant Man look like Angelina Jolie.

“Wang,” I said, unable to tear my eyes away, “what in the hell did you bring me out to see?”

Fred Moses’s voice erupted from behind me in his characteristic rumble, “Now that is just the ugliest motherfucking thing that ever existed. Who the hell is responsible for this?”

“I don’t remember his name anymore,” Wang said. “I had seen pictures when we studied this airport in college. I always told myself if I ever came this way I’d have to stop and get a picture of myself next to it.” His voice sounded almost reverent.

“Well… why?” Fred asked. “I wish I could un-see the damned thing.”

“Jesus wept!” said Jessica as she walked over to join us.

“I mean, is it a joke or something?” Fred continued. “Did the artist get screwed by the city government and this is his revenge?”

“Why would you go to the trouble to give it an asshole?” Jessica asked in dismay.

“That’s not even the best part,” said Wang. His voice was shaking on the verge of laughter. “In the evening when it was dark? The eyes would glow bright red.”

I erupted into laughter at that point. I couldn’t help myself; the whole thing was so preposterous. The blue color, hideous veins, genitalia, and inflamed asshole were insane but could be explained away with artistic eccentricity. Glowing red eyes was just an obvious troll. This horse was a giant middle finger extended right at Denver; there was nothing anyone could have said at that point to convince me otherwise. I laughed so hard that I started coughing uncontrollably; huge, wracking hacks that came from the center of my windpipe and burned like fire. I felt a shaking hand on my shoulder and realized that Fred was leaning on me, laughing as well. Wiping tears from my eyes, I looked up and saw that all of us were doubled over in various states of duress.

We carried on for several minutes before we began to regain control of ourselves, the intense laughter giving way to roiling aftershocks. Through choking hiccups, Wang stopped laughing just long enough to gasp, “The locals used to call it ‘Blucifer…’”

And just like that, we were off again. I ended up on my knees clutching my side, genuinely afraid that I was about to crack a rib.

“You’re a fuckin’ asshole, Wang,” Fred said in a panicked voice a few moments later, still laughing. All of us were panting desperately.

When I was capable, I stood up and said, “Very well, can we get the hell out of here now, please? Before Wang takes us around the side of the building to have a look at the Goatse exhibit?”

Wang giggled at this, but Jessica asked, “Goatse?”

I rolled my eyes, wanting to kick myself for running my mouth. “Yeah, look, don’t ask me to explain it, okay? You don’t want to know anyway. I’ll just say that a bored Marine is a dangerous Marine and the advent of the internet only magnified the problem.”

“I’m not following,” she said.

“One of the ways a bored Marine will typically pass the time is to try to gross out his buddies and, well, you could find some pretty disturbing imagery on the Internet. Do you have any idea how depraved you have to get to gross out a Marine?”

“Oh…” she replied.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’m not entirely convinced that the Internet going ‘poof’ was such a bad thing.” I slung my rifle over my shoulder and nodded at Wang. “Are you good now?”

“Yeah, thanks,” he said, shaking out one last chuckle.

I turned on my heel and walked back toward the bus, eager to put distance between myself and Blucifer.

We had to wait a while longer for everyone to get back onto the bus (they were out either stretching legs or watering the sides of buildings). I sat up in the driver seat trying to keep from fidgeting while I waited. Once everyone was back in their seats, I started her back up again and drove down a street that emptied out directly on the tarmac. There was a guard shack with a security gate barring our access to the field, so I parked the bus, retrieved the hooligan bar from the back (which had been part of the soldier’s gear from the day before), and stepped off to go to work on the gate. Fifteen minutes of grunting and cursing saw the gate opened with us on the other side.

We had to drive across the two runways and park on a road on the opposing side. I saw a C130 sitting abandoned up by the northern end of the runway and made a mental note to check on it when we came back. Having parked the bus, I exited to have a look at the tent city spread out before us.

The whole thing appeared to go on for several kilometers, but it was hard for me to tell; after a certain distance, I just lost all ability to estimate. It may have been five klicks across, but that’s really only a wild-ass guess. In the distance, it just looked like a sea of different sized white, brown, and olive squares laid out in a grid. The tents that were closest to us had clearly seen better days.

Many of them were either knocked down or blown over; whatever had been inside of them had been strewn out all across the field. Whole patches of the encampment, some as large as a football field, were blackened from a fire that must have raged through the area. There was no rhyme or reason to the pattern—you’d see a cluster of tents that looked totally intact right next to a gutted area that had been charred to the ground.

Concerning me the most was the lack of support vehicles. With an encampment of that size, I had expected to see a wide variety of trucks lined up throughout the field, from 7-tons all the way down to Growlers. There was none of that. I saw a couple of burnt out chassis in a few areas next to tents that had seen significant fire damage, but outside of that, there was nothing. I stood there with my hands on my hips staring out at the wreckage, trying to figure out what came next.

Straining my eyes, I looked closer at the garbage scattered between the tents and saw the occasional human body at odd intervals.

I heard the old familiar thump-step approach from behind.

“Do you think there’s anything left out there?” asked George. Other people from our group manifested in my peripheral vision to either side of me.

“I don’t know,” I finally said, sighing. “It looks like a battle took place here.”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” asked Rebecca. I glanced over at her and then had to look away to the field again; I had a serious weakness for Irish girls (well, being fair, I had a serious weakness for anything with a pulse and appropriate plumbing) but looking at Rebecca was dangerous. She’d make you forget what you were talking about; make you say stupid shit if you weren’t careful.

Oblivious to (or perhaps used to) my reaction, she said, “Whoever was left alive in the city would have come here for food and supplies, the same way we did, right? There would have also been survivors in the tent city itself. Most of us came from a tent city, didn’t we?”

“I did,” agreed Fred.

“Us too,” said Monica Dempsey, her hand draped over her daughter’s shoulder.

“Yeah, so survivors living here were trying to protect what they had from survivors coming in from the city. It probably got super brutal,” Rebecca concluded. I turned my head toward her again, getting a good look this time and not allowing myself to be distracted by her eyes, full lips, chest, or those big, fat, red curls coming out of her head in every direction (Jesus, that hair was something else, though). I had always thought of Rebecca Wheeler as your typical, selfie-addicted bundle of bad decisions. Outside of the fact that she was nice to look at, I had her categorized as just another person to look out for and keep fed; never really expecting much back from her on the return angle. Looking at her then, I could see some genuine street intelligence at work in those eyes. I took it as a data point to adjust my expectations for her. Not just another pretty face.