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

“Or, you know, they died like the rest of us and other people came through to take the trucks, right?” Kyle suggested.

“Yeah. There’s that, too.”

I handed him the binoculars. “I want you to keep an eye out while I’m busy watching everyone down there,” I said. “Don’t keep the binos glued to your face. Just keep on a constant swivel while looking back behind us to make sure that we’re not being crept up on. If you see movement, use the binoculars to confirm.”

He did as instructed but also griped, “I can handle a rifle, dude. Serious.”

“Kyle… what’s your last name?”

“Montgomery.”

“Montgomery… okay, Gomer it is. How old are you?”

“Eighteen. And what do you mean ‘Gomer’?”

“Guys on the fire team gotta have a nickname,” I said. “I have determined that yours shall be Gomer.”

“Awe, dude, fuck no. Can’t you call me something else? Like, I don’t know, ‘Ace’ or something?”

“Nope, you don’t get to pick your own nickname. If it worked that way, everyone would walk around calling themselves stupid shit like ‘Terminator’ or ‘Predator.’ No one could take anybody seriously. It would be total chaos.”

“Yeah, but Gomer? Bullshit, man.”

I glanced at him and smiled. “You know what my nickname was in Boot Camp? Mr. Brown.”

“Oh, well see? That’s a cool name—”

“No, just hang on. They called me Mr. Brown because I have a bit of a sensitive stomach and it took me a long time to get used to military chow. It wasn’t until I was approaching graduation day that I really started getting used to it. But before you get close to graduation, you have to get through The Crucible.”

“Oh, dude. ‘Mr. Brown’? Is this going to turn into a story where you shit yourself?”

“No, no. Almost, but no. But I was farting the whole time like a sick rhino.” Kyle started laughing, which made me smile. “I couldn’t help myself. It was like clockwork. Me and my buddies were out there, caked in mud and soaked through to the bone, going through the most demanding physical trial that we had yet experienced, and I was farting loud enough that guys were hearing it three columns over. And the smell was fucking putrid. One of the DI’s came as close as I ever saw to breaking character to comment on it.”

“Holy crap, man,” Kyle laughed.

“I ended up being one of the guys to get a nickname change halfway through boot camp. I’d started out as ‘Chimp.’”

“Chimp? You mean chimpanzee? What the hell for?”

“My last name is Gibson. ‘Gibbon,’ ‘monkey…’ Chimp.”

“That’s… that’s not even funny,” Kyle said. “Like, you have to think too hard to get it.”

“Yes, it is, in fact, like going around your elbow to get to your ass,” I agreed. “But that was just like a place holder nickname… you’re keeping your eyes open, right? Scanning the area and such?”

“Oh, yeah, man. No sweat.”

“Good. So we had this one drill instructor in my platoon; Sergeant McGill, our kill hat. He was amazing. He rarely if ever referred to any of the recruits by their names. By the first day, he no-shit had a nickname assigned to every one of us and never forgot a single one, no matter how much we tried to float under the radar or how much we pissed him off.”

“How many people were in your group-thing, or whatever?” he asked.

“Platoon. Fifty-four of us graduated; a couple washed out.”

“Damn,” Kyle muttered, impressed.

“I know. He had a gift. But in a lot of cases, those nicknames were just placeholders. They were there until we did something sufficiently stupid to get rebranded. There was one dude, Simmons, who made the mistake of asking another of the DI’s to make an ‘emergency head call’ during our morning PT.”

“You can do that?”

“Well, you can,” I said. “The drill instructors don’t want recruits pissing themselves any more than the recruits want to piss themselves. But you never call it an ‘emergency head call.’ The very microsecond the words left his mouth, he had three very large, very loud DI’s running circles around him screaming ‘emergency! We have an emergency!’ and forced him to make siren noises. One of them followed poor Simmons all the way to the head making siren noises and screaming ‘emergency!’ as loud as he could, which is goddamned loud. From that day forward, Simmons was known as Potty Break.”

Kyle began to laugh. Loud, honking explosions erupted from his throat; the kind of laugh a sick teenager makes after one of his buddies nuts himself on a skateboard. It surprised the hell out of me, and I almost considered changing his nickname on the spot.

We fell into silence for a little while. He scanned the area behind us and, to his credit, never expressed boredom in the activity. He seemed to grasp that the job was important if not glamorous. I appreciated that in a teenager. I would have been complaining nonstop at his age.

I looked out over the field and watched our people pick among the remains of the tent city. They made slow going but covered a broad area. Every so often I’d see one of them stop and bend over to examine something closer; sometimes they would pick something up and take it with them. It was a hopeful sign, but not enough of them were holding parcels in their arms and, even if all of them were carrying something, we needed more supplies than each person could carry in their hands. I decided we were going to have to push into the city and started planning; who was coming with me and who would stay behind to guard.

“So you mentioned that you used to go shooting with your dad,” I prompted.

“Yeah,” he said, sounding serious again. I never learned the circumstances of his separation from his family. “We’d go target shooting out at the range and stuff. We went deer hunting a couple of times too.”

“Nice,” I said to myself. “What did he teach you about shooting?”

“Mostly safety stuff. I mean, he showed me how to line up the sights and all; he never even let me have a scope until our first deer hunt. He said he wanted me to be comfortable on iron sights first. It used to piss me off at the time, but I think now that he was right. It made me a better shooter. Never got to tell him that… that he was right.”

I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to interrupt. I suspected he’d speak again when he was ready, and it turned out I was correct.

He cleared his throat and said: “The only ‘lesson’ I really remember, if you want to call it that, was what he told me before he’d even let me hold his rifle… it was a Marlin. He said ‘The only safe gun is a gun that isn’t pointed at anyone.’ Man, I remember this just about as well as I remember anything. I asked him about safety switches, and all that, and said ‘Don’t those make the gun safe?’”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said that any safety mechanism that could be disengaged isn’t foolproof, so they can’t be relied on. He told me that I needed to be the safety instead of some little switch.”

I raised my eyebrows at that. I liked the sound of Kyle’s dad. He had made it clear to his son that he needed to own responsibility for his weapon at all times. I could get behind that.

“How long and how often did you guys go shooting, Kyle?”

“He started taking me out when I was eight. We went out to the range all the time unless it was raining. He’d only started taking me hunting just before… you know. We only went out hunting a couple of times.”

I nodded. I was starting to feel pretty good about this kid, so I made a decision on the spot.

“We’re not finding what we need here,” I said. From my right side, Kyle turned and looked back out at the people in the field.