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

“Because I wasn’t planning on sticking around and they knew it. Why should they invest time or resources into keeping me healthy if I was just going to bounce? There would be no reason to do that if they couldn’t rely on me to stay and pitch in.”

I chewed all this over in my head for the next hundred yards or so. Finally I said, “Well, let’s get this food situation handled. After we get that under control, I might just tag along with you.”

“Hey,” she said, sounding genuinely excited, “no shit?”

“No shit,” I agreed. “Who the hell else am I going to flirt with? Davidson’s not my type. Too much ass hair for my taste.”

Jessica laughed and, to my surprise, snorted. This shocked her as well as me, which caused her to laugh harder. When she calmed down a bit, she said, “What about that red head? She didn’t look so bad. I’ve been into dudes for as long as I can remember, but she’s enough to make me second guess my position.”

“Sure, sure, she’s a looker. There’s no denying that,” I agreed. “But as I’ve gotten a little older, I’ve found that youth and a perfect rack becomes a secondary concern.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the primary concern.”

“Backbone,” I said without hesitating.

She was quiet for a while before she responded. “You’d come with me because of my backbone?”

“Well… among other things,” I said, taking my turn to smile out of the corner of my mouth.

She aimed a devious smile in my direction, causing my heart to shift up a couple of gears. I hadn’t flirted this successfully with a woman in I couldn’t remember how long (well, one that I wasn’t passing a couple of dollars to, anyway).

We had plunged fairly deep into Denver within an hour’s time, often veering away from Washington but never getting more than a block away. Washington eventually passed under the 70 freeway and became 38 thStreet, which quickly passed under a railway overpass and dumped out onto a busy little intersection. The hour itself hadn’t been consumed entirely by walking; a good portion of our time was spent in breaking into and casing buildings which looked like good candidates to contain food or water. In several instances, we found some good prospects in the form of vending machines, as I had mentioned earlier. We noted their locations and continued on, still holding out hope for that big score. The vending machine food was a good find; much of the food they contained would keep for months if not longer but I didn’t want to bank our hopes on it. Most of that garbage is of low nutritional value. It’s the crap that people eat when they’re bored and not when they’re hungry. Even if we managed to bring back several pounds of the stuff (Funyuns, crackers, cookies, and trail mix), the group would burn through it like fire through dried brush in an attempt to stay nourished. The Coke machines were a much better find in this regard—water is water regardless of the source, despite what any new age health guru may tell you. It just needs to be uncontaminated, and you can live on it.

We stood at the intersection looking down Walnut to our right and Marion just ahead of us. Walnut appeared to lead towards a business district with larger buildings of various shape, size, and intent, whereas Marion went into a residential area with single family homes.

Not wanting to dictate every little thing, I said, “Well, people, what do you think? Businesses one way or homes the other?”

They both looked in either direction. Presently, Kyle said: “We’ve been having some decent luck with the businesses and such. Those look like bigger buildings down Walnut than what we’ve hit so far.”

“What do you guys think would be more likely for a military checkpoint?” Jessica asked. “Would they set up in a business or residential area?”

“It would be more about how heavily traveled an area is,” I said. “A checkpoint is set up for security; it’s about limiting movement and violence. We’re most likely to find them on major arteries. The soldiers manning them would have staged from those points and patrolled the immediate area.”

“Well, let’s stick with the businesses,” Kyle suggested. “We’re kind of just hoping to get lucky and stumble on some Army stuff, right? Well, we’ve totally been getting lucky with offices so far.”

The logic was decent if you only gave it ten seconds of thought and we weren’t feeling strongly either way, so we followed his suggestion. On Walnut, we spread out a bit as we traveled southwest to cover more ground. Jessica walked a block to the north down Blake, I stayed on Walnut, and Kyle was south of us on Larimer. We traveled on in this fashion for a few minutes, each of us stopping at cross streets and waiting for the others to come into view on the adjacent intersections before continuing for another block. I was in the middle of one such block when Kyle came running up my street from behind me. The sound of his feet pounding the sidewalk had me spun around with my rifle leveled before I realized what was happening. This brought him up short, his eyes wide and mouth opened in surprise. I didn’t yell at him nor was I angry; the fact that I’m wound tight was not his fault.

“What’s up?” I asked as I dropped the muzzle.

“I think I have something on my street,” Kyle said in excitement. “Some trucks, a big sun shade of some kind, and a whole crap load of sandbags stacked up everywhere.”

“That does sound good,” I said. “How far?”

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“Did it look like more than a mile?”

He considered for a moment before saying, “I guess? I’m really not sure, dude.”

Attempting to restrain frustration (and perhaps failing), I said, “How many intersections were between you and what you saw.”

“I dunno. Something like five or eight? Definitely no more than ten.”

I drew in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Finally, I said, “Okay, good job. In the future when we’re doing something like this again (and we will be), remember to count the number of blocks to your target. A guy like me is always gonna want to know the distance.”

“Okay. You got it, man.”

“Good deal. Let’s grab Jessica and go see what you found.”

We went a block over to Blake to flag down Jessica. She put her hand on her pistol, which was stuffed in her right hip pocket, and jogged over to us. I updated her on the situation, at which point she looked over to Kyle, smiled, and punched him lightly on the shoulder.

“Way to go, stud!” she said. Kyle blushed bright red and stood there grinning like a little idiot. I suppressed a laugh, not wanting to embarrass the poor kid, and said, “Come on. Let’s go have a look at what you found.”

We crossed the two blocks over to Larimer and turned southwest again. Our target came into view as soon as we rounded the building corner; more of an outpost than a checkpoint about three blocks away. As reported by Kyle, the outer perimeter was walled off with chest-high sandbags and covered with a large canvas shade. There appeared to be some razor wire wrapped around the whole thing; the outpost itself spanned all four lanes of the street, from building to building. There was a traffic gate on the north side of the street that narrowed vehicle passage down to a single lane; it was the only break in the sandbags that I could see. I could just make out a Jeep and a supply truck on the other side of the outpost enclosure. Thinking back to the bonanza we had encountered in the single soldier and his humvee down in Colorado Springs, I felt my heart beat harder in anticipation. There would be much here that we could make use of; I could taste it.