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

Still no sign of pursuit. Good deal. I began to make plans for when we got to the bus; trying to figure out what I was going to do for Jessica’s leg. I kept coming up against the same wall; the most training I got in field medicine took me just far enough to stop bleeding and stabilize a casualty long enough for real medics to arrive. I didn’t know anything about dealing with a nicked or severed artery. Back when I was still working within a functional military, you typically shipped your wounded back to the forward surgical team (or fst) and let them handle treatment. I imagined that, in this case, such a team would have to open the leg up a bit and sew the artery shut to kill the bleeding. I hadn’t the first clue how to do this. Maybe I could amputate and cauterize the leg, but that had its own set of problems. She had lost more blood than I cared to consider, most of it crusting up in a giant sheet down my back. There was simply no blood to pump into her to replace what she had lost; any supplies that were still available in blood banks or hospitals had long since died out when all the refrigeration failed. I had no idea what her blood type was and, even if I did, I still didn’t have the tools or the knowledge necessary to take any out of a donor and pump it back into her. If she was going to live, she was going to have to replace whatever she lost the old fashioned way: metabolizing it naturally via nutrients and water.

Blood is manufactured in the body’s bone marrow. Some of the largest bones in the body are found in the leg; precisely the part of her I was thinking about hacking off. Even assuming she survived the shock and trauma of a limb removal, never mind the amount of blood loss sustained, there was still the risk of probable infection to deal with. There was a small amount of broad-spectrum antibiotics in my blowout kit and probably a bit more in the ruck that I had taken off the deceased soldier (Adams, I reminded myself; his name was Adams) but I was certain there would only be enough to get me to a nonexistent fst. A partial course wasn’t going to get the job done for Jessica. I was afraid that, in the end, Jessica’s survival was going to come down to Jessica and her inherent inner strength; how stubborn she was naturally. Unfortunately, the kind of wound that she had sustained tends to take the fight right out of a person.

I looked up as we passed another street; 36 th. The Blake overpass was in sight, thank you, Jesus.

“Alish, I need you to get in here and spell one of the kids,” I called ahead.

“Take over for Alan,” Greg grunted. “I’m still good for a while.”

The two swapped places and the younger of the two boys got out ahead of us. I moved ahead to walk alongside of him and said, “We’re going to 38 th,” I said. “If you don’t know where that is, the street we’re on right now goes over it. When we get there, we’ll have to veer off at the last minute to get under the bridge, understand?”

The boy named Alan nodded and said, “Where are you taking us?”

“I have friends up Washington Street waiting for us. There’s a bus—we can get the hell out of here.”

“What if we don’t want to get out of here?”

I took a deep breath, blew it out through my lips. “Fine. Once we get my friend back to the bus, you three are free to go.”

“We should just leave her,” Alish said from behind me. “She’s not going to make it; I think she may have passed already.”

Without turning around to look at her, I said, “Drop her at your own fucking peril, lady.” She said nothing in response.

I glanced back at Alan and said, “Sorry, kid. You guys don’t have any choice but to help me lug her back. If you try to cut and run, I swear to god I’ll mow all three of you down, even if that means I bring our new friends down on top of my head. If you want to stick with us, I can promise that I’ll do the same for you if the day ever comes when it’s necessary. Failing that, you’ll be free to scamper off once she’s unloaded.”

Alan glanced over at me, and I could see him working it over in his head. I wondered if I’d actually be able to shoot them if they just dropped Jessica and ran off. I mean, it was definitely within my skillset to tag all three of them without very much trouble; I just wondered if I’d be able to squeeze the trigger. I told myself ‘ Absolutely, ’ but the deeper part of me (the honest part) suggested that I would only watch as they left me behind, mentally jammed between calling after them and just sitting down on the sidewalk next to Jessica to wait and fight it out with whoever happened by.

Finally, he said, “Okay. We’d probably do the same thing, anyway.”

“Thank you,” I said, and fell back to the rear.

Blake Street ran over 38 thas a bridge overpass; as we approached our goal, we found our way barred by a waist-high metal fence protecting us from a ten-foot drop to 38 thbelow us. We had to swing right about eighty feet to get around the fence and onto 38 thto achieve a path that would take us underneath the bridge. I was just starting to breathe easy; I had built it up in my head that passing under Blake was our ticket to freedom. We just had to get on the other side of that, and we were well on our way to safety.

Before we could round the fence to 38 th, I heard a shout, the sound of gunfire coming from much closer than I would have liked, and a ricochet from only a few yards away.

“Go, go, GO!” I barked at the others, turned, and dropped into a crouch. There were three people only a few hundred feet away that had taken up position under some trees a few streets over; they were almost directly south from my position. I dropped into a prone position to give them the smallest target possible and lined them up in my sight. I got good center mass hits on two of them; the third ran off down the street like trailer trash racing to Walmart on Black Friday. I got up and ran to catch up with the others.

“Let’s pick the pace up, guys,” I bawled. “We’re getting some company real quick.”

The three of them really started hoofing, and we made better time up the street, but it still felt agonizingly slow to me. I used to have nightmares about this kind of running gun fight when I was in Iraq, nightmares that continued long after I had left the Corps (when I wasn’t having the standard “You’ve been reactivated, and we’re deploying you tomorrow!” bad dream). Contrary to what TV and movies would have you believe, getting into a firefight isn’t the end of the world. Many times, especially in the city, the people you were shooting at were so far out that you only ever hit them if you got lucky; maybe five or six hundred yards. They were just close enough to have us in range of their 7.62 (which wasn’t that big a deal as their AKs weren’t exactly sniper rifles, and they weren’t exactly snipers) but just outside of the effective range of our 5.56, which meant guys like me didn’t have a lot to do outside of barking out instructions to the radioman or walking our machine gunner onto a target. We’d be positioned behind some shitty dirt wall somewhere or stationed up on a rooftop and just take shots to keep them pinned down, blow the hell out of any vehicles that looked like they were coming our way, and either call in some air support or wait for the QRF to show up. Sometimes it even got boring enough that we’d start cracking jokes here and there just to keep entertained. It was pretty easy to stay calm and collected when you knew you had the whole of the Allied Forces backing your play and prepared to drop ordinance on all the Allahu Snackbars out there. If you had to be in a firefight, that was the way you wanted it to go.

This was entirely different. My closest support was probably a mile or more away, they were in a school bus instead of an mrap, and they had a single rifle and a pistol between them. They had no idea what my situation was because I had no way to radio back to them. They could probably hear the gunfire and were more than likely tap dancing in place trying to figure out what they should do (I prayed to any god that would listen they were smart enough to stay put). I had a single rifle and whatever ammunition I was carrying. Kyle and his rifle (my M4) had simply been lost in the no man’s land between our initial point of ambush and the military outpost; I hadn’t even thought to check Jessica for the pistol until I had her stretched out on the counter, discovering that it was nowhere to be found. Our asses were hung out twisting in the wind, and our only chance was to simply outrun whoever was coming at us. We had however long it took for that runner to catch up to his buddies and tell them where we were before we had a serious running gunfight on our hands. I began to contemplate sending the three ahead of me to the bus while finding a strong position to make a stand.