Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2)

by Joshua Gayou

  “Understood!” shouted Davidson over the roar of the wind; he’d shoved his door open as soon as I’d finished speaking. It slammed shut shortly after and the truck cab was thrown back into relative silence.

  I looked back down at the gauges. Sixty miles per hour and twelve miles per gallon. I flexed my hands on the wheel and tried to keep calm; the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I could almost feel our pursuit crawling right up my ass.

  “They’re going to be on us in no time at this speed,” Wang said nervously.

  “I know but I’m hoping we only have to hold them off until Arizona.”

  “What happens in Arizona?”

  “You remember that little mountain pass we drove through on the way down here?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. You ever hear of the battle of Thermopylae?”

  “Of course. Everyone has,” Wang said. “After that stupid movie came out…”

  I rolled my eyes. Right; war rhinoceroses and sword-wielding goblin orcs. Totally accurate film.

  “Well, that was actually a real goddamned thing that happened, once upon a time,” I growled. “A small force of men were able to successfully detain the overwhelming might of the Persian army through the use of superior terrain. Just like we’re going to do.”

  “Did the Spartans survive in real life? They all died in the movie.”

  “Well…no.”

  “No?” Wang yelped.

  “Relax. The Spartans were constrained in that they weren’t able to displace. We are, but we’ll be able to slow to a crawl in there and light the fuckers up like it’s the Fourth of July. Plus, I’m pretty sure they’ll run out of bullets before we do. I think we can take away their will to fight in there. I think we can back them off.”

  I looked into my side mirror and saw that the column was noticeably closer now. I tried to get a look at Greg and Davidson as well, but the angles were all wrong. I hit my radio and said, “Davidson, how copy?”

  “Loud and clear,” he came back. “What’s up?”

  “How’re you doing back there? You guys in position?”

  “It’s about as comfortable as butt sex in a Volkswagen but we’re all set.”

  I grunted a laugh despite the situation and said, “Nice. It looks like we have a little time yet. See if you can restack some of that shit further up so you don’t end up breaking things while shifting around.”

  “Roger that,” he said.

  We drove on a while in tense silence, eyes flicking back and forth between the road ahead and our side mirrors, noting that the column had come closer every time we looked back. I glanced down at the speedometer and noticed that it had crept back up to seventy-five. I cursed, pulled it back to sixty-five, and locked in the cruise control to take my twitchy foot out of the equation. I looked into the side mirror again; they were close enough that I could make out the silhouettes of heads inside vehicles. From what I could tell, they had slowed down to match our speed, maintaining a static distance.

  “What the fuck are you up to now?” I muttered in a low voice.

  “Maybe they just want to talk?” asked a hopeful Wang.

  I scoffed. “Yeah, they want to talk us out of our shit. You saw that woman back there; she was bait. Carjackers used to do shit like that.”

  I rubbed my chin and checked the road ahead of us again.

  “My guess is they’re wondering why we’re not trying to get away. They may be wondering if this is some kind of a trap. Of course, there may be some sort of trap ahead of us, in which case we’re fu-“

  A high-pitched clank rang out directly behind my head, causing me to duck low behind the wheel and shout, “Gee-zus CHRIST!”

  A few seconds after that, two more clanks rattled off and Davidson’s voice came through over the radio. “That’s it! Here they come!”

  The cab of the truck erupted with the rapid-paced clanging of rung metal, rattling all up and down the bands of spring steel behind us. It came so fast and heavy that it sounded like we were caught in an epic hailstorm from Hell. I broke out into an instant sweat all over as I resigned myself to just take the punishment for moment, trying not to flinch at every impact; each bullet strike was a physical thing that I could feel in my back, making my muscles twitch and jump.

  I hit the transmit button on the radio and shouted, “Davidson! How’re you guys holding up? Is that shield working?”

  “So far so good,” he called back. His voice came through muted by a hail of gunfire. “I don’t know how long this will hold, though. It sounds like a drum solo out…oh, shit. Stand by!”

  The sound of more rifle fire erupted behind us, this time incredibly close. I looked out my mirrors and saw that a few motorcycles had swung out on either side of us, scouting ahead. Greg and Davidson had begun spraying rifle fire in their direction; Davidson’s M4 was clearly set to auto as it spat 5.56 rounds in rapid succession. I saw bike riders begin to go down into the dirt and disappear behind us.

  “So far so good,” I repeated through grinding teeth.

  The rear window exploded into the back seat, showering both of us in little, blocky nubs of safety glass. At the same instant, a tiny hole bloomed in our windshield with cracks webbing out in all directions. Whatever had caused the hole, it had just missed Wang’s head by a few inches.

  “Holy shit,” Wang’s voice quivered. He began to brush glass shards off with shaking hands.

  “That one nearly had your name on it,” I said.

  “I can’t believe they got one through,” he laughed in a thin, weak voice. “Those gaps are tiny!”

  “I hadn’t planned on them standing up to such volume,” I said.

  “It’s heating up back here, guys!” Davidson shouted over the radio. “Some holes are starting to show up in our barrier back here!”

  I jerked my head over to look at my mirror again. A truck with a bunch of guys in the bed swung out to the side and began to pull up alongside of us; some of the men in the bed of the truck appeared to have hands that were on fire.

  “Molotovs!” I yelled into the radio.

  In a display of rapid threat assessment that made me proud (made me proud later, at least, when all this shit was over), Davidson rolled over onto his side and unloaded a magazine into the whole group, causing the men to drop their improvised explosives in the bed, which broke and engulfed them up to their wastes in flames. Without hesitating, he re-aimed and fired a grenade from his M203 into the passenger window of the truck, where it detonated and blew out all the windows. I had just enough time to see the truck lose speed and begin to roll off into the desert before my side mirror just simply disappeared, having been vaporized by a rifle round.

  “FUCK THIS!” I screamed. “Wang, get your ass over here and take this wheel!”

  He jerked his head at me, face white with panic, and shouted, “Say what!”

  “You heard me; get the fuck over here! Move!” I popped his seatbelt with a jab from my finger, grabbed him by the drag handle of his vest, and yanked him over into my lap. Once he was positioned, I threw my feet over to the right, rammed my palm into his hip, and shoved myself out from under him.

  “What the hell?” he shouted as I slapped my radio into his hands.

  “Put this on!” I yelled. “I’m getting back in that fight! Do not take your eyes off the road ahead. Be on the lookout for road blocks and ambushes, do you copy?”

  Wang rattled his head up and down like a dashboard bobble head.

  “And take it the fuck off cruise control! I don’t know what the hell I was thinking; slowing down was wronger than two boys fucking in the back of a church! Get this piece of shit moving! NOW!”

  I reached across the cab and yanked the earpiece and mic off of Wang’s head, hit the button, and yelled, “Davidson, how copy!”

  The sound of rapid fire erupted in the speaker as Davidson’s small sounding voice shouted, “Yeah, here!”

  “I want you guys to count to five, then stand up from b
ehind that wall and spray the ever-living fuck out of the whole horizon. Over!”

  His voice came back immediately. “Copy all! Five seconds starting now!”

  I threw the sling of my HK around my neck, braced at the door momentarily, and then rammed it open with my shoulder.

  “Don’t die!” Wang shouted from behind me.

  He timed his acceleration such that we were picking up speed again before I’d swung myself out onto the side runner, which I appreciated the hell out of. Reaching up to grab the steel tubing of the frame Fred had constructed for the armor plating (which wrapped over the roof of the cab), I began to shimmy backward to the rear. As I went, I leaned my head back to look behind us and saw a fat line of vehicles in close pursuit stretching far back enough that I couldn’t see the end of them; they were stacked up so thick that they were running off the sides of the road, which I assumed was to maximize the firepower of their front line. Davidson and Greg were standing up in the trailer with their rifle barrels held over the top of the shield wall, shooting at everything they could. It seemed to be helping; the constant rattle of bullet impacts had dropped off considerably.

  Just as I closed the gap with the truck bed but before I’d managed to swing a leg up to climb in, I heard the frequency of our gunfire cut in half. I felt a flash of panic and jerked my head to see what had happened. Davidson was crouched low and fumbling with his receiver, either trying to clear a jam or swapping a mag; I couldn’t tell which. The return fire picked up again almost immediately. I saw an entire line of muzzle flashes over the tops of pursuing truck cabs and out the sides of car windows in the distance.

  I swung my left leg into the truck bed and nearly lost my grip to fall away as something that felt like the size of a softball yet hard as a rock slammed into the back of my right leg, knocking it from the runner and out into open space. I screamed through clenched teeth and pulled myself up over the edge of the bed, using nothing but my left leg and a single hand. Falling into the giant pile of food, I lay there a moment panting. I reached down to feel behind my leg and encountered searing pain, as though a red hot charcoal had been dropped into my pants. I put my other hand back there as well and began to probe around, finding both entry and exit wounds.

  “Motherfuckers…” I hissed. I pulled my hand back to look at it; saw that it was covered in blood and…something else. Something brownish-yellow.

  “What the fu-“ I gasped, trying to figure out what part of the body might produce a goo that color. Intestines? Down in my fucking leg? Had I shat myself?

  I pulled my hand closer and smelled it, anticipating the aroma before it hit. I was shocked when it smelled the exact opposite of what I’d suspected.

  “Er…curry?” Realization dawned on me immediately. “Fu-uck me!”

  I rolled over to look beneath me; several of the MRE packages were perforated by bullets, the contents spilled throughout the bed.

  “You cock SUCKERS!” I screamed. Pain forgotten, I heaved to my knees and swam the rest of the distance to the rear of the bed before launching myself bodily into the trailer, bruising several parts of myself painfully on the more jagged edges of ammo crates and boxes that were contained there. Stumbling across the pile of weaponry while fighting with my rifle to keep from tripping up over it, I eventually positioned myself between Davidson and Greg at the back wall. I noted in mixed horror and anger that several holes had punched through over the entire surface.

  “I feel as though we’ve been here before,” Davidson shouted.

  “Yeah, yeah, shit happens,” I shouted back. “How’s it look back there? Are they falling back?”

  “Uh…” Davidson poked his head around the side and yanked it back immediately. “Negative. They’re matching speed.”

  “Okay, get on the radio and tell Wang to floor it.”

  As Davidson shouted into his mic, I began to search through the various boxes, bags, and crates at my feet. I grunted and screamed freely as I worked; the hamstrings in the back of my leg ignited in furious pain at the slightest muscle twitch. I began to throw shit around angrily. I’d known where it was when we loaded it up – I’d purposefully made a mental note so I could grab it out and play with it as soon as we got home. Everything had been shifted around now and I was having a bitch of a time finding it.

  “Hey, dude,” Greg shouted between taking shots around the side of the wall. “You want to get in on this, or what?”

  “Just hang on a minute, damn it.”

  I saw it then, lying under a pile of vests; a black, hard-shell case only a few feet away. I grabbed it and yanked it over into my lap, popping the latches immediately and throwing the lid open. Laying inside, just begging to be rotated into the fight, was a Desert Tech SRS-A1 chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum, one of the nastier high powered, long range sniper rounds ever conceived. With zero hesitation, I yanked it into my lap and kicked the case away, dropped the mag, and dove into the pile of shit in front of me to search for a box of the deadly ammunition. After a few short moments I hit pay dirt and began thumbing the big, meaty bullets into the five round magazine.

  “Greg,” I shouted, “get down in this mess and find me a scope. A big one!”

  He rotated and dove into the pile like an Olympic swimmer. While he did that, I slapped the magazine home, pulled on the clownishly oversized operating lever, and cycled a round into the pipe.

  I turned to face to the rear and, using my one good leg, popped my head over the barrier to see who was back there. They’d fallen back a bit, yet they were still close enough that I could hit them without the need of a sight, of which the rifle currently had none.

  “Okay, Davidson, have Wang hit the brakes to kill some of that speed, and then tell him to jam the gas down again.”

  “Hit the brakes?” he screamed. “Are you-“

  “Just do it, already! I want ‘em close enough that I can smell their pussies!”

  Davidson grimaced and mouthed the word “Jesus” before relaying the message back to Wang. After a bit of argument between them, Wang did as instructed, and we all braced ourselves as our weight was thrown towards the front of the truck. I heard a grunt from my side as Greg rolled over onto his shoulder.

  Three seconds later, we were thrown in the other direction as the Ford began to haul some real ass. I took that as my cue and popped up over the wall. I selected my target instantly, a big-ass grey Bronco that was close enough that I could see the paint scratches in the hood, and pulled the trigger.

  The rifle butt slammed into my shoulder, nearly knocking me back on my ass due to the fact that I only had the one leg to stand on.

  “You missed!” Davidson shouted in disbelief.

  “The fuck I did!”

  I suppose he’d expected me to disintegrate the driver’s head, which I must admit would have been nice, but I’d chosen instead to kill the Bronco, drilling a round straight into the grill. The truck was already bleeding off speed noticeably as smoke erupted from under the hood, creating a barrier that the other vehicles had to swerve around.

  I crouched behind the wall to work the bolt on the rifle as Davidson said, “You wanted to shoot out his radiator?”

  “Man, I wouldn’t be surprised if I punched a hole through his block. That truck is done forever.”

  I stood up and administered the same treatment to another vehicle; a Mercedes of all things.

  “Shit, Gibs! You’re shot!” Greg shouted from behind me.

  “I am,” I agreed. “It sucks but we can’t deal with that just yet.” I took another shot, murdering a pickup truck. “We have to win the fight first. Always win the fight first! Where’s that scope?”

  “I’ve got it here!”

  I spun and dropped back down to my ass and took a long cardboard box out of the kid’s hands.

  “Leupold. Good taste!”

  Despite the situation, Greg laughed and said, “What?”

  “Nothing. Get back up there and start shooting.”

  “Right on!” he sho
uted and did just that.

  I ripped the scope from its packaging and confirmed, thank fuck, that it would mount to the rifle’s rail. Torqueing down the mount’s thumb screws, I yelled, “How do they look, Davidson? They falling back?”

  “Yeah, they’ve fallen way back! They’re still in range to shoot at us, though. Maybe a few hundred yards?”

  “Bet your ass they fell back,” I grumbled under my breath. “Show ‘em a little tooth and just watch their dicks shrivel up and fall off…”

  I didn’t have the requisite allen wrench to secure the Scope’s mount to the rifle rail, so I had to content myself with using the pliers on my multi-tool to twist the screws down, scuffing the shit out of everything and not giving one good goddamn. Dropping the scope into its mount, I pulled the Phillip’s head screw driver out of the tool and tightened everything down.

  I shouldered the rifle to see how I’d done and found the picture to be about the jankiest thing I’d ever slapped together. The crosshair was all lopsided, making any adjustments for windage or elevation absolutely pointless. I was just going to have to figure out where to hold on target and pray for the best.

  Digging out a pair of binoculars, I turned and wrestled myself one-legged back into a standing position. I held them out to Greg and said, “I’m gonna need you to walk me on.”

  “Say what?” he asked.

  I pointed at the rifle. “I just slapped this piece of shit on here. It’s not zeroed or anything; I’d be surprised if it even gets close to where I’m aiming. I need you to sight where I hit and tell me how far off I am.”

  “Oh, holy shit,” he groaned, grabbing the binoculars. He put them to his eyes and moaned, “Proceed…”

  I took aim and, just before I could squeeze the trigger, a bullet impacted into the wood below my chin, shooting splinters up into the air and stinging the shit out of my face.

  “Yeah, they’re still in range, I said,” an annoyed Davidson shouted.

  “Well why the fuck aren’t you suppressing, man! Turn up the heat on them! Jesus Christ!”

  He grumbled a bunch of shit under his breath while swapping in a new magazine. He slapped his bolt release, pivoted, and had three-round bursts going down range almost before his muzzle was in place.