Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2)

by Joshua Gayou

  “Okay, where was I?” I whispered, and took the first shot. “Where’d I hit, Greg?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “You didn’t…were you looking?”

  “Oh, no, Gibs, you’re right. I was over here downloading porn to my iPhone and twiddling with my dick!”

  “Well, put it away and peel your damned eyes, son! You’re looking for puffs of debris on the pavement, okay?”

  “Got it,” Greg said. “Go again.”

  I took another shot. “Anything?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t see a damned thing.”

  “Well, shit,” I said and pulled the mag out. “Start shooting back at them, Greg, while I get this hog reloaded.”

  Davidson suddenly fell on his ass beside me and shouted, “God DAMN IT!”

  “What! What happened?”

  He was alternating between slapping at his chest frantically and holding his hands up in front of his face.

  “Davidson, what? Calm the fuck down! What is it!”

  “Figure it the hell out soon, will yah?” Greg shouted.

  “Tom!” I shouted, grabbing him by the front of his vest and giving him one hard shake. “What the hell, man?”

  Relief poured over his face in a wave as he let his head drop back and he began to laugh. “Son of a bitch. I took a hit right to the chest. I thought I’d had it. Felt like a fucking truck!”

  I laughed along with him, relieved that he was okay. Lightly slapping his plate carrier, I said, “Glad you’re not dead. Now quit skating and get back in this fight.”

  “Yes please!” Greg yelled, dropping behind the wall to swap in a fresh magazine. With all three of us down, the return fire intensified considerably.

  I finished reloading and groaned as I turned to stand up again, accepting Davidson’s offered hand. Settling the barrel down on a one-time shield wall that now looked a lot more like Swiss cheese, I glanced at Greg on my left and shouted, “Ready?”

  He put the binoculars to his eyes and gave a thumbs-up.

  “Alright. Red sedan in the center. See it?”

  “Yeah, go!” Greg yelled.

  “Davidson, try not to shake the shield, okay?”

  He stopped firing long enough to say, “Roger. Sorry.”

  “Okay,” I whispered quietly. “Let’s…see…” The rifle crashed, slamming back into my shoulder.

  “Got it!” Greg shouted, slapping the barrier with his hand. “You were low and to the left!”

  “How far?”

  “About a couple of feet left and three down.”

  “Jesus, that’s way off. Okay, how about now?” Another crash. I thought about how shitty my shoulder would feel the next day…assuming I lived that long.

  “Nothing that time,” Greg said, binoculars glued to his face.

  “Maybe too high…” Davidson suggested.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” I said. “Okay, here we go. Red sedan…” I exhaled and squeezed.

  Have you ever played basketball or maybe just been out on the court shooting hoops with some friends? Sometimes you take a shot, maybe from the three-point line, and you know…you just know that it’s going into that hoop. The shot feels so good that you know the ball is going home as soon as it slips off your fingers.

  Yeah. That’s how that shot felt.

  “Boom, motherfucker!” yelled Greg. “Right through the hood!”

  “That’s it. That’s where I hold.” I smiled and cycled the bolt. “Okay, shit bags. Let’s see how well you drive without engines.”

  I blew out three more vehicles in rapid succession after that. Just…one after the other; bang, bang, bang – like that, before they figured out what was going on and fell back even further.

  “Think that’s it,” Davidson said, pulling his rifle back. “I don’t think I can hit them anymore. You guys?”

  “Not me,” said Greg.

  “I’m out too,” I said. “This little baby could hit them if I had the scope set better but I don’t know where to hold it on them anymore. I don’t want to waste any more rounds trying to find my mark again. Let ‘em hang back there for now.”

  I turned and sank down to my ass, groaning as I gingerly stretched my right leg out in front of me. The entry and exit both seemed fairly clean to me; it wasn’t even bleeding as bad as it could have. It hurt so bad I could barely stand on it but outside of that, I seemed to have gotten off easily. I opened up my blowout kit, dug out an Israeli Battle Dressing, and began irrigating the wounds with a bottle of water. “Davidson, get Wang on the radio and tell him to slow it down. Let’s not eat that fuel up if those assholes are hanging back. Oh, and let him know we’re gonna top off the fuel so he doesn’t freak out when he sees a bunch of lights flash on his console.”

  As Davidson relayed my message up front, I told Greg, “Hey, very carefully, head up to the front and top our tank off, will yah?”

  “Uh…can we do that? While we’re driving, I mean?”

  “Sure. Of course,” I said. “It ain’t like gasoline. Go for it, kid. Just feed that hose into the pipe and turn the reserve’s pump on.”

  “Oh, okay. I’m on it,” he smiled and began to stumble his way across the trailer towards the tailgate.

  30 – Wang’s a Bad-ass?

  Gibs

  We’d been coasting along at an easy speed while the asshole brigade continued to follow along at a safe distance; about a mile as far as I could estimate. They weren’t creeping up on us but they certainly weren’t breaking the chase off either. I was fine with it. As long as they were back there I didn’t have to worry about hot lead drilling up my ass.

  The other guys, Davidson and Greg, stayed in the trailer with me while I fiddled around with the scope mounting on the SRS. I figured there was no way I’d get the thing to zero on a moving truck but I could get the crosshairs aligned properly, which would allow me to at least use the elevation and windage markers on the crosshair to better estimate where to hold my aim. Before, when the orientation made it look more like an X than a cross, I was basically down to holding my finger up in the air and making a wild-ass guess before pulling the trigger.

  “Hey, Wang’s asking what comes next!” Davidson shouted suddenly from my side, fighting to be heard over the rushing wind.

  “What comes next? Tell him to keep driving. Just take us home.”

  “Well, what about these dicks behind us?”

  “What about them?” I yelled.

  “Aren’t they just gonna follow us all the way back to Jackson?” Greg asked.

  “I’m betting on them running out of gas before we get there. And if they have to stop to refuel, we’ll just leave them behind.”

  Davidson was muttering into his mic as he relayed my answer up to Wang. Greg pressed the point by asking, “Are you sure they’ll run out of gas, though?”

  “Pretty sure,” I yelled. “We have to drive through the whole state of Utah before we get to Wyoming. Let ‘em keep following us if they’re so damned stupid. They’ll be coughing on fumes halfway through the state and we can just bend over and slap our ass cheeks at them as we sail off into the sunset.”

  Davidson repeated everything I said into the mic verbatim, paused a few moments, and then said, “I’ll ask him.” He looked at me and shouted, “Wang wants to know what happens if they make another move.”

  “Hah, Gibs’ll just kill their cars,” Greg laughed.

  “No, he has a point,” I said. “This rifle only holds five rounds at a time before it needs a reload. If they rush us, they can get on top of us. Then the long reach of the SRS won’t mean a damned thing.”

  We rode along silently for a few moments, all of us uneasy about the prospect of that entire column coming down on us all at once. Three men with rifles would likely be overwhelmed in no time at all.

  “Grab that roll of duct tape,” I said, pointing to the edge of the trailer bed. “Let’s start hanging that spare Kevlar on the wall, here, while there’s still a wall to use. L
et’s make sure they’re all carrying armor plates…”

  We spent the next several minutes trying to cover every square inch of perforated board with ballistic body armor, strapping it all down with copious amounts of 100 mph tape. I did my best to help the guys but with my gimp leg, I spent more time just trying to keep from falling off the trailer than doing anything else and had to settle for holding vests in place for the others while they secured it all.

  “You think this’ll do it?” Davidson shouted at me.

  “Better than what we had before,” I said. “Pass me those binos,” I said to Greg.

  He handed them up to me and I put my eyes on the column following behind.

  “How’s it look?” Greg asked from below me. He had his back propped up against the wall with his rifle in his lap.

  “Messy,” I answered. “There’s an awful damned lot of them back there…one, two, three, four…seven…shit, they’re moving all over the place but I’d guess thirty different vehicles of all types, including the motorcycles. Two or three people to a vehicle, more in the truck beds. I guess there could be fifty people back there? A hundred? Hard to tell the way they’re moving around all over the place.”

  “Shit on me,” Davidson moaned. “I wasn’t even sure there were a hundred people left anymore!”

  “Oh, they’re out there,” I said. “People are gonna draw together over time, just like we are.” I spit off the back of the trailer into the wind. “Just like they are.”

  “Hey, message from Wang,” Davidson interrupted. “Says we’re hitting Mesquite in five.”

  “Well, thank God for that!” I shouted. “It’s gotta be only ten or fifteen miles from there to the mountain pass. That crowd back there will bottleneck like a son of a bitch. That’s our best chance to get some distance on them. Once we get on the other side of the mountains, we’ll pull off the road into Atkinville and hide out among the houses there.”

  “Hang on, hang on,” Davidson waved at me. He held the mic up to his mouth and relayed everything I’d said to Wang. After he finished, he looked in my direction but his eyes remained unfocused, clearly listening to Wang’s response. A moment later, his eyes refocused onto mine and he asked, “Won’t we just run into them again if they pass us? When we get back on the road to go through Utah?”

  I nodded and said, “We’ll camp out a couple of days and then take an alternate route…some road that parallels the 15.”

  “But the fuel! Won’t we run out of-“

  “I don’t know, okay? Holy mother of the falafel eating Christ, can we just first extract that detachment of Mad Max rejects from our assholes, please? Son of a bitch, we’ve made it across country without a guaranteed supply of fuel before. We’ll do it again.”

  They both looked down at the deck, uncertain and clearly worried. They looked like a couple of scared kids.

  “Hey,” I shouted, pulling their attention back to me. I hooked a thumb over my shoulder and said, “Fuck those guys, alright? Only reason they’re such a pain in our asses is because there’re so many of ‘em. One on one, they’re jack shit, right?”

  Davidson’s eyes pulled away from mine, looking straight behind us. They widened and he shouted, “They’re making a move!”

  I spun in place, nearly fell over when my bandaged leg screamed in fury, and pulled myself back into position using the edge of the barrier and Greg’s shoulder.

  They had clearly accelerated, bearing down on us hard, and four trucks as well as a handful of motorcycles pulled out ahead of the group and began to swerve haphazardly across the road.

  “What the fuck are they doing?” Davidson shouted.

  “They’re driving evasively, of course,” I answered. “They’re trying to nullify my ability to murder their engines.”

  Davidson laughed hysterically. “Those morons!”

  “Yeah, no, it actually works,” I said. He looked at me in horror and I shrugged. Pointing at the SRS, I said, “That scope is so far off it might as well be held onto the rifle with bubblegum. I figured out where to hold my aim when they were static at a set distance. With what they’re doing now, I’d be better off just throwing the bullets at them. I can wait for them to get closer, of course, but they’ll be able to shoot back at that point.”

  Davidson only stared at me, mouth working silently. Finally, he said, “Well, shit!” and hefted his rifle.

  “Here they come!” shouted Greg.

  We watched as they came flying toward us, carving wide, sweeping arcs through the dirt, then over the paved road, then back into the dirt on the opposite side. At the last moment, just before I pulled the trigger on my HK, the trucks broke in opposite directions, swinging out to either side of us, while the motorcycles stayed back and peppered the trailer with bullets. The three of us dropped behind the wall and aimed out to the sides of the trailer to try and shoot the trucks as they pulled up alongside, which would have worked great except for the fact that the trucks didn’t pull up alongside; they blasted forward, presenting a brief, multicolored blur as they plowed through our field of view. A fraction of a second later and they were lost from sight, somewhere on the road up ahead of us.

  I clawed for the radio clipped over Davidson’s ear to scream at Wang to get the hell out of the way but it was unnecessary. The Ford slowed down hard, throwing us all a few feet forward, before Wang swerved us off the side of the road. At our high rate of speed, the truck pitched up and down violently like a breaching whale, whipping the trailer behind it. The three of us could only hold on for dear life, nearly being thrown from the vehicle as it bucked like an enraged bull.

  As Wang pulled us off to the right, the four trucks that had positioned themselves ahead of us came into my field of view to the left; they slowly repositioned so that the collection of men in the back could shoot at us broadside. Fumbling around with the radio earpiece, I finally gave up and just put my mouth as close to the mic as I could get it, close enough that I could smell Davidson’s panicked sweat, hit transmit, and shouted, “Get us back alongside them! Get as close to them as you can! They can shoot our tires out if you put distance between us!”

  The truck jigged back onto the road like a bronco, throwing us all into the air again, and slammed hard into a Silverado holding a trio of shitheads with shotguns. We didn’t even have to shoot at those guys; the brutal force of the Ford slamming into its side launched the Chevy off the road into the ditch, sending the men in the bed into the air screaming, only to land several meters away. They quickly became unrecognizable as the abrasive dirt and pavement turned them into ex-human meat waffles. The Chevy followed soon after, rolling several times before ramming into a guardrail, which catapulted the vehicle high into the air and back down into the gulch where it finally came to a rest, pulverized entirely.

  Before I could say anything else, Wang punched the gas and pulled us up along the next truck in line with a whole new collection of assholes for us to contend with. They pulled their weapons up to bear on us and, I swear to God, I could see a gleeful grin on at least one of their faces.

  “Look ou-“ I began to shout.

  Wang’s hand thrust out of the driver’s side window holding a brand new 1911 and began to light them the fuck up with round after round of .45 ACP, pulling on the trigger until the weapon clicked. His hand disappeared momentarily inside the truck and immediately thrust forth again with the only thing better than the 1911 he’d just emptied: a second fully loaded 1911. He shot that one empty as well, dumping the whole magazine into the passenger side window of the opposing truck, which swerved frantically across the road; several of the men in the truck bed (who were dead anyway) went tumbling out onto the road like a pile of human speed bumps.

  Wang’s hand disappeared into the cab again to set his pistol down and then thrust out through the window a final time, middle finger extended towards the retreating truck.

  “FUCK YEAH, WANG!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “GET SOME!”

  “Holy shit, Wang’s a ba
dass!” Greg said excitedly.

  The men in the bed of the third truck were ready for us as we swerved and pulled up on its right. Their rifles were down and firing before any of us had a chance to get a bead on them. Rather than trying to shoot any of us in the trailer, these men unloaded into the side of the cab where the vehicle was soft and unarmored. Wang immediately swerved into the bed of the opposing truck in response, fish-tailing the vehicle, which spun to the right in front of the grill of our Ford, hung there for a moment as we plowed it up the highway sideways, and then slowly slid further to the right where it reversed directions and began to slip by us. Greg was ready for them when they came, shooting into the windshield as they inched by and certainly killing everyone inside. Davidson and I dealt with the men in the bed, who could only hang on as their truck swerved and sloshed around under them.

  As they passed behind us, the old, familiar rattling of bullet impacts started up again on the armor wall I was leaning up against, interleaved from time to time with the muted thup, thup of slugs hitting the Kevlar vests.

  “Well, our friends are back,” Davidson said needlessly.

  I ignored him. The Ford was hitching underneath us, sputtering forward and then falling back, alarming the shit out of me. “Get Wang! Ask him if they killed the truck!”

  A few seconds later Davidson said, “Negative. The truck is fine. Wang took a bullet.”

  “Fuck me,” I growled. “Where at?”

  “Where at?” Silence a moment, then, “The hip! Says it hurts so bad he can barely see straight!”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I shouted. “Somebody needs to get up there and relieve him! Davidson, you stay back with that launcher. Greg: go!”

  He nodded and climbed to his feet, just as the fourth and final truck swung into view and fell back next to us, close enough that the men in the bed could have boarded us like a collection of apocalyptic road pirates.

  Greg looked back at me and we locked eyes. Time froze down to a single, motionless instant as he and I shared complete understanding. As he stared at me, half a smile hanging on his lips while a collection of men stood behind him holding pistols, shotguns, and rifles, I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was going to jump across to that other truck in an attempt to kill every last one of those bastards or at least die trying. I knew it like I knew the sky was blue and I felt my balls draw up into my stomach in panic.