Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2)

by Joshua Gayou

  He gave me the slightest of nods, turned on the spot, gathered his legs under himself, and leapt…

  …And had his momentum arrested immediately as I grabbed his dumb ass by the drag handle of his vest and slammed him into the trailer on his back. My leg ignited into flaming, outraged fury at this action and I fell down on top of him screaming in agony.

  Davidson, in the meantime, unloaded everything he had into the bed of the other truck, thoroughly fucking up their entire universe.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ, Greg, what the hell were you doing? Did your mother drink Drano throughout her pregnancy?” I dragged him out from under me and slapped him on the back of his helmet. “I did not give you permission to die, you bent-dick, little puke! Wang needs relief, goddamn it! Get your underfed, boney ass up there and relieve him!”

  Face full of confusion, panic, or both, Greg rolled over onto all fours and began to crawl clumsily towards the truck bed. Instead of waiting to watch the climax of his ponderous journey, I set my HK aside and retrieved the SRS. “Okay, sweethearts,” I said, “we’ll see if you all remember my good friend Mr. Lapua…”

  I lunged forward into the shield wall, dragging myself up with a hand and a snarl. Davidson was alternating between diving under cover and popping up just long enough to lob another volley downrange.

  I poked my head over the wall and suffered a moment of shock when I saw the long array of cars, buggies, motorcycles, and trucks stacked right up on our asses. I began to consider the very real possibility that we weren’t going to make it through this. The mountain pass was so close but they were already on top of us and we had just lost Greg’s firepower to keep the truck moving.

  I confronted the possibility of failure; the idea that the people back home (who were depending on us to save them from starving) would go right on waiting for a bailout that would never come. Winter would come through the area in full force, snow them in, and they would all run out of food. Thinking back to the pulverized MREs in the truck bed, I realized that I didn’t even know how much of the food we’d collected was still intact; it was entirely possible that we’d still failed even if we managed to get away.

  I looked up at Davidson, who stared back at me wide-eyed, and shouted, “Not another one of those twats gets ahead of us, do you read me? I don’t care if we’re taking bullets to the face. I don’t care if we fuckin’ die back here. This truck makes it home, no matter the cost. Clear?”

  He swallowed hard and shook his head in a jarring nod.

  “Gimme that radio,” I yelled, and he did. Bullet impacts rattled behind me, drumming a rapid percussion beat into my body by way of my spine. Davidson stood overhead, shooting and screaming equally, and I couldn’t tell if it was his voice drowning out the gunfire or the other way around.

  “Wang! How copy?”

  “It’s Greg! Wang’s too fucked up to talk! I couldn’t even move him; I’m driving from the center in here!”

  “Fine!” I shouted. “Listen to me: pin that peddle into the floorboard, do you copy? I don’t care if the engine explodes and the transmission is shat out the back end! You get me every bit of speed out of this bitch that you can find!”

  “Understood!” he shouted back, though his voice sounded small in the earpiece, and the truck lurched forward under us again.

  I dropped the SRS in favor of the H&K, pawed at Davidson’s shoulder to haul myself back into position, and put my muzzle back over the wall. I heard the snap of bullets passing by in the air; saw the pursuit behind us falling back due to our unanticipated surge forward. They were falling back, but then that increase in distance began to slow as they fought to keep up with us. There was shooting in the air all around us, shield wall rattling against our chests like a living, aggravated animal.

  I went to work, then, and a blood lust came on me the likes of which I’d never before experienced and have not encountered since. The rifle came alive under my hands and the world went black around the edges of my vision as I shot at everything that moved before me. I suspect a lot of it was the adrenaline, which had surged up again in response to my exposure.

  James Mattis, the patron saint of all Marines, once said, “There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed.” Well, I’m here to tell you that wasn’t a bunch of machismo bullshit on his part; anyone that’s come out of a firefight alive will tell you the same thing. There is no feeling, not even sex, that’s as sweet as coming face to face with Death and cheating that son of a bitch. When you’re in a fight and the enemy’s missing, when the bullets are sliding off of you, and your buddies are standing beside you alive and angry…

  There are two circumstances under which you’ll ever feel invincible in a gunfight: you’re either dominating the battlespace and everything is going your way or all means of retreat have been closed to you. When the choices are either to prevail or die and you’re maybe unsure about which way it’s likely to go but you’re okay with either outcome.

  I don’t know which it was for me at that exact moment; don’t know if I was kill drunk because things were starting to look good again or because it didn’t matter how they looked at all. I remember how hard I screamed - just this long, endless outpouring of rage and frustration. I screamed to drown out the rushing wind and the revving engines and the constant rumble of gunfire. I wanted the ones I was shooting at to hear me howl; to know that I was going to keep on killing them for as long as they’d let me, and that I loved them for letting me do so. I was grateful to them for being there to receive what I had to offer.

  I don’t remember what Davidson was up to by that point; only remember that I could still feel his presence next to me, that I still felt the percussion of his weapon firing at all angles. My vision blurred and I blinked angrily, squirting tears from both sides of my eyes, and I don’t know if those tears were from wind or fury. I quit yelling at them only when I had to change out magazines; all I got for a breath was that little window before I was hollering and shooting again, as though my screaming were a requirement to the weapon’s function.

  We stood like that, Davidson and me, and I killed more people in the space of a few minutes than all the other days of my life combined. For that instant, when the concept of “five minutes later” didn’t even feel like a remote possibility, I was fine with it.

  31 – Gates of Fire

  Gibs

  The mountain wall rose up out of the ground before us on the right after not too long and we quickly closed the distance. Our pursuit was fighting to make up some distance again; one last push before we plunged into the safety of the Hot Gates. They’d had a hell of a time keeping up as Davidson and I had killed enough drivers and engines that vehicles had either rolled to a stop or crashed into those adjacent, peppering the length of the highway with pile-ups and jumbled bodies. I’d taken some rounds to the chest in the confusion of it all, the wall beginning to truly fail despite our best efforts to keep it serviceable.

  At one point I looked over at Davidson, who had been laughing, to see that the bottom half of his left ear was gone with a sheet of blood running down his neck. There was a big, grey scrape running up the middle of his helmet accompanied by a visible crack that threatened to make me feel queasy if I spent too long thinking about what caused it.

  Before I knew what was happening, the shadow of the desert-brown mountain walls loomed up on either side of us, abrupt as a thundercloud passing in front of the sun, and we plunged into the narrow pass that cut through the Virgin Mountains. The 15 was reduced to two lanes in either direction through these parts, divided in the center by a gorgeous concrete wall. Those bastards could get on the wrong side, sure, but they couldn’t get back over at us after they did.

  “Greg…copy?” I shouted into my mic.

  “Yeah?” he came back.

  “How we doing up there, kid?”

  He tried to respond but the signal was broken up by interference. I cursed the piece of shit civilian radio and fiddled around with the display to confirm I was
still on the right channel.

  “Repeat your last, Greg!”

  “I said Wang is seriously fucked up, man! I got a sweater crammed up against his ass but it’s soaked throu-“

  More static in the earpiece.

  “-pale! We gotta get away from these guys and fix him up!”

  “Okay, okay, copy all!” I lied. “Listen: slow us down again!”

  “The fuck, man? I just said-“

  “I know what you said. Slow us down anyway. We’ve got to stop these cocksuckers now or there’ll be no fixing up Wang ever.”

  The column rounded the bend into the cleft behind us and began to gain again; we were crawling along at something like thirty miles per hour. They came at us three abreast, unable to spread out any wider than that in the cleft, each row composed of a couple of vehicles on the road and one on the soft shoulder. Every so often, the passage narrowed enough that the ones on the shoulder had to merge back onto the pavement. Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly; the number of vehicles behind us had been reduced significantly over the last little while), they slowed down as soon as they saw us, once again hanging back to see what we would do.

  “What’s our play if they don’t come at us?” asked Davidson.

  Instead of answering, I asked, “How many of those grenades do you have left?”

  “Eight.”

  “Mmm,” I nodded. “Crouch down behind that wall where our friends can’t see and line us up a few more rifles. Get them all set with full mags, then start refilling all the other empty mags on the floor. Shit, fill a couple of those Mossbergs with slugs as well.”

  “You got it,” he said, and dropped to his knees to get busy. He was at it for several minutes while that whole army of cowards hung back behind us, my contempt for them growing the whole time. It seemed they’d been stung enough by then that they were more interested in waiting us out than having another go. When he was done, there were several loaded rifles at our feet, a couple of shotguns, the pouches on both of our rigs were filled near to bursting, and there was a 40 mm grenade waiting in the M203.

  “You ready to make an end of this?” I asked.

  Davidson reclaimed his position next to me and said, “Hell yes.” He knew what was coming next, I think; he had his rifle pressed up against the wall with his knee and hung empty hands out in the open where they’d be visible.

  I nodded. I took a deep breath and said, “You would have been an outstanding Marine, Tom.” He said nothing back. I didn’t know if such a sentiment even meant anything to him anymore; realized I didn’t care. It still meant something to me.

  “Greg,” I said into the radio, quieter now because we weren’t hauling ass up the road and the wind was down. “Stop the truck.”

  He didn’t even bother asking what I was thinking that time. The truck just came to a stop.

  I bent down painfully and dug an old, white t-shirt out of the pile of shit we were standing on; something we had used to wrap up a few handguns to keep them from slamming against each other in one of the boxes. I held it up high in the air and waved it back and forth.

  Given the distance we were at, I could see a number of the men and women still standing in the remaining truck beds look about each other uncertainly. I smiled to myself and said, “That’s right. We got no more fight left in us. Come and get your prize.”

  We hung out like that in the middle of the road for several minutes, walled in between a concrete divider on one side and a jagged mountainside on the other, and I waved until my arm felt like it would fall off. The shirt fluttered overhead and Greg’s voice came again over the radio: “I hope to fuck you know what you’re doing, man.”

  Some more static crackled over the radio and, buried just underneath it, an unfamiliar voice that said unrecognizable things. I put it out of my mind; whatever it was, it sure wasn’t going to contribute to the current situation.

  Out in the distance, a man slapped the top of a truck cab and they all started rolling forward again, slowly. It was just trucks and cars at that point; the folks on two wheels hadn’t done so well in the last skirmish. A few people jumped from truck beds to walk along on foot, rifles at the ready.

  “They’re gonna be pissed,” I said quietly to Davidson. “They probably won’t shoot us outright. They’ll want to get close, get us under control. They’ll want to do us up close…”

  “Okay,” he said. His voice was steady like iron.

  “…so let ‘em get close,” I concluded.

  We did. At a distance of two hundred feet, give or take, I dropped the shirt and said, “Get some.”

  The M203 let off a POONT! from my right, followed immediately after by the crump of an explosion in the very center of the closest truck’s windshield. I joined in with my rifle, taking my time and putting rounds into the center mass of anyone or anything stupid enough to be visible. Davidson continued with the M203, firing grenades off into the mass of vehicles as fast as he could load them, until there were none left and he had to be content with normal bullets.

  Screaming had erupted as soon as we’d begun firing, only this time it was theirs. A few of them who were still alive after our initial volley attempted to reverse out of there in a hurry but the space was so limited that they only jammed into each other and bound themselves in place. There was return fire in our direction but only sporadic, now. When we abandoned diving behind cover before, it was out of a general desperation and disregard for our own safety. Now, we didn’t bother with cover out of a general disregard for our enemy’s anemic response.

  There was no yelling from us this time, no gnashing of teeth or cursing. We proceeded about our business purposefully, methodically. Before, it had been hellfire. This was just surgery. I shot my rifle empty and, rather than taking the time necessary to swap the mag, I just let it hang and picked up one of the others that Davidson had leaned against the wall. I shot that one empty, too.

  Davidson did the same, picking his targets carefully and taking his time on them, every slug assigned a special purpose. Cars and trucks slammed into each other only a short distance away; tires spun in place and belched great clouds of white smoke into the air. Not long after, the excess rubber that had been laid onto the road ignited in several places from the heat and bright flames licked up to consume the vehicles’ undersides. A few people ignited as well and made to run off in all directions. I shot them when I could but put most of my focus on those that were still fighting.

  Despite the fires, many of the vehicles were still quivering back and forth as the drivers attempted to escape. In answer, I dropped my second rifle, retrieved the SRS, and put a .338 round through every engine to which I had a clear line of sight. After a few moments, there were fewer tires spinning. The white smoke rising into the air began to darken over to black.

  We both emptied several more magazines between us. After that, I picked up one of the shotguns and started shooting out every window I could see with one ounce slugs. In some cases, the spray of glass was accompanied by the jerking of a human body, but that was coming less often now. The movement across from us tapered off; then stopped entirely.

  We stopped firing and waited. The low idle of a few surviving engines floated out to us through the smoke. We listened for shouts or gunfire but heard neither.

  I thumbed my radio and said, “Take us out of here, Greg.”

  When we emerged from the other side of the pass, the radio came to life and I heard a voice at once foreign yet totally familiar. It said, “Unknown station, this is Buzzard 1. Please identify, over.”

  Davidson took note of the expression on my face and shouted, “What? What the hell is it? Wang?”

  I sat there and blinked like a dumbass. The radio squawked again in my ear. “I say again: unknown station, this is Buzzard 1. Please identify, over.”

  Greg’s voice came on: “What the fuck?”

  I jammed the button and responded, “Buzzard 1, this is Casanova Actual, over.”

  Davidson pulled a scan
dalized expression and mouthed, “Casanova?”

  I waved a hand at him and concentrated on what I was hearing.

  “Good to meet you, Casanova. What’s your status, over?”

  “Travelling north along the 15 freeway just outside of the Virgin Mountains, approx. sixteen klicks away from the Utah border. Two casualties, one critical, over.”

  “Roger that. Continue on current route and we’ll come out to meet you, over.”

  I looked at Davidson and swallowed. “Buzzard 1, define ‘we’, over.”

  “United States Army, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, Casanova. Just keep coming. We’ll meet you en route. Buzzard 1 out.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were pulled off the road facing a recently landed Black Hawk, the gusting wind of the rotor wreaking havoc on anything not tied down. The door gunner came running over to meet us.

  In a daze, I saw the screaming eagle of the 101st Airborne riding on his shoulder. Without even stopping to introduce himself, he shouted, “Where’s your critical?”

  “I…in the cab. He took a round to the hip. I think his pelvis is shattered.”

  The man (his name tape said Jeffries) winced and started speaking into his team radio. Two more soldiers came running over to the truck with a stretcher.

  “You’re wounded too, sir.” He had a lazy hillbilly drawl like he’d come tumbling out of the Appalachians.

  “Huh?” I looked down at my leg. “Oh. Fuck it. It’s fine for now. Our friend with the hip is the one who’s in trouble.”

  He nodded and said, “Understood.”

  “I didn’t think you guys were out there anymore,” I said like an idiot.