Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  The bus had been abandoned in the middle of the street. We approached from the rear, swinging out wide to the right to get a good look down its length. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the vehicle; it was your standard big goddamned yellow school bus. The only thing that made it stand out for me was the blue-green letters running along the top side saying “COLO SPRINGS DIST 11”.

  I traversed the length of the bus from back to front while trying and failing to get any kind of a glimpse through the windows; their tint job made it impossible. Past the front, there was a minor vehicle block that would prevent us from travelling forward. It didn’t look like any of the cars in front of us had crashed; they were only crammed in bumper to bumper. The knot of vehicles ran four deep at its worst point but beyond them the street opened up enough that we would be able to navigate through if we used every square inch of it (along with a bit of the sidewalk).

  “We’ll have to move all that shit out of the way,” I said to Wang, indicating the mess with a nod.

  “Do you think it’ll take long?” Wang asked glancing down at his watch. I looked down at my own watch on the inside of my wrist. It said 1412 (or 2:12 pm).

  “It shouldn’t be bad,” I told him. “What are we looking at, six cars? No, seven. We can get them moved in twenty minutes if we hustle – the ground is nice and flat here. Why don’t you go have a look at the next cross street and see if there’s room enough to store them all? I’ll check this bus out.”

  Wang trotted off in the direction I suggested. It made me a little twitchy to have him head out like that without any kind of a weapon but we were never going to get anything done if I insisted on keeping him in my back pocket. I kept reminding myself that this wasn’t Iraq, there weren’t any Muj up in the buildings waiting to light us up, and that anyone we did run into were more likely to start with talking than they were with fighting. Regardless, it all felt very familiar.

  I shoved open the accordion door of the bus, stepped on, and made a quick circuit of the aisles. The interior was blessedly abandoned – if there had been any dead things inside I would have given up on the whole project. I’d cleaned out corpses before. I wasn’t interested in doing that shit again without a really good reason or, at the very least, the promise of bacon. I can be bribed with bacon.

  Returning to the front, I checked the driver seat, visor, and the little compartments in the immediate area. There were no keys anywhere but I wasn’t terribly worried. I heard Wang approach from behind and step onto the bus.

  “Damn, it looks even bigger on the inside,” he said as he looked towards the rear. “Do you think you can drive this thing?”

  “Me?” I said, mildly shocked. “How the hell did I get signed up for this?”

  “Well, I can’t drive it.”

  I looked down at the instrument panel on the dashboard. There were more buttons than I was used to seeing in any vehicle along with a big yellow push button for the parking break next to the ignition.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. Nothing like a little OJT (on the job training).

  “Did you find a key anywhere,” Wang asked.

  “No but it’s not a problem. I think Oscar can hotwire it.”

  “Oscar – he was the guy with that little girl?”

  “Maria, yeah,” I said.

  “Huh. He was a mechanic?”

  “Nope, construction. He was a foreman. But, he was also a bad boy before his daughter came along,” I said and smiled at him. I nudged past him to exit and called back to him over my shoulder. “Come on, let’s head back and pick everyone else up. It will help to have everyone here; we’ll be able to work in parallel. I’ll need a tire iron to break out the windows on these cars, at least.”

  “We still don’t know if there’s any gas in it,” he warned as he followed me.

  “I know. It’s a calculated risk,” I told him. “The thing was in park and looked like it had the break set. Whoever drove it took the key when they left. There’s a pretty good chance it didn’t idle down to empty. How did those cross streets look?”

  “We’re good,” he said. “There is at least enough room to get the worst of the cars moved out of the way.”

  “Outstanding,” I said, and looked at my watch again: 1418. “Okay, it’s almost 2:20. Let’s keep up a good pace and try to shave some time off that return trip. I want to be driving out of here before we lose our light.”

  3 – Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus

  Gibs

  I really, really hated that cock sucking bus. Driving that fucking thing was like trying to steer a fat, drunk woman away from the last slice of cake - you’d better start turning her early and if your judgement is off, plan on running into things. It was basically a real life version of one of those crappy, frustrating smartphone games that made you want to tear your hair out.

  I imagine such an app would be called Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus.

  We had completed our transfer to the bus a little after four. Wang and I got back to the group, updated everyone as quick as we could, and then thirteen of our people all piled into two sedans like a circus clown act. We got an initial five into each vehicle in the usual fashion, then took the smaller people (there was our Maria, Oscar’s nine year old daughter, and another girl with Wang’s group named Rose Dempsey, who was fourteen) and put them on laps. Even Rebecca, that incredibly attractive red head that was way too young for this leatherneck, ended up in Davidson’s lap – he looked like Christmas had come early and she kindly pretended not to notice. It was kind of touching, really. She was twenty-six to his twenty-two but it was obvious that she was something more like forty-six in hottie years, experience-wise. I felt like I was watching a waitress at a Hooters restaurant patiently dealing with an adolescent boy who was having a hard time keeping his eyes on the menu. Oscar and I escorted the two vehicles on foot, each of us armed with a rifle.

  Things went quick when we got back to the bus. The first thing we did was get our two eldest members, Barbara Dennings and George Oliver, installed safely on board. I passed Oscar some screwdrivers and a multi-tool, asked him to go to work on the bus ignition, and had the rest of our crew transfer all of the baggage, gear, and provisions from the two cars to the center aisle of the bus all the way to the rear. I took a tire iron from one of the cars, trotted around to the front of the bus where the pileup was, and began to move as quick as I could from vehicle to vehicle breaking out windows. When that was done, I had Davidson get into the driver seat of the first vehicle out in front and Fred Moses came over to help me push the car out of the way. We had to shove each car about two hundred feet to get them all onto a cross street and out of the way, but with Fred’s help pushing, it was pretty easy work that went by fast. By the time we had the pileup cleared, everyone was setup on the bus and ready to go. Oscar had exposed the necessary ignition wires a long time ago and was just waiting for us to come back before sparking the bus to life.

  I could see that he already had a couple of the wires twisted together and that the instrument panel was currently lit up, which was a good sign as far as the battery was concerned; however the fuel gauge was all the way down to empty. He held two other stripped wires in each hand.

  “This is really gonna suck if the tank is empty,” he warned and touched the two wires together.

  The starter began to chitter immediately and the engine itself growled to life soon after. Oscar separated the two wires he was holding immediately and kept them apart. We both looked over at the instrument panel, where we saw the fuel needle positioned at just over three quarters of a tank.

  “Oralé pues!” Oscar said and smiled up at me. “You got any electrical tape in your bag, man? I don’t want to leave these wires out; they’ll shock the shit out of anyone that touches them.”

  “Wait one,” I said and went to the rear to find my duffel. I dug around until I found my Universal Repair Kit (a roll of 100 mph tape) and took it back to give to Oscar. He wrapped the ends of the exposed wires and
let them hang against the popped center console panel, which he’d had to remove to pull the ignition switch. He also wrapped the end of the two wires he had twisted together.

  He got up out of the seat and pointed at a big yellow push button floating out in space next to the dangling ignition switch. “That’s your E-brake there. Make sure you pop it before you try to drive.”

  “Hey, do you think you can drive this thing?” I asked.

  Oscar hesitated, looking down at the wheel.

  “I mean, don’t take it personally, but you kind of have more experience driving all sorts of different vehicles than I do,” I said in hushed tones.

  He leaned in close and also lowered his voice. “I was jacking Toyotas, man. I never got into hijacking, like, shipping trucks and whatnot; there was too much danger of someone getting hurt. I’m as likely to roll this bitch as you are.” He straightened up and gave me the satisfied smile of an asshole absolved of all responsibility. “Saddle up, cabron!”

  “Hey, I know what that means, dick,” I said to his back. “You think I didn’t have any loudmouthed Mexican Marines in my outfit? They’re so much of a stereotype that the Corps just gave up and started issuing at least two to every squad.”

  Oscar sat down in one of the bench seats towards the middle of the bus next to his daughter and smiled at me. “Okay, Mr. Bus Driver, move that bus!” he called out, earning some giggles from the others.

  I turned back to look at the steering wheel, which waited passively as if to say, “We can sit here and waste fuel idling all day, buddy. I don’t give a shit.”

  As previously mentioned, driving the thing was a challenge to say the least. Managing a full sized bus is one of those jobs they used to make you undergo training for, and that was just when we lived in a world where the roads weren’t pockmarked with broken down and stalled vehicles. The apocalypse had significantly upped the difficulty of Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus. Driving along the straight sections in the road wasn’t too bad; as long as you stayed away from the most travelled areas you could get around, although you sometimes had to sideswipe a car here and there. In some cases I had to put the bus in park and take one or two guys along with me to go push another car out of the way. After a couple of instances of this, Fred, Davidson, and Oscar just stayed up at the very front of the bus with me, ready to deploy when needed.

  No, the worst part of driving that bastard was making a right angle turn. The first time I tried to do so through an intersection, I heard a shout erupt from behind me followed immediately by the distressing sound of grinding. I hit the brake and looked back over my shoulder to see the right side of the bus pressed up against a pole on the street corner (I think it was a light or a street sign of some sort – I couldn’t see the top of it through the window). I had to back up in order to get off of it, straightened out the wheel, and attempted the turn at a slower rate, stealing glances over my shoulder as I went. Again, the side of the bus came dangerously close to the pole and I heard Kyle, an eighteen year old kid from Wang’s group, say, “Nope. You gotta swing out way wide, bro.”

  “Oh, fuck me with a toaster, you think?” I growled through gritted teeth – I kept it under my breath, though. I didn’t know him very well yet and wanted to avoid scaring him. I needed people to be able to come and tell me bad news without fear of my chewing their ass. I’d give him some time to get to know me before I introduced him to the more winning aspects of my personality.

  We made it around the corner on the third try, swinging out so far that the front of the bus nearly hit the light pole on the opposing end. I got the hang of it after a while; the fact that there was no one else on the road helped. If I had to make a right turn, I could swerve over to the left side of the road first to give myself the greatest possible radius, and vice versa for left turns as well. This was one of the more dangerous aspects of driving the Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus. It was like working with really dangerous woodshop tools; as soon as you got comfortable with what you were doing, your attention might wander and that was when the malevolent intelligence hiding inside the machine would reach out and dick punch you.

  We weren’t on the road for very long before I was pulling over to stop again, this time for reasons that excited me. Down a side street, almost tucked out of the way, there was a tan Humvee sitting next to the curb. A Humvee meant two things: diesel fuel and gear. This had potential to pay huge dividends.

  “Oscar,” I called back. “How the hell do I turn this thing off?”

  He came up to the front with me and said, “Pull those two red wires apart. Don’t touch the ends, though.”

  I did as he said and the engine went to sleep. I slapped the parking brake, got out of my seat, and called back down the length of our ride. “Everything is okay. I’ve just seen potential fuel and supplies. Sit tight; this shouldn’t take long.”

  To Oscar, I said: “Grab the fuel can and pump.” Then, looking over to Davidson, “You grab the M4 and come keep an eye on us.”

  As Davidson was coming along to cover us, I left my rifle on the bus by the driver seat (I was going to need both hands anyway) but grabbed the tire iron. All three of us approached the Humvee from the rear.

  “You’ll find the gas cap on the right side,” I told Oscar. “Make sure you dump out whatever is left in that can before you pump any diesel into it.”

  “Uh, you wanna show me how to do this?” asked Oscar. “I’ve never actually done it before.”

  “Oh, sure, man,” I said. It occurred to me that I hadn’t shown anyone how to siphon out a tank from start to finish; I had just been doing everything for people. That was going to have to change – I wasn’t doing anyone (especially myself) any favors by keeping people ignorant. It was time to put my SSgt hat back on again.

  “Okay,” I said, “take the donkey dick off that can and pour out whatever is in it.”

  “The what?” said Oscar, laughing.

  I had said it without thinking and suppressed a grin. It wasn’t the first time I had seen someone entertained by jarhead terminology. I reached out to take the can, unscrewed the cap, and pulled out the spout a few inches. “This thing. You unscrew and detach it from the can completely. Why, what do you call it?”

  “Like, a pour spout?” Oscar was still chuckling.

  I put on my best disappointed face. “Well, that just isn’t any fun at all. ‘Donkey Dick’ it is.”

  Oscar removed the spout, upended the can, and shook it vigorously while I unscrewed the Humvee’s cap. I took the pump and unrolled the hoses. Handing it to Oscar, I said, “Okay, you take this end and feed it down to the gas tank. You want to go gently until you hit some resistance.”

  He did as instructed, finally saying, “Okay, I feel it hitting something right now.”

  “Good. Now this part can be kind of a bitch. The end of that hose is cut at an angle so it can wedge past the roll valve and get down into the tank. You have to twist the hose in order to get that wedging action to work, so what you’re trying to do is twist it slowly while applying enough downward force to get it to dig in. You can’t use too much force, though, or you’ll just bind up the hose against the inside of the tube and it won’t go anywhere.”

  Oscar paused a moment to take all of that on board and then nodded. He began to work the hose with his fingers and said, “How do I know when it’s past?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it,” I said. “You’ll feel it – it’ll grab for a bit and then you’ll suddenly be able to push it forward again.” I watched as he fought with the pump while trying to rotate the hose. “Why don’t you go ahead and detach the pump for now? Once you get the hose set you can reconnect it.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he said and did so.

  I gave him a light slap on the shoulder and approached the passenger side door with the tire iron. Looking in through the window, I could discern the outline of a head and shoulders inside the vehicle. I grunted, “Yep. Shit.” I half expected this.

  I tri
ed the handle and found that the door was unlocked, so I set the iron aside. I opened the door and found the remains of a Soldier in a partial state of undress in the front seat. His plate carrier, chest rig, and fatigue jacket had all been stripped off and thrown into the driver seat. He had been there for a while; having no odor that I could detect. I looked at the name tape on his jacket. “Sorry, Adams,” I said. “This was a shitty way to go. Rest in peace, buddy.”

  I glanced into the back seat and immediately experienced a wave of intense sexual arousal. “Oh…oh hello…you big…beautiful bitch.”

  From my left I heard Oscar bark happily. “Ha! I got it, homes! Finally!”

  “That’s good,” I muttered in a daze. “That’s really good, man.” I couldn’t tear my eyes off what I was seeing. It seemed as though Adams had been a Grenadier. I was looking at an obviously well-loved M4 with an underslung M203 grenade launcher. Wordlessly, I walked around the front of the vehicle to the other side and opened the rear door, grabbed the rifle, and began to inspect it. It all appeared to be in good working order. There were plenty of scuffs and scratches on the surface of the weapon, which is what you expected to see from a Soldier that actually had to work for a living, but all was in place where I hoped to find it. The action functioned smoothly, the ACOG optic was good to go, and the magazine dropped out and reseated with no issue. Moving towards the front of the rifle, I confirmed that the grenade launcher leaf sight was undamaged and then slid the M203 barrel forward. A spent 40 mm shell extracted and clattered to the pavement.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered. “You had to fire this thing.” I wondered about what must have happened that drove this man to fire off a grenade in a U.S. city. Hopefully, he had only gone as far as firing smoke or some sort of crowd control.

  “Goddamn!” I heard Davidson call from behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and saw him staring openmouthed at the weapon in my hands. “I call dibs on that shit!” he said, pointing excitedly.