Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1) Page 6

  “Well, what am I missing?” I asked. “I know there could probably be more food but the gear seems pretty okay.”

  “Okay, where’s your trauma kit?”

  “Uh…” I hesitated. “You mean like first aid?”

  “No, I mean like trauma. First aid kits are good for sprained ankles and paper cuts. I’m talking about a serious trauma kit. Kind of thing you can use to treat gun shots or sucking chest wounds.”

  “I wasn’t aware there was a difference but I don’t have either anyway.”

  “Yap,” Billy agreed. “Either way, we’ll keep our eyes open and find you something – either ready-made or we’ll get some stuff together to cover all the bases. We need to beef up some other things as well. You and I could probably both use a tent if we can find something small enough to haul around. We’ll get you a rain fly at the least. We’ll want fire making tools, a good knife for you, and some better clothes for when the weather goes to shit. We’ll see if we can find some medicine like Tylenol, Aspirin; if we get really lucky we can find some antibiotics, maybe.”

  He trailed off as he saw me staring at him while he rattled off the list. “Will we be able to haul all that?” I said.

  “Just trust me,” he said. “You keep your eyes open for anything that might be useful. No one is making new stuff anymore, Whitey, and if you find yourself needful of something you can’t just pop off down to the store to get it. Most things have been picked over already so we’ll get lucky to find even half of what we’d like. You’ll see. The new basis of short term survival is going to be defined by our ability to loot like it’s 1992.”

  “Short term survival, huh? What will be the basis of long term survival, then?”

  Billy pinned me in place with a sober, serious gaze. “Long term survival will depend on our ability to wean ourselves from the dependency on that loot.”

  -

  The 15 became more clogged with stalled and abandoned vehicles as we came closer to the edge of the city. Weaving my way through became an exercise in patience as I was forced to zig-zag back and forth with the bike trailer. Billy never commented on this; he just patiently moved along next to me. I noticed that his head was always moving. He was always trying to see all directions at the same time, always had his hand on his shotgun. If we got into tight areas where visibility was reduced, he would even hold it in a high ready position (presented out in front of him with the butt down and barrel up on the level with his eyes). Despite his apparent focus on our surroundings, he was still perfectly happy to chit-chat as we made our way in. This was absolutely fine with me as it felt less like he was standing around waiting for me to get a move on, which he was.

  “So you were going to explain the superiority of shotguns to me…” I prompted.

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re superior,” Billy said. “They’re just the right tool for the job when you’re close-in or in the city. That M4 is outstanding when you need to reach out and touch someone at distance, say 400 yards or so. You have to aim and take your time but you can do it reliably with some practice. When you’re in the city, you don’t often get uninterrupted stretches at that distance. Everything becomes a lot closer.”

  “Okay,” I said, struggling around a bumper with teeth grinding, “but you’re not spending all your time in cities, right? What happens when you’re out in the open on the road?”

  “Everyone that I’ve run into so far has been in a city or on the outskirts of a city. Everyone is gravitating to them doing the same thing we’re doing right now: looking for supplies. You’re the first guy I’ve run into out on the open road. You actually had me sweating a little – I didn’t know you had that rifle but I knew you had some kind of long gun. I kept waiting for a bullet to hit me. Damned unnerving.”

  “Sorry about that,” I muttered. “I guess I could have raised my hand up in a salute or something. Give some kind of indication that I wasn’t out to get you.”

  Billy straightened up at that, looked directly at me, and raised his hand up in the air, palm out, and said “How”, in a voice even deeper than his natural rumble. He then bugged out his eyes, reversed his hand, and flipped me the bird while sticking his tongue out, surprising a belly laugh out of me.

  “Forget about it,” he said. “There was really nothing you could have done at the time to settle any nerves. We’re both walking and talking right now, which indicates that everyone did everything correctly, more or less.”

  I don’t remember saying anything in response to this but I may have grunted.

  “So, yeah,” he continued, “Having both the shotgun and the carbine would be nice in a perfect world but you have to make choices when you’re travelling light and on foot. My experience has been that the carbine has been required a lot less than the 870 out here, so shotgun is what I went with. It’s not just the weapon, you know. You have to carry the ammunition to support it. Shotgun shells are, unfortunately, about as big, nasty, and heavy as it gets for small arms but I can still lug quite a few around with me. It would be a lot worse, though, if I had to lug both 12 gauge and 5.56. I’m getting too old for that shit.”

  That earned a look out of me. Though not old, I wasn’t exactly in the prime of my youthful vigor, and Billy had at least another 20 years on me. Even so, his physical strength was easily apparent. You could see leg muscle through the denim of his jeans, which you’d maybe expect from a 20 year old gym rat. Likewise, he was wearing a bulky jacket that looked like a cross between a military-style utility jacket and camping or hiking attire (despite the fact that we were just entering into the warm part of the year) that was incapable of masking the breadth of his shoulders or the stability of his back. It’s true he carried a bit of a gut under that barrel of a chest but it didn’t bother him in any way I could see. He certainly didn’t breathe heavy or even huff carrying his own weight plus all that gear on his back. He could certainly joke about his age but I wasn’t buying it.

  He continued on oblivious to my appraisal. “There’s more call to fight in the city than there is out on the open road, therefore I stuck with a shotgun, which was my choice for home defense anyway, okay? This Remington was mine before the shit hit the fan; I didn’t lift it after the fact. It was just ready to go.”

  “So what is it that makes it better close up? I’m guessing you just don’t have to aim it due to it firing shot?”

  “Oh, no, you still have to aim it,” he said, extending his hand in a “slow down, tiger” gesture. “It’s true that the shot spreads out as it flies but not massive like you’d think. The pellets might spread out to the size of a fist at 50 yards. That’s a pretty big pattern but you still have to aim to get that to hit your target. It’s just that it’s so damned fast to put it on target. Here, look at this sight…”

  He held the shotgun out to me; pointed in the direction we were walking and rotated it so that I could see a small, brass nub out on the tip of the barrel.

  “That’s a bead sight. That’s all you get on your average shotgun. No rear sight component. So you put your cheek on the stock, put the bead on what you want to hit, and pull the trigger. You don’t have to spend time lining up the front sight with the rear sight, making a perfect little picture and all that shit. Close up, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re not 100% perfect because what you’re shooting at is up close. Two or three inches off of center mass still hits center mass. And, the nature of the shot tends to correct for a lack of accuracy at a distance because the pattern spreads out. It’s pretty forgiving.”

  “So how far can you reliably shoot that thing?” I asked.

  “All depends on your ammo. This is the other reason I’m such a fan of shotguns. Assuming I can find it, there is a long list of ammunition types I can fire that are all useful for different things. I can load birdshot into it and go hunting for small game. If I’m fighting someone, I can load buckshot, which is devastating. Look, that M4 fires 5.56, right?”

  I looked down at my rifle and shrugged like an idiot. “If
you say so.”

  “It does,” he nodded. “Also, you need to start memorizing this kind of stuff. It does you no good to carry a rifle if you don’t know how to feed it. Anyway, 5.56 millimeter, which is equivalent to .223 caliber…” He looked at me pointedly.

  “Okay?” I prompted.

  He made a face. “Are you any good with math?”

  I found this question a little insulting but I let it go. “I’ve been known to math from time to time,” I told him sarcastically.

  “Okay, then stop thinking about what the bullets look like and start thinking more about what those numbers mean. .223 is the diameter in inches of the bullet and 5.56 is just the metric equivalent of that measurement. And, when you think about it, .223 is really just .22.”

  I stopped in my tracks. I wasn’t a gun guy but I was never opposed to them either. I knew enough to know what a .22 round looked like. I popped the magazine out of my rifle and looked at the round exposed in the top. “That’s a .22 round?”

  “Yap. I know what you’re thinking. It’s certainly a lot longer than a .22 long rifle bullet and the shell and powder load are a lot bigger so it has way, way more force and inertia behind it and better range but essentially, that’s a .22 round.”

  I was shocked. I almost wished I had a .22 rifle there so I could poke a bullet into the barrel to see if it fit.

  “Now look at this,” he said as I inserted the magazine back into my rifle. He reached into one of the pockets on the front of his jacket and pulled out a shotgun shell. He handed it over to me. Feeling the weight of it, I realized how heavy it would feel to carry many of them at once.

  “That’s a number 1 buckshot load,” he said. “It contains 15 pellets, all of which are about .30 caliber. They certainly don’t travel at the speed of your 5.56 round and they don’t have the range but at 100 yards or so, they dominate your rifle for muzzle energy. Your rifle makes, I don’t know, maybe 600 or 700 foot pounds of energy at the muzzle. It depends on the round; 5.56 has a little more ass behind it than .223, but call it around 700 foot pounds just for shits. This shotgun produces anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 foot pounds of energy; that’s how much wallop is transmitted into the target on impact.”

  An appreciative grunt was the only response I could come up with. I handed the shell back over to him. I must have been making a face because he chuckled when he looked over at me to take it.

  “That’s right,” Billy agreed. “Now, that energy dissipates pretty quickly over distance, which is why the effectiveness of buckshot drops off a lot after about 50 yards. Again, your carbine has my shotgun easily beat for distance. But up close, you’re still shooting high powered, high speed, tiny little .22 rounds. What I’m packing will turn you into a god damned canoe.”

  “Okay, okay, hang on,” I interrupted. “You’ve still got to get to me. If we’re coming at each other down a long stretch of street – say 250 to 300 yards or so – you actually have to get to me in order to get me. That’s a pretty long distance you have to make up while I get to take free shots at you.”

  “Well, yes, if I’m not seeking cover and just running straight at you like a dumbass, I suppose you get to light me up at your convenience. The thing about cities, though, is that there’s a lot of shit to get behind. Also, there’s this…” He held up another shell, extracted from yet another pocket. “This is a slug – essentially a big-ass bullet. This is something like .69 or .70 caliber. It’s basically artillery. Now, you really have to know what you’re doing if you just have a bead sight but you can hit targets reliably at 200 yards with this thing. I don’t think I could make that kind of range with a bead (not while the target is moving, anyway) but with some kind of a scope or a decent optic on this thing set for that distance, it would be very doable.”

  He handed me the slug and I looked down at the front of it. A huge, lead dome stared back up at me in place of the usual plastic starfish of a normal shotgun shell.

  “The other good thing about a slug,” he continued, “is that I can use it to get through a door that doesn’t want to unlock.”

  I looked over at his shotgun with new respect. I knew they were nasty but that last bit sounded excellent. There had been plenty of doors that I had to pass by because they were locked and I just had no way to get in.

  “The only real drawback besides the range thing is the shitty capacity.” He held the 870 out in front of him. “I had to modify the magazine on this just to hold 8 rounds. These guns are pigs. You always have to feed them ammo. You are always, always reloading them in a fight. It’s why most defense shotguns have these side saddles,” he noted, pointing to a line of 7 shells mounted on the side of the gun. “No matter what’s happening, you’re going to be reloading very soon. You might as well have your extras right by the receiver.”

  “It still sounds pretty good,” I mused. “I’ll make sure to keep my eye out for one.”

  “Well, as to that…” Billy gave me a sly grin out of the side of his mouth. “I’ll just say it’s damned convenient that your folks live on Decatur. It turns our route into a straight line, more or less. There’s this place I want to check out along the way. It’s not a storefront so much as it is a shipping warehouse. I have this theory: most of the outdoor places like Big 5 and Turners are going to be stripped bare. Hell, you can see the firepower on the racks right through the front windows plus people would be turning the place over for camping gear and other stuff like that. A warehouse, though, well…it’s still possible that the place is picked over but it won’t be obvious what it is, I hope. There’s a chance we find many good things.”

  “Make strong like bull, huh?” I asked.

  “Hey, there you go, Whitey!” he said with approval. “I’ll be teaching you the secret handshake before you know it.”

  As we entered the main drag of the city, we took an abrupt left and started making our way towards Decatur. It amazed me how much congestion dropped off as we moved away from that main drag. The 15 is really the dominant artery into and out of that city, so it makes sense that traffic would be absolutely jammed along this channel but I had a hard time imagining what the owners of all those cars were actually up to sitting in all that mess. If they had just moved a little off the beaten path they would have found a multitude of options for getting around in the city. Perhaps they found themselves locked in and immobilized in the press of the traffic; I certainly saw plenty of cars and trucks with no bodies in them – just abandoned on the roadway. Some of them had doors that were left open, completely and utterly discounted by their owners.

  We spent the whole morning and midafternoon first locating and then fueling two vehicles. The first became Billy’s vehicle; a blue Ford Transit van. The second, a white Dodge 1500, became my ride. I had argued for smaller vehicles, perhaps even motorcycles, to help us navigate the really bad areas, but Billy eventually sold me on the idea of the larger trucks. They both had the ability to go off-road (the truck more so than the van) in the really nasty areas; as long as we kept out of major choke points and took our time circumnavigating cities and major congestion areas, our mobility would be maintained. The main point was the ability to haul gear, he said. You couldn’t beat what we had found. Fueling them became the main problem.

  There had been a run on gas in the final days so we weren’t going to find any fuel at actual gas stations. Moreover, there was no power to pump it up to our tanks. Even so, we did go to gas stations and auto shops to get our hands on any gas cans we could find. In this regard, we did well. They were empty, but we managed to load a respectable collection of various sizes into the truck bed. We would be able to keep ourselves topped off reasonably well assuming we could keep the cans filled.

  Finding actual gas was much easier than I originally suspected. There was about a half a tank in the van and less in the truck when we found them, so we were initially able to move them around and get them to those places we needed to be. We found a Pep Boys just off of Jones Blvd and invited ourselves in. Surprisin
gly, there were quite a few useful things in the tool category left in the shop. We grabbed a socket set, some jumper cables (I berated myself silently for leaving the set of cables in the old sedan I abandoned), and an extra tire for the van and truck each, even though I was pretty sure that they both had full sized spares. When I stated that I had no clue how we would get the tires on a rim, Billy noted while picking out a can of spray sealant that he’d show me how to do it with a crowbar if the situation presented itself.

  The whole collection was rounded out with some rather large drip pans, funnels, a mallet, and ¼” taper punch (what amounted to a big, metal spike). When I asked him if he’d like to include floor jacks, stands, and spare water pumps he stopped to consider it and I really couldn’t tell if he was toying with me or not. He asked me to take the first round of goodies out to the truck, which we had backed right up to the door along with the van, while he continued to look around. He went to a corner of the store and righted an overturned shopping cart, much to my chagrin.

  As I was loading the tires into the pickup bed, I noted to myself that we would need some way to pressurize them. I just turned to poke my head back into the store and tell Billy when I saw movement across the street out of the corner of my eye. I immediately dropped to a crouch behind the bed of the truck and started cursing at myself for leaving the rifle against the window inside of the shop. I pulled the Glock from my waist band (a weapon I was totally unfamiliar with and had yet to fire) and crept around the side of the bed to look across the street. There was nothing. I must have sat there for a good five minutes, barely willing to breathe and looking for any hint of movement whatsoever. Presently, my knees started to ache horribly and I was just beginning to consider relaxing when Billy’s voice issued from directly behind me, unexpected.

  “What’re you doing, there, Whitey?”

  I jumped in place. My outraged knees collapsed as a final “screw you” to my unreasonable demands and I plopped down directly on my tailbone.