Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

Without waiting for anyone to start asking questions, Jake said, “I’ve asked you all to meet with me in this way because I think it’s probably a good idea that we lay out everyone’s intentions before too much time passes. Bringing in the leaders of your group seemed the best way to do that; large groups can devolve into a lot of chatter.”

I noted that when Jake said “leaders,” different people had different reactions. Gibs looked tired but resigned while Wang passively revealed very little. George looked surprised, as though he hadn’t expected to be lumped into such a group, and Edgar straightened up in his chair.

“Well, that’s fair,” Gibs said as he leaned back into the couch. “What are your intentions?”

I was curious how Jake was going to play this. Saying, “Hey, come live with us,” sounds a little nuts when you just blurt it out like that.

“If it’s alright,” Jake responded, “I was hoping I could ask you to share what your plans were before I ran into you all in Jackson.”

“That seems reasonable,” George said quietly. Gibs seemed to take a cue from this and nodded gently.

“Okay,” Gibs said. “Our plans were fairly simple. Find a place that doesn’t suck, dig in, and scavenge for food and supplies.”

“How has that been working out?” Jake asked.

Gibs’s left leg began to bounce rapidly on the ball of his foot, but he seemed not to notice; he met Jake dead in the eye. “Could be better.”

“I’ll say we started strong, but things got a bit harder as we went,” George supplied. “Got a lot harder, really.”

“And you all started out together?”

“No,” said George. “I had started out with Gibs and Tom, that’s Tom Davidson, in a sick camp down in Texas. This was when things had really started to go south, you understand; we just sorta nodded to each other one day, got up, and left. We ran into Oscar and his daughter Maria not long after that, Rebecca was out on the road.”

“Rebecca is the redhead?” I asked.

“That’s right,” said George.

Jake said, “You just picked up the rest along the way?”

“More or less,” Gibs said, wobbling his head back and forth. “We ran into Wang and his crew in Colorado Springs… that would be Jeff, Fred, Monica and Rose, Wang and Edgar here and… Kyle and Jessica.”

“Jeff was the quiet one, wasn’t he? He didn’t say much while we were eating,” said Jake.

“Yeah, but he’s alright once you get to know him,” said Gibs. “Doesn’t complain, carries his weight. Helps out with the kids, also.”

“You said ‘Kyle’ and ‘Jessica,’” prompted Jake.

“Yes,” Gibs nodded. “I lost them.” ‘I’ not ‘We.’ His leg was drumming almost frantically. I was surprised no one pointed it out but I certainly wasn’t going to. My job was mostly to watch them and compare notes later with Jake.

In the meantime, Jake nodded to himself and stood from his chair. He walked to a cabinet in the back of the room (up against the wall that was shared by the kitchen on the other side) and asked, “Can I offer any of you a drink?”

“I’d love a vodka,” Edgar said hopefully.

After a brief pause in which he turned back to consider all of us, Jake returned with a tray carrying six tumblers and a fresh bottle of Crown Royal. Placing the tray down next to the Chess set on the table, he began to remove the wrapping from the bottle. He made no comment at all regarding the fact that he brought back Canadian whiskey rather than vodka, met no one’s eyes as he poured. He didn’t even attempt an apology over having no vodka on hand, which would have been a lie anyway. He poured a couple of fingers’ worth into each glass, selected one from the bunch, and then settled back into his chair. He took the first sip and sighed, wearing his unreadable smile, and nodded to Edgar, who looked more than a little dazed as he reached out hesitantly to take his glass.

Jake nodded to him happily and said, “It’s quite good.”

Edgar looked at his glass as though he expected to find something floating in it. Apparently finding nothing, he looked up and smiled around at the rest of us before taking a sip. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of whiskey, which is why I felt sympathetic when one of Edgar’s eyes squinted, and he just managed to suppress a shudder.

“It’s very good,” he agreed, and Jake nodded again happily.

I looked at the others and saw that Gibs wasn’t paying attention to the interplay at all, choosing instead to warm his glass between his hands. His leg was still running a hundred miles an hour, and he appeared to be locked within his own black thoughts. George seemed amused by Jake; he sat with his hand covering his mouth, but I could see a smile in his eyes. Wang looked completely confused by the whole affair.

“That’s whiskey,” Wang said.

“Hmm?” Jake asked in a distracted tone.

“That’s not vodka. It’s whiskey.”

Jake looked down at the bottle for a beat then back up at Edgar. “Oh, no! You did ask for vodka, didn’t you? How stupid of me; here let me take that. I’ll get you fixed up right now.”

“Oh, well if you insist,” said Edgar.

“I do,” Jake said as he snatched the glass from his hand. He disappeared back into the kitchen where we heard him discard the glass into the sink.

He came back out and squatted down in front of the liquor cabinet. He called back to us over his shoulder, saying “Okay, you’ll need to pick one. I don’t really know anything about vodka.” He stood and approached the group with two bottles in his hand, one of which said “Tovaritch” across the front. The other was a terribly gaudy pink bottle that looked like it had been bedazzled near to death. It said “Alizé” along the front of its face.

Edgar’s eyebrows pulled up high on his forehead, and I briefly wondered if he was as put off by the bottle of disco vodka as I was. To my surprise, he pointed right at it and said, “That’ll do fine,” in a whisper that quavered.

Jake’s expression didn’t alter in any way that you could see but, having lived with him now for months, I noticed his demeanor shift. His side of the room chilled slightly, though he continued to smile as if nothing had happened (nothing did happen as far as I could see). “As you wish,” he nodded and turned to fill a glass. He returned to his chair, reaching out to hand the glass to Edgar before settling in, who took it carefully with both of his. He took a sip and looked intensely satisfied.

I should mention here that this was the last time Jake actively addressed Edgar that evening, instead only choosing to respond to him politely when spoken to directly. George shook silently in suppressed amusement, which aggravated me; I hated being left out of a joke.

Jake now looked back to Blake Gibson, who always insisted on being “Just Gibs” and said, “You were saying, please?”

Gibs looked up from his glass and nodded. He raised it to his lips, threw the entire thing back in one gulp, and said, “We were heading for open country free of any nuclear power plants when we started out. That meant heading north from Texas for Colorado.”

Jake and I both settled back into our chairs to listen to Gibs fill us in on the last few weeks of their lives together. His narrative was supplemented at times by the others when it seemed he might pass by a detail that was important to them. Gibs didn’t mind being interrupted at all and yielded the floor happily to anyone who cared to add additional perspective.

I won’t recount the details of his story here as I believe he’s already relayed as much to you during his own interviews. I will say that both Jake and I were horrified by their encounter in Denver. In our entire time together, we had not once run into such a large and apparently organized group of aggressively hostile people. While we’d definitely had some run-ins with some incredibly unsavory people (and dealt with them accordingly), these were always limited to very small groups. In the total of my experiences, we had only come up against perhaps two of what I would consider to be evil people. Maybe only one. Everyone else seemed to be in the same boat we were; just stumbling around attempting to find a new place in the world while at the same time trying to avoid getting killed by everyone else.