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

“Hell, put my ass in a tent for now. We can always put a roof up,” Fred replied. Oscar pointed in Fred’s direction and shot him a thumbs-up, which the much larger man returned with a nod.

George laughed softly and said, “Well, they’ve already made it clear that we can stay here for the night. Whether we do or not, I think we all know we can survive another evening sleeping on the bus. We would have ended up doing that here or anywhere. As Fred suggests, though, this could be a place to build on.”

A few people nodded to this and considered things silently. I kept my yap shut, feeling that it wasn’t my place to try and sway people one way or the other. If they were going to stay, they needed to come around to that decision on their own.

“I feel I should point out that this isn’t our only choice,” said Wang. Everyone in the group turned their attention on him, and he continued, “This valley isn’t the only place in the area we can stay. I know I saw at least a couple of neighborhoods in the surrounding area as we drove in. We could just drive into one of those, pick whatever houses we like, and set up there. It’s not like we need to talk to a realtor or anything.”

“That’d be a little awkward, wouldn’t it?” asked Rebecca.

“Awkward how?”

“Well,” she said, “we’d be setting ourselves up as competitors, wouldn’t we? It’s like Jake said; wherever we end up, we need to be collecting as much food as we can to buy enough time to figure something better out. If we do what you say, we’re basically fighting over the same food in this area.”

“That’s a really good point,” George said. “Things could come to a head.”

“Not to mention our first night would probably be spent dragging bodies out of homes and fumigating…” Rebecca shuddered.

“I don’t think going to any random set of homes should be an option,” stated Jeff, surprising myself and others. Jeff Durand, who I’d always thought of as an ageless man-boy, was whisper-quiet most of the time. He was of average height with the build of a perpetually underweight teenager. His bearing and appearance made it damned hard to tell his actual age but, if I were forced to guess, I’d say he was a lot closer to his thirties than his teens. He was exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be playing a high school student in a bad 80’s movie.

“How would we prevent someone from just coming by and forcing their way in?” Jeff asked. “We need a place that’s protected. Somewhere we can keep the kids safe while we’re out doing our thing.”

Monica and Oscar both considered this, very carefully it seemed.

“This whole thing has me pretty concerned, frankly,” Edgar blurted. When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “Go on.”

He looked at me and said, “Look, I know you, and I haven’t always seen eye to eye but just hear me out on this one, okay?”

“I’m listening, man, we all are. Let’s hear it.”

“I’m worried about us all becoming a bunch of second class citizens around here,” he said. “They seem pretty friendly, but Jake didn’t make any effort to hide their chief interest. They need help accomplishing things here. Labor. What keeps them from setting themselves up pretty while we all bust around like a bunch of worker drones?”

“Well, there are sixteen of us,” I offered.

“Meaning what, exactly? You’re suggesting we kill them and take this place?” he asked. His expression was horrified, which went a long way to restore some of my faith in him.

“Oh, hell no, I’ll break my foot off in anyone who suggests doing so seriously. You,” I pointed at Fred, “I might just have to shoot. You might hurt me.” He laughed and shook his head before shambling over to the other table and leaning his weight against it. He kept closer to the end where he would be over the table legs, and thus the strongest point, but it still sagged alarmingly under him.

I continued, “I just meant that two people can’t really force sixteen people to do anything, can they? What are they going to do? Hold us at gunpoint? Two people can’t keep sixteen people under control like that and still have them mobile enough to be doing work around here. They’d spend more time guarding us than doing anything else.”

“It wouldn’t necessarily happen like that,” Edgar responded. “They could do it slowly.”

His statement stopped me. I couldn’t see how but something about the way he said it tickled something at the back of my mind. “I’m listening.”

“How do you think dictators and fascists hold onto their power? They used to control whole nations where everyone lived under horrible, substandard conditions. What kept the citizens from rising up against the guy in charge?”

George was nodding, now, and said, “Primus inter pares.”

I wasn’t exactly a scholar of extinct languages, but I’d caught up with the concept by that point.

“I’m sorry, what does that mean?” Alish asked.

“What they mean,” I said, “Is that, over a period of time, they establish a hierarchy around here; a small power structure. Within that hierarchy, some people will enjoy more privileges, get nicer things. We’re talking about a long game, here. This isn’t something where they come out tomorrow and say ‘Okay, Alish, you’re now the President of the well and it’s your job to ration out water.’ That wouldn’t work. But over a long period of time, months probably, you could build up enough structures and relationships around here where certain people just have it nicer than others. It might be as simple as job assignments, you know? The idea is that those people with the nicer setups will want to hold onto that and will work for the ones in charge to maintain the status quo.”

“Jesus Christ,” Monica whispered. “You really think they’d try that?” She looked around at us, and a realization seemed to strike her. “Do you really think that would work on us?”

“Probably not,” George said. “I don’t think the group is large enough for something like that to take hold. We’re too small and too tight. I used to cover this stuff when I taught high school history. I think you’d need at least fifty people to get something like that off the ground. Your population needs to reach some critical mass where folks can exist as acquaintances or even strangers. It’s still a damned good point that Edgar makes. It’s something to keep in the backs of our minds, anyway.”

“Agreed,” I said, and Edgar looked surprised.

Davidson chose that moment to speak up. “So, will someone tell me what the hell we’re doing? I feel like we’ve been going in circles.”

“I vote we stay,” Oscar said. “My man Jeff is right. All this other stuff aside, you can’t beat the area. We can leave the kids here with a small number of grownups while we go out and get the bacon. They’ll be safe here. If that Jake dude wants to get stupid, I can just give him a little beat down to keep him in line, like.”

“You think Jake is someone you can just give a little beat down?” asked Barbara, who had been uncharacteristically silent since we’d arrived.

“What’s on your mind, Barbara? You seem worried,” George asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Amanda seems okay. She’s a hard woman, but she has a young daughter. I can understand and respect that. Jake is… something else. He makes me nervous.”

“How?” I asked.

“I just said I don’t know. Look, does anyone else get the impression that something is off with him?”

“Yes,” Wang said. “I felt like he was playing a role.”

“Could just be playing his cards close,” Fred suggested. “He did just invite sixteen armed people to come live with him.”