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

He let go of my hand and said, “I don’t think we’ll ask you to sleep on the bus or outdoors tonight; you’ve all had a rough road. I’m sure we can find room for you all here even if we have to break out the air mattresses.”

“I assure you,” I said, “air mattresses would be just fu—just freaking dandy.”

From behind Jake, Amanda called out to me with a smile, “You’ve done that a few times today; correct yourself mid-sentence like that.” She walked up to stand beside Jake in the entry.

I grimaced and nodded. “Yeah, sorry. That’s my underdeveloped vocabulary coming through. I only have about half of it available when I’m in polite company.”

Her smile widened, and I saw that she was genuinely, almost exotically attractive. Then again, I’ve always had a thing for the Hispanic girls.

“Gibs, I can’t speak for everyone else but, as far as I’m concerned, strong language doesn’t bother me a fucking bit. You should have seen the cousins I grew up with. They used “fuck” like a comma.”

I snickered and said, “I think I may have served with your cousins.”

“Well, that’s unlikely,” she said. “They tended to end up in jail every so often. I know the Corps frowns on that. Anyway, all I’m saying is you don’t need to be like that around me. Just say what you’re going to say.”

“Okay, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “So, should I grab everyone, then? Oh, hell! I don’t mean to be pushy but what are you guys doing for showers around here? We’ve all got at least a week or more of road caked onto us. You probably don’t want us crawling into beds smelling like bags of smashed ass.”

“Linens can be washed, but we can get a bath going for you guys,” Jake said. “It’ll probably take the rest of the evening for everyone to get a turn. We have a couple of rain barrels outside that we can draw from. This will take a while, though; we should heat it up over a fire, or it’ll be like ice. I’m also sorry to say that there won’t be enough for everyone to get a fresh bath… we’ll have to reuse the water a bit.”

My skin was already starting to crawl before he’d finished the sentence. The thought of sponging off with other peoples’ ass grease set me to squirming on the spot. It didn’t help that I knew, intellectually, that I’d been caked head to heel in some of the foulest material imaginable in my long, lovely career in the Infantry or that I was every bit as nasty as everyone else. Sure I was disgusting, but that was all my filth. All that other filth was… foreign filth; tainted.

I suppressed a shiver and said, “We’ll make it work. I’ll head out and let everyone know.”

“Excellent,” said Jake. He turned to Amanda and started asking about air mattresses as I walked back out of the house to update everyone on the plans for the night.

It took the rest of the evening to get all sixteen of us washed and presentable, the whole thing turning into a group effort as we went. They had an old oil drum set up as a hobo fire pit outside between the cabin and garage where they burned most of their trash. There was a good cord of wood stacked up along the wall of the cabin outside just under the bedroom windows; some of the logs were thrown into the drum along with our trash from the evening and ignited. Very soon there was a strong blaze jutting up out of the top of the barrel and over this was positioned a grill and a massive, five-gallon kettle filled with water from the rain barrels. We placed it there long enough to just start boiling (which was a pretty decent amount of time given how much water it could hold), after which two of us would grab it by the handles and haul it inside to the bottom floor bathroom to dump in the tub.

One pot translated into depressingly very little water in the tub, so we had to boil two pots to get enough water to cover just up to a person’s ankles. Once we had that (and once the water had cooled enough to just be on the safe side of scalding), we’d send someone in to sit in the puddle with a washrag and a bar of soap with the goal of taking up no more than five minutes; at ten I’d start hammering on the door.

Our original plan was to try and get three people to one fill, but the water was so horrifyingly grimy after just two that I vetoed the whole idea. There were some people who were willing to do it, but I don’t think I could have slept that night if I’d allowed it. Despite the fact that we had to boil sixteen kettles of water that night and depleted one fifty-five-gallon rain barrel down to nearly empty, we got a pretty good rhythm going once we got the hang of it. The trick was to have a kettle on the fire at all times, whether we thought we needed it or not. In that way, we could have one up to a boil right around the time the second person was stepping out of the tub. We also learned that it wasn’t necessary to bring both kettles up to a boil; just the first one. For the second, it was enough to get it lukewarm; once it was poured into the scalding water in the tub, the combined temperatures would normalize down to something a human being could handle, and the water would remain comfortable long enough to accommodate two people.

Each person had a new set of clothes waiting for them after the bath was over. In most cases, these were shirts and baggy sweat pants with the exception of Fred, who would have looked like he was wearing capris. He got a pair of athletic shorts just large enough to be comfortable, though they were still too snug to be decent (the poor guy was walking around hunched over at the hips with his face flushed; I considered calling him “Knuckles” as a gag but decided against it, not wanting to chance getting hammered flat into the ground).

Sleeping arrangements were handled efficiently. Amanda and Elizabeth took the master bedroom upstairs while Barbara and Rebecca shared the bed in the second room on the other side of the loft. George and Oscar took the king bed downstairs, and Monica, her daughter Rose, Maria, Alish, Greg, and Alan all took bunks in the last room, which typically belonged to Elizabeth. Jeff and Wang took couches in the rear entertainment room while Edgar took the easy chair. Fred and Davidson each got an air mattress; we stuck one in the center of the entertainment room between the couches and the other in the dining area; we pulled the table and chairs over tight up against the kitchen.

That left me with the couch in the front room where we had all conducted our meeting with Jake and Amanda earlier that day. I was surprised to see Jake easing back into his chair across from me at the end of the night when everyone else was settled into their various beds.

Quietly, so as not to disturb anyone else in the house, I asked, “You’re sleeping there?”

He smiled. “Not many places left. It’s this or pitch a tent outside.”

“Huh. I would have thought you’d just take the bed up with Amanda.”

“Why?”

I stumbled over the answer for this. I realized I had been making some assumptions about them without any real evidence. “Well, I guess I just thought that you two… you know.”

Jake nodded slowly and said, “It’s not like that. It’s different.”

I didn’t know what the hell to make of that, so I just grunted. Jake killed the lantern and put his chin down on his chest. The house was already filling up with the soft sound of snoring from all the different corners that had been stuffed full of people.

I closed my eyes, went under almost instantly, and had an unrestful sleep.

Iremember that our earliest days on the commune were full of interviews. This is strange, now, for me to recall because it feels like a whole lifetime ago and I’m not sure if any of us knew what was going on while this was happening. We all kind of compared notes sometime after we’d settled in and figured out that both Jake and Amanda had worked through each of us early on, getting a handle on who we are; our strengths and probably our weaknesses too.