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

I can’t even tell you who was approached first or what sequence this happened in. All I know for sure is when Jake came to find me.

I’m pretty sure I woke up before anyone else on the first morning. It was still dark, and I was disoriented enough that I reached out into empty space trying to find the back of a bus seat with my hand to orient myself; after several seconds of confusion, I remembered where I was. I heard the sounds of deep breathing and Fred’s snoring soon after; realized everything was probably okay.

I felt a sharp cramp in my stomach, deep down between my hips, and realized that this is what must have woken me up. The pain felt like a knife digging around inside of me; I immediately understood that I had to go to the bathroom. It had been a few days since any of us had had a decent meal and last night I’d stuffed myself full, so I guess my body was just having a hard time getting used to being fed again. I think that canned fruit might have played a part as well.

I carefully stood from the couch and walked around Tom and Fred, who were both lined up on the floor on air mattresses. I was having a hard time seeing anything; for one thing, I was still fuzzy from sleep, but there’s also the fact that not a lot of moonlight makes it into the back part of that house. The rear is pretty much covered with thick tree growth, plus the largest opening in the back had been covered over with a big sheet of wood. The rear of the house is dim even during the middle of the day because of this. Once I turned left around the corner into the main hall, it became easier to see as more light from the moon and stars was able to come in through the front windows.

I had a shock when I came through the front room and saw Jake sitting in his chair. At first, I thought he was just sitting there quietly next to Gibs, who was still asleep and waiting for the rest of us to wake up, which would have been intensely disturbing. I froze in place for a few seconds waiting for him to acknowledge me before I realized that his chin was down and he was asleep. My stomach cramped again, reminding me that I had problems to take care of, so I continued down the main hall towards the front door, rounded the corner back down the smaller side hall, and found the bathroom.

I’m not going to get all gross about what happened in there but what I’ll offer here is that I had forgotten how nice it was to use a clean toilet that still flushed. We’d all been sharing dead commodes on the road for so long that using “pre-filled” facilities was something we were all familiar with. Being able to sit down and… take some time on an unspoiled toilet had become a luxury. When I found the full roll of toilet paper, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

I knew it was time to leave when I started feeling pins and needles in my legs. I finished up, put myself back together, and flushed; the sound of the toilet doing what toilets do was surreal. It was so… normal! I’d gone so long without hearing it that I experienced something like a wave of nostalgia or déjà vu… or something. This is harder to describe than I thought it would be; I was confused by that sound, as though there was a part of me that knew there was supposed to be a world in which light switches made light, toilets flushed, and ordinary people didn’t try to shoot each other, and still another part of me that understood that all of this was now gone, perhaps forever.

There were two large jugs of water on the sink, both of which I poured into the toilet tank for the next person that would inevitably be in there. I collected the jugs to refill outside of the house at the rain barrel.

I exited through the front door of the house and probably would have crapped myself if I hadn’t just taken care of business a moment ago. Jake was sitting out on the front porch, now awake, apparently. I never heard him move through the house or open the door; I suffered a childish urge to look back into the house and see if he was still sleeping in the front room. Ultimately I didn’t… but I can’t say that I wasn’t at least a little nervous about what I would have seen if I did.

It was a shock to see him sitting there, like I said, and I blurted out something like, “What the hell?”

Jake raised a hand and whispered, “Easy. You’ll wake the others.”

“Sorry,” I whispered back. “I wasn’t expecting you there.”

He nodded and gestured to a chair to his right on the other side of a small wooden table that still had some of the tree bark on it. “Join me?”

“I should refill these,” I said stupidly, holding up the jugs.

“You’ve refilled the tank already, right? You have time. We’ll hear the next time the toilet flushes. You can refill them and take them back then.”

I shrugged and moved around him to have a seat, placing the jugs on the table between us.

“I’ll make coffee in a little while when the others start to wake up,” he said. I was a tea drinker, personally, but I knew a lot of the others would appreciate this.

He fell silent for a while after that. I glanced over at him out of the corner of my eye while trying not to be obvious about it. He seemed to have forgotten that I was out there with him; his eyes were cast up to the sky with an expression hard to describe. His eyebrows were raised a little and beetled together at the center; the eyes themselves squinted and shined. His lips were cracked open just enough so that he could breathe; it was clear to anyone that whatever was left of his nose didn’t do much more than take up area on his face. He sounded like an old boxer when he spoke; like a mouth breather. It gave you incorrect impressions about who he was. Thinking back on it, I’d have to use the word “wonder” to describe what I saw in his eyes.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to this view,” he said quietly, eyes still locked forward.

I looked out in the same direction and saw what he meant. The sun was just starting to peak up over the horizon but was still hidden behind the mountain wall, so the only hint of it we could see was the outline of the mountain ridge itself, a pure black contrast, lined by a deep red sky which immediately gave way to indigo before reverting to black. There wasn’t a cloud up there; the entire sky was packed end to end with stars, just big, sweeping, bright waves of stars everywhere. The world all around us was impenetrable, solid black with that yawning sky stretched out above us. I felt as though I was looking down into a reflection on the surface of some great lake; like I might begin to fall up into the sky if I didn’t look away.

I said the first thing that came to mind. “Holy shit. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“I feel sometimes as though I have no business seeing this.”

“What?” I asked. “Why?”

Finally, he turned to look at me. I was certain he was going to answer; the shadow of his lips flexed like he was about to form words. He turned his head back to look out ahead of us again and sighed just loud enough for me to hear.

“It’ll get better shortly as the sun moves higher,” he said.

He was right. During the normal day time, you don’t notice the sun so much. It’s the last thing you want to look at because it will hurt you, so you’re really only aware of it as something bright and hot above you somewhere. Mostly, what you see is the blue sky above. You don’t realize how deceptively fast the sun moves across the sky unless you watch a sunrise or a sunset. As we sat there, not talking, the heavens above us shifted from black to red-pink to blue, and the valley out in front of us morphed from formless void to open, green fields ringed on all sides by tree covered mountains.

“You know,” I said, “I think this is the first time I’ve ever sat out and watched a sunrise.”