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

“If you say so.”

“Okay, cool, but, um, where’s the water coming from?”

“Sorry?” Amanda asked.

“You’re, like, a single house out in the middle of nowhere,” said Oscar. “There’s no way the city runs water all the way out here just for this one place, so where did the water come from that used to fill the toilets back up after they were flushed? I mean before we had to fill the tanks manually? This place is basically off the grid. I remember Jake even mentioned all the power comes from either solar or a propane generator, right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Amanda said, almost to herself.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I was just thinking about something Billy told us once,” she said. “Would they have run electricity out here?”

Oscar shrugged. “I doubt it, really. There ain’t nothing out here. You see any power lines running to the house?”

“Huh,” she said quietly.

“City isn’t just gonna run electrical out to nowhere, even if there is a house. You’d have to get a bunch of people living out here for them to do that. I don’t even know if this area’s considered part of Jackson.”

“You look like somethings bothering you, girl,” I said.

“Yeah, it kind of is,” she said. “Billy used to talk about this place like it ran off the power grid. I remember: he even said that a grid failure would knock his power out and he had wanted to install solar on the main cabin before the plague hit.”

Oscar raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. He blew it out through his lips like a horse and said, “I don’t know about any of that, but that place there,” he pointed at the cabin, “was never on no city grid.”

“I’d like to talk about your time as a Marine if that’s okay.”

We’d ended up in the library/office at the back of the house; it was where I found Jake when I came in looking for him. He’d been back there talking with Wang, and he gave him a book which many of us on the compound would eventually become familiar with. Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength became a kind of combination bible/manual/safety guide that everyone had to read if they wanted to utilize the weights in the garage. Wang had the big, blue book tucked under his arm as he left the room.

We were sitting by the small fireplace in a couple of well-worn Windsor chairs that were surprisingly comfortable despite their spindly, wooden construction. You could lean into them and have your back supported just the way you wanted to, without the chair trying to slump you over and spill you back out onto the floor. I held my coffee cup in one hand and concentrated on not jackhammering my leg around like a little kid. Jake never moved, or at least, he never moved more than he had to. He just sat in his chair with his hands rested in his lap as though he’d forgotten them. He always looked like he was sitting for a painting.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“Mostly what you did while you were in, when you got out, experiences, and so on. Oh, and tell me if we’re going somewhere in the discussion that you don’t like, please. I don’t intend for this to be adversarial.”

“I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” I said. “There isn’t anything I did that I’m ashamed of.”

A strange expression seemed to pass over Jake’s face but disappeared so fast that I assumed I’d only imagined it.

“So, let’s see,” I said. “I enlisted when I was eighteen years old (just out of high school) and went to boot camp at Parris Island. I was in Platoon 3120, 3 rdRecruit Battalion, and graduated on January 7 th, 1994…”

“Yes?” Jake asked.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about my sdi… that’s Senior Drill Instructor. Staff Sergeant MacBride.”

I must have been quiet for a while because Jake asked, “Are you alright?”

His voice made me jump. “Yeah, fine. My mom died just before I enlisted so when I graduated, there wasn’t really anyone there to see it except my uncle (her brother). It was good of him to show up since we’d never been that close. I think he came more for his sister than he did for me, though. He shook my hand, told me Mom would have been proud, and that was his obligation satisfied as far as he was concerned. He got in his truck and went home.

“Anyway, we could have ten days of leave, if we wanted them, before reporting for soi, and I had just made up my mind that I didn’t want any of it. I’m standing around in a crowd of newly minted Marines hugging their mothers and fathers, sticking out like a bleeding asshole, when SSgt MacBride puts his eyes on me from across the way. He started walking in my direction, and I internally groaned as I braced myself for one last parting shit sandwich.

“‘Private Gibson, where are your family?’ he says. ‘Haven’t any left, sir!’ I said back.”

I finished my coffee and put the cup down on a table. I hadn’t thought about this in years.

“He instructed me to meet him down at the Brig & Brew later that day (that was a local bar and grill on the Island). When I did, the man sat down and had a beer with me.”

“He sounds like a hell of a person,” Jake said quietly.

“He was a motherfucker!” I said. “He was the absolute eye of the shit storm, I kid you not. The other hats just kind of swirled around this guy, sucked the evil out of him to recharge their own fucked up batteries and then fluttered out again to bury us all in shit. All it took was a sideways look from that son of a bitch, and the kill hat would enthusiastically smoke the whole fucking platoon. No shit. Satan wore a campaign cover.”

“But… he took you out for a beer,” Jake said.

“Yeah. He took me out for a beer,” I agreed. “I just don’t want you getting the wrong idea about the guy. It wasn’t like some movie. The guy wasn’t a secretly cuddly father figure who actually loved all the recruits and desperately wanted us to succeed. Every one of us found ourselves pinned to the deck under his boot heel.”

Jake nodded, seemingly accepting what I said, so I continued. “Anyway, after that I went on to soi, that’s School of Infantry, and trained my primary mos: 0311 Rifleman.”

“I’m sorry,” Jake interrupted, “mos?”

“Sorry. ‘Military Occupational Specialty.’ Everyone gets a job in the service, see? We don’t just spend all day oiling rifles, marching in formation, and doing a bunch of pushups. There’s shit to do and all sorts of different specialties to pursue. You could be an admin guy, you could go work in intelligence, you could go work in comms… shit, you could even be a mechanic, okay?”

“I see.”

“So for me, I wanted to go Infantry, and that’s what I got. That ended up being a predictable run, if not routine. You deploy for a stretch, come home, keep current on training, head out again. After a while, you get used to shuffling around a bit. Then 9/11 happened, and things got special. I went to both Iraq and Afghanistan more times than I care to remember.”

“I remember seeing it on TV,” Jake said. “It must have been rough.”

“You get used to it,” I said. “I was good at what I did, kept my head down, and did my job. I promoted when I was supposed to promote, and ended at Staff Sergeant, mos 0369 Infantry Unit Leader before I left.”

Jake sat up and leaned forward. “Why did you leave, if you don’t mind?”

I considered his question, trying to find the best way to condense my reasons down into a salient point. Finally, I said, “Mandatory Fun Day.”

“What?”

“They were these fucking events that everyone had to show up for. Could have been anything; barbecue, bowling, family fun day, you name it. As a Staff Sergeant, it was even my job to organize a few, though I mostly kept them to barbecues where everyone understood they could leave in fifteen minutes if they wanted. The ones that finally did it for me were these balls that they’d hold. These were formal affairs that everyone had to show up to, married, dating, or single. The event was formal, so you showed up in your dress uniform. Regs require that you get all your medals mounted for this, by the way. Well, not only do you have to pay for that, you have to buy the medals, ribbons, and mounts as well.”