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

There was no one there when we arrived. Someone had left a note tacked to the front door (I think it was my mother-in-law, Beatrice—looked like her writing, at least) that said, “Left for camps. May God bless and keep us all.” I didn’t really know what to do at that point, so the four of us moved into the little house, and I decided to spend some time searching the area. Didn’t have what you’d call a long term plan; we just figured one place was as good as another. Portland was pretty big, had lots of dense populated area; plenty of things to scavenge and such. So that’s what we did for a while.

During the days, Robert and I would head out into the area to go looking for things; water mostly but anything that was useful, like. At night, we did what we could to keep entertained. We played board games, told stories, and read books. It turned out that Robert had a good speakin’ voice and would read out loud for the rest of us often enough if we asked him to. I spent a lot of nights lookin’ through old photo albums with Ben, showin’ him pictures of his mother as she grew up. I think it’s easier for him since he was so young when we lost her. I had a harder time with it; seein’ my Gerty again brought a lot of things back, made my chest feel so constricted with grief I could hardly breathe. Did my best to hide it, though, ’cause it seemed to make Ben so happy.

We saw the first people after livin’ there… oh… I’d guess it was three weeks or so. We saw them at a distance, Robert and I, and they was skittish, runnin’ off and disappearing, like, when they noticed we was there. Couldn’t get much of a read on them except to say that there was three of them and they weren’t interested in making friends.

Wasn’t long after that when a couple of people broke into our house. All four of us was home, thank God; I don’t know what would have happened if it’d just been Ben and Samantha that was home when they came through the window. I tried to talk to them, thinking they might just be goin’ house to house lookin’ for food and just tryin’ to let them know this one was occupied. They wasn’t interested in talkin’, so Robert and I did for them and then gave ’em a look-over when it was done. They did happen to have a duffel bag between them loaded with some supplies, a couple of pistols, and one rifle between them. We took all of that and threw it onto our pile. There wasn’t anything else about them that was very special, except that they had red bandanas tied around their arms, just at the elbow. I wasn’t sure what that meant at the time, though I was familiar with gang culture and all that foolishness, and what I saw made me uneasy, knowin’ what all that might mean.

That encounter shook us up a bit, and we spent the next few days locked up inside, waitin’ to see if any more would come callin’. No more came, and yet it took us a while longer to get over it. We were in an ugly spot surrounded by bad options , as my mamma would say sometimes. Going out into the city was necessary because that was the only way to get more food, but it was also dangerous because there was obviously people out there waitin’ to be found; some friendly and others not so much. So, we didn’t want to go out into that alone. It just felt better having someone you trusted to watch your back. Robert had done a lot of growin’ up between Utah and Oregon, and he’d become someone I depended on daily. I knew I could rely on him to protect all of us and havin’ him at my back with a rifle put my mind to ease. To th’other hand, Ben was too young for any of that kind of activity and Samantha was either too fidgety or too scared to fight. The few times I actually got her to pick up a gun, she’d pinch it in her fingers and pull back into herself like she was waitin’ for the whole world to end.

So if we went out lookin’ for food and water, it felt really risky without two people to do it but, when we did that, we was leavin’ our people undefended at home, and we already knew for a fact that people would find the place and try to come in because it had happened before.

It broke my heart, but we eventually decided it would be best to leave. The house, as it was in the middle of Woodstock, was too out in the open, too hard to defend, and too hard to fortify. We agreed between the three of us (Ben wouldn’t agree and didn’t want to leave) that we’d pick up and move to a more remote location outside of the city; probably somewhere’s high, where visitors would have to work they way uphill to get to it, and hopefully under cover so it wouldn’t just draw strangers from miles off by simply existin’.

Leaving that home had been harder than I expected. We’d fought so damned hard to get there, and the place had become a kind of King’s X for me; I’d traveled towards it for weeks telling myself that all will be better when we get there, everything just gonna be fine and click into place. And now we was leavin’, and it weren’t fine. I wanted to take everything in that house with us. There was things all throughout that I recognized from my life with my Gerty, my gal, that her folks had held onto. Her mamma kept a little curio shelf in the front room, and I saw keepsakes that my wife had kept in her room when we was dating, some of ’em given to her by me. I left ’em all there, thinkin’ they was more likely to get broke on the road with me.

I took a single photo album with us; one of the ones that had the most pictures of Ben’s mamma from the time she was a girl to when she was a woman, even some of our wedding pictures. There was a framed portrait of her and her family hanging in the hallway. I think she was fifteen or so in that picture. I stopped there and kissed the glass over my dead wife’s lips and then kissed the glass over her mother’s forehead as well, a thank you for givin’ birth to the love of this tired, ol’ man’s life. We lit out.

We spent some daylight movin’ ’round the city, trying to get out of it. The streets was all a mess, as you can well imagine, and it took careful plannin’ to plot a way through all the chaos that wouldn’t see us wedged into a corner someplace. After a while, I got the impression we was bein’ herded along; always when I thought we’d gone far as we could, we’d find a way that was open through the worst part of the snarl and it was always feeding us in the same, damn direction. I mean, it may have switched back every so often for a block or two but our direction would always correct back to the same path: northwest—almost the opposite direction we wanted to travel, which was southwest across the Willamette for less populated areas like Shadowood and such.

We eventually came to a place so piled up with cars and garbage that there was simply no way to get through by drivin’. We could either turn around or try to clear away some of the wreckage to get by. I was just getting ready to turn us ’round when Robert said, “Hey, let’s get out and try to clear a path. I think we’re in luck, here.”

I asked him what he meant and, in answer, he pushed a city map into my hands and pointed at it.

“Look, we’re right about here, I think, just coming up on Clinton, right? Well, if we can just find a way to push through a couple of blocks west from here, it’ll dump us onto these train tracks. They run all the way down until… here, where they split off and go east. We can get off at that point and try to pick up the 99, see? That’ll definitely get us going in the direction we want.”

It looked really good from the perspective of the map. The main thing was just breakin’ through the snarl ahead to get on the other side. There was so much crap piled up at the intersection that you couldn’t see over the top of it and, at the center of it all, two trucks had been left spanning the gap, overlappin’ and facin’ each other in the street.