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

I waited about a minute to give someone else the chance to say something. When no one took it, I asked, “How certain are you that those men on the rooftops were soldiers?”

Otis looked at me, surprised, and shrugged. “I ain’t, I guess. Sure dressed the part, from what I could see. They had the helmets, anyway.”

“Why do you ask, Gibs?” Jake asked.

“Well, it sounds like they had an ambush set up, only it was poorly executed. When you lay an ambush like that, you typically want an element to close in from the rear and block off any kind of escape, only you folks drove right out of there. I’m just a little surprised.”

“I don’t think they was interested in prisoners,” Otis said slowly. “They never called out at us to surrender or anything. They just up and started firin’.”

“Well, as to that,” I said, “that all depends on their past history with your group of red-armed bandits. If they’d mixed it up enough with that group, they certainly wouldn’t greet them with a handshake.”

“Maybe they didn’t expect the third vehicle?” Amanda suggested. “Maybe the train was too long, and they couldn’t close in from behind?”

“That shouldn’t have mattered,” I said. “There’s typically enough flexibility built into the kill zone that you can correct for things like that.”

“Maybe they were just undermanned,” said Jake as he rose from his chair. “There could be any number of explanations. Fruitless to speculate, though, with the information we have.”

“Where’re you going, Jake?” asked Amanda. He was moving across the circle of people towards the cabin.

“I’m going to go grab something. Why don’t you take Otis over to Billy’s Tree? I’ll meet you there.”

A few minutes later, Amanda and Otis stood in front of a massive fir tree, though I couldn’t tell you the exact kind of tree it was, with Barbara, Wang, George, myself, and the rest of the grownups all standing back from them by a few feet to give them some space. I couldn’t see much in the black of night as we were pretty removed from the fire; there were just two people-shaped voids standing out in front of me, about ten feet away. I heard soft footsteps approaching on the right, and Jake’s apparition appeared next to them.

“That’s Billy, then?” Otis asked.

“It is,” said Jake.

There was the sound of a sniffle, followed by Otis again. “You folks saved us all, back then. Didn’t have to.” His voice shook.

“We’re glad you came to find us,” said Amanda. I thought I saw an arm go around a set of shoulders, but it was so damned dark I couldn’t be sure.

There was the sound of liquid swirling in a bottle, followed by a gasp. Jake said, “Here,” and then that same swirling sound and another gasp, this time with a cough.

“Hah!” Otis growled. “This the same stuff we had last time?”

“The same bottle,” Jake confirmed. Another round of swirling; this time Amanda gasping.

They were quiet a while. Finally, Otis said, “Always wondered, Jake. What did you say to Robert that day? That boy grew into a different person after we parted ways. He grew into a man. What’d you tell him?”

Jake didn’t answer for a good, long time and I thought no answer would be forthcoming, which we’d all grown used to. He surprised us all, though, and said, “Just told him a bit about me. Where I’d been. Where he was heading if he didn’t watch it.” Another swirl and a cough.

“Yeah,” agreed Otis.

I must have been bouncing on the balls of my feet. I’d never heard Jake give up that much before and was holding my breath just waiting for him to say something else. Within my head, my inside voice—that part of me that does the yelling when I become aggravated—was screaming, “What? Fuck, man, don’t stop there! More, goddamnit!”

Instead, I said in a calm and controlled tone: “Where is it you’ve been, Jake?”

I could feel the people standing around me tense up. We were all waiting to hear what he’d say. In the dark, a hand reached out and squeezed mine, though I have no clue who it was. The flesh was soft and loose; I suspected Barbara.

In the darkness, Jake’s voice floated back to us, hollow and remote. “Here and there.”

A sound of swirling liquid, splattering in the dirt, and Jake was gone.

Though Oscar had busted his ass both day and night to produce housing adequate to meet the demand of our group, it remained that there were still pockets of people packed in tighter than could reasonably be considered comfortable. With three additional people moving into the neighborhood, Oscar, Greg, and Alan redoubled their efforts with urgency to find ways to get everyone housed. This was especially critical, as the housing distribution had not ended up being equitable in some situations; mostly due to the composition of our little subgroups. For example, people with familial relationships naturally wanted to be housed together, and yet these relationships all consisted of no more than two people; Greg and Alan, Monica and Rose, Oscar, and Maria, and Amanda and Lizzy. We simply had to fit more than two people to a residence in order to make the best use of our space, which essentially meant that we were asking families to take on adoptees.

The challenge is that family members paired with acquaintances creates an us-and-them dynamic, which boiled down to the very real problem that most individuals didn’t feel comfortable being paired up to live with a family, whether that family was fine with having that person in the home or not. There were cases where it worked out, of course. Rebecca ended up living with Monica and Rose in a container home, as they all did a pretty good job getting along. Alish, who was at the time still struggling to fit in and find her place in the community, ended up staying with the Page brothers, again in another container home; an arrangement I suppose came about naturally just because all three of them had spent the most time together and were all at ease in each other’s company.

On the other hand, you had Oscar and his little girl Maria, who had a whole container home to themselves, due in large part to the fact that most people had no desire to encroach on that father-daughter relationship, especially with her at such a young age. It was naturally agreed without the need for discussion that those two just required their own place to be their own way.

A lot of these little live-in relationships came about naturally like I said, but the problem was that the leftovers created some rough dynamics that needed some pretty rapid resolution before shit came to a head. You had Fred Moses, for one, who nobody in their right mind wanted to room with; not because he was a slob or anything—he just snores like a motherfucker. Sleeping anywhere within twenty feet of the man is basically pronouncing a death sentence on quality sleep (unless you’re a veteran; guys like me can sleep through anything). Not only that, he had a quirky personality, as I’ve taken the trouble to illustrate in past entries. I’m still trying to find a good way to describe Fred’s temperament and, so far, I’ve failed to find anything that fits without running my mouth for fifteen minutes to describe him into the ground. Most of the time, the guy is totally personable, right? Quick to laugh, quick to joke, always the first guy to pitch in to help when help is needed, and he’ll absolutely break his damned back in the process of helping you out. And yet every so often, you find patches of his hide that are paper thin. It’s bizarre. With most people, you just know; you can either talk shit with them or you can’t. With Fred, you can talk shit with him most of the time , until you find whatever random hot button that manages to piss him off for that day. Then it’s all hurt feelings and dick measuring contests until he gets over it. It’s tough for me to put my finger on—I hesitate to label the guy a bully; I’ve seen how they operate, and Fred doesn’t fit the profile. But there is definitely a kind of you-got-me-so-now-I’m-gonna-get-you-harder thing going on with him.