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

He let the silence hang a while, not looking at anybody or anything, just sitting on the fender regarding the floor. Some of us began to shift around. I caught Barbara’s eye; thought I saw a tear. I wondered just what in the blue fuck Jake thought he was doing.

Finally, he looked up and said, “You guys are asking me for a guarantee that this works out and I simply can’t give you one. The best I have for you is that what we’re doing right now isn’t getting the job done. We have some pretty good data that suggests it won’t get the job done no matter how hard we push. We need a big payout. This is the best way I can think of to make that happen. If they don’t find anything, we’re just back to where we started anyway. If they do find something, though…”

“You’re suggesting the only risk is lost time,” Edgar said. “You forget we were all chased from Colorado under fire. That two of us didn’t make it out of Colorado at all. There’s an additional risk right there. Gibs and his team may not come back at all.”

Jake’s demeanor went all cold, then, as he stapled Edgar to the deck with those shark’s eyes of his. His body language died completely, as though someone had cut the puppet strings, and he said, “I’m not forgetting anything, Mr. Muller.” Edgar took a step back at the sound of his surname, and the people surrounding him moved away reflexively. I hate to say that the temperature in the room dropped because it’s a goddamned cliché but, if I’m being faithful to what happened, the temperature did seem to take a hit. Rebecca folded her arms, for one thing, and the fact that I wasn’t distracted by the movement of her chest is a testament to just how tense the exchange had made everyone.

Then Jake took another pull of his beer and just like that, it was over. People could breathe again; could hear and produce sound again. Jake held out a hand and said, “We understand the risks. Gibs certainly does. That’s why he’s taking time to prepare. We’re going to mitigate the risks as best we can. I’m sorry, I simply don’t have the power to eliminate the danger from your lives. But I’d like you to consider the following…”

He stood and walked out into the crowd, standing among us. He looked from face to face as he said, “When it comes to risk, your whole life is a gamble. A coin toss. Every day, you’re faced with decisions you have to make, and if you choose wrong, you could die. You can’t know what the outcome will be, but you toss the coin anyway. You gamble. And, as we all know, when you gamble long enough you’ll eventually lose.”

He rotated slowly in place until his gaze settled on Edgar. “The problem is we were all thrown into the game against our will. We play simply by existing. You don’t get to opt out; you’re flipping the coin just by being here. Failing to make a decision is still a decision. Failure to take a risk is still, essentially, a risk. The only way to get out of the game is to die. Paradoxically, the penalty for gambling poorly is also death.”

Edgar had shrunken somehow. He’d pulled back into himself and, though he still met Jake’s gaze, his head was pulled to the side, as though he couldn’t stand to meet his look full on.

Jake’s hand rose from his side and rested on Edgar’s shoulder. Softly, he said, “Under such circumstances, the only sane, reasonable choice is to flip the coin and bet for a win. You bet on hope, Edgar. You choose to take the risk. You do so because either choice is a risk in the end, be it heads or tails. If it’s true that there really is no way to back out of playing, you make the hopeful bet that has some chance of paying out, remote though it may be.”

Jake withdrew his hand from Edgar’s shoulder and stuffed it into his front pocket. When he pulled it out, there was a dull, silver flash reflected from the overhead light as he popped his thumb. A quarter tumbled through the air, rang as it hit the concrete, and rolled only a few inches before landing on its side. During this time, Jake’s eyes remained locked on Edgar’s, who didn’t move a muscle.

“What do you say, Edgar? Do you need to look at that coin for an empty promise? Or do you bet on hope? What will you take: risk or death?”

Without looking down at the coin, Edgar raised his drink to his mouth with a steady hand, took a deep pull, and said in a clear voice, “Risk.”

I took that as my own personal cue to vault up to the CD player on the table and start thumbing through the CD’s that had been spread out over the surface. “I thought we were supposed to be having a party here,” I bawled. “Somebody needs to fire the damned DJ!”

This was met with explosive laughter from the crowd. I soon gave up trying to find the perfect artist or song, settling instead on a random dance mix that appeared to cover the whole gamut from pop to R&B and Motown. I dropped it into the tray, hit the play button, and twirled a hand at everybody on the floor in a get-your-asses-moving gesture. As the beat started to float out over the crowd (some kind of thumpy hip-hop song I’d never heard of and couldn’t name if my life depended on it), they all began to move again, slowly getting back into their groove while deciding that everything was probably okay, or at least that it would all be okay for this night. They were safe right now, and they looked like cutting loose.

“Thanks,” Jake said, having climbed back onto the platform to stand next to me. He leaned closer to me to ensure that I would hear and said, “I didn’t know if they were going to buy that or not.”

I leaned over to him and said, “Fuck you, Jake. You believed what you said every bit as much as the rest of us.”

He pulled back and regarded me momentarily, perhaps wondering if he wanted to be offended. He apparently decided he was okay with it, as he nodded and returned his gaze to the small crowd of people whooping and hollering on the floor.

Overall, I think it ended up being a successful night, if not a little odd. Between the three of us (Jake, Amanda, and me) we had wondered how much resistance we were going to catch when we shared our plans for a road trip with everyone else… and what it would take to cut through it all. I was thankful that we wouldn’t have to discover the results of Jake giving up and just saying, “Fuck you all, we’re doing it.” You never want to pull heavy rank like that if you can help it.

Everyone got out there on the floor at one point or another that night, and some of them stayed out there the whole damned evening. One of the biggest shocks for me was Amanda, or more specifically, how she moved. It was such a different aspect to her personality from what I was used to, having known her in my time there only as a serious, competent person. Well, let’s face it: if you spend any amount of time with these people, you eventually figure out that Amanda is essentially Jake’s Hammer. In all my time living here in the commune, I’ve learned that Jake trusts and relies on her completely. He certainly trusts the rest of us as well, I’m sure, and there have been plenty of things for which he’s leaned on me to handle, but… well, let’s see. I’ll put it like this; if Jake thought it was a good idea to kill someone in their sleep, he wouldn’t ask me to do it. The only person he’d trust for a job like that would be Amanda.

Tonight, though, Amanda wasn’t Jake’s Hammer. She was just a woman who loved to dance, who dominated the floor and made everyone else appear shabby by comparison, even Rebecca, who could only manage a rough approximation of what the smaller woman achieved through instinct. Amanda had a way of moving, of getting low and growling with her body, that I’d simply never seen before. There were no choreographed steps that I could recognize, no easily identifiable patterns. She just closed her eyes and let go, like a creature responding to hereditary knowledge, and her entire body positively throbbed along the floor. Everyone in that room was thunderstruck by her movements; most of the men had to pick their jaws up off the floor. No one came close to her nor did they even look like trying. She was in a whole class by herself, and the rest of us were rendered lacking in her presence.