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

“We’d better get rolling,” I said to no one specific.

Jake stepped towards me and extended his hand, which I took. “I like this truck,” he said. “Try to bring it back in one piece, huh?”

I laughed and said, “We’ll see what we can do.”

His face went deathly serious. Well, his expression was as flat as ever, but there was real fire just behind his eyes. The skin around his eyebrows had gone tight, and his shoulders were all balled up like he was carrying some vast, invisible weight.

“You bring yourselves back in one piece,” he commanded.

He nodded to the others in my team and stepped back to rejoin the group. Amanda came next. I extended my hand to her as I had to Jake, which she batted aside before throwing her arms around me. I hadn’t expected this from her at all and stood frozen with my hands at my side for a brief moment before returning the hug. As we stood there, she lifted up onto her toes, straining to put her mouth next to my ear, and whispered, “If you see anyone out there on the side of the road, keep driving. Understand? I don’t care if it’s a woman screaming for help or anything else. You keep driving. Got me?”

I looked at Jake, who appeared oblivious to the whole exchange, and wondered if he knew what she was whispering to me. I gave a tight nod to let her know I understood, determining that I would use my own best judgment should such a situation present itself, regardless of whatever the hell anyone said.

Rebecca and Alish approached next, the former wrapping herself around Davidson, which made me smile, and the latter wrapping her arms around Greg and holding on for a few beats longer than would have seemed reasonable, which made me curious.

Finally, Fred Moses approached Wang but stopped just shy of closing the total distance. He held up a bottle of tequila and said, “This is supposed to be the good stuff. I guess it used to go for several hundred a bottle when money was a thing. Never been opened. You and I are gonna crack this baby when you come back, okay?”

Wang smiled happily at him, all past transgressions either forgiven or forgotten, and said, “Are you sure you can deal with a skinny kid half your size drinking you under the table?”

Fred erupted into booming laughter and said, “Deal with it? Hell, I want to see it!”

“You keep safe, Wang,” Monica said, pulling Rose tighter into her side. “I want to see that skinny behind of yours back here in three days. Any more than that and we’re gonna have words.”

“I mean, you don’t have to wait three days to see it if it’s that important to you…” said Wang. He waved awkwardly and climbed into the passenger side of the truck, barking out a “Shotgun!” to anyone that happened to give a shit.

“Come on, guys, we’d better hit it,” I said, and walked around to the driver’s side. Greg and Davidson piled into the rear seat as I fired up the engine. Waving to our assembled group of friends, I pulled a wide U-turn and began the long drive out of the valley.

“How’s it feel,” asked Wang. “Is it handling funny with all that weight on the back?”

I pumped the gas a little just to dig the tires in and push us forward a bit. “Honestly, I can’t even tell. The torque on this thing is ridiculous.”

“Nice,” he said.

“Hey, let me ask you something. Were you flirting with Monica back there?”

“Oh, shit! Wang’s goin’ for some of that dark chocolate!” laughed Greg from the back seat.

“Dark chocolate? Good God, I can’t decide if I should be offended or just embarrassed,” said Wang in mild disgust.

“What,” asked Greg. “Is that offensive? I wasn’t trying to be, man.”

“You might as well say ‘Yellow Fever,’ dude,” Wang replied.

I saw Greg screw his face up in the rearview mirror. “Aw, shit, man. Well, I didn’t mean that at all. Sorry.”

“Being fair,” I said, “she does have really lovely skin. Then again, I’ve always had a hell of a weakness for the black girls…”

“Good lord…” Wang muttered.

It was either two or three days after Gibs and the boys left for Utah that we learned about Jeff; I’m not totally sure anymore after all the time that’s gone by. Jake, Lizzy, and I have been here around two years now, and this all came about relatively soon after Gibs’s people came to live with us. Jake sometimes refers to them as “the first wave.”

Jeff Durand: quiet and unassuming, always helpful, not much for fighting but always there to pitch in on housekeeping. Jeff, who was so good with the kids.

It was Rose that finally told us what he’d been up to.

Or, at any rate, Rose told her mother, Monica, owing to the fact that Rose was fourteen and knew better than to keep quiet about such things. I think the other children (Ben, Maria, and Lizzy) were young enough that the fear of what might happen if they told would somehow be worse than the reality of what was happening. After it was all over, I had been near to shouting at Elizabeth for not coming to me to say anything; it was Jake who had kept me under control and thank God for him, honestly. I would have been wrong. I had to remember that to my little girl, the forces pulling at her to tell would have been at war with Maria begging her to stay quiet. Elizabeth was only eight at the time. She’s such a smart kid that I forget her age sometimes.

I wasn’t present for what happened initially. We all compared notes a day later and pieced things together. After Rose told her mother, Monica went directly to Oscar, which I honestly can’t say was the right or wrong thing to do. After everything we’d all been through, either on our own or together; the Flare, all of the millions of people we lost to it, the Plague, and the presumed billions of people it took… well, this was just something that never would have occurred to any of us in a hundred years. I don’t know if there was any perfect way to handle it.

I became involved just as Oscar was preparing to finish Jeff. I had been out on one of my walks, just trying to get a little space between myself and everything else. It’s probably the only thing that saved Jeff, too; I’d been sporadic about wearing my sidearm around the immediate area but still carried religiously when I went for my walks, especially since those walks had been pushing further and further out.

I returned to echoed shouting, a cascade of garbled words and moving bodies. I pulled my Glock reflexively before I saw Oscar dragging Jeff across the common ground by the neck towards the site of my future cabin, where many of the tools were located at the time. Several of our people were trailing behind them, some of them shouting while others walked silently. Without knowing exactly what was going on, I could tell things were serious and broke into a run.

As I closed the distance, I watched in horror as Oscar pinned Jeff back against a log and lifted a hammer up into the air. George hobbled towards them and called out to me, saying, “You’d better hurry!” The children were out there, too, separated from the murder that was about to happen by a small ring of adults, including Rebecca and Samantha, who held them back. They were sobbing, with the exception of Ben and Rose, who only looked terrified.

Oscar was spitting a long, unbroken string of obscenities in Spanish, of which I understood only a small portion, and the hand holding the hammer trembled in the air. I was running up from behind him; as I came closer, I could see that Jeff’s face was a pulped and bloody mess. I put the barrel of my pistol into the base of Oscar’s skull where it joined the neck, and he froze instantly. A few voices from behind me called out either in anger or shock, I’m not sure which.