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

A couple of Johnny’s boys were over there, all working their clipboards. Clay never bothered to remember any of their names; he couldn’t keep any of them straight no matter how hard he tried. He had a fantastic memory for faces, but names had always eluded him. There had always been so many details to track and so many people to deal with—even before the world had gone all to hell, when he’d been a Senior Project Manager at NuParadigm—that accurately cataloging names had just seemed like that one extra straw that would break his spine. In the case of Johnny’s boys, he just referred to them all as “Mini-Johnny.” Rather than being insulted, they seemed to get a kick out of it and started referring to Johnny as “Big John”; it also helped that Clay went out of his way to emphasize that his inability to remember the names of those people with whom he did not deal on a daily basis was his own personal failing—it in no way reflected on their value to the group. They all seemed to buy the excuse, and Clay was grateful as hell they gave him a pass.

When the headcount had blown past one hundred, Clay and his guys had figured out quickly that the little honor system employed up to that point just wasn’t going to get the job done; there were too many strangers in the group. On one hand, you could always find someone who knew somebody else in the crew, but on the other, everybody did not know everybody else; they were just too damned numerous. And though it was true that Peter typically worked well with Paul, he was just as likely to screw the New Guy.

What had been needed (and eventually developed) was a system of exchange, a process that prevented people from being lying shitheads. At first, Clay and his main staff (Pap, Johnny, Doc, and Ronny) had considered some form of currency, though they abandoned the idea almost immediately. The problem with currency was that it had to be minted in such a way that it defeated counterfeit, a proposition that was simply beyond the group’s technological means. So, fine, they couldn’t create money; the next thing they tried was arresting their little society at a level of simple barter. This had worked for a little while… until it didn’t.

The problem with barter was that it was too random. It required everyone to know how to do everything, or it required a person to have the exact item needed by his trading partner at the right time, which simply wasn’t a repeatable process in a group of this size. Numbers were the big bitch, here; they were too large, to be honest, but still too small for things to evolve on their own naturally. To Clay’s way of thinking, the only way they were going to get ahead was if people started specializing in key areas. Such a thing might have evolved from their barter system, given enough time and people, but Clay didn’t have the time to wait. For Clay, time was always running out. It ran out at each little place they stopped when all of the good bounty of the land eventually dried out, forcing them to relocate like a swarm of locusts.

Also, the little barter system they had attempted required people to self-police, and they were right back to the problem of Paul fucking the New Guy over again; that kind of shit couldn’t be allowed to ride. Disputes became a common headache; always stupid little arguments. “The agreement was two cans of food for six batteries, but two of those batteries are dead!” and other obnoxious assholery of a similar nature.

Clay hated that mundane shit, so the barter system went right the hell out the window. What they eventually landed on (and what seemed to be working for now) was their current system of credits. A credit wasn’t a thing you carried with you in your pocket; it was a reckoning. Everyone had their own account, which existed simply because everyone in the group agreed to believe that such a thing did exist. A credit was universal: one hour of honest labor was equivalent to a single credit, and credits could be broken down into quarters… but no smaller. They figured that anything that could be done in less than fifteen minutes probably wasn’t worth tracking. Clay wondered idly as he walked if the new establishment of whores would change that assumption…

Credits could be given freely to others in the group; they were a person’s own property after all, and that was what made them work. The implementation of the credit and its easy transference from one person to the next is what made it possible for his people to specialize in different areas. The system was what made it economically realistic for a small group of folks to set up a laundry business in the middle of the post-apocalypse and thrive. Boy, did they fucking thrive! It turned out that laundry was even more miserable of a task without electricity, and those folks with their little wash buckets were making a killing. Even better: the rest of the people had more time to pursue other interests because a significant portion of their day was no longer being consumed with scrubbing the grime from their clothing. People were specializing, and more work was being crammed into a single day. That was some goddamned progress!

The only challenge with the credit system was the need to track it all. No concrete currency meant that a process was needed to enforce everyone’s accounts. They had briefly discussed using a new kind of gold standard, where a scarce precious resource was used as a stand-in for a credit, but the only thing they could come up with that matched all the requirements were bullets, and that was just fucking dumb. An economic system in which you had to destroy your own currency to defend yourself in life or death situations was about as sustainable as shitting into your own water supply to improve your protein intake. In other words, it made no goddamned sense at all.

Enter Johnny and the Mini-Johnnies. Collectively, they all functioned as a sort of notary public; a transfer of credits from one person to the next was not valid or binding unless one of Johnny’s boys was around to officiate the exchange. They all went about their day, seeing to their own needs until such an exchange had to take place; then, out came the clipboard. In the evening, Johnny and the Mini-Johnnies would all get together and tally the day’s transfers (there was a cutoff time after which credits could no longer be exchanged, mostly so the boys wouldn’t be tumbled out of bed in the middle of the night so some idiot could purchase a jar of hooch) and balance up everyone’s account in preparation for the next day. It was a decent system that seemed to work well.

Clay had considered the fact that, at some point, one of the Mini-Johnnies would figure out a way to start skimming. He hadn’t been sure how such a thing could be done at first, but then, he wasn’t a white collar thief, either. The one thing Clay knew for sure was that there was always some ingenious little asshole that could figure out a way to game any system, and now, here came this business with the whores. He supposed that he would have to accept some percentage of graft over the long haul, but then he also supposed he might have to cut off a thumb or two if anyone got really blatant about it. He chalked the thought up as a problem for another day.

Clay reached the front door to the body shop and entered. He passed through a relatively clean front office (the first thing his people did when they moved into any new area was to sanitize key facilities for general use) and out into the garage. It was a multi-bay setup, most of which were empty due to the fact that they only had the one mechanic, Beau. Parking vehicles into additional bays would have been pointless since he would have had to move his tools and his power (a little Honda propane generator to drive his lighting and air compressor) over to each bay to work; it was easier to just back a truck out when he was done and pull a new one in. Clay approached from the side of the truck, a large Dodge diesel (they still ran gas vehicles, though they were all on borrowed time now, with all the available gasoline decaying away as it was), and saw one tattooed, sweaty elbow jut up from the engine compartment; Beau’s blue-jeaned ass half-hung-over the grill, motorcycle boots dangling off the concrete floor by a good foot.