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

He stood up and looked back at me. “It occurred to me,” he continued in a reasonable, professor’s voice, “that you should have a say in what happens next. Strictly speaking, you’re probably the most aggrieved person involved in this whole situation. I’m content to make this your call.”

He stepped over James to come closer to me. The process of him stepping over James felt as though it carried weight. He did it slowly and deliberately, as though he had to make a conscious decision of will to take that step. “Billy gave you a gun, yes?”

I nodded, frozen in place by a gaze completely lacking in all expression—a reptile’s gaze. Jake reached behind his back and pulled out a large, black knife—what I would eventually learn is called a Ka-Bar. He offered it to me, handle first.

As my hand closed around the grip, he said to me, “Make sure whatever you do is something you can live with, whether it’s quick or not. If you can’t live with either, come and get me and I’ll put him down fast.”

He moved past me toward the door and stopped to look back. “Whatever you end up doing: fast, slow, or not at all—no one’s going to hold it against you. Do what you have to do. I’ll give you ten minutes.”

He stepped out of the RV and shut the door while James bucked and kicked behind me, grunting and screaming through his nose wordlessly.

I walked toward him and kneeled down. He instantly went still and became deathly quiet. I held up the gun on one side of his face and the knife on the other, both pointed at the ceiling. I looked between the two weapons and back to his face. His gaze was doing the exact same thing.

I thought of him with his hands tangled up in my hair in the middle of the night. I thought of him bending me over the table and spitting between my legs.

I thought of him throwing Elizabeth through the door of the motorhome out into space; the sound she made as she struggled to recover her breath. I felt a wave of heat start in the pit of my stomach, washing up my body and over my face.

I put the gun down on the dining table overhead and switched the knife to my right hand.

I took all from him that I wanted.

“Ihave some land up in Wyoming,” Billy said as we loaded the last of the supplies into the truck. “Jake and I were heading up that way. There’s more than enough room for two more.”

“Oh?” I said. “How much land are we talking about?” I reached my right hand down to feel the butt of my recovered rifle, which Billy had informed me was an M16A4. It was becoming a real habit; I had to keep convincing myself it was still there even though I could clearly feel the weight of it on my shoulder.

“Around one-hundred-and-fifty acres,” he said, “but that doesn’t matter so much anymore, I guess. Land just goes for as long as you need it to, these days.”

“Uh huh. And if I say ‘no’?”

Billy looked at me out of the side of his eyes, sighed, and lifted a plastic crate full of water jugs into the bed of Jake’s truck, the available space of which was rapidly diminishing. “Look,” he began, turning to face me as he leaned against the truck, “no one is going to force you to go anywhere. I certainly don’t want you around if you don’t want to be around. Be too much like having my ex-wife back.” He shuddered and lumbered off to grab something else to load.

Despite my urge to smile at his antics, I called behind him with a steady voice, “So if I decide to take Lizzy and just go, that’s it, huh?”

“No,” Jake’s voice materialized from behind me. I jumped about a foot and spun around, heart hammering in my chest. I know there are some things that I’ve done that aren’t so pretty and some of them I’m not exactly proud of, but Jake used to scare the hell out of me in those early days. It seems like he’s loosened up a little by now, but when I first met him, it was like nothing was going on behind his eyes. I felt like I was dealing with some kind of robot instead of a person. He rarely talked and spent a lot of time inside his own head. He’d sneak up on you without trying to sneak up on you. His natural, unconscious state was that of someone who appeared where you didn’t expect him. He was even grimmer at this instant, with blood still seeping from his nose and both eyes beginning to blacken angrily. Billy had done his best to set Jake’s bridge back in place a while ago, which had produced an outraged howl. Even so, it always had a flattened, mashed in appearance. He’s often indicated troubles breathing for as long as I’ve known him.

“Sorry,” he said as I took a step back and muttered something like “It’s fine.”

“Anyway, no, that’s not ‘it’ if you decide to go. We’ll stay long enough to get you set up with a vehicle and outfitted with supplies. Or we’ll leave if you don’t want our help. It’s up to you.”

“I really advise against that, Little Sis,” Billy said from behind me. “Maybe you and your girl find a space where you can carve a spot out for yourselves, maybe not. Maybe you find some other people. But maybe the wrong people find you. Again.”

I hadn’t told them that it was actually me who had flagged down James and his crew; I couldn’t bring myself to admit that at the time.

“But there’s strength in numbers, Amanda. We can watch each other’s backs. We can accomplish different tasks, practice complementary skill sets.”

What he was saying made good sense, of course. We weren’t doing very well at all when we were on our own before. We had run completely dry on water, and I wasn’t finding any more in all of the places I knew. I began to wonder just how deep in we were, how much there was that we needed to learn to survive. Ancient cultures used to live off the land and thrive but as our knowledge had become more specialized and focused in the modern age, we had lost that entire accumulated general competency. I could figure out how to launch my own web blog in about an hour or set up a brand new TV, but I didn’t know the first thing about growing a tomato or how water could be made safe to drink.

I began to think about how much we’d lost and how much there was to do; how far we had to go to make up the ground that had been lost in just a few short months. I was beginning to realize that there really was no going back. The government wasn’t going to come in and save us, there were no work crews banging away on the grid to get the power turned back on, there was simply nothing left. As far as I could tell, nearly everyone had died off, and those who had managed to survive through dumb luck didn’t know enough about how everything worked to turn the lights back on. If you had someone who knew how to write software, for example, you didn’t have anyone who knew how to build the circuit boards and components to run the software. If you had someone who could build those components, you didn’t have the people who knew how to run the facilities to make those components. Even if you could find those people, you certainly weren’t going to find anyone who knew how to process the raw materials found in nature to make things like silicon boards, conductors, resistors, or any of the rest of it.

Our whole society had evolved to a point where it couldn’t possibly function or produce literally anything unless all of the workers involved in the entire supply chain, from digging material out of the Earth to putting wrapped packages on shelves, specialized in a microscopic portion of that entire process. Our world was such that manufacturing a single shoelace required an infrastructure and support network of thousands of people and interlocking parts all playing together nicely, all knowing their unique little piece of the puzzle and ignoring the details in any process not related directly to their own. We thrived through the process of extreme micro delegation.