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

So Clara and I started living a lot like we all do now, only we didn’t have a fucking clue what we were doing. We used to think it was smarter to go looking for food at night because we’d be under the cover of darkness and hard to see, never realizing how far sound carries in a dead world. It took some time to figure out that it was just better to go during the day when we would at least have light to see by.

We ran into others from time to time. Most of them left us alone. Some of them, we had to run. I was aware of how my sister looked, see? Guys had started to come around even before the Flare, so I knew to look out. And, I guess as you already realize, no cops meant that a lot of people got more brave about certain shit.

There was one family, though, that we came across, and they seemed okay. And when I say “family,” I fucking mean it. It was a father, mother, and daughter… and they had all been a real family before the plague; they hadn’t joined up after. I mean, what are the chances, right? Immunity in both parents, just at random? This was the only time I’d ever come across this; we hadn’t even heard rumors of such a thing back at the Pest Camp.

So the guy had his wife, and his kid was only something like ten or eleven, so I figured he was probably safe, you know? And it seemed to me that none of them had had the chance to get real evil yet. They’d never stayed in quarantine before, either; why would they? None of them ever got sick, so the Army wouldn’t have hauled them off.

We sort of established a base up in the Fontucky area, only not in any of the houses. Houses were bad in those days… but not because of the bodies; you just cleared those out and burned them. Houses were targets even more back then than now. There were whole scavenging parties, like eight or ten people strong, just canvassing neighborhoods door to door. So the guy (his name was Isaac) suggests that we go hobo and set up our own little camp at the 210 and 15 crossing, tucked right up under an overpass. His point was that we’d be guarded under the shelter of the freeway if we wedged right up under where it joined the ground, and we could pile shit up on both sides to hide our camp from anyone passing by. And hobos weren’t really a problem by that point; they were all dead, as dead as everyone else. We did this, and it worked out okay for a while.

I mean, it didn’t work out very well; it was a pretty miserable fucking existence, but it did work. The girls would stay in the camp during the day, and Isaac and I would head out looking for food and other stuff. We found it, too, but it was hard; hard to get enough together at one time to feed four people. We all started losing weight. This didn’t seem to bother Isaac, who had a touch extra to drop, but his family didn’t have a lot to spare and neither did we. It was pretty bad. Some days we’d pull in enough, but it was only enough for that day, right? It was never enough to make up for the ground we’d lost on the day or days before, so, we just kept wasting away down to nothing. And then it wasn’t very helpful that larger and larger bands of assholes were just combing through areas helping themselves to anything they liked.

So one day we’re out and about, and Isaac comes up with this idea; he was always strategizing, see? He says that we’re burning up too much energy digging around for scraps and that we’d never get out ahead of things at our current rate, not with the larger parties grabbing everything. His idea, or proposal, was that we let the larger groups do our work for us. A lot of them used to follow pretty predictable patterns; they were easy to avoid because we knew where they were going, for the most part. We had rifles (I mean, everyone had rifles; that shit was just laying around everywhere). So, we’d hunker up somewhere under cover, wait for a group we thought we could handle to pass by and ambush them for what they had.

I wasn’t too excited about this at first. I mean, it seemed like a pretty shitty thing to do, right? Those people were just doing the same thing we were; what fucking right did we have to just help ourselves to their stuff? But, you have to understand something about Isaac, here. He could talk you in circles until you agreed with anything. I’m serious; he could have convinced the Devil to attend Sunday mass. And, fuck, let’s be honest, okay? It didn’t take a lot of convincing with me. We were all on the edge of starving, and the circles under Clara’s eyes—shit, the ribs I could see sticking out along her back—made me a pretty convincible guy. And Isaac really only had to ask me a very simple question to get me over to his way of thinking. He said, “Yes, you’re right, I am proposing we do a despicable thing. But our family is starving right now . What is your plan to take care of that situation right now ?”

And I didn’t have an answer.

So, we suddenly started bringing back a lot more food and water, and the girls started looking and feeling a lot better. We all did. Shitty as they were, Isaac’s methods were effective.

We weren’t holding people up, you see; there were too many of them and too few of us. We went in a few circles over it, when we were first planning out how it would work. I just wanted to hold them up and take their supplies, but Isaac kept explaining how that wouldn’t work. And he was right, obviously.

Once you cross a certain line with a person, you’d better just count on them killing you if you’re dumb enough to give them the chance. What would we do? Round them up in a circle and tie them up? Then what? If you leave them tied up like that, they probably starve to death, don’t they? Untie them? Do that, and you could count on them following you, looking to get even. There was even the possibility that they untied themselves and followed you. Same result. So really, once we decided to turn guns on them and take what they had, killing them all was pretty much inevitable. So Isaac explained.

Well, having been out there as long as we had, we knew a lot of patterns, so we knew the good places to hide in wait. He and I used to target some narrow corridor that we knew they’d be coming through and try to get some elevation on them whenever we could. We’d position ourselves so that one of us was on a flank and the other would be out in front of their path; kind of ninety degrees out from each other, like. Isaac was usually out in front of them so he would start the show, which was good since the first few shots had a pretty fair chance to pass through a few people at once—plus groups traveling like that tend to put their strongest guys up front, so it was best to kill them first. After Isaac’s first few kills, the targets would always scatter and dive undercover, after which I’d start picking them off from the side. They’d usually reposition in response to this, too, and get where I couldn’t see them, but that was fine. All I had to do at that point was pin them all down long enough for Isaac to move around to another position.

We got pretty damned good at this after a while. In fact, the first time we tried it, it went perfectly. I kept expecting to fuck it up somehow or, I don’t know, it was all going to go wrong somehow, and suddenly we’d be in deep shit. But no; once we started shooting, it was smooth sailing. The first time we did it, Isaac said the whole encounter only lasted five seconds, though I don’t know how the hell he could keep track of something like that.

So, that kind of became our routine, and taking down a group of twenty or so wasn’t anything we gave a lot of thought to. You know how well a twenty-man crew’s food supply divides between four people? Pretty fucking well. I got used to it and, not long after, I stopped feeling so shitty about it all the time. Isaac said that repetition helped; you get used to anything when you do it enough. And, seeing the effect on the girls helped too. Clara went from starving to strong in very little time; Isaac’s girls too, and I was becoming pretty close with them, I guess. They were good to us. All those people I was gunning down were just strangers, understand? Didn’t know who they were; fuck ’em. We had Clara and the girls back at camp, and our choice was either feed them or don’t.