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

I lifted the back of my seat out of a reclined position, stretched my neck a bit, and looked in the back seat.

I came up off the seat and must have rotated in midair because I came back down on my knees facing the rear of the cab. Elizabeth was gone. I grabbed my rifle and slammed into the passenger side door trying to open it. I had to fumble with the handle before I could operate it properly. I finally got the door opened and jumped out of the truck. I was barefoot. I remember the rocks on the ground hurt and that I didn’t care.

I ran around the front of the truck and stopped immediately when I saw Elizabeth, Billy, and Jake sitting around a smoking campfire. All three of them turned to look at me, all wearing the same wide-eyed, confused expression.

“Mom?” Lizzy asked.

I felt a sharp throbbing pain in my right hand along the ring finger. I lifted it up to look at it and saw an angry, white crease along the back of the nail. I must have folded it back when I was fighting with the door handle.

Billy came over with a wool-lined denim jacket and offered it to me. “Put some shoes on,” he suggested. “It’s chilly out this morning.”

I was distracted then by an incredibly savory smell coming from the fire. “Oh… oh my God,” I said. “What do I smell? What is that?” The smell was making me salivate; it was so good that I had forgotten to be pissed at Lizzy for scaring me half to death.

“Sausage!” Billy said in his best homemaker voice.

“Sausage? Where did you find sausage??”

“Freeze-dried sausage!!”

I only stood there, alternating my gaze between him and the fire. I think he actually shocked me stupid.

His shoulders slumped a little, and he finally said, “Look, go put some shoes on. You’re going to hurt yourself.” He returned to his spot at the fire. “I have some coffee brewed up. We’ll save some for you when you get back.”

“You have… coffee?”

“Well, we have it for now,” he said. “We’ll run out at some point, of course. That doesn’t mean we have to live like a bunch of savages right now, though, does it?”

I didn’t even bother to tie my shoes. I just pulled them on and rushed back to the fire. Lizzy was opening up a chair for me to sit in, humming to herself and chewing at the same time. I had just finished pulling on the jacket when a metal plate was thrust in front of me with a little pile of crumbled sausage and some crackers. “I’ve got a fork or something here in the Kitchen bin,” Billy muttered, digging in a plastic container. He turned back to me to hold out a fork and saw that my plate was empty. He stared at the empty plate and then looked up at me. “More?”

“Yes, please,” I said through a mouthful. I wiped my eyes, which were watering because my tongue was stinging from where I had bit it when James attacked me.

He took the plate and offered me a cup filled with black coffee. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t have any creamer or sugar.”

“I don’t care, this is amazing,” I said and meant it. I never would have done black coffee once upon a time, but the smell of this stuff alone perked me up. I felt a panicked urge to gulp it down and had to restrain myself from burning my mouth. Thinking of this, I felt an unhappy twinge in my bladder. I handed the cup back to Billy. “I have to go take care of some business,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Billy said, taking the cup back. “Bushes and such over there,” he gestured to a thick patch on the other side of the trucks.

When I came back to my spot by the fire there was another plate of food and my coffee, now cooled down a bit. I dug in, going slower now and taking the time to savor it.

“Be a nice day today,” said Billy happily. “Clear sky. Beautiful weather.”

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

“We were discussing that before you woke up,” Jake said.

“We’re going shopping for a new car, Mom,” Lizzy interrupted.

“New car?”

“Yeah, it’s probably a good idea to find you a vehicle,” Billy said. “We need to get you started on gear and supplies and the truck and van are just about filled to capacity carrying all of Jake’s and my crap to begin with. If we find something really good, we might could hook up some kind of trailer to whatever we get you. There was no ball hitch on either of ours.”

“What about gas?” I asked.

“No worries. We have ways.”

I thought about all that for a minute. Something about taking the extra time to locate a suitable vehicle, fuel it (however that was done), and load it full of supplies that had yet to be acquired seemed off to me.

“How far is your place from here, Billy? How long will it take to get there?”

“Well, the town I’m closest to is Jackson. From here I’m guessing that’s about a ten-hour drive? Maybe less—but that was how long it took before. Who knows what road conditions are on the way? I suppose we’ll either get there tomorrow or the next day.”

“And how are we set for food and water?”

Billy nodded. He was probably beginning to understand my train of thought. “Before when it was just Jake and I, we could have probably stretched out what we had for a week, assuming we minimized physical activity. Now that you’ve joined us, we’re down to maybe half of that, depending. I’m not sure how much Elizabeth eats—maybe not too much at all—but you just murdered enough canned pork to put your face on The Little Pig’s community watch list, so…”

I burst out laughing, surprising myself and everyone else around the fire. It was a peaceful morning, interrupted suddenly by my cackling. I couldn’t help myself. I had gone so, so long without laughing and it just felt so good to do it. All of the tension and the fear, the anger, resentment, the despair, and hate; every bit of poison that had been building inside of me ever since that first day when the lights went out broke loose and poured out from me like a flood. It was a vomiting forth of raw, pent-up emotion. I tried to tamp it all back down and control myself, but the mental image of my face on a “Have you seen this woman?” poster got me going again in fresh peels of chortling.

It was worse when I tried to look up at the rest of them. Lizzy was laughing along with me, not understanding what was funny but infected by my behavior even so. Billy had a ridiculously goofy grin on his face (which is about as close as I ever saw him come to laughing; he would joke with us constantly, but his delivery was always straight and deadpan). I then looked over to Jake and lost any remaining reserve of control that was left to me. His look of mild confusion sent me right over the edge.

Before I understood what was happening, I felt a hand on my back rubbing gently along the length of my spine, and there was another, much larger hand resting on my shoulder. I realized Lizzy was standing next to me saying, “Mom? Mom, what is it?” and Billy was soothing her, telling her, “It’s okay, Girly. This was gonna happen at some point. It just had to shake loose and work its way out. This is normal. She’ll be okay.”

I realized I was sobbing uncontrollably and rocking in my chair. Billy was down on one knee next to me with his arm around my shoulder. He stayed like that with me until the worst of it was passed, reaching out every so often to squeeze Elizabeth’s hand.

“What the hell?” I said after things had calmed down a bit. “I wasn’t even feeling sad. I don’t know where that came from.”

“It’s fine,” said Billy. “It turns out the part of you that makes you laugh lives right next to the part of you that makes you cry. All that stuff is controlled by the same buttons. You just went through a hell of a thing. You gotta give yourself some time; this will happen every so often. You’ll have to let it work its way out of your system.”