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

“A what?”

“It’s a mess. There’s no right answer, Davidson.”

Monica said, “Well, it can’t hurt to have more information, can it? They’re coming whether we’re ready or not. What do you think, Amanda?”

She was still looking across the clearing at Jake. He’d stepped back from the bus’s door to make way for the disembarking Soldiers, who all looked rather uncertain (or maybe shifty) at his summons. Jake gestured back towards the cabin, at which point Lum nodded and waved his men along. “I think they’re all heading this way right now. Maybe just shut up a bit and follow Jake’s lead.” She turned to make hard eye contact with Edgar. “You’re quick enough to put all the other decisions on him… why change that now?”

Jake returned to the porch with the other seven men. They remained down in the dirt and spread out in a half-circle before the steps with Jake in their center, standing next to Lum. Without waiting for anyone to speak, Jake said, “I’ll summarize for everyone’s benefit. Sergeant Jeffries, your people, have finally arrived from Arizona, as you well know; you’ve already had an initial meeting with them out in Jackson. What you may or may not know, depending on what you observed, is that there is no small amount of our people here in the valley who admit to feeling nervous at their arrival. They look to be incredibly capable, like yourselves, and… well, we were really just trying to get a sense of how all this might play out.”

Jake scanned the faces of all the other people standing mutely on the porch. “I… can’t remember who it was that asked this, now, but how many of your people are trained military, would you say?”

Before any of them could answer, Gibs raised his hand and said, “It was me that asked.”

Lum’s eyebrows raised a bit. “Damn, Gibs. Like that, huh?”

Shaking his head, Gibs said, “No, it’s not like that. We’re just trying to get the lay, here, that’s all. People are getting twitchy. I’m just trying to collect a little data to work it all over.”

Lum nodded. “Last I’s there, we had forty-three military personnel. That’s includin’ me and the boys, here. Mostly grunts ’n legs but they’s some of ’em higher-end, too. Otter’s a Seal, hisself.”

“And how many civilians?” asked Gibs.

Lum see-sawed his hand. “Hunnerd ’n fifty or thereabouts.”

Gibs glanced at the others pointedly but said nothing. Edgar shrugged and said, “I don’t really see what that means.”

“What’s the question we’re trying to answer here, guys?” Dawkins asked.

“Having observed and communicated with your Commander, Amanda has a concern that he’s intent on taking control of this area. Her intuition has always been sound in my experience, so if she has a concern, I do as well,” said Jake.

Many of the other soldiers nodded. Lum said, “Well, knowin’ the Otter, ’Manda’s probly right.”

A sharp gasp issued up the porch from Barbara and Rebecca both, though most of the others never learned the source. They all had their attention locked on Lum, eyes wide and fearful. Jake, who maintained his base level of calm as usual, said, “I see…”

Dawkins rushed to add, “Look, guys, you have to understand… he’s not coming up here to enslave everyone. That’s not what he’s about.”

“Can you say what he is about?” asked Jake.

“Come again?”

“Can you state specifically what his intentions are? Would you, if you could?”

Dawkins looked at the others briefly, feeling uneasy. “I really couldn’t, Jake, I’m sorry.”

“Huh…”

Edgar threw out his hands. “So? What next?”

Jake looked passively off into the distance (Amanda noted that he seemed to be looking at the beginnings of her cabin again). He didn’t answer for a while, and the others began to fidget as they waited for his response. Amanda prodded him gently with a hand and said, “Jake…?”

Without changing the direction of his gaze, he said, “They’re coming up this way, like it or not. Still, we don’t really know what’s coming until we speak with him, do we? Let’s, uh… let’s wait and see, yes? He’ll come through that cleft, eventually, and I’ll go out to have a talk with him when he does. Meantime, you all might as well go on with your day. Standing around worrying over it avails you nothing…”

He climbed the steps of the porch and settled into one of the low chairs, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets. He sat motionless, unblinking eyes leveled on the road into the Bowl. The steam that issued from his slightly parted lips was the only indication he was alive. The others dispersed, knowing he’d discussed the matter as much as he cared to, and all floated off to their safe little nooks.

Gibs spent the next couple of hours pacing around in the front room of his camper. The living area was woefully inadequate for the activity; he could complete a full circuit in a few strides, which only served to make him feel claustrophobic. He sought some level of calm by sitting on the couch where, as soon as ass achieved contact with cushion, his right leg proceeded to bounce around with such intensity that he began to suspect it was trying to shake itself loose and escape. He sighed, stood up, and crossed the room to look out the window for either the hundredth or thousandth time.

He saw the north side of the cabin beyond the garage; the two windows denoting the bottom-level bedrooms and, to the right, the sudden bulk of the library and its stone chimney protruding from the back of the structure like a tacked-on caboose. He focused his attention on the front porch, specifically its termination point at the northern corner. His camper was angled in relation to the cabin such that he could not actually see the total expanse of that porch, nor could he see the front door of the cabin. He thought he might be looking at Jake’s knee just poking beyond the edge of the log wall but there was so little of it to see that it might not have been his knee at all—it was very possible Gibs was only looking at the armrest of one of those Adirondack chairs. Impossible to tell; whatever he clocked was only an unmoving dark mass.

“Fuck,” he snorted, “‘unmoving dark mass’ is his primary characteristic. I might as well be staring at a rock.”

He began to pace again, realized what he was doing only a few seconds later, cursed, and sat down on the couch. He forced his leg to stop bouncing and grabbed a nearby magazine; a National Geographic judging by the yellow border around the cover. He turned to a random page and commenced to stare at the word ‘precipitation’ for the next few minutes.

He thought about just going over there and waiting on the porch but discarded the idea almost as soon as it came to mind. He would only do the same shit there that he was doing now; pacing around, rattling his foot, cursing at random intervals. Jake, in his imminent pain-in-the-ass fashion, would remain serenely calm the entire time, which would only piss Gibs off, and he’d start snarking at him out of a general need to burn off energy. This wouldn’t work (it never worked with Jake), which would piss Gibs off even more, and before too long he’d either stroke out or suffer a heart attack.

He glanced out the window again, just in time to see Jake’s back disappear around the edge of Oscar’s Connex home off to the left. He craned around as far as he could but his head collided with the cold window. His entire field of view to the east was taken up with those goddamned Connex homes, staggered as they were.