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

He muttered, “Sonofabitch…” and rushed out the front door, snagging his heavy coat on the way. He yanked it on as his long legs ate up the ground, pulling up the zipper against the chill air as he humped through what he dearly hoped was the last snow of the year. He was just finishing with securing all the straps and doodads when he emerged around the side of Oscar’s house; he saw Jake standing alone about fifty yards away, feet planted and hands at his sides, facing the entrance of the valley. Gibs looked beyond Jake’s back to that same entrance, about a kilometer away, and saw the unfamiliar Humvee rolling towards them at a snail’s pace.

He walked up to stand behind Jake on his right side and watched along with him. “Here they come…” he said uselessly.

“So it would seem.”

He stood for a time, chewing the hell out of his bottom lip. His hands began to ache from the cold, and he cursed himself for not grabbing his gloves. He thought briefly of stuffing them into the pockets of his jacket but decided he could deal with the cold a while yet. The Humvee lumbered on abysmally slow, and Gibs thought, “ Hell, he’s driving like a decrepit, old Asian. ” Immediately after this, he remembered Wang hauling their literal asses up the highway at sphincter-puckering velocities and winced.

He let his mind run a bit more as they waited. He glanced over at Jake and realized that something might be off about him. Gibs couldn’t be sure, really; there was nothing about the man’s demeanor or stance that triggered any understanding in the Marine’s mind. Gibs could only see a bit of Jake’s bearded cheek from his position, but he assumed (rightly so) that his face was as impassive as ever. Even so, some undefinable thing radiated dully from the man; a thing that set Gibs’s teeth on edge and made his stomach muscles tense up.

Gibs’s mind wandered to other things, replaying, as minds will, the last few hours. He became even more uneasy. Feeling as though he had to dispense with a bit of unavoidable business, he pulled in breath to speak.

“Yes?” asked Jake.

A bit of that breath was surprised out of him. He recovered, drew it back in, and said, “Jake… that shit with Edgar… you can’t be doing that.”

“Oh?”

“Well… Christ, I guess you can do it, but you shouldn’t, alright?”

“You think I was wrong?”

Gibs blew a puff of air through chilled lips. “Fundamentally? No, Edgar’s an asshole. But… the way you did it. You can’t just be rolling up on people like that. Not at your size. Especially not on a guy Edgar’s size.”

Jake scoffed; a sound of annoyance so uncharacteristic that it caused Gibs to jerk in his direction.

“His size had nothing to do with it, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yeah, I know that. I know you don’t give a shit about things like that. But you really need to be thinking about how you’re perceived. A man built like you bearing down on a bitch like Edgar… that starts to look a lot like a tyrant to people, okay? And once you put that image in someone’s mind, it doesn’t go away. Not easily.”

Jake considered this quietly. Gibs saw the breath puffing before his face at regular intervals, coming at a rate far slower than he would have thought reasonable. He saw three of these puffs, transpiring over a period of a rough half-minute before Jake answered.

“Gibs… do you believe that people have a soul?”

“A what?”

“You heard me. A soul; do you believe they have one?”

“Jesus… or… well, fuck, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”

“I do. I spend a good deal of time regarding such things. I’m undecided on the matter as well. It’s a thing we’d like to believe, mostly because of the implications depending from its existence, but then there is always that overpowering voice of rationality drowning out the hope, isn’t there? Such a thing must not be so, and here are all the reasons why… So our rationality advises.”

Unconsciously, Gibs slipped his hands into his jacket pockets.

“Perhaps it’s a thing that needn’t be proven, though,” Jake continued, eyes still locked on the slowly approaching Humvee. “Perhaps it’s simply a thing worth believing in. And… if we choose to believe in such a thing, such a thing needs protecting. Preservation.

“Edgar counseled something low. Something unworthy of the people who live here. I need him—need everyone—to be better than that…”

Gibs pulled his attention from the advancing vehicle to look at his friend. Eyes narrowed, he said, “Fair. But they need you to be better than that, too.”

Jake didn’t respond to this, though Gibs waited patiently for him to do so. After a moment, a long, unending stream of breath billowed out in front of his face, continuing on for so long that Gibs wondered at the capacity of the man’s lungs. It continued long past decency before finally thinning out. Sometime later—a very long time, as far as Gibs was concerned—the regular puffs of exhalation resumed at their ten-second intervals. Jake had not moved an inch through this; he’d stood out there like a carved statue ever since Gibs had joined him.

They stood quietly for a time, watching the approaching Humvee together, Gibs wondering privately what its arrival would bring. It was an unarmored slant-back, about as bland as you pleased, but the windows and interior were dark, making it impossible to see who was inside… or how many.

He heard approaching footsteps. Recognizing their sound and pattern, he nodded gently without looking back and said, “Amanda…”

“Hey, Gibs,” she said. She came to stand on Jake’s left side, just behind him. Gibs glanced at her and saw she’d left her rifle back in the cabin, though she was wearing that Glock, as always. He supposed it didn’t matter so much.

More footsteps approached shortly after that, all of them audibly cascading over each other and impossible to recognize. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw Fred, Oscar, Davidson and Rebecca, Greg, Otis, and Monica all forming a line behind the three of them. Gibs nodded to them, noting who was there (and, to his chagrin, who was not), and some of them nodded back. They looked hard and unfuckable. Gibs, in his innately hardwired Jarheadedness, approved.

“You know, you really don’t need to be out here,” Jake said. “You could all be keeping warm right now.”

“Hell with that,” Fred rumbled from the back rank. “You’re not standing out here alone.”

There were some mutters of approval at this. Jake cocked his head, almost imperceptibly, and said, “As you will.”

More footsteps as they all stood together waiting on the Humvee to close the final hundred yards to their position; Gibs glanced back and nodded at Jeffries and his men. They gathered in a tight cluster to the right of Jake’s crew and, pulling a double-take, Gibs realized that Samantha stood out there with them—she was very close to Jeffries, lightly holding his hand.

The Humvee came to a stop just before them, engine shuttering to sleep almost immediately, and Gibs saw a dark-skinned Hispanic male climb out of the driver’s side. The man was vaguely familiar, though his name escaped Gibs for the moment; he specifically recalled shaking his hand and exchanging a few curt pleasantries before tearing out for home. The man walked around the front of the vehicle, nodding slightly at them as he passed. He continued on to the rear passenger door, opened it, and began talking quietly to the occupant.

As they watched, the front passenger door swung open and a pair of heavy-soled Danners planted into the mud-churned snow. The door slammed shut, exposing the Otter fully. Unlike the rest of his men, he wore very little in the way of gear. He was wearing his brown NWU’s, and Gibs, looking the man over carefully, saw that though he wasn’t tooled up, he was still wearing his kneepads and sidearm. Rounding out the man’s appearance was a black knit cap covering his megalithic head, pulled down over the ears. His eyes tracked constantly as he took in the area, scanning the surrounding tree line in all directions before settling on the people standing directly before them. He recognized his men, nodded slightly, and then began to take in Gibs’s people, moving quickly over faces whether they were familiar or not. Finally, his gaze landed on Jake. There was the briefest of flickers as Warren looked him over, after which he nodded curtly and turned to regard the open door at the rear of his vehicle.