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

Jake shook his head. “Well, then we’ll be right back to where we are right now. But at least we will have tried.”

Warren grunted out a laugh; a lazy bark that could have meant anything. He stood, and Jake thought he saw the chair rise up slowly from the ground, exultant at its sudden relief as it gradually formed back into its original, intended shape. He took two steps to the tent’s entrance, pushed up the flap, and said, “Montez, install this prisoner in a tent well away from everyone else. Keep him under guard, please.”

Montez said, “Aye-aye, sir,” and rushed in to collect his charge.

Warren sat in his tent for no small amount of time after Jake had been hauled away, thinking. He was deeply troubled by the man; troubled by his seemingly conspicuous honesty. Having accumulated an entire career’s worth of experience in being lied to by men just like Jake, he found now that everything about the man’s offer smelled too good to be true. His instincts railed inside of him, churning up his guts, and he wracked his brain looking for the angle. There was always an angle with such men. Not once in his whole history, within the service or without, had he ever encountered a too-good-to-be-true situation that turned out to be so.

He considered it from every direction and perspective he could dream up, looking for that goddamned angle, and the harder he thought, the more it seemed to elude him.

He sighed and raked his fingernails over his scalp. In his roiling mind, the same Sun Tzu quote circled around and around, folding back on itself until it came dangerously close to meaninglessness.

“… For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

He shook his head and looked over at his closed tent flap, imagining the events playing out on the other side. They’d left their mess tent behind in Arizona, so people would be gathering around in pockets outside, probably starting up fires where they could, and tucking into a late meal. There had been many circular arguments about this—the making of fires at night. They were highly visible in the dark; apt to draw attention at great distance. On the other hand, they’d seen barely anyone or anything coming up the highway. Along with his people, Warren was fairly convinced the risk was acceptable. They had their perimeter, their watch schedule, their circled vehicles. He had some thirty-eight personnel to divide up over their area, not counting the medical staff; an undermanned platoon, in other words. He thought about all of the concessions he’d had to make, all the cut corners lost to simple attrition. They were well, well off the map.

He rose from his cot and exited the tent.

Standing outside on the edge of the small side-road, he looked around at the people he could see. Most of them were civilians, bundled up in heavy outerwear against the lingering May cold, which they found was dropping into the mid-forties at night.

He looked over the noticeable cliques that had evolved naturally over time; the religious folk who tended to eat together due to the fact that it was just easier when it came down to it—easier to offer up the meal prayer without the uncomfortable side-glances of the disbelievers. Over there was the healthy collection of Hispanics; not far off from them a smaller grouping of African Americans. A larger smattering of Caucasians and a small handful of Asiatic races. Such things had ceased to be curious to Warren long ago; he was well versed in the nature of tribalism. So long as they weren’t hostile toward each other, that they continued to work well together during the day—as they certainly did—he suggested to himself that he was disinterested in how they chose to divide during their meals. If there actually was anything at all interesting to him about the practice, it was that they all tended to take the noon meal together, jumbled up into a large, mixed collection, ethnicity be damned… religion be damned. It was some sort of unconscious, natural rhythm, he surmised. Lunch was a time of collaboration, of coming together to share in the labors of the day. The evening meal was a time of recuperation, so it seemed, and he guessed that people wanted to be with their own during this time; to be awash in the familiarity of common experience.

He had considered this aspect, in particular, a great deal, despite his efforts to mentally turn away. The evening meal had traditionally been the time of day when families had come back together and synchronized. It was their time of reconnection. Warren wondered if the people he protected gravitated towards their own in the evenings, purposefully or unconsciously, in search of a proxy for their lost families. The thought of this, the very hint of it, was a thing that made him feel at once exhausted and cripplingly sad.

He looked from person to person, identifying them by their silhouetted shapes rather than their features, which were obscured in the darkness, until he located the man he sought. He sat on a box at the edge of his own fire, with his back directed at Warren. Warren noted with an undercurrent of discontent that the man had positioned himself on the west end of the camp, closer to Jake’s tent. As he approached, that discontent deepened when he saw that Jeffries was surrounded by those men that had accompanied him to Wyoming. Seven men, having been removed from the company for half a year, remained segregated. They maintained proximity to their adopted chief, whether intentional or not.

He made plenty of noise as he approached them so they would know it was him. Heads turned, identified his presence, and several of them called out a greeting, inviting him to pull up a rock and share their meal. He took some measure of comfort (or maybe it was relief) in this relaxed behavior. Together, they’d gone beyond the usual stiffening of spines, the snapping to attention, whenever he appeared. The formalities, even the relaxed formalities of a deployment, had all loosened up. Warren appreciated this. He’d learned to deal with them as a necessity within the old organization but, being totally honest, he sure didn’t miss the lower echelon’s ass-puckering reaction to his presence. People were more likely as not to refer to each other by last names these days, leaving the rank completely out of it, which was fine with him. He supposed he still had the authority to make a field promotion if he felt like it, to grab a corporal and make him a sergeant on the spot, but would it really matter, outside of the name? There was no paygrade involved anymore, no rank insignia certainly—unless they wanted to go scavenging for replacement patches. It was really just a case of pointing at a man or a woman, expressing that more was needed out of them, and then laying out the task.

There was no amount of formality they could employ that would make any of this work anymore. It wasn’t formality that kept the people he had left from just disappearing out over the horizon, he damned well knew. People didn’t follow a man because of formality, and if they weren’t apt to follow him, there was no amount of formality you could impose that would make them behave otherwise.

Not in this world. Maybe not ever again.

He shook his head and politely declined their invitations to sit down with them. A few of them held metal or hard plastic coffee cups in their hands, and Warren also damned well knew those cups weren’t holding coffee. That was another cut corner; another one of those things they were letting slide a bit, on a trial basis. None of them had gotten out of control, so far as he’d seen. They continued to be up before the sun every day, kept after their duties. And he knew the civvies were dipping in on a fairly regular basis as well, so what the hell was he going to say to his people about that? That would have been a tough bite to work through, so he didn’t even bother asking them to swallow. They could unwind a bit, as far as he was concerned, just as long as they didn’t show their asses. They’d never let him down yet.