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

“Jeffries, I’m wondering if I could steal you for a while?”

The sergeant nodded and said, “Absolutely. Did… you want to talk to all of us again, sir?”

“No, that’s fine. Just you will do.”

Some of the other men around the fire made foreboding “Oooo” sounds, as though their friend was being called out on the carpet. Jeffries laughed and threw a spongy, perforated slice of wheat bread ration at one of them, who turned out to be Tarlow. Despite the darkness, the man caught it out of the air and happily bit a hunk off. Jeffries threw back the last swallow of whatever he was drinking and stood up to accompany Warren.

He asked, “Headin’ back to your tent again, sir?”

“No, I’m tired of it. Let’s head out into the field away from all these fires. The sky’s cleared up; it’ll be a good view of the stars.”

“You ain’t lookin’ to put the moves on me, are you? I ain’t had a shower or anything.”

Warren laughed softly. “Well, you keep batting those pretty green eyes at me and I just might.”

“My eye’s ain’t green, they’re—”

“Green, I say, and knock it off. You’re wrecking the fantasy.”

Jeffries snickered. “Alright, then…”

They stood out in the dirt field, the light and noise of the tents now well behind them, and looked up into the night sky. The Milky Way was an impossibly thick blotch of stars bisecting the blackness overhead.

“Boy, they just keep a-spinnin’ round up there, don’t they? Not a damned care in the world over what happens to such as us down’ere…”

“I need your help, Lum.”

“Name it.”

Otter looked down at the dirt a moment, composing his thoughts, and then glanced back at the camp. He said, “I need to know about Jake.”

Lum shrugged. “Well, we told you all that, Otter.”

“Yeah, I think I was asking the wrong questions. I know their weaponry, their level of training, who does what. I get all that. I know that Jake says what he means; based on everything you guys have told me. But I spent so much time focusing on what he might do… what he was likely to do… that I think we may have skipped over the most critical factor.”

Lum nodded and said, “Okay. Shoot.”

“Lum… what kind of man is he? What kind of leader is he?”

The sergeant thought about this question a good, long while, looking back up at the stars as his mind worked the problem over. He finally said, “Folks sometimes argue with him. He has a way uh talking them ’round their arguments, makin’ ’em see his way. Most of them follow his lead, but they do it ’cause they have a mind to. He don’t insist on it.”

“Most of them?”

“Well, sure,” Lum said. “Always a peckerwood in the bunch, ain’t there?”

“Would you follow him?”

Lum nodded. “Have followed him, Otter. I’d lay it down for ’im, too. Lay it down for all of ’em.”

Warren shook his head and sighed.

“What’re you thinkin’, Otter?”

“I can’t leave them out here, Lum. Everything my guys tell me, everything you tell me, it all points to them being good people, and they’ll fight me tooth and fucking nail if I try to lead them out of here. And what the hell am I consigning them to, if we just leave them behind? These winters up here? They think they’re going to farm this—make a run of it? Jesus Christ, they’re going to freeze up and die of pneumonia.”

“Haven’t yet,” Lum offered.

“No, they haven’t. And they haven’t been up there that long, either. What happens when one of them breaks a limb? You said they’re getting started on farming, right? How about when they suffer their first crop failure?”

“Seems to me they ain’t hankerin’ to be saved…”

“Oh, this goes much deeper than that. You know it. Lum, do you know what the Minimum Viable Population for humans is?”

“’Course I do—”

Otter shook his head. “No, not the definition. The actual number.”

Lum thought a moment before admitting he didn’t.

“It’s a little over four thousand people. Four thousand to keep the species going healthy. Any lower than that and you start dealing with genetic defects, and that’ll just snowball out of control. In a world like this genetic defects die off, and that just results in a cascading failure for the whole human race. Now, what’s the largest number of people you’ve seen together in one place since the Plague burned out?”

Lum sighed and said, “Well, it ain’t four thousand.”

Otter nodded. “How about four hundred?”

“I… well, I really couldn’t say.”

“And that’s the point, Lum. To all of this. I don’t know if there’s a God up there or not but if there is, he sure forgot to send out the memo before he plowed us all under this time around. Nobody appointed a Noah; there isn’t any damned ark lying around anywhere. What’s left? Me? I’m a counter-terrorism expert. This is not my fucking cup of tea.”

“Oh, damn, that’s a bit much, Otter…”

“Not really. This is just what I’m left with. What were we told? Safeguard the survivors. Well, I’m here to tell you this right now: whatever survivors are out there, we need to get them gathered up, and it needs to happen damned soon. If we fail that mission if we can’t create that critical mass? That’ll be it, Lum. There won’t be any human race left inside of a hundred years.”

“There’s other countries out there, sir.”

“No, Lum. Wrong. This can’t be someone else’s problem. We cannot afford to just assume that someone else has this covered. It’s too big. We have to own it all. If we fail to do so… well. If we just let it go, that’s exactly what will happen. It’ll all go. Right down the fucking drain.”

He looked back up into the sky, the infinite expanse of worlds spinning violently over his head.

“And that’ll be the story of us.”

Brian Chambers awoke from a deep, dreamless sleep to a morning chill that seemed to have crept into the tent to wrap its icy claws around any bit of exposed skin. He yawned and buried his arms under the flap of his bag, pulling the edges down tight around his neck, and blinked in the low, gloomy light. He possessed the inexplicable knowledge that something had awoken him, some sound perhaps, though he couldn’t for the life of him think of what that thing might have been. He rolled his head to the right, looking at the empty space that would have been occupied by his friend Wang, recently vacated. He heard morning sounds outside; voices calling instructions, the clattering of plastic. He thought he smelled the smoke of a wood fire.

Sighing, he unzipped his bag, hissed sharply at the inrush of frigid air, and began his morning routine.

He emerged from his tent fifteen minutes later, planning to make a trip to the head, when he noticed immediately that the entire company, military and civilian alike, were gathering up into a large cluster in the middle of the road at the center of camp. One of the civilians was just passing by in front of him in a path to join the group, and Brian called out to him.

“Hey, Isaiah! What’s all that about?”

The man shrugged as he moved past, not slowing down, and said, “Dunno, man, they’re just gonna make some announcement, is all I heard.”

“How soon? I gotta take a leak!”

“Do it fast, then, or ask somebody after the fact…”

Isaiah hurried on, eventually disappearing into the crowd.

Brian did as the man suggested, shaking off so quickly that he splattered the front of his britches a little, and was still zipping up his fly as he came rushing up to the back of the crowd. Through the press of heads, he saw a collection of men in charge including Otto Warren and his right-hand man, the Marine everyone called Montezuma. Next to these were the long lost Sergeant Jeffries and a collection of his men. Warren must have been standing on some sort of box or something, though Brian couldn’t see what it was through the thickness of the crowd; he was a good head and shoulders above everyone else.