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

“Water. Sure, I’ll come with you.”

“Water. Jesus. Yeah, okay, come on…”

They climbed the steps up to the porch. Gibs selected a half-empty bottle of rye from the table and poured himself a double while Warren refilled his mug from a water jug. Gibs took a drink, swirled it around in his mouth a bit, and thought a moment.

“I wouldn’t follow anyone into hell, Otter. There’s only one person I ever met in my life that I would, and he’s dead now. And he wouldn’t have needed me to follow him anyway. Devil would’ve seen him coming, shit his furry britches, and run off in an almighty panic. But Jake… I’d take a round for Jake, yes I would.”

Gibs took another sip, poured some more into his cup, and screwed the cap back onto the bottle. He crossed the porch to lean on the railing.

“You probably don’t know about this, but we had a child molester here a while back.”

“Shit,” grunted Warren.

“Yeah. Jeff was his name. He’d been found out messing with one of the kids—”

“Oh, no…”

“—and, as you could imagine, the father was gonna slot the son of a bitch. A lot of them wanted to. I wasn’t here at the time when it happened. This was when Wang got shot, and your boys picked us up. I had to hear about it all later from Amanda.”

“Okay,” Warren nodded.

“So they were getting ready to do him, and Jake talked them out of it, I guess.”

“He talked them out of it?”

“Yep.”

Warren took a drink from his mug and muttered, “I might have handled that differently; you’re saying they had evidence on this guy?”

“Yeah, they did. And yes, I think I might have handled it differently too, if I’d been there. But Jake didn’t. And it wasn’t because he was worried about anything like justice or morality or any of that. He’s done his fair share of violence; that wouldn’t have even factored in. No, you have to understand this: he talked them down because he was protecting them from what they were about to do to themselves.”

Warren took this new information on board for a bit. He looked back out over the large gathering of people, now broken up into various groups around the fires. He noticed that there were several groups containing both his people and Jake’s, chatting together easily. He glanced at the small cluster of children, all of whom looked strong and healthy.

Gibs continued. “Jake isn’t perfect, and he can be frustrating as shit sometimes. But he’s my friend. He’s backed me up when I needed him the most. He’s put himself at hazard for the rest of us, just like we’ve done for him; for each other. I know you can understand that. You think about your brotherhood. What would you give to have those guys back? What would you be willing to do for them if they were back?”

Warren nodded. “What wouldn’t I be willing to do?”

Gibs said, “Rah.”

The Seal turned back to look at Gibs, his face thoughtful. He tossed the water in his mug out into the dirt, held the mug out, and said, “Let’s have a finger of whatever’s in yours.”

Gibs smiled, retrieved the bottle, and poured some into Otter’s cup.

Otter raised it up and said, “I still don’t know where this is going, but I’m giving him his chance to make whatever point he has. An honest chance.”

Gibs nodded, knocked his mug against Otters, and said, “Well, that’s all you can do, anyway.”

They both drank, and Otter growled slightly after he swallowed. He said, “I’m not gonna lie. I’ve had better.”

“Have a beer or a soda…” Gibs prompted.

Grinning broadly, Otter responded, “…whichever you prefer,” and they both laughed, their voices booming. Several of the people down by the fire glanced up towards them, wondering what it was all about.

“Fucking Gunner,” Gibs chuckled.

“Fucking Gunner,” Otter agreed. He moved over next to Gibs to lean on the railing.

“You met Gunner too?” Gibs asked.

“It was my distinct honor.”

“ Huh ,” Gibs thought, “ guy gets around for a squid. ”

He took another drink, thinking quietly for a moment, and then asked, “Hey, know why sailors have their names tattooed across their shoulders?”

“Why’s that?”

“So the Marines can tell who they’re fucking.”

Otter grunted, his small square teeth flashing dully as he smiled. “What do you call a Marine with an IQ of a hundred and sixty?” he asked.

“Let’s hear it.”

“A platoon.”

“Ha!” Gibs laughed. “I’ll remember that one, asshole.”

Warren drained the last of the rye from his cup and pushed off the railing. “Be sure you do. Make sure you bring some heat next time.”

Otter descended the steps, waved his goodnights to the few people that noticed him, and made his way out to his tent.

Warren’s eyes ratcheted open at 0400, as they had done of their own accord for years and years. It was an automatic behavior of his, like breathing or walking; a thing to which he no longer had to dedicate any brain power. As a younger man, waking up at such an hour without the aid of an alarm clock had required a conscious decision. It was a trick he’d picked up from an old bubble-head friend of his, a friend now long dead, who said, “It’s really not that difficult. In bed, right before you fall asleep, you remind yourself. You make a conscious decision that you want to wake up by such-and-such a time. When that time comes around, you’ll wake up. The trick is that you actually have to want to be up.”

Warren had tried it on a day-off when he didn’t have anywhere to be. As advertised, his eyes had shot open at the desired time, and he’d stopped bothering with alarm clocks ever since.

He was out of his rack and into the icy air of the tent fast enough that an observer might have thought he was shoved. He put on some sweats, splashed a few handfuls of frigid water over his face, and brushed his teeth. He yanked on a pair of running shoes, and by 0415 he was off for a run around the valley.

He took off in a southwest direction, down toward the latrines and just missing the stack of RVs and campers by about a hundred feet on their left. He made an easy pace, giving himself time to get used to the ground, which was unevenly soft and hard by turns from all the melting snow. There were still patches of the stuff throughout the valley, mostly in the shady areas under trees that were well obscured from the sun. The ground out in the central valley floor was nearly uncovered now, showing alternately dry and muddy patches of dirt fouled by clumps of wild needlegrass now exposed and perhaps waking back to life. Warren considered these as he jogged, absentmindedly picking his pace up to a relaxed six-minute mile as he wondered if such vegetation actually survived under the snow cover or if it had to die off and regrow completely. He supposed the older lady might know; Barbara.

He rounded the back of the latrines and began a circuit due south along the edge of the trees at the mountain foot, thinking about those people; Barbara and George, Gibs, Jake, Amanda, Oscar, Fred… The names of the valley’s inhabitants rotated through his head in time with his footfalls, replaced by a new occupant every time a shoe impacted the dirt. He thought about his own people as well, their names becoming interspersed with the natives; Jeffries, Montez, Lee, Dawkins, Kilmer, Andrew, Brian, Mary, Hurley, Alfonse, Abigail…

They all paraded through his mind in a fast rhythm—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—until Edgar cycled through and locked in place, as he knew his name must eventually do.

He thought about Edgar. He thought about that man a great deal.