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

Warren twirled his finger around in a circle; a lets-go gesture. Taking the hint, Edgar rushed the point.

“I guess the main thing is that Jake said he’d bring Lum and the rest of his men over to ask their opinion as to your intentions and I, uh, well I disagreed.”

“On what grounds?”

Edgar’s face twisted as though he was being forced to swallow something incredibly bitter. “On, ah, on the grounds that they were your men and that they might bring details of the discussion back to you. Um… details we might not have wanted you to have. Essentially.”

“Essentially.”

“Yes,” Edgar nodded, still not meeting the man’s gaze.

“But you’ll tell me all this now.”

“Well, I mean—”

“Not long ago, I’m a dangerous man—not to be trusted—and you’re arguing with Jake over even having discussions in front of my men. And now, today, here you are talking to that same dangerous man, asking him to take control of the area.”

Combing his fingers through his hair, Edgar muttered, “Well, it sounds horrible when you say it that way…”

“There’s no other way to say it, Edgar. It’s the truth. What changed between then and now?”

“I… well… we’ve all spent time together, haven’t we? If you were really to be feared, as I had feared you, I wouldn’t even be able to approach you with this, would I? We would have been trussed up by now or otherwise brought under control, perhaps violently. What happened instead? You’re here having a barbecue with us! I mean, you’re obviously not the threat we’d feared you to be.”

“But you’re asking me to become that threat, aren’t you?”

Edgar blinked. “What?”

“You are right now asking me to do those things that you were frightened I would perpetrate only a few days ago. Where is this going? You either want this or don’t you?”

Edgar nodded, pointing at Warren as though the conversation was back on the track he wanted. “This is different, though. I can work with you. Help to ease the transition. I can work to build up support for you with our people, you see? With a little effort and careful planning, this can be a painless transition. Given enough time, even Jake will probably come to see that it was for the best.”

Warren blinked slowly but said nothing. He sat upright, feet flat on the ground with his hands resting on the wide slabs of his thighs. The uneven light of the lantern hanging from the tent’s cross-pole hid his eyes in deep shadows so that his thoughts were inscrutable. It was an uneasy experience being regarded by that man, so far as Edgar was concerned. It was like standing before an ancient monolith behind which some scrupulous, mechanical, black-and-white intelligence marched, on and on until all of the internal gears eventually ground a deep enough furrow into the housings and support structures that it all screeched to a halt, though such a thing might not happen for hundreds of years. The intelligence in that boulder of a head was unrelenting, unforgiving; judging in absolutes wholly innocent of allowances for mitigating factors. The palms of Edgar’s hands broke into a cold sweat, and he wondered if he had blundered horribly.

Warren stood abruptly and paced over to the tent flap. He withdrew it and said, “Well, you’ve certainly given me a great deal to consider this evening. This will need to be thought over very carefully. I’ll thank you for bringing this to me and say goodnight.”

‘Goodnight’ was said with inarguable finality. It cracked in the stillness of the tent like static discharge, causing Edgar almost to shoot up to his feet. Rubbing his palms over the legs of his pants, he nodded and said, “Of course, of course.” He walked towards the exit, paused, and looked again at the immovable face. “I’ll, uh, I’ll await your word, then. Good evening. And thank you—”

Warren dropped the flap, returned to his cot, put out the lantern, and was asleep a few minutes later, dreaming quite easily.

When he came to the river, he was forced to turn left and run along its bank rather than finding some way across to maintain its track along the tree line, as he’d originally intended. It was impressively wide for as far as he could see and each bank was still clogged by jutting platforms of ice. These were thick where they joined to the bank, likely still capable of supporting a man’s weight, but they thinned out as they spanned towards the center of the rushing waters, until the edges looked more like razor-sharp, jagged glass than ice. The center had been ripped out completely by the rising temperatures and the snowmelt coursing by just underneath the surface. As he ran, Warren estimated an average distance of fifteen to twenty feet from shelf to shelf, though the banks narrowed and widened wildly along the length of the valley floor.

His track eventually brought him back to the communal grounds, past that ridiculously large camper with all of its various pop-outs. He saw Gibs sitting out in front of it as he passed by, wearing warm clothing though it was nearly all denim instead of the waterproof winter gear they would have needed earlier in the year. The man sat in a camping chair with a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other, prompting Warren to wonder what the hell he’d find worth reading about in the pages. The Marine nodded and tossed out a friendly, two-fingered salute as Warren plodded past. He returned the gesture, continuing on without comment.

As he approached the giant, steel prefab garage, he heard the old, familiar sound of iron clanging against iron. It was a distinctive sound—unforgettable—investing his mind with powerful imagery, as if he’d heard something elemental out of childhood. Playing cards in bicycle spokes, perhaps, or the sound of a wooden bat impacting a baseball as it echoed across a grass field.

He slowed as he approached the rollup door, peaking into the low light to confirm he heard correctly. He saw Jake, Amanda, Tom, Greg and another young man he didn’t recognize (he suspected it was Greg’s brother) standing around a barbell resting on the floor. A quick glance told him the bar was loaded up to three hundred and fifteen pounds.

They stood there in various states of recovery, from Jake’s relaxed, nonchalant demeanor to Tom’s heavy, gulping breaths. Jake was saying something to them all, but Warren missed it. Usually circumspect, the state of it all just laying out in the middle of the garage floor as it was threw him off balance, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for a collection of people to be pumping iron up in the Wyoming mountains so long after the whole world ended. As though nothing had ever ended up here at all. The surreality of it unmanned him temporarily, moving him to hasty speech.

“Where in God’s name did you people find all this?”

Those people who stood with their backs to him startled at his grinding voice; a personality trait of which he was well aware and took pains to mitigate when the situation called for it. This situation actually had called for such tempering of manner, though he’d failed to do so, having been placed off balance by the mundanity of their activity; he couldn’t have been any more astonished if he’d stumbled upon them having tea with an alien.

It was Jake who answered him, owing to the fact that he’d not been startled by the man’s arrival at all; had seen him, in fact, as he rounded the entryway to the garage. “The cabin came equipped with these, actually. Our friend Billy was a strong believer in strength training. It’s something we try to carry forward, now.”