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

Ronny realized that Pap wasn’t going to get there in time and smiled, his mouth twisted and sour.

He pulled the trigger on his shotgun and blew the contents of Beau’s head fifteen feet across the pavement. He put two more into his chest after he hit the asphalt, though he knew the gesture was unnecessary; Beau’s head had disappeared completely from the jaw up.

Having done this thing, he grabbed a few more shells and started thumbing them into his weapon. He wracked the pump, stuffed in a final shell, and took the briefest of moments to glance at the three men before him. They all either sat or leaned up against the panels of the car, mouths hanging open, completely speechless. Pap’s face was white as a sheet; he slid down the car’s fender, legs suddenly too weak to support his heavy frame. He pushed back his reclaimed hat with a shaking hand and giggled nervously.

Clay’s expression was awestruck; a study in naked, unfiltered wonder.

Ronny smiled at them all and asked, “Are you fellas gonna get back in this fight or what?” He brought the weapon up to his shoulder and moved around them, advancing carefully up the street.

His smile widened until his face ached.

“Saying that Jacob Martin is a private man is like saying that the summer months in Arizona can be a touch on the warm side. He’ll tell us what he will, in time; perhaps not. We’re forced to guess on all else. How far shall we attempt to dig? What do we have, besides our day to day life with the man; the evidence that he is with us? That he struggles along with us? His name, I suppose?

Very well; Jacob is a character out of The Bible, the grandson of Abraham and the son of Isaac, a patriarch of the Israelites—the only one whose name remained unchanged. He experienced the sacred vision of the ladder, ascending up to Heaven. He once wrestled with the Angel of God, and won.

‘Martin’ has its origins in ancient Norman culture, deriving from the Latin ‘Martinus’; a further derivative of Mars, the Roman god of war.

And what does any of that actually mean? Nothing, I suspect. They’re just names—labels that were once assigned to a baby boy before he’d even had a chance to understand what it means to be conscious. They mean as much or as little as we decide they do, in other words, just as the actions of his past will carry whatever weight we choose to assign. And for myself—though I’m now an old man and probably not much longer for this confused and silly world—the actions of today mean so much more for me than those of some time now far removed.

Jacob Martin is simply Jacob Martin, and that will be enough for me…”

Jake and Otter sat beside each other on the cabin porch. It was the end of the day when the sun was just starting to recede behind the mountains, and the people of the valley began to build their home fires. There would be no meeting by the barrel that evening; everyone had worked themselves to near exhaustion on the greenhouse. Perhaps on the following evening.

They’d all spent the last few days together working on the project. The crew had maintained its original composition throughout fairly well, with a small number of folks flitting in and out as opportunity allowed, but the core group that started the work labored to see it through to the end, not willing to miss any part of the construction.

The footings had all been poured on the first day, cured by the second, and the support beams had been erected not long after; a goodly expanse of four-by-six beams supported by four-by-four posts and laterally braced with two-by-four struts. This core structure having been completed, they wrapped it in a double-layered PVC skeleton of concentric hoops running down its length on the following day.

Tomorrow, they would wrap the inside layer in plastic sheeting and, if time allowed, would begin the work of wrapping the outer layer in its rigid Solexx shell. Jake and Warren had spent the day tilling the earth in preparation, anticipating the difficulty involved in swinging a pickaxe under the domed enclosure.

They sat amiably together—two silent men—Jake sipping at a cup of coffee while Warren drank his well water. The Seal sighed happily; it was some of the sweetest tasting he’d ever encountered.

“We’ll be leaving soon, Jake,” he eventually said.

“Oh?”

“Not until the work is done, of course. After that.”

“I see,” said Jake, running a thumb along his cup. “I may assume, then, that we see eye to eye?”

“We’re beginning to. I think you and I didn’t disagree so much at any point, even at the beginning, honestly. We just had different ways of getting to the same point. But after being out here a while… after seeing how they’ve responded. Well, I think the best thing I can do is to back away and let it happen.”

“Perhaps leaving isn’t necessary…” Jake began.

“No, it is. There are still too many to be supported here. Maybe in time but we’re too much for you to absorb right now. I would like to leave a selection here, if that’s alright with your people; those who would volunteer.”

Jake nodded. “I’ll discuss it with the others. I think they’ll be okay with it, but we’ll have to do a little math, I guess. See what will have to be adjusted as far as the crops are concerned.”

“Of course.”

“And you’re sure you’re okay with leaving them here?”

Warren thought on this question a moment and said, “No. I’m not sure.”

Jake turned his head a fraction of an inch in Warren’s direction. “What concerns you?”

“Something I heard. Jake… I need you to tell me something about yourself. A true thing. The people that have lived here the longest still talk about you like you’re some kind of mystery. I need to know who I’m dealing with, okay? Just give me something. Anything. Something real.”

Jake looked down into his coffee cup. There was a small amount of liquid left as well as a smattering of grounds. He tossed it back and chewed the remainder thoughtfully. He looked off toward Amanda’s cabin, the walls of which were stacked as high as they would ever be. The roof would be going on soon, he thought, and then she would be moving out. Moving out to move in.

He heard Warren sigh quietly somewhere off to his left.

Still looking at the cabin, Jake said, “I was bullied quite a bit as a child. Ever since I could remember. It was my reading, you see, or my inability to read, rather. My parents were… frustrated people. My mother did what she could but my father was, I believe, convinced that I was retarded for most of my childhood, at least until I was diagnosed. Diagnosis means nothing to children, of course.

“This was something I dealt with for many years; just taking it, yes? I avoided confrontation at all costs, reasoning that my parents had enough to worry about with my miserable grades; I didn’t want to add behavioral problems to the situation. I did this, put up with it, until I was, oh, I’d guess thirteen or so.”

Warren shook his head. “That’s a hard way to live.”

“Indeed,” Jake agreed. “So much so that I finally gave up on trying to do so. I had one specific tormentor who used to follow me home from school; we followed the same track to get home, you know? I used to look for alternate routes, sometimes going a couple of miles out of my way just to avoid him. Well, one day I didn’t take an alternate route and, as I knew I would, encountered him on my way.

“I don’t really know what was different on that day as compared to any other. Honestly, I really don’t. But, when he came up behind me and kicked at my heel, I turned and hit him across the face as hard as I could. It wasn’t terribly hard, of course, I hadn’t the first clue what I was doing back then, but it was good enough to knock him down. And then I set to kicking him because I didn’t want him to get up and hit me back. He was on his back lying in the street right next to the gutter, you see, and his right arm fell across the edge of the curb as he flailed, and I stepped on it, breaking it. Well, the police showed up around this time, of course, and carted me away.