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

He leaned back into the couch and dug the heel of his palm into a bleary eye. Speaking softly now, he muttered, “Not that I’m qualified one way or the other. Jesus!”

He climbed the cabin porch steps and knocked on the front door six minutes later. The liberal application of soap and water had squared his face and beard away—though there was a considerable amount of scruff around the neck and cheeks—but nothing short of a full dunking could have resolved the tangle on his head. He’d compromised by yanking a knit cap down over the mess and scouring the insides of his mouth with two full brush-loads of Crest. A jacket and boots finished off the fashion ensemble.

The door opened to reveal Jake, who stood there just as peaceful as you pleased, accouterments all together and battened down tight. He gestured for the Marine to enter and Gibs, taking a brief moment to mentally shit all over Jake’s sunny disposition, stepped through with a grimace.

The door shut behind him, dropping the light in the hall to a low glimmer, and Jake asked, “Take your coat?”

“Thanks but no. I’m still waking up, and it’s chilly out.”

“Late night?”

Gibs shrugged as he made for the dining area where the rest of the people sat and said, “Something like that.”

The others shifted about to make room for him as he approached and when he sat down, he found himself across the table from Otto Warren (“Otter” to his friends). The SEAL sat there with his scowling, craggy, misshapen head bolted onto a leathered neck as thick around as a normal person’s thigh, regarding him. Wang had once referred to the man’s grimace as The Resting Bitch Face From Hell, causing all who stood near (including Warren himself) to devolve into helpless laughter. Gibs glanced down at the table and laughed softly through his nose at the memory. A full coffee cup appeared in front of him, having been placed by Jake. A meaty hand rested on his shoulder briefly as his friend moved back to the head of the table.

Gibs grunted something that might have been English, and Jake nodded at him as he eased into his chair. It creaked and sagged under his weight.

You’re getting’ a big ass on you, big boy , thought Gibs, though that actually wasn’t true at all. The man was thick as hell, certainly—and sure, there may have been a little fat stored down around the waist—but it was nothing anyone would term a health problem. High amounts of protein in their diet combined with his near-obsessive activities with the barbell in the garage had simply turned him into a densely-muscled son of a bitch. Gibs couldn’t even tell who was the bigger of the two anymore; Jake or Warren. He’d seen them both going head to head in the garage on occasion—the two seemed to feed off each other’s presence and competed like a couple of teenagers. The last Gibs had heard, Warren was still out-squatting Jake, but nobody had Jake beat on the deadlift. They were both apparently suffering from the same mental disorder, so far as Gibs could tell.

Also at the table was Amanda sitting off to Jake’s right, as well as Andrew Stokes (the de-facto leader of Warren’s civilian contingent) and Patricia Campbell, a lady that had come up from the military camp positioned down by the mountain exit fairly recently… once the opposing parties (Jakes commune and Warren’s military, that was) had decided they probably weren’t going to just shoot the shit out of each other. Gibs was a little surprised to see her at the table that morning; he hadn’t realized she carried any juice.

Resting his hands on the table, Jake said, “Okay, all. Gibs makes a full house. Shall we proceed?”

Warren cleared his throat and said, “The question at hand really comes down to a matter of how many of my civilians you can absorb. Space isn’t so much of an issue; my team is already working with your people to expand housing.”

“That’s been a great help,” Amanda said.

Warren nodded. “So, the matter really comes down to sustenance. It’s all calories per day, isn’t it? Have you been able to work up some estimates?”

“We have,” said Jake. He thumbed a sheet of paper from a stack at the corner of the table and passed it across to the Commander, who began to read it. After a few moments, Warren’s shoulders slumped.

“I was hoping for better…”

“I know. We were, too,” Jake agreed. “The problem is that all of our best estimates are based on data we haven’t yet created. I’ve been working on this for the past few days with Edgar and Barbara, yes? Sure, the greenhouses are complete, but we don’t yet know what the yield is going to be. We think we can keep them running all year round, but I must emphasize the word ‘ think.’ Temperature shouldn’t be a problem; the double-wall design makes a great insulator, and we can run charcoal stoves through the worst parts of the year to keep the ambient heat up. But I’m very concerned about light. The winter months in this area are brutal, and the worst of it sees the sky in an almost constant grey overcast. Just going off how much the recharge times for our solar batteries increased over the last season, it’s reasonable to say that we’ll have some dead months in the year where we just can’t get anything to grow at all. What sunlight we do get will already be coming in at a trickle… and even though that Solexx stuff is made explicitly for this purpose, I’m wondering if there will be some UV loss incurred for using it.”

“You don’t know for sure?” Warren asked.

“We looked for a whitepaper on the stuff but didn’t turn up anything. Most of the data dealt with heat loss. I’m sorry, most of us just don’t know enough about this kind of thing to make an accurate guess. A lot of our planning is dictated by ‘should’s and ‘probably’s .

“The next issue is that we’re not going to be able to start with a full crop. Most of what we have are scavenged seed packets. We have made excursions out to surrounding farms in search of transplant material—we even found some in a few cases, very early on—but it’s sadly all dead now after the last winter. So, we have seeds but not enough to fill out all of our farmable soil. We’ll start first with potatoes as a staple crop because they’re more forgiving but also because Lum has so much experience with cultivating them back home. We’ll plant what we can wait for it to grow enough to develop a healthy tuber, and then split and replant those tubers. We should be able to expand the crops exponentially… but that will take place over a period of several weeks, and we won’t be able to consume any of it while we’re focusing on bolstering the crop. And that doesn’t even get into necessary greens and so forth. Again; lots of ‘should’s .”

Warren sighed heavily and looked down again at the sheet in his hands. He shook his head and said, “Twenty people?”

“At the most,” Jake emphasized. “It’s a conservative estimate, I’ll grant you that, but you haven’t been through a winter here, either. Otter, we’re taking this transfer of your people very seriously. All of us are very wary of taking more on without being able to guarantee their safety and good health.”

Blowing air through pursed lips, Warren passed the sheet along to Andrew, who shared it with Patricia. They both began to read over the figures it presented as though it was a contract for a home purchase.

“Well, I can respect that,” Warren conceded. “We certainly don’t want to offload people here if it won’t be a success. I was just hoping we’d be traveling lighter. We’ll need to move fast to cover the most ground, and the road is really beginning to take its toll on many of them.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Patricia stated. All of the heads in the room swiveled in her direction. A slight woman with somewhat ratty, dishwater blonde hair, she shifted uncomfortably under their gaze and glanced at Andrew for support.