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

The newly arrived dispersed among the locals and groups of four or five splintered away to tour the homes; to spend a few more moments of privacy together; to exchange gifts or tears. By midday, more trucks came bringing the rest of Warren’s people; those who refused to be left behind, having secured passage to the valley through the half-threat of mutiny. Warren stiffened at the sight of them trundling through the pass and began to bark orders at Montez, but Jake halted him with a hand and a word.

“I apologize for this,” Warren rumbled. “I’d intended to minimize this.”

Jake, who stood looking out at the remaining hundred or so people joining their friends—their family—shook his head and said, “This is the right thing. There’s plenty of drink to go around; we have enough of that at least. Gibs and Davidson both make it a point to grab more whenever they go to Jackson. And even if there wasn’t enough, it wouldn’t matter. These people have all been together for so long. This is necessary.”

A silent moment passed as they regarded the gathering together. Clearing his throat, the SEAL said, “I’m glad I met you, Jake. I’m glad I met all your people.”

“Oh? I got the sense you didn’t care a great deal for me at first.”

“No. But if we’re being fair, you can be a bit of a pain in the ass.”

Jake smiled and nodded.

“Just let me say this,” continued Warren. “I can’t speak for everyone but… I’ve felt as though I was fighting a losing battle for so long now, I hadn’t even realized that I was counting on eventually losing. I was never going to quit, of course. But I just didn’t see the way through to the other side, do you understand? This place… what you’ve started here… it makes me believe that there’s a win on the horizon again. It’s a foundation we can build on. We needed that; that idea of home. Of our place . Even though my people are packing up to leave, we’ll still think of this place as such. Our place. Where we rebuild. We’re coming back, Jake. We’re going to go find more, make them safe, and bring them back.”

“You might not, though,” Jake said.

“What? Why wouldn’t we?”

Jake glanced at the other man, eyes tense. “You’re heading back East, now. Eventually, you’ll be moving south. Gibs and George once thought they had to stick to the middle of the country out of a fear of the various nuclear power plants sprinkled along the coasts and so on; they worried that safety measures may have ultimately failed, you know? Wide-scale contamination?”

Warren grunted. “We’d discussed the possibility but find it unlikely. We would have heard something at some point.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I have to imagine—”

“Are you sure ?”

Warren sighed. “Strictly speaking… no. Of course, there is always a possibility that something somewhere failed and we didn’t hear about it. Reliable communication was, in fact, one of the first things to go.”

“Do you have a plan for that?”

“There are a line of hospitals we intend to hit on our path out. A lot of these had radiation detectors; survey meters and the like. The locations of those power plants weren’t exactly secret, either. We’ve been gathering Intel in that regard; stopping in libraries and so forth. As we learn of more sites, we mark them on the maps we use to plan out our travel. With a little luck, we’ll be able to thread the needle as we go.”

Jake’s shoulders relaxed, and he nodded, surveying the crowd of people milling over the grounds. He saw Barbara talking with a large group of some twenty or so people over by the first greenhouse, laughing and gesturing animatedly with her hands at the long, cylindrical, white structure.

“Good. That’s good. And then, on the other hand, you’ll be looking at better climate. Warmer areas with a longer growing season.” He stared at Warren. “If you find something that works better than this, make your stand there. Don’t bring your people back to this if you can find something better, Otter. Set them up in some place that’s safe—come back and retrieve your people here if you must. But don’t bring everyone back up here if you find a better situation. It’s a hard life up here.”

“Come back and retrieve ‘my’ people? What about you and your people?”

Jake shrugged. “They can go back with you, of course, if it works out that way. Not me, though. I’m done traveling. I’m done looking, I think. This is home now. This is where I die.”

Warren scoffed and looked out over the valley, at the people moving about. “I think that’ll be enough of that. What do you say about breaking open some bottles?”

Snapping his fingers, Jake said, “Let me run to the garage and grab another crate. We’ll need a lot more for this crowd.”

“Let’s not get crazy!” Warren called behind him. “I want them able to travel after this!”

They packed up and left the valley three hours later, roughly an hour and a half after Warren wanted to be heading down the road. The goodbyes were long, lingering, and often repeated; people shaking hands or hugging, pulling away, and then hesitating, expressions of not-quite panic in their eyes. They often found new things to say to each other, kicking off the conversation for another fifteen minutes or so, after which the entire ritual had to be repeated. As Monica Dempsey watched it all transpire, she was reminded of family holidays out of her past—gatherings in which it took hours just to say goodbye, to say “I love you,” to part ways. She looked over at Wang, her somehow new partner—perhaps new love, though the entire situation was still mightily confusing for her—and wondered at where she’d ended up. Wang might have been her own son in another reality, had she gotten busy a little too early in her youth… say seventeen. She would have scoffed in embarrassment at even the thought of sharing her bed with someone his age once upon a time but… now, here she was. Her daughter Rose had accepted the relationship easily enough, thank you sweet lord, and even seemed happy for her mother, but Monica was still working it through in her mind. She wondered if Lloyd could see her from wherever he was now and what he thought of the whole deal. If she knew him at all, he probably awaited her with a smile, for whenever it was, they met again… not to mention a few cougar jokes . He’d been such a good man, like Wang.

He was leaning against a table to free his arms up from the crutches, his ever-present fighting rig draped over his shoulders for the utility of its pockets rather than any need to fight. He was surrounded by a collection of Soldiers and Marines both, a distinction Monica had learned to make by subtle differences of uniform and insignia. She knew most of their names, such as Montezuma and Hughes, Compton, Taylor, and Jones, though there were more still in the group. Hughes rested his arms over a long, dark case nearly as high as his chest. Drawn by the gathering, Rose walked up to stand next to her mother and asked, “What’s going on, here?”

“Hush, baby,” Monica whispered.

“We, uh, we got something for you, Tripod,” Montez said and glanced at Sgt. Hughes, their armorer.

Hughes pointed at the table with his chin and said, “Better sit down.”

Curious, Wang posted off the surface of the table and pivoted around on his remaining leg, swinging what was left of his backside into a chair. The movement was, as always, paradoxically ungainly and graceful.

Hughes placed the case on the table in front of Wang, nodded, and then gestured at it with both hands. “Open her up.”