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

Gibs thought it over a moment. “It tickles a memory, I guess. Why? What’s your point?”

“As I said: I wonder what he wanted to keep an eye on. His people… or us?”

Gibs grimaced and looked back out at the new line of homes a few hundred feet away from the porch. “Does it ever stop with you?”

Rather than answer the question directly, Jake left his chair and came to stand between Gibs and Amanda. “I didn’t make the world as it is, Gibs. I respond to it. I suggest we all maintain a certain level of alertness if we desire a smooth transition, here. The last time a new group of people came to live with us, we brought them in no questions asked with our guard lowered. For the most part, that ended up quite well.”

Gibs’s eyes narrowed. “Alright, I get it.”

“Not counting the fact that a predator was included in the mix.”

“Goddamn it, I said I got it. You ass.”

“I’m not trying to twist a knife, Gibs,” Jake said. “I’m making a point. I made a mistake once before, and Maria paid the price. I won’t be doing that again.”

“That wasn’t just you, Jake,” Amanda said.

“Goddamned right,” growled Gibs.

“Oh, let’s just agree to keep an eye on things, shall we?” Jake said, disinterested in pursuing it further.

“Eh, whatever you say, Chico.”

“How did we do for resupply, Gibs?” asked Amanda. It seemed to Gibs a pretty transparent attempt to change the subject, but he let it go.

“We made out pretty well, there,” he said. “Warren left us a good stack of long-life food in case the farming doesn’t go as well as we hope. If we didn’t have another source of food at all, I’ll bet it would get us all through the next winter if we ration the hell out of it. We’d all lose a few pounds, but it could be done. And the good news is that it isn’t our only source of food; there’s still the hunting, and what we forage, so I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

“Any diesel?” Amanda asked.

“Hell no. They had little enough as it is. I need to take a circuit of the city with a map and an ink stick, in fact, and see if they left us any, the guzzling bastards.”

“That’s okay, our reserves are holding,” Jake said.

“Any idea on our gasoline?” Gibs asked.

Jake shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. The rest of the year, maybe? I suppose there must have been some sort of test to measure these things, but I don’t know what that might be. I certainly haven’t found anything in the library. I expect that, at some point, the engines just stop working. Anything left in the city is most certainly flat, so I suggest we burn up as much of the stabilized gas as we can before it follows.”

“How about ammo?” Amanda interjected.

“Pretty goddamned good,” Gibs nodded. “I don’t have the numbers memorized, but we’re talking in the thousands.”

“ Hijole … they’re just driving around with all that?”

“They have to be. It’s not like anyone’s going to top them off. They had a whole truck loaded with it all; they must have consolidated everything from the surrounding camps when they moved to the northern point of Arizona. They left us a lot more than just bullets, too. We got hooked up with grenades, forty mike-mikes, more radios, a bunch of .50 cal for the M2’s, not to mention the two Humvees those M2’s are sitting on, C4—”

“C4!” barked Amanda. “What the hell for?”

Confused, Gibs said, “Well… to blow shit up, Amanda, what the hell else? You sure as hell don’t run it through a Play-Doh factory.”

“Blow what up, though?”

“Err… shit whose situation would be fundamentally improved by the liberal application of explosions, I suppose? Christ, I don’t know. Help me out, here, Jake.”

“It’s okay, Amanda,” Jake soothed. “I had a lot of questions about it too. I guess it’s a lot more stable than most people realize. You can even throw it into a campfire in perfect safety.”

Amanda squinted suspiciously, glancing between the two men. “Are you two fucking with me?”

“Absolutely not,” said Gibs. “C4 is very stable. It has to be detonated with a shockwave; you basically have to blow it up in order to get it to blow up. It’s pretty hard to get it to go off accidentally—hell, you can even fire bullets into it safely.”

“Where is it right now?”

Gibs hooked a thumb over his shoulder, “Back of the garage.”

“Jesus Christ, you guys, the garage!”

“Well, where the hell else are we gonna store it?”

Amanda descended the steps of the porch two at a time. As she strode toward the garage, she called back, “Right next to Lizzy’s punching bag? Dickheads?!”

“Hey, I said it’s sa…!—oh never mind. Jesus, what an excitable woman. You know, she keeps that rifle in her cabin on a hook by the door with a stack of mags right next to it without a second goddamned thought.”

“Which she began doing well after you started with Lizzy.”

“Yes, I realize that, Jake. It’s just odd what she takes exception to. I’d give a toddler C4 to play with if the shit didn’t make you so damned sick if it gets in your mouth. Guns are a thing—well, they used to be a thing that you kept under lock and key at all times, you know?”

“Gibs, do you think Elizabeth’s not mature enough to recognize a rifle hanging on the door for what it is.”

“No, she’s good to go,” said Gibs. “Given the sheer amount of time I’ve spent with her, she has my full trust—God help me if any child advocacy groups get ahold of my ass, though…”

“Then what is this? If you’d had that big of a deal about it, you would have said plenty to Amanda by now.”

Gibs scratched his chin, looking around furtively from home to home. “Goddamn it, I don’t know. Sometimes I look at what’s become ‘ normal ,’ and I wonder just what the fuck has happened. I wonder if this isn’t all just… getting away from us.”

Jake grunted. He looked far out into the distance, out where Warren’s trucks had disappeared into the cleft. “I can sympathize with that, Gibs. That’s a big part of the plan, here, isn’t it? Wall ourselves off, preserve what we can, let the world go crazy if it must—”

“It just seems like there oughta be a better way…”

“There are only twenty-two of us—”

“Ah-ah,” interrupted Gibs, holding up a finger, “much more now, chief. Let’s not forget.”

Smiling, Jake nodded. “Of course. That actually brings something to mind, Gibs. Something I’d like your opinion on.”

“Oh, Jesus. What next?”

“I don’t like how easily Warren was able to just roll in here. It’s actually something that’s happened a few times now, hasn’t it? Otis came up to see us with no trouble at all; Warren came riding in with an army—”

“That’s hardly even a platoon, Jake.”

“Whatever it was, it came right up to our front doorstep with not even a speed bump to slow it down. Most times it’s worked out for us but… well, I have a very good friend planted under a fucking tree as a result of the time it didn’t.”

Gibs shifted in discomfort; glanced to the right in the direction of Billy’s tree, now partially obscured by Amanda’s cabin. “Yeah. That’s a fair point.”

“So, I was interested in—”

Jake was interrupted by the arrival of Amanda, who had exited the garage and was striding back in their direction, jaw set, and brow furrowed. The two men regarded her silently as she approached; perhaps bracing themselves against what might follow. She did not so much as look in their direction as she came, her pumping legs eating up the ground in wide, heel-toe impacts. She passed by the front porch, refusing to look at them, but as she came to a point where the two men stood just on the edge of her periphery, her right hand shot out at them bearing a proudly extended middle finger. She yanked her hand back a few seconds later, resumed swinging her arms vigorously in time with her steps, and vanished into her cabin shortly after.