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

“Not fer the cold,” Lum said. “Wind sometimes gits funny through here. I don’t want a buncha embers blowin’ into the tents if she picks up.”

Elizabeth and Rose made several trips out into the forest to collect more wood for their stay, wanting to minimize time spent on the following day to collect more—they gathered what they judged to be enough to last through the evening and cover breakfast on the following day.

At dusk, Elizabeth showed Rose how to shave ribbons from the hunk of fatwood they’d harvested with the spine of her knife. She scraped enough of the streamers into a bird’s nest big enough to fill both of her hands cupped together and set the clump aside next to the fire pit. As she did this, Lizzy arranged a small pile of fuel inside the pit and produced a ferro rod. Lum smiled at this and shook his head. Lizzy looked at him, confused, and he said, “Wanted to do ’er differ’nt tonight. Got a bit of a challenge fer you.”

Lum pulled a hand drill and board from his ruck and handed it over. Slightly open-mouthed, Lizzy took it and cradled it in her lap. She regarded it for a few seconds and asked, “Really?”

“Really,” Lum confirmed.

She sighed. “This is nuts. I have a rod right there in my pack!”

“Mightn’t always have a rod…”

“Yeah, but I do now! Oh man, we’ll be here all night waiting for me…”

Lum set the fireboard down in the dirt before her crossed ankles and said, “Won’t either. Trust me, Lizzy, it’s a lot easier than you’d think. These’ll go up; I dried ’em out myself a good few days ’fore coming out here. Just r’member it’s more about constant speed than it is force. Don’t tar yerself out or you’ll have to rest ’fore you have a ember.”

She braced her foot on the board, inserted the sharpened tip of the drill into the bowl, and began to spin it between the palms of her flattened hands. Almost immediately, Lum said, “Faster—and don’t push down s’hard. Let the weight of yer arms do the work. Faster. Just work on bein’ faster.”

She worked at it for what seemed like forever, sawing her hands down the length of the stick, resetting them back to the top, and running down the length again. She kept at it until her palms got sore and her shoulders started to burn and, before long, her speed began to flag. Lum would gripe at her at these times, saying, “Don’t ease off now, not when yer so close! Keep goin’, fer heaven’s sake!”

The heat in her shoulders began to feel like fire, and she was panting before long. She nearly gave up right then, just wanted to throw the damned sticks aside, tell Lum what she thought of his stupid caveman science, and light the fire as God had intended. Before she did, a thin wisp of smoke curled up into the air from the grinding tip of the hand drill, and Lizzy forgot all concerns for her throbbing hands or burning shoulders. Her pulse quickened, and she began to breathe rapidly through an open mouth, panting away quietly as she concentrated on keeping the drill moving.

As she labored, the wisp grew into a streamer, and Rose gasped happily from her position at Lizzy’s side. The younger girl began to laugh, not believing what was happening, and then a moment later Lum was telling her to back off, that she had an ember already, and she was fixing to burn a hole right through the damned board.

She lifted the board and tilted it tenderly over the bird’s nest, as gentle as if she strained to lift a splinter from the pad of a baby’s fingertip. She tapped the board with the hand drill, and the smoking ember fell into the jumble of stripped wood, where it caught on strands as thin as fine tracing paper. It began to smolder where it landed, and Lizzy held the nest up in the air and blew gently into her cupped hands. A moment later, Rose clapped happily as flames sprung from between Elizabeth’s fingertips. She lay the wad of tinder into the fire pit and began to stack fuel on top of it, blowing the fire carefully as she did to keep it alive. The others watched her wordlessly, though Lum had long since settled back into his chair with a hunk of wood and a pocket knife, watching her through one squinted eye, knowing she had things under control. When she finally had the fire crackling loudly on its own, she settled back on her haunches, dusted her hands together, and smiled.

“So, what’s for dinner?”

Smiling, Rose asked, “Whatcha cooking?”

“Me? I started the fire!”

“We’ll et from our s’pplies tonight,” said Lum easily. He gestured at the bin of food he’d brought along with the knife. “Come mornin’, we’ll head up the rise a spell, cut fer sign, an’ set some snares. I’ll tote the rifle along; case we see anythin’ big enough fer thirty cal.”

“You mean deer?” Rose asked. She looked at him sidelong and fought to keep her voice easy.

“Might could be,” Lum said.

She looked down at her folded hands and frowned.

“Rose,” George tried, resting his hand on her shoulder, “it’s what we have to do, now. We can’t get enough nutrition unless we do. I agree it is hard but… we have to feed our people, don’t we? Wouldn’t you agree?”

“You don’t have to take the shot,” Elizabeth said in a remote voice. She stared into the dancing pit of flames a moment, eyes unfocused, and then looked up at the others when she noticed they’d fallen silent. Glancing at Rose, she said, “It’s probably important we all learn how to do it? You know? But nobody’s going to force you.”

Rose smiled at her and nodded.

“Supper, then?” Lum asked. He hauled the food bin over, pulled the top off, and began listing off the names of parcels as he found them, sometimes handing them out to people who spoke out with interest. The girls set their own chairs up on the perimeter of the fire pit as he did this and Rose poured out cups of water from the canteen to pass around.

They ate their evening meal together and chattered around the fire, cleaning up after dusk and sitting out in the dark of night underneath a field of stars framed by the ovoid window of the mountaintops. At one point, Lizzy leaned over to toss a log onto the fire, stoked the coals up with a twisted old branch, and said, “Isn’t this where we’re supposed to tell ghost stories or something?”

“Know any such?” Lum asked quietly. He held an old, battered metal cup of coffee in his lap.

“Well… actually no…”

“I dislike ghost stories, personally,” George muttered.

“Oh? How come?” asked Rose.

He thought it over a minute and shrugged. “I guess I don’t see the point anymore. Well, not outside of the spook they give you at the end, but… Ghost stories are a thing you tell when the world is a safe, rational place, I think. Where the shadows can be banished by the touch of a button and all things are knowable and known. In a world of dependability—of certainty—it makes sense that we should seek a little excitement sometimes, doesn’t it? There’s a bit of programming in our heads that tends to dump a heavy shot of hormones into our bloodstream when we’re excited; a bit of an invigorating cocktail that enlivens and gets the heart pumping. When you live in a controlled, safe little world, I think you get a little starved for that dose of excitement. You start looking for things like amusement park rides and scary movies—ghost stories—to awaken that feeling inside yourself.”

He leaned over and grabbed a crooked branch from the ground, no bigger around than his thumb but long enough for him to drag the tip through the fire’s embers.

“We don’t live in such a safe world anymore, though. Oh, it’s safe enough, I guess. Safe enough, now, or at least as safe as we can make it. Maybe this isn’t the best topic of conversation, now, for present company, but—”