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

“Nothing after that?” I prodded.

“Oh, nah. Not really. I did a standard four years in the Army but that was after Vietnam was over and before we went sticking our noses into anything else, so that was really just four years of being stationed in various places doing a lot of paperwork. Never saw any action.”

“So…” I hesitated; took a breath, “never killed anyone?”

“Ah,” he said. “No, ma’am. Not until after.”

“I hadn’t really killed anyone until today,” I said.

“Until… today?” Billy said, confused.

“James wasn’t a person,” I said. “He was some kind of animal or monster or… something. He just needed to be put down. He was truly evil. I don’t feel anything at all for what I did to him. I’d do it again if I had the chance.”

“Okay. That’s fair enough.”

“The people we killed today? They weren’t evil. They were just trying to get along for the most part, like us I think. I got Jake to tell me enough of what happened so I could make sense of it all while we drove over here. It was how we kept him awake.”

“Well, they did tie your daughter down to a chair,” Billy said.

“Oh, I know. I also know one of them held a knife to her. Trust me, if I had seen that I would have killed the bitch myself. But aside from her, those guys who came out shooting at us? That was after Jake had killed two of theirs. In fact, no one had been killed before Jake went to work. All that happened was they stole our van.”

“Are you suggesting Jake was wrong?”

“No, I’m not. I’m saying we’ll never know how it could have gone because everyone (on both sides) started off by pointing guns instead of talking. I get that we’re living in an extreme survival situation right now and that there is true evil in the world. I just wonder how much we’re giving up if we start each encounter under the assumption that it has to end in gunfire. I wonder if there was anything I could have said in that warehouse that would have made those guys stop shooting long enough to listen to us. It’s bugging me.”

I was quiet a moment while I worked up the courage to say the next thing. “I don’t know how to say this, really. When I shot that man, I was excited. I felt this intense rush, like, ‘Fuck you! I own you , bitch!’ That feeling, more than anything else, is what scares the hell out of me.”

Billy hefted his shotgun and held it out to me. “Hold onto this a second.”

“What?”

“Just take it a minute for me.”

I did. He went to the truck and dug around in one of the plastic bins. I heard the deep clink of a liquid filled bottle. He came back with two plastic cups and a bottle of some sort of hard liquor. “Jim Beam,” he said, “the cheap kind, sorry. I have some better stuff where we’re going. This’ll have to do for now.”

He sat back down and poured us both some cups. He offered me one and took back his shotgun. He saluted me with his cup and took a drink. I did the same, coughed, and shivered.

“Hijole, that’s nasty,” I gasped.

“You get used to it,” he said. After a moment, he cleared his throat. “What you’re dealing with, what’s bothering you right now? It’s a pretty natural thing. In fact, if it wasn’t eating at you, I’d be a little worried. It doesn’t make it any easier for you to deal with, of course, but it’s still a normal reaction.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ve got this book in the library of the cabin…”

“You have a library?” I said, giggling.

“Yes, I have a damned library. It’s nothing crazy; just an office with a bunch of books on the wall. May I continue?”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“Thank you.” He took another drink and snarled. “Oof. This is pretty horrible. So anyway, this book is called ‘On Killing’ by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.”

“Ugh, that sounds lovely,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, but stay with me. He spends a lot of time examining the act of killing and how it impacts people; mostly from the perspective of the soldier on the battlefield. His point is that the vast majority of the population, ninety-eight percent or so, has this instinctive, hardwired resistance to killing its own kind. By and large, unless their life is directly threatened, the act of killing another human is just something they wouldn’t be able to do.

“Now, this makes sense from the perspective of evolution. The ability to easily murder your own kind without any sort of psychological trauma isn’t all that conducive to the preservation of the species. Mother nature has made it so that it’s just really hard to kill something that looks like you.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Ninety-eight percent? How can that be? Our prisons were overflowing with murderers.”

“Well, yes,” he agreed. “But a lot of those murderers came from a culture and society that had been systematically dehumanizing those around them from the time they were able to start watching TV. On top of that, the prisons may have been crowded, but the numbers were still well within the limits of Grossman’s data. Look at this: the population of the United States was some three-hundred-twenty million when the Flare hit, right?”

“If you say so,” I said.

“It was. So ninety-eight percent of that is… uh—three hundred thirteen million, six hundred thousand. Or in other words: six million, four hundred thousand people in the United States were capable of killing without any real remorse or psychological impact, according to Grossman.”

“Well, okay. I’m going to assume all those numbers are correct,” I mumbled and took a drink.

“Oh, they are. I’m good with numbers,” he said, winked, and took a drink of his own. He opened the bottle up and poured some more for himself.

“I thought you said this stuff was horrible?” I asked.

“Yap, just making sure, though. Want some more?”

“Yes, please,” I said while holding out my cup.

“Alright, now the last time I looked up the numbers on this was because I was giving a presentation to the council on this subject in relation to violent crime and some local initiatives to get our youth off the streets—early intervention… that kind of thing. In the whole of the United States, there were two-point-three million people in lock up. That’s everyone: local, state, and federal prisons both convicted and not convicted. Keep in mind; those aren’t all killers. A lot of them were drugs, burglary, assault, and so on.”

“So that means that Grossman’s two percent estimate is a little high versus what reality actually is. The bottom line is that most people have a hard time killing other people without walking away from it psychologically damaged.”

“Are you saying I’m experiencing PTSD?” I asked.

“I’m nowhere near qualified to make that kind of diagnosis,” Billy said seriously. “I am saying that we were in the process of learning that the symptoms of PTSD were much more normal and natural than anyone in history was previously willing to admit. I am also saying that this new world that we find ourselves in is a lot more like what our Neolithic ancestors experienced. Killing is going to become normal again and will become easy if we let it be so. I believe it’s going to be important for all of us to understand that and to understand the psychological impacts that killing has on the killer, especially what happens to a person when they become numb to the act. We need to understand all that if there’s to be any hope of holding onto what little society we have left and not devolving into a bunch of shitheads. Given enough exposure, a human can become used to anything. That’s just basic brain chemistry.”

We both took sips from our cups and exhibited various levels of distaste for the contents.