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

“I’m sorry for that, Lizzy,” Jake said.

“It’s okay. He had it coming.”

Jake looked at Ben and Otis in turn. “I apologize to the both of you for that.”

Ben nodded at Jake, clearly shaken by the exchange. Otis nodded to Elizabeth and asked, “Do you know any card games, honey?”

“Mom taught me Crazy Eights,” she said.

“Ben knows that one, don’t you son?”

“Yeah!” Ben said. He pulled an old, beaten pack of Bicycle playing cards out of his jacket pocket. Looking at the rest of us, he asked, “Is it alright if we play on the tailgate of the truck?” I said, “Of course,” so he took her off to the truck a few feet away, pulled down the gate, and helped her to climb up onto it. He jumped up beside her and started shuffling the deck.

“Been rough with him. Robert, I mean,” Otis said quietly. “He gets like that. I don’t know the details behind what happened to their parents, but I know it wasn’t pretty. I’m not sure how strong to be with him. Don’t know what’s appropriate.”

“He’ll be a problem eventually,” Jake said. “You’ll want to get that handled or leave him behind soon.”

Otis’s heavy sigh indicated that this was a problem that had been troubling him. “Yeah,” he agreed.

Billy took a sip of whiskey, coughed, and said, “You were saying about the tents?”

“Oh, sure,” Otis said. “So, they were rounding us up, good bad, or indifferent. Not being mean about it but just making it clear that we were coming with them no matter what. Took us all down to the tent city and put us in these big old communal things with row on row of cots.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said. Otis nodded to me and lifted his cup in a little salute.

“From there, they shuffled us around some more,” he continued. “As folks within a tent got sick, they were moved out into quarantine sub-areas; sick tents within the tent city, I guess you’d call it. In time, the number of sick equaled the number of healthy, and then the ratio overbalanced the other way. It became easier for them to move the healthy into their own sub-areas. It started getting crazy toward the end. Ben and I were moved sometimes two or three times a day. The following morning, there were always more people who had passed on in the night—more people that had to be hauled out to the pits. After a while, I figured out that no one was actually working on any kind of cure or medicine to make it right. They were just playing a giant human shell game with us until there were none left to move around anymore.”

The sound of cards slapping down on the tailgate startled me. The kids giggled, and half-argued, half-joked about who won the last round. The sound of Lizzy laughing and playing with another child helped to take the chill off the story Otis shared.

“We were in those tents, oh, five… maybe six weeks? That’s all it took for some three hundred thousand people from Albuquerque and the surrounding areas as well as another fifteen thousand Army, medical, and support staff to get whittled down to something approaching less than one percent. I have no idea how many were left when the dying finally stopped; Ben and I didn’t stay around to find out.”

Otis drained what was left of his cup and gasped. Billy offered more, which was accepted gratefully. I noticed a slight tremor in Otis’s hand as he held out the cup.

He was silent a moment while looking off into the distance at nothing in particular. Suddenly, he sat up and asked, “You folks remember the National Dispatch?”

It didn’t ring a bell for me. Billy, Jake, and I looked among ourselves, and it became clear that none of us had heard of it.

“Ah, must not have circulated out your way. You remember that all the private news networks were still trying to get back up and running after the Flare? Well, they never quite had the chance to get off the ground, and any traction they got was lost when everyone started getting sick. The Stars and Stripes created an offshoot service called The National Dispatch. Started using it as an interim service to deliver news updates and keep everyone informed. Nothing fancy—just basic newsprint, maybe five or six pages per issue, zero advertisements.”

“Why the name change?” asked Jake.

“Had something to do with branding,” Otis said. “I asked one of the soldiers about it in the tents. He said they were trying to minimize the appearance that the news media had been taken over by the government, which it essentially had. Wasn’t like they were being shady; the government was literally the only organization left that was capable of getting the word out.”

“Never saw it out my way,” said Jake.

“Me either,” I said. “And I was in a tent city a lot like the one you were in.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. They were down to sending copies in on pallets with the supply trucks.” Otis leaned forward and pitched his voice low. “I saw a story in one of the articles that said that some researchers thought the Plague was some kind of… uh… chimera, I think it said.”

“No shit?” Billy said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Nasty stuff,” Billy told me. “I saw something on this sometime after all the Anthrax and dirty bomb scares. One of them doctors that seemed to make his whole living dreaming up shit to be worried about started talking about these manufactured vaccines that were made from two or more different viruses. He said the process could be adapted to combine some kind of killer cocktail virus. A new kind of bioweapon. This article said it was man-made?” this last question was directed back at Otis.

“Well, it said they suspected but I been thinking about it. You think of the timing of everything as it happened: first, the Flare comes and flattens the power grid and, not too long after that, everyone starts getting sick.”

“I know where you’re going,” Billy said. “I had the same thought myself. I just never had the benefit of a newspaper to back me up. Damned sure didn’t think of any kind of chimera…”

“So I figure, someone somewhere was getting up to some business in the lab that they probably shouldn’t have. Don’t even know if they were trying to make a weapon, you know? There were pharmaceutical companies and every other damned thing dreaming up all kinds of futuristic garbage across the whole country; growing noses in Petri dishes and grafting human ears onto mice. All kinds of Frankenstein type foolishness. Suppose the power went out at some critical moment while they was cooking up whatever nasty shit they were working on? Suppose whatever containment they’d put together was only as good as the electricity it was running on?”

“But they would have had backup systems… safety measures.” Jake said.

“Sure. Fukushima had all kinds of backup systems and safety measures, too. Remember them?”

That shut us all up.

“Anyway,” Otis said, “the timing of it all was such that I don’t believe for a minute that the Plague was just something that popped up out of nowhere.” He drained off his second cup and declined Billy’s offer of more with a shake of the head and a “Thank you.”

“None of which helps us today,” Otis declared, raising slightly out of his chair and brushing off the tops of both legs with his hands. He settled down heavily into his chair and grunted. He giggled to himself and said, “That’s good stuff,” while pointing at Billy’s bottle.

“Well, anyway, like I said I wasn’t gonna hang around the place with Ben and watch everyone die off around us. When enough had passed on, the Army stopped trying to keep everyone from leaving. They became resigned. Their primary function became to keep the area sanitary, comfort folks as best as they could, and preserve human dignity as much as was reasonable. They were giving us a safe place to move on into the next world, see?”