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

“That’s quite a thing,” said an impressed Jake. “You’re saying all of them were doing that?”

“Oh, well, they were supposed to,” Billy shrugged. “I’m sure you had your sandbaggers in their group just the same as you have in any other. But again, this idea of preparedness is baked into their cultural identity, you see? By and large, these people were just about ready for anything.”

“Weren’t ready for the Plague,” I said.

“Okay, almost anything. Be fair: no one was ready for that.” He turned off the grill and retrieved a colander from an overhead cabinet, which he placed in the sink. Protecting his hands with a dish towel, he poured the spaghetti in to drain.

“Sorry, there’s no butter for this,” he said almost to himself. “Still deciding if I leave the fridge where it is or get rid of it. Takes up a ton of space to not be doing anything.”

He transferred the spaghetti to another bowl, opened the jar of sauce, and poured half of it in. He then looked up, shrugged to himself, and poured in the rest, most likely realizing that he had no cold storage for the opened jar.

He began to stir the bowl. “Anyway, I followed their lead and ended up here. This was all over time, you understand. I did pretty well for myself. I wasn’t rolling in millions’ worth of cash or anything… in fact, most of the money we made at the casino either went straight for the betterment of the tribe and our lands or was just reinvested back into the casino itself. I did earn a comfortable salary during my time running the place, though. Had some luck with my investments. Even so,” he gestured all around at the house with a hand, “doing all of this at once would have hurt. What you’re seeing is the result of several years’ worth of planning, saving, and building.”

“Billy,” I said while placing a hand on his shoulder.

He looked surprised at the gesture. “Yes?”

“On behalf of Jake and myself, I want to thank and congratulate you for being an obsessive doomsday prepper. It turns out the lunatics were right. We concede.”

He rolled his eyes and smiled. Lifting the bowl, he moved over to the dinner table dividing up the space between the kitchen and the family room. “Hey, Girly!” he called. “Come have some dinner!”

“Silverware?” Jake asked.

“The drawer to the left of the sink,” answered Billy. The sound of metallic jangling came from Jake’s direction while I looked into the pantry for more water. The pantry itself was looking bare—there was a half-empty flat of bottled water on the floor, some jarred and canned goods interspersed throughout, and an opened box of crackers. I grabbed some water bottles and went to sit at the table as Elizabeth came wandering in. Billy pulled a handful of plates from a cabinet and set them out at one end of the table. We sat down, and he began to serve out spaghetti to all of us.

“Like I was saying,” Billy continued, “the hobby started with this concept of food supplies, but the more I did, the more I thought of that I could be doing. Suppose I needed something while basic services and infrastructure was down? I could survive here on the food I’d packed in for plenty of time, but I might not be able to get my hands on new things that I needed, so I added a woodshop. It had the added benefit that I’d be able to fix things that broke as well.”

He stopped talking to have a bite. I was shocked to see that a significant portion of the food on my plate had disappeared down my mouth. After weeks of nothing but MREs, canned goods, and prepackaged foods like protein bars, a simple plate of pasta was gourmet eating.

“Adding in a new feature or capability always exposed another area I was lacking. I added a woodshop but that really only covered the ability to work with wooden things. I should add a machine or metal shop, right? Well, I never got to that—it was just on the list of things to do. I put solar on the Butler Building so that I could power everything in the event of a grid failure, which made me realize that the main house would be S.O.L. I had planned to put some solar on this house as well but just didn’t get to that in time. I had to compromise.”

“Compromise how?” Jake asked.

“Propane generator. There are ten, one hundred pound propane tanks lined up along the wall out in that garage; I’ll point them out to you the next time we’re in there. You store propane as a liquid, and one tank holds almost twenty-four gallons. It’s something like two-hundred-seventy times more compact as a liquid, so there’s a ton of gas out there. I don’t recall the math to determine how many joules of energy are stored in one full tank, but the answer is a lot . The very best thing is that propane won’t decay like gasoline or diesel will. The stuff will last forever. Our only challenge is finding more when we run out. Our limitation there is that we have to count on all the tanks and storage facilities failing over time, leaking it all away into the atmosphere. I don’t know when that will happen but, when it does, we won’t be getting any more of the stuff until someone figures out how to pull it out of the ground and bottle it again.”

“Does that mean we could watch movies on the TV in here?” asked Elizabeth.

“Well, yes, but I don’t think we want to burn up our emergency energy watching movies,” Billy said. At her disappointed expression, he quickly amended: “Hey, maybe we have movie nights every so often, though. We can’t be running stuff around the clock, but we’ll have special nights sometimes for movies, okay?”

Elizabeth seemed to think about this compromise for a moment; finally smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Is it alright if I have some more?” I asked, gesturing at the bowl.

Jake sat up and looked over the bowl at my plate. “Damn, dude.”

“It’s good !” I barked defensively.

“We should eat it all. Anything we don’t finish will just go to waste,” Billy said. Everyone spooned up a second helping.

After a few more bites, Billy spoke while chewing, unable to contain himself long enough to swallow first. “You know, the other thing about the solar on the garage: it’s not getting the best efficiency. Too many trees around it. Another one of my projects was going to be to take down the trees closest to it. This has the added benefit of providing fresh lumber for anything that may need to be built.”

“Oh, what do we need to build?” I asked.

“Anything really. Another building, tanning racks, livestock pens, and fences… we’ll think of more over time. A new project always starts with someone saying ‘You know what would make things better around here?’”

“Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Jake said.

Conversation around the table stopped at the implied meaning behind Jake’s statement. Finally, Billy put his fork down and looked at Jake. “We do. Think you might stick around to help?”

Jake chewed for a moment while he considered this. “Well, I did help you get here, but there’s obviously still much to do. I can stick around for a while to help you get settled in.”

“Okay,” Billy said as he wrapped another bundle of pasta around his fork. “I can work with that.”

I’d love to report that the next few days were happy ones, but life is rarely a simple, single-emotion experience. There were definitely periods of happiness but, more importantly, it was also the first time Elizabeth and I had felt truly safe in months. Now that I wasn’t constantly on edge all the time, I finally had the opportunity to get inside my own head to process the grief over everything we had lost, everything we had been through, and (perhaps the worst) some of the things I’d done to survive. The others seemed to sense the need I had to work through these things and gave me a wide berth when there wasn’t work to be done. I spent a lot of time walking by myself around the property within the vicinity of The Bowl (the term I had begun to use for the grounds on which the cabin was built and the surrounding valley almost completely encircled by mountains). Billy told me that the area contained within the valley was a very rough and irregular square mile—he had purchased only a portion of the area when he acquired the land, but the concepts of such things like property lines seemed to lack relevance anymore; we just looked at the whole thing as our territory.