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

I debated opening the slider and stepping outside but soon discarded the idea. It sounded like an excellent way to broadcast my position and provide a target to whoever was out there. I finally settled on taking up a position crouched behind the kitchen island and waiting.

The sound of breaking glass came from one of the bedrooms on the side of the house. A few seconds later, a large rock flew through the sliding glass door, sending shards of glass all throughout the combined rooms of kitchen, dining room, and TV common area. The island behind which I hid protected me from the worst of it.

A shadow appeared in the wreckage of the door frame even while glass was still falling to the floor. It was hunched over and moving fast. I followed the shape with my rifle and fired off several shots, all of which missed (I hadn’t yet learned at this point how hard it was to shoot something moving laterally across my field of view) but the sound of shots fired coming from his right startled the intruder, who drew up suddenly and swung in my direction. This was all I needed to line a bead up on him, and I put rounds into him until he fell.

I recalled hearing the window of the bedroom shatter, but I stayed where I was with the barrel pointed back out the frame of the obliterated glass door, wondering if the window had just been a diversion. My answer came when a single gunshot sounded from the direction of the front door, followed by grunting and snarling. I heard the sound of furniture being displaced and the thin, high pitched tinkle of small glass breaking. I rushed around the useless refrigerator and back into the main hall leading to the entryway, only to see Jake in his original position over Billy where I had left him. I could just make out a pair of boots extending from the bedroom hall behind him. They were on their heels with the toes pointed up. I grabbed one of the many flashlights that we kept throughout the house and thumbed it on as I ran over.

The last man to have broken into the house lay on his back with Jake’s Ka-Bar sticking out of his throat. It was buried to the hilt.

Jake looked up at me with an expression of complete hopelessness hanging on his face. “He’s going, Amanda. I can’t stop him—he’s fucking going!”

I ran over and kneeled by Billy. His eyes were shut tight, and he was breathing shallow as if it hurt him to take in any air at all. He reached up with a shaking left hand and wrapped it up in the collar of Jake’s T-shirt. He growled and said, “I need you to read the Iliad.”

“What‽” Jake barked. He laughed, sounding hysterical. “What the hell are you talking about, you crazy old…”

Billy’s hand twisted in Jake’s collar and pulled hard. Half of the front of Jake’s shirt tore away from his chest. “Don’t argue with me, God damn you. You promise.”

“I promise!” Jake blurted, not wanting to deny him anything. “You have my word. Immediately.”

Billy sighed and let his hand go loose. It stayed tangled up in Jake’s shirt, limply hanging off the ground. “Good. That’s good, Whitey.” He rolled his head over to the right, looking up at me. “You… you take ca…”

The last of his breath escaped in a sigh as he died.

The next few days were spent recovering from the fight. On the night that Billy died Jake drug all those we had killed from Howard’s group around the back of the house out of sight and hauled Billy out on the porch, covering him with a sheet. He did this while I opened the garage to find Elizabeth, who had been crying and near panic. I did my best to calm her fears before trying to find a way to explain the unexplainable to her. She became even worse at that point, running out of the garage and toward the house to her room. When she got there, she screamed in horror; it was her window which had been broken by the intruder. I caught up to her, collected her, and took her up to Jake’s room. I finished the night by helping Jake drag an old sheet of plywood out of the garage and to the back of the house, which we used to board up the broken glass door. It wasn’t a very good job (we knew we’d have to clean it up later) but it would do to keep animals out of the house overnight.

When we were done, we both cleaned the blood from our hands using some rain barrel water and a five-gallon bucket outside. I went numbly upstairs to Jake’s room to sleep with Lizzy. I believe he spent the night on a couch downstairs, not willing to claim Billy’s room.

Jake spent the following morning digging graves while I went through Howard’s trucks to see what they had. Among the usual supplies was an acetylene torch and igniter which I suspected they had planned to use in gaining entry to the garage. There was also a dead buck in one of the truck beds, most of which would go to waste as none of us knew how to properly dress a deer or preserve the meat without any cold storage at the time. I stored the various supplies in piled sections in the garage, to stash later in more permanent areas. The firearms and ammunition from the group were collected and deposited on the upstairs level of the garage by the safe.

With this done, I went outside to find Jake, who was just finishing the mass grave he had excavated for Howard and his six men two hundred yards away from the house. It was not terribly large, but it was deep enough and would accommodate them all when stacked in on top of each other. I pulled down the tailgate of the truck in which Jake had transported the bodies, took one of them by the shoulders, and began to pull. He came up next to me to help.

We had them all covered with tamped down dirt within an hour. “Thanks,” Jake said. “Ready to go say goodbye?”

“No, but let’s do it anyway.”

We drove back to the house and parked next to our growing collection of vehicles (the hulking Ford was still stored in the garage), and I helped Jake dig a grave for Billy close by under a large fir tree. We laid him into the ground; covered him over.

Jake briefly rested a hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ll go get Lizzy.” I worried for her as he left, fearing that she would regress into silence again the same way she had done when Eddie died. To my surprise, she emerged from the house with Jake not long after. She was holding his hand; in her other hand, she was clutching something fiercely. As she came closer, I could just make out the brass end of Billy’s old folding pocket knife peeking out of her fist. I realized Jake must have gone through Billy’s pockets and, finding this one personal item, gave it to Elizabeth to remember him by. I met his eyes and mouthed the words, “Thank you,” to him. He nodded and came to stand beside her before the tree.

“This tree is where Billy has come to rest,” he told her. “If you ever feel like you need to talk to him, you come out here, sit under this tree, and talk.”

“Will he hear me?” she asked. She was crying silently and just able to control her voice enough to speak.

“I honestly don’t know,” answered Jake. “But it’s what I intend to do whenever I’m missing him. If there’s a chance, he can hear I figure it’s worth trying.”

I will never forget how they looked when he bent and kissed her softly on the top of her head: my new broken family. He left her there alone and came back to stand next to me.

“She’ll be okay,” he said. “You both will.”

When? I thought but didn’t say.

As though reading my mind, he said, “Tomorrow or the next day. Eventually. There’s much to do. Plenty to keep occupied. There’s always another problem to solve in this world.”