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

“Jake,” I said. The tone of my voice caused him to look over at me. “Don’t leave us. I know you were planning on it at some point… whenever it was that you thought we would all be settled in and safe, I guess. I don’t know why or what it is that’s driving you but just… don’t, okay? I’m too exhausted to come up with an argument. Just stay here. We need you.”

Jake looked back at Elizabeth standing under Billy’s tree. He drew in a heavy breath and blew it out through pursed lips. I made ready to repeat myself, trying to conjure up in my mind the magic combination of words that would make him understand. Make him see. I was distracted by the thought of the protective vest that I wore the night before and how it had been unnecessary; no one had gotten off a single shot in my direction. I thought about how it would have saved Billy’s life and fought back my own tears. I began to panic inside. I thought: I can’t convince him. I can’t even string two sentences together right now.

Finally, he surprised me by nodding.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

Blake Gibson (“Gibs” to his friends) wiped a forearm across his eyes and blinked as he hauled on the oversized wheel of the school bus, navigating a path up the cluttered debris of garbage and derelict vehicles on Wyoming’s Northbound 191. He hated that God damned bus. It was a big pain in his chapped, finely aged ass to maneuver, was ridiculously loud, and keeping the tank topped off was about as easy as keeping his unreasonable cow of a second ex-wife satisfied to any reasonable degree. He would have given anything to trade down to something more manageable; one of those Fiat clown cars, a motorcycle, even a fucking go-kart. Anything would have been preferable to a massive, fuel guzzling, bright-ass yellow, “Hey-You-Guys!” school bus.

Unfortunately, the damned thing had ended up being a bit of a necessity. No less than fifteen people had barnacled themselves to his hide (man, woman, and child of every age) and this had turned out to be the most efficient way to transport them. They had initially attempted a convoy of several vehicles but that had only worked about half as well as a dick sandwich. It turned out that the time required for the activity of refueling vehicles actually scaled up when the number of vehicles increased – they had eventually spent more time topping off tanks than they had making progress. A compromise was found: this fucking bus. Sure, it was a whore to weave around through all the pileups and the gas tank was virtually bottomless but the benefits seemed to outweigh the negatives in the long run.

Gibs looked up in the long overhead rearview mirror after getting around a particularly nasty knot, having rolled his left rear wheel off the pavement and into the dirt to do so. The bus had lurched sickeningly in that direction, threatening to topple and roll down a shallow hill into a ditch. “We all good back there?” he called.

He was met with one or two smiles. Even Barbara, a little old grandmotherly type, met him with a thumbs-up and a wink.

He nodded and put his attention back on the road. “Rah,” he muttered to himself.

He didn’t know where the hell he was going nor did he have any clue what he was looking for. They had been on the road for weeks now, looking for somewhere to settle down, always finding some reason to flee hopeful looking places. He had lost two of his people in the process of escaping Denver; picked up three new ones not long after. Every day they pushed out a little further looking for that green grass on the other side of the fence, all the while their diminishing food and water a constant worry on Gibs’s tired, overburdened mind. As it happened, the time required in the process of scavenging supplies also scaled up with the number of people for which he had to provide, and some of his people were too infirm to get out there and dig with him.

Sixteen people including him, two rifles, a pistol, and a couple of boxes of bullets between them all. Fuck.

Gibs wiped his forearm across his eyes and blinked again, shaking his head to combat a lack of sleep. Off to the side, a sign approached on his right. It was as blurry as if he had killed off a bottle of Jack that morning, which he hadn’t. Good sweet Christ but he’d butter up a chimpanzee’s nuts for a cup of coffee. He’d even drink that shitty Folger’s crystals garbage.

He focused hard enough that a headache bloomed in the center of his forehead, forcing the sign to resolve.

“Jackson, 65 miles”

“Jackson,” he thought. He liked the sound of that. It brought to mind a favorite Johnny Cash song of his. “Screw it,” he thought. “Jackson it is.”

He repositioned himself in his seat and sat up straight. He lifted up his right hand and waved forward, which conjured his friend Tom Davidson at his side, who he insisted on referring to only as Davidson.

“Think we’ll have a look at this Jackson town coming up, see what we find. Maybe we hunker in there.”

Davidson slapped him on the shoulder and nodded. “Right on. I’ll let the others know.” He turned and made his way back down the aisle, holding onto the seat backs as he went.

Gibs smiled to himself; never much of a singer, he began to tunelessly chant:

“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout. We’ve been talkin’ ‘bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out. I’m go-in’ to Jackson, I’m gonna mess around. Yeah, I’m go-in’ to Jacks-DAH, sonofafuckbitchcocksucker!”

He hauled on the wheel again, narrowly missing a washout on the road by scant inches. He got the bus straightened out on the other side miraculously with only a minor squealing of tires, the backend fishtailing in sickening fashion. He coughed and took several deep breaths to calm himself. Jesus!

Having thus regained control, he couldn’t help but finish his initial thought: “Look out Jackson town.”

This document comprises the second book of the history of the Jackson Commune, covering its growth from a small homestead to a collective of survivors occupying an increasing footprint in the mile-diameter valley that we have unofficially named “The Bowl.”

As in the first book, these stories have been collected through interviews with the people who live here and are presented in narrative form for the sake of readability (for my original, unfiltered interview notes, see Jacob Martin’s library—all notes utilize a basic key script shorthand, which should be readable with little effort).

My understanding is that Blake Gibson’s (who everybody just calls “Gibs”) arrival was something of an unsettling experience for everyone involved. I was not present for this event; I showed up sometime later. From his perspective, he was shepherding a collection of diverse people across the country in a school bus searching for a safe haven, or at least someplace they could make into a safe haven. From the perspectives of Jacob “Jake” Martin, Amanda Contreras, and Elizabeth Contreras, they had only recently defended their home from the incursion of a large group of squatters, losing their good friend Billy in the process.

It is fair to say that relations were tense in those early days. Gibs and many of the people who came with him (such as George, Barbara, and Oscar) have since become integral members of the community, of course, but this was a state that had to be actively pursued by the constituent members (against their own instincts in many cases). There were some key decision points along the way that would play a major role in defining the intra-social relationships of our members as well as what I would personally define as the “karmic balance” of the whole. As is typically the case in life, the answers were rarely black and white.