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

Gibs has found a niche for himself in the group as the head of security with a secondary function as liaison between us and the United States Military Remnant under Commander Warren (being a Marine veteran, he speaks their language a lot better than any of the rest of us). In his mid-forties, he stands at six foot two, is fair complexioned, and what hair remains to him is a trim, sandy brown. He maintains a clean boxed beard, some of it grey, and has the physical build of the perpetually thin—meaning that any dietary struggles on his part would have been along the lines of putting weight on rather than trying to work it off.

He is consumed by an inner, frenetic energy that seeks expression in various ways. The man simply cannot sit still. If he is in a chair, one of his legs must be bouncing. If he is standing, he is shifting from foot to foot or continually walking forward and back for a few steps. When backing up, he tends to run into things that are behind him (often more than once on the same occasion). It takes a directed effort of will for him to put his hands in his pockets (I’ve seen him do it—he jams his balled-up fists in and grimaces).

Gibs is an eloquent man for the most part, well-spoken and well-read. Even so, it is clear that he has devoted a significant portion of his life to learning how to swear in the most creative (often times surprising) manner, elevating the practice to his own personal art form. An old world chivalry has been programmed into his psyche, both from his time in the Marine Corps and from his mother, who he dearly loves and idolizes (referring to her alternately as “Mom,” “The Kraken,” and “Queen Killjoy.”) Because of this, his usual brand of profane eloquence is reduced to stuttering sentence fragments when he is in the company of women or children; half of his vocabulary is rendered off limits. In such company, he often lapses into official military-speak—the kind of procedural dialect one used to encounter when speaking with active duty service members or police officers on the clock.

Gibs lives in a fifth wheel, a forty foot Forest River Sandpiper, which is positioned fifty yards northeast of Jake’s cabin (to the right of the cabin, essentially, if you stand in front of it facing the entrance). The fifth wheel was a special project executed between Gibs and Jake; Gibs discovered it on a particular excursion into Jackson and was unable to forget it once he saw it. Jake was happy enough to go out with him in the Ford and bring it back. He parked it fifty yards out from the main property and embedded back into the tree line. He stated that he preferred the arrangement, noting that it would, “keep the riff-raff off the front lawn.” He refers to his trailer as Casa de Redneck.

Sitting with him at the dinette inside the impressively appointed camper (it has no less than five pop-outs, two bedrooms, two entertainment centers, two full bathrooms, and an interior and exterior kitchen), I arrange my notebook, pens, and a delicious cup of coffee that Gibs has provided from his personal stores. A self-professed coffee addict, he regularly uses his clout to get the product bumped to the top of any scavenging list, whether it be ground or unground beans, instant, or any of the paraphernalia necessary to brew the beverage. He never has to push very hard to ensure that coffee is looked for on our excursions; he is well loved, and we are happy to make the effort.

Gibs takes a sip from his own mug, leans back in his chair, and says, “Well, what would you like me to talk about?”

“Anything, really,” I answer. “I’ve found that people often only need to pick a place to start. Once they’ve found that, everything else flows naturally. Just start with how you arrived here.”

“Okay, then.”

I want to say we came rolling through here just under two years ago. I’m not certain exactly how long it’s been now… maybe a year and a half. I don’t spend much time looking at calendars anymore. But let’s call it a year and a half for shits. And “rolling” is probably too charitable a word. We were essentially limping along on fumes in a last-ditch desperation effort. Things were pretty bad when we ran into Jake.

We had been driving around in one of those big, yellow Laidlaw school buses; me and fifteen other people. We punched into Wyoming by way of Colorado looking for somewhere safe to settle. Initially, we had looked into Denver to see what we could find, but things didn’t go well there. I lost some people.

We were in the area on George’s (that’s George Oliver) advice. He had been with me since Texas along with Tom Davidson. In a discussion we’d had very early on, he explained how the entire United States east of Abilene as well as Arizona, the coast of California, and up into Washington and Oregon were basically pockmarked with nuclear-goddamned power plants. Now, we had never heard any news about a meltdown in those early days, and I guess the emergency shutdown systems in the American plants were pretty good, but I’m old enough to remember Chernobyl. In fact, Fukushima was our most recent demonstration of just how nasty things get when a nuke plant goes Tango-Uniform; we had no way to know if an area we were living in or driving into was contaminated with radiation. We wouldn’t know until we started getting sick and by then it would be too late. Old Georgie made a compelling argument: avoid nuclear power plants.

States like New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah were all free of nuke plants and, according to George, Wyoming was in the dead center of a nuke-free oasis. We started heading in that general direction while keeping our eyes open for a good place to settle.

We picked up others along the way. We ran into Barbara in Oklahoma. Rebecca, Oscar, and his daughter Maria joined us just outside of Pueblo, Colorado. It was like that—just running into people in two’s and three’s along the way. We’d stop to talk with them, trade news and such. I was always looking to trade supplies, but nothing ever came of that. We always just ended up pulling people into our little caravan. Everybody just looked so fucking lost; I wasn’t about to stop, shoot the shit with them, and then leave them behind with a wave and a smile.

It was in Colorado Springs where we finally had to stop and adjust our tactics. Davidson ran into a big group of eight people living in a King Soopers grocery store while he was out on a scavenging run during a refueling stop. I had a little siphoning tool that I was taking from car to car to fill the gas cans we had with us; nothing sophisticated—just a couple of stiff hoses and a hand pump. It was a pain in the ass to use and took forever, but if you were patient, you could snake the hose down past the gas cap and carefully rotate it until it wedged past the rollover valve. You couldn’t get all of the gas out of the tank because there was no way to control where the hose ended up once it was past the valve, so we left a lot of gas behind, but what we lacked in efficiency we made up for in volume.

We were all standing out there together while I cursed up a blue streak trying to get the hose into a Subaru. It was maddening—you can’t rush the technique at all. You twist slowly while you carefully insert the thing and you know if you’ve got it or not; there’s slight resistance, but the hose will eventually push through. If you fuck it up you’ll also know because the hose will bind up and go no further; it’s stiff enough that you can tell you need to back it out and try again. I had fucked it up three times already, and I could feel Davidson’s eyes resting on my back by that point, which only served to agitate me, which caused me to fuck the job up a fourth time…