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

I turned to see a horrified Davidson staring back at me. He was frozen in place and clutching his rifle (my rifle, damn it) to his chest. I was annoyed but did not resent his shock; he hadn’t been out there with us nor did he see what happened to Kyle. I waved him out of my way and ran over to Jessica, who was contorted around in a new position owing to all the jostling punishment we had suffered in our escape.

I knelt in front of her to go over her vitals. As I did, Oscar called from up front, “Hey, someone clue me in on where I’m going up here! Please!”

“I don’t care,” I called back. “Just get us out of the city and onto some road leading away.”

Jessica’s skin was cool to the touch. Her lips were blue, and there was no pulse to be found anywhere. I looked up to her leg, which seemed to have sucked all of the color out of her body to condense into that one area of deep purple lividity. A set of brown, delicate hands were mashed down onto the bloody leg bandage. They were attached to Alish, who looked back at me with wide and haunted eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she croaked and took her hands away.

Iconsider it to be my fault that we continued on to Wyoming rather than adjusting course to travel into Nebraska. As it is, I’ll admit that I felt (and continue to feel) a bit of guilty relief that the decision was taken out of my hands. The deeper part of me, the part that likes to keep all accounts balanced, wanted to drill into Nebraska in search of Jessica’s daughter, Pinch. It was Jessica’s plan, after all, and I felt like I owed her. I still do in some respects.

At the same time, I had a certain degree of responsibility to the people who were still alive and with me. There were fifteen people with me when we came out of Denver, all of whom I had boldly declared to be my problem. None of them (not counting Alish, Greg, and Alan, who weren’t there at the time) had spoken up to dispute the point when it was made; their acceptance of my position was implied in their silence. They had all agreed together that, yes, this man can be trusted with the safety of the group.

All I knew of Pinch’s whereabouts was a half-guess her mother had made. Jessica herself wasn’t willing to ask the group to come along with her because she knew how shaky her chances of finding her daughter were. Now with her and Kyle gone, we were left with a bus missing a wheel, enough food and water for one last partial-ration meal, and a tank of diesel that would get us an undetermined distance (I hadn’t been paying enough attention to our consumption to get an idea of the bus’s fuel economy). I had assigned so much hope to topping up our provisions in Denver that I was pretty well out of ideas and was having trouble mustering up enough give-a-shit to dream up any more. Asking everyone to embark on such a quest would have been unfair; they probably all would have said yes, whether they did so eagerly or reluctantly. Jessica viewed herself as a loner, but she was well liked in the group.

Our group was down to the red line on everything imaginable, from resources to morale. In opposition to that reality, I was responsible for the death of two people and owed their memory better than just packing up and moving on. Had I been forced to make a decision regarding our next steps, I would have just frozen up anyway.

I sat for a long time on the floor in the middle aisle of the bus with Jessica’s head on my thigh. I kept my hand rested on her forehead, sometimes smoothing the hair away but mostly just holding it there, keeping the flesh warm, trying to keep at least some part of her warm. I don’t know what the hell I thought I was doing; I had this sense that I could somehow hold a part of her spirit back inside her body if I could just keep a part of that body warm, like it was still alive. I felt that as soon as I let her go fully cold, I had to admit she was gone. Stupid shit; and it probably had a lot to do with the fact that Jessica was a “she” rather than a “he.” I had lost three buddies in my career as a Marine, all men. It was brutal each time, and I still miss the hell out of them all, but it was somehow more manageable than this. I’d never lost a woman until that day in Denver. Whether you want to accept it or not, it’s different losing a woman. The relationship is different. All discussion of equal rights aside; I don’t have the words to explain why it should be like that, but there it is.

I’m not sure how long I sat like that on the floor, but at some point, I felt a hand on my right shoulder. From behind me, Barbara said, “Hey, are you alright?”

Unsure how to respond, I simply stated the fact: “I got them both killed.”

“That’s nonsense,” she said softly. “You were trying to teach them. You still need to teach the rest of us. You certainly won’t be able to protect all of us all the time. The only ones responsible for this are the people who attacked us. This is not your fault .” She emphasized those last words in anger.

I reached up across my body with my left hand to clasp hers. I squeezed it, turned my head, and kissed the back of her soft, wrinkled knuckles in order to remove any sting from my next statement. “Lay off a while, Barbara, and let me process a bit, huh?”

She said nothing else but squeezed my shoulder before removing her hand.

In time I realized that I had to deal with the fact that rolling along with a dead body was going to make the survivors pretty uncomfortable, not to mention play some messed up games with their minds. I gently put Jessica’s head aside, leaned forward, and put my right hand up onto the seat behind me to push myself up. This elicited a harsh burn at my shoulder, and I remembered the asshole that had grooved me during the gunfight. Sighing, I opened up the blow out kit on my rig and got out some antiseptic wipes, cream, and gauze. Rolling my shoulder, I could see that the damage wasn’t horrible; it probably didn’t even need stitches. I pulled some wipes out of a packet and began to clean the area, scraping out the valley of the wound with a wrapped finger and snarling at the stinging burn that I could feel all the way up in my neck. Completing this, I tossed the wipe aside, squirted some cream onto the area, smeared it in, and began to curse at myself under my breath as I tried and failed to wrap the area up in gauze with my clumsy left hand. Wang, who was across the aisle from me, looked back over his shoulder to see what I was up to. When he saw my predicament, he turned out into the aisle and said, “Let me help with that,” while reaching out over Jessica’s body to take the gauze from me. I grunted and let my hands drop. He started complaining that the wrap wasn’t staying in place, so I pulled a small roll of tape out of the pouch and handed it up to him wordlessly.

He smiled and said, “Handy little kit.”

“They’re alright,” I agreed.

With things finally secured in place, Wang handed the remainder of the material back to me, which I stuffed back into the pouch. I nodded my thanks and levered myself up to a standing position. Heads turned back to look at me, which I ignored as I walked up the length of the bus to speak with Oscar.

“How you doing, bro?” he asked as I approached.

“I’ll get there,” I said. “I’m not there yet, but I will be.”

“Sure, of course,” he nodded, sounding unsure.

“Pull us over when you get a chance,” I said. “Something like a field. Try to find someplace nice.”

“You got it,” he said.

I went to the rear of the bus and shrugged out of my rig, feeling suddenly forty pounds lighter… mostly because I was suddenly forty pounds lighter. Nearly the whole rear of the thing, including the camelback and plate carrier, was colored a solid, dark brown from blood. Twisting awkwardly, I could see the same had happened to the right side of my back and the rear leg of my pants. Shaking my head, I set the rig aside and dug out the soldier’s shovel (what we called an E-tool). The bus slowed and came to a stop alongside the road.