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

Looking out the side window, I saw that Oscar had stopped us next to a private farm surrounded by acres of grass fields with a large, attractive home out in the distance. The grass was peppered with small white flowers that looked to me like Baby’s Breath in a teenaged girl’s Prom corsage. It wasn’t exactly a sacred shrine, but it was apt to be as good as we would find.

I moved for Jessica’s body, but Fred beat me to it with three strides of his giant, swinging legs. He knelt and collected her into his arms gently, like a father preparing to take his little girl up to bed, and stood without any hint of exertion. She hung suspended well over the seat backs while Fred Moses’s head nearly scraped the ceiling of the bus.

“I got you, Gibs,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned and carried her outside. Everyone else remained seated, looking back at me. Waiting. I took a breath and followed Fred down the steps out into the field.

He had laid her down gently in the field by the time I caught up to him. We stood together a moment under an endless, blue sky heavy with wide, low clouds. A flat horizon surrounded us for miles, and the peaks of mountains were just visible in the distance behind us. Fred held out his hand to me for the shovel.

“No,” I said.

He nodded without comment and took two steps back. Taking the e-tool in both hands, I began to dig.

The earth was composed of good soil and was easy to displace once the grass layer was cut through. It didn’t take me very long to cut out a hole that was respectfully deep enough for its intended purpose. I’d guess I was at it for a half hour or so. The others from the bus had filtered out to surround us as I worked; they all stood by solemnly. Waiting. Always waiting. George leaned on his cane, his other arm resting on Davidson’s strong and youthful shoulder. Rebecca and Monica were both crying openly. I looked about the faces briefly, trying to spot Kyle, before remembering.

I nodded to Fred. Quietly, he lifted Jessica only to lay her back down in the hole. He crossed her arms over her chest and then retreated to his place in the crowd. Without waiting, I began to shovel dirt over her, starting first with her angry leg, following with her body and the tattoos she had displayed so proudly (those that had started as a fuck-you to a better-forgotten husband but ended as an advertisement of inner fire), finishing with a still lovely face. I smoothed the patch over and dropped the shovel. I could think of nothing else to do, so I only stood and stared at where she had been along with a spot right next to her; a place that should have held Kyle, who had briefly been my young friend.

A throat cleared from somewhere behind me. I gritted my teeth and tried not to scowl; I always detested the social requirement to speak at these kinds of things.

George said: “I didn’t know Jessica…”

“Collins,” Wang supplied.

“Collins. I didn’t know Jessica Collins as well as I would have liked. From what I saw, she appeared to be a kind and free spirit. She had a beautiful laugh. I’m sorry that I won’t learn more than that.”

“She was a good person,” Wang agreed. “When we needed food, she was always one of the first volunteers to go out and find it for all of us. She was always ready to help. She was strong. She, uh, she was a manager at some sort of delivery service. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know more than that.”

There was a silence weighing down the air around us after Wang finished speaking. It was thick and made me feel as though it was hard to breathe. From the corner of my eye, I could see some folks start to fidget, some of them shifting their stance around. I looked over and saw many of them looking back at me; I realized in horror that they were waiting on me to speak.

I looked back at the little patch of ground concealing Jessica’s remains, furious that any of this should be necessary. I said the first thing that came to mind. “Kyle was on his way to becoming a fairly good hunter. It was something he did with his father. Though he never said as much to me, I’m certain Kyle loved his father a great deal. I hope he was able to say goodbye to the man properly when the time came.”

To my left, Rose, little fourteen-year-old Rose Dempsey with her too skinny arms and shoulders, encircled mocha arms within her mother’s darker, stronger arms, buried her head, and began to sob. Monica held her daughter and rocked her quietly, resting her lips on the girl’s forehead, and shushed her. I wondered at the girl’s attachment to Kyle, wondered at how much was there and how great it may have been. He had been a good looking, kind young man.

“Jessica… erm—” I cleared my throat and tried again, almost steady the second time around. “Jessica had backbone.”

I picked up the E-tool and whispered, “I hope you find Pinch, either way.”

I coughed and growled out a “goddamnit” under my breath. I returned to the bus and sat down in the driver’s seat.

We rolled into Jackson, Wyoming a couple of days later, owing to a whim. I’d been driving pretty much aimlessly for a time, not paying so much attention to where I was going as I was to looking for someplace (any place) to stop and kill that engine for the last time. I can’t share a great deal of my thought process from that period, mostly because I don’t think I had much of one at all. The loss of my two friends was eating away at me, and I wasn’t devoting a great deal of brain power to giving too much of a fuck about anything, save keeping on the move. Save looking for someplace to get the rest of those people that was different from where they’d come. Food was down to nothing, and I wasn’t sleeping so much anymore. When I came to a crossroads that was blocked by cars or debris, I just took the easier path without thinking about it or asking for opinions, and no one really offered me any either way.

I remember driving along, thinking about how I’d been hungry the day before but that I wasn’t hungry the day after, and thinking that was probably a bad thing. At some point, I saw a sign that said “Jackson” on it. I recall smiling and singing to myself, feeling better about the whole situation. Don’t know why, anymore, except to say that something that I figured had been dead inside of me woke back up and started kicking again.

We approached from the south along Highway 191, skirting the edge of a vast expanse of mountains on the east side. The road was just laid right down on the edge of them, like God had traced the whole range out with a galactic crayon.

I hunched down closer to the wheel as we came closer to the edge of the city with my eyes almost perpetually glued to the gas gauge; there weren’t any lights flashing at me yet but the needle was right on “E,” and it was looking like a toss-up between driving or walking into the city. Davidson and Wang stood behind me with eyes peeled either for obstructions or any kind of movement.

Before the city came into view, I was spending a lot of energy weaving around vehicles in the middle of the road, and I began planning for the inevitable point where the road became unnavigable. When it came to that point, I decided we were leaving the bus where it was and continuing on foot. None of us had consumed a full meal for the last two days, and the last of our rations were eaten that morning. We were all weak with hunger by this time and needed to be dealing with calorie management; specifically, we needed to not be burning critical calories by pushing cars off the road. Once a new food source was secure, we could always come back for the bus. Secretly, I hoped to leave the damned thing behind for good.