Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

“Wow,” I whispered. “You’re carrying an arsenal around.”

“This is just a small piece of it,” he said. “There’s more in the van. I told you, we did really well in Vegas.”

“What, did you guys raid a police station?”

“Naw, those were the first places to get picked over. There was a low-key shipping warehouse that I knew of out there; I used to buy a lot of goodies from the company online and noticed that the stuff was always coming to me from Vegas. When the world went to hell, I started looking for supplies in the obvious places like your Walmarts, outdoor stores, and the like. Those places were all picked clean because everyone knew that stuff was there. I figured very few people would know about a nondescript shipping warehouse. Turns out I was right.” He smiled, eyes twinkling.

“I’m going to get geared up,” Billy said. “Go grab yourself a backpack; throw some food and some waters in it.”

I walked over to the truck, experimenting with the rifle as I went. I noticed that I could just let it hang from the sling, which was fairly comfortable, but the barrel still bounced off my legs as I walked. I grabbed the grip with my right hand to steady it and point the barrel off at an angle to my left, and the problem went away. I suddenly understood why the soldiers I had seen in the footage from the Middle East all seemed to have the exact same stance and posture with their rifles. I feel silly saying this (I never went through one-tenth the training that those people did, not even now with the benefit of Gibs’s drills) but I felt a connection to them at that moment. It occurred to me that this new world was something to which people like me would quickly have to adapt or die. For those men and women who had done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, this would just be like any other day. If they had survived the plague, I imagined they would be doing just fine right now.

As I began to move items around in the truck bed, Lizzy got out of the cab. She walked by shooting me an angry look as she went, and approached Billy. She spoke to him, her voice sometimes rising, and he nodded to her the whole time.

I hung my head into the truck to look across the seat at Jake. “What was that?”

“She’s mad at you for going into town. She thinks you should stay here where it’s safe. I imagine she’s explaining to Billy that there will be hell to pay if he doesn’t keep both eyes on you.”

I looked back over to her and Billy, who was now squatted down in front of her and talking quietly. “Crap,” I said. “I’d better go deal with that.”

“This is really none of my business,” he said, “but she’s probably too angry to hear you right now. Might as well wait until you come back, so you have the proof of your results to back your position.”

“You’re right, it is none of your business,” I said. He nodded and looked off toward the city. “But you’re also right about her, as well. I’ll follow your advice on this one.”

He nodded again, without looking back at me.

Billy approached as I finished loading my backpack. He had his own backpack as well as a couple of belts full of different colored shotgun shells crisscrossed over his chest and under his survival jacket. His shotgun hung from a sling on his shoulder. A pistol was strapped to his belt on a holster.

“You look like less-thin Poncho Villa,” I told him, smiling.

“Watch it, Little Sis. You’re talking about the man I love.”

He heaved the heavy duffel bag up into the truck bed and then walked around to the driver’s side of the truck and got in. “You ready?”

I stood there for a moment, trying to process what I was seeing. “Never learned,” he had said. I stared at him, unmoving.

“Amanda?” he prompted.

I shook my head and climbed in beside him. Before I could say anything, Jake came to the driver’s side window and said, “Billy, keep your eyes open for a chess set, okay?”

“A… chess—what the hell for?” asked Billy.

“I told Elizabeth I’d teach her to play if we could find one. She’s read most of the books I found, it turns out.”

Billy drove away from our staging area due east toward a gentle rise of hills about a hundred yards away, over which the roofs of a housing tract were just visible. The ground was fairly gentle, and we could see a dirt road out in front of us that angled straight for the homes but Billy took his time, creeping along at an easy pace. I watched as he worked the stick and clutch effortlessly.

“So…” I said.

“So?”

“So, you never learned to drive a manual?”

He grimaced, and his left hand momentarily squeezed the top of the wheel where it had been resting loosely a moment before.

“Forgot about that,” he said.

“You want to explain why you were bullshitting me? You get one chance to do this right.”

He pulled a sigh all the way up from his stomach. “Let me ask you: what do you think of Jake?”

I was so surprised by his question that my eyebrows rose all the way up my forehead. “You’re playing Apocalypse Match Maker, now?”

“No, no. Don’t look at it like that. I’m being serious here. Just as one person to another, what’s your impression of Jake?”

I gave the question due thought because it was obvious to me now that this was bothering Billy. I had the impression that not much bothered him. “He scares me. Or, he scared me at first. Not so much now—I mean, I trust him alone with Lizzy, right? He does make me nervous, though. I can’t get a read on him. It’s like he doesn’t feel a particular way about anything at all.”

Billy nodded. “Exactly. Now I’ll tell you something about Jake. I haven’t really known him that long, and we’ll just say that he’s always been the private type, but he was different when I found him, all the same.”

“Different how?”

“Easier going. He was never what I would describe as chatty, but he spoke with me more than he does now. We weren’t trading jokes back and forth or cracking each other up. Actually, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the guy laugh. But he was communicative. Responsive.”

“Jake??” I asked. I couldn’t picture it.

“Yap,” he confirmed. “Listen, we all lost when the world fell apart, right? I know I lost people I cared about, you did too. I don’t know anything really about the kind of life Jake had before; who he knew, if there was anyone special or the like. I do know that whatever loss he suffered, it hit him hard. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet on you being the emotionally stronger of the two.”

“How can that be?” I asked. “It’s like he doesn’t have any emotion at all.”

“He does. I was with him when he found some of his people from before…what was left of them.”

“What happened?”

“Not my place to say,” he sighed. “What I think I can tell you is that Jake is trying very hard to be someone who doesn’t need people around him. The problem with that is no matter how hard a fish tries, it simply can’t be a bird, as the man says.”

“You think Jake needs people to be happy?”

“I think Jake needs people to function ,” Billy emphasized. “As far as I can tell, he doesn’t give much thought to his own welfare or safety. It’s like he has to have someone to live for or he just…drifts. Perfect example: after—well, just after, the best I could get him to agree to was to just come with me to Wyoming and see the place. I got the impression the only reason he agreed to come was to see that I arrived safe. I told him to stay with me but who knows what the hell he’s planning on doing when we get there? I’m fairly sure he plans on getting me to the front door and then just disappearing somewhere.”