Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

“Yeah,” Billy said. “Nice one.”

“Well, good. Let’s call this a draw and get out of here.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s just…” Billy fanned his hands in the air, “there was a lot of good hardware in that van, man! It just galls the hell out of me. It’s galling.”

“Forget it,” Jake said. “We got the kid. Good enough. We get settled in Wyoming, I’ll drive all the way back to Nevada and get another load myself. We didn’t clean that whole place out by half.”

Billy brightened up at that. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Course I am. Now help me out of here before what’s-her-face comes back.”

Billy and I each took an arm and lifted Jake onto his feet. He grunted and moaned—some very unsavory things came out of his mouth. I felt naked walking out of there like that, with Jake draped over both of us and our weapons hanging uselessly from their slings. Goosebumps ran up my back as we passed through the door into the loading area with the line machines. That would have been a perfect time for a hidden someone to come jumping out at us. Such a thing never happened, thankfully.

When we got outside, the sun was sitting on the horizon under a red sky. Billy said, “He’ll ride with you. Put him up front and roll the window down. Don’t let him recline. Don’t let him fall asleep. Soon as we get a ways out of town, we’ll pull off the road, and I’ll see about cleaning him up.”

We almost made it to the Jeep before Jake stopped us to vomit. He couldn’t stand on his own, so we had to hold him up by his arms but let him bend over to have it all out. There wasn’t a great deal for him to get rid of, I imagined he hadn’t really eaten all day. While I was waiting for him to finish, I asked Lizzy to go grab a few bottles of water out of the pickup truck.

“What all was in that van?” I asked Billy as Jake was finishing.

“Mostly weapons, tools, ammunition and body armor, that kind of thing. It’s nothing we can’t live without, but it still hurts. That van constituted a major advantage for us in the way of gear and equipment. The loss of ammo truly hurts.”

“We’ll make do,” Jake groaned below us. We straightened him up. “We’ll find a way. Besides, we’re not totally helpless. Still have the duffel bag.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” Billy said as we started walking him slowly toward the passenger side of the Jeep. “We’ll have to get you set up again, though. Your M4 was in the van.”

“Ugh, damn it! I liked that rifle. Just had it figured out.”

He groaned enough for all three of us as we got him settled in the Jeep. “There we go. How do you feel?” I asked like an idiot.

“Like I downed a bottle of whiskey and got horse-kicked in the face.”

“Lizzy, you get up in the back seat and help your momma keep Jake awake, okay?” Billy said.

“Why can’t Jake go to sleep?” asked Elizabeth.

“He took a nasty shot to the head,” Billy answered. “I need to get him to a place where I can check him to see if it’s safe to let him sleep. If I get this wrong, he may not wake up.”

Elizabeth’s eyes went very wide and solemn at that. She jumped into the Jeep behind Jake and put her hands on his shoulders, shaking gently. “Stay awake, up there,” she commanded.

“I’m serious,” Billy said to me specifically. “Don’t let him sleep at all. I want to look him over before we allow that.”

“How long will it be before we know he’s safe?”

“We’ve just got to get to a safe area where I can get a good look at his eyes,” he said. “I’ve never dealt with a concussion directly; only read about them. But the main thing is if his eyes aren’t dilated, and he can talk coherently, he can sleep. He’s talking fine right now, but I just want to get a look at his pupils. Assuming all is well, we want him to get all the sleep . It still might be as much as a week for him to be back to full speed. Mostly he should find it easier to solve complex problems and use his memory, but I think we’ll know we’re through the rough part when he stops talking like he’s drunk.”

“Do you mean the slurring or just talking way more than usual in general?”

Billy just shrugged at this and turned to make his way to the truck. “Keep close behind me, Little Sis,” he called back. “Soon as we get away from all these towns we’ll pull off the road and see about stitching him back up.”

Billy led us about twenty miles North of Cedar City up the 15 before pulling off the road and taking us to a good stand-off distance.

He jumped out of the truck and came our way, his always present shotgun slung over a shoulder and a flashlight in hand. He opened the passenger side door to gain access to Jake and said, “Okay, let’s have a look at you. Amanda, can you start setting up the tents? They’re in the back of the truck. Alright, look over this way, Jake…”

The flashlight turned on and off several times with intervals of five to ten seconds in between. Billy let out a sigh.

“Good news. Here, Jake. Let’s get this seat reclined back. You go ahead and get some rest.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Jake groaned.

Billy eased the door shut and came over to where Lizzy and I struggled with the tents. He passed us by and went back to the truck to shift bags around in the bed. I resigned myself to decoding the riot of poles and canvas without help.

Now, I have since learned to erect all manner of tent, so I know how the things work by now. It’s just that at the time, this kind of thing wasn’t a regular activity for me. We had been camping all of twice since Lizzy was born and Eddie did most of the work putting the campsite together both times. I knew enough to understand how the poles worked, though, so I started straightening them out with Lizzy and laying them aside. The two biggest challenges we had to deal with were that this was during the night (we had to do everything while juggling our own flashlight), and the two tents with their constituent parts had all been jumbled together, so it wasn’t obvious which poles went with which tent.

While we straightened out the poles, I heard Billy grunt off to my right followed by the rattling sound of a pill bottle. This was followed by the sound of ripping fabric. Billy called over to me, “Hey, remind me to put washcloths and towels on the shopping list, huh?”

“Uh, okay!” was all I could think to say in response.

This was all followed by the sound of water splashing onto the dirt for a few seconds. He straightened up, replaced some items into the truck, and walked back over to the jeep. I heard him speaking to Jake but his voice was low, so I couldn’t make out what was said. Billy shut the door and came over to check on us.

We had finished straightening out all the support rods and had the two tents spread out next to each other. Billy bent, picked up one of the rods, and said, “The longer rods go with the blue tent,” before threading his through the green one.

“Ah, thanks,” I said and meant it. “I was worried about getting one set up halfway and finding out I made the wrong choice.”

“Sure, no worries. I’ve mixed them up several times.”

Things were up quickly after that. I was concerned that my tent looked sad and deflated compared to Billy’s until he showed me some little plastic clips running along the length of the nylon that I had missed. I clipped them to the rods, and everything looked much more squared away.

“I think he’s gonna be okay,” Billy said when it was all done. “He just needs a lot of rest. I don’t know how long he’ll be goofed up, but we need to make sure he understands that he’s not to push it. He seems to me like the kind that will just try to tough it out through this sort of thing. With a head trauma, that’s only going to make things worse. I think if we explain to him that pushing it will make him a liability, it’ll get the message delivered, yeah?”