Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

Quietly, I got up, worked the zipper on the tent flap slowly until the opening was just big enough to let me out and then slipped through. I closed the zipper, stood up, and turned to see Billy looking back at me.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“Not really,” I agreed and went to the truck. I pulled out another chair while making as little noise as I could and brought it over to open up beside Billy. The air was on the chilly side, but I still had the wool-lined denim jacket, which was incredibly warm and comfortable. I wedged into the chair, jammed my hands into the pockets, and sighed.

“Nightmares?”

“What? Oh, no. I never got to sleep at all. Too much on my mind.”

“I’m not going anywhere if you need to unload.”

I was silent for a while, trying to figure out how to frame my thoughts into words. To his credit, Billy waited patiently while I worked it out.

“Billy, what did you do before all this happened?”

“I was a senior member on our tribal council and also served as the chief administrator of our casinos and other related gaming interests,” he said promptly. “Like I said: Indian gaming.”

“You… ran the casinos?”

“Yap. Also brokered the deals with the US government that allowed us to operate. Me and some of the other old farts; we built the whole operation from the ground up.”

“I… I didn’t realize…”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m usually vague about my involvement. It’s an old leftover habit that’s hard to break. I liked to stay as unknown as possible. People tend to be more genuine when they don’t realize you’re the guy in charge.”

“Well—okay. So it’s safe to say that you didn’t really live a life of, uh, violence? Before?”

“Eh, define violence. I mean, growing up on the reservation wasn’t exactly a cake walk. A lot of us were hotheads. I used to get in a lot of fights. Even used to win sometimes, too.” He smiled at me.

“Nothing after that?” I prodded.

“Oh, nah. Not really. I did a standard four years in the Army but that was after Vietnam was over and before we went sticking our noses into anything else, so that was really just four years of being stationed in various places doing a lot of paperwork. Never saw any action.”

“So…” I hesitated; took a breath, “never killed anyone?”

“Ah,” he said. “No, ma’am. Not until after.”

“I hadn’t really killed anyone until today,” I said.

“Until… today?” Billy said, confused.

“James wasn’t a person,” I said. “He was some kind of animal or monster or…something. He just needed to be put down. He was truly evil. I don’t feel anything at all for what I did to him. I’d do it again if I had the chance.”

“Okay. That’s fair enough.”

“The people we killed today? They weren’t evil. They were just trying to get along for the most part, like us I think. I got Jake to tell me enough of what happened so I could make sense of it all while we drove over here. It was how we kept him awake.”

“Well, they did tie your daughter down to a chair,” Billy said.

“Oh, I know. I also know one of them held a knife to her. Trust me, if I had seen that I would have killed the bitch myself. But aside from her, those guys who came out shooting at us? That was after Jake had killed two of theirs. In fact, no one had been killed before Jake went to work. All that happened was they stole our van.”

“Are you suggesting Jake was wrong?”

“No, I’m not. I’m saying we’ll never know how it could have gone because everyone (on both sides) started off by pointing guns instead of talking. I get that we’re living in an extreme survival situation right now and that there is true evil in the world. I just wonder how much we’re giving up if we start each encounter under the assumption that it has to end in gunfire. I wonder if there was anything I could have said in that warehouse that would have made those guys stop shooting long enough to listen to us. It’s bugging me.”

I was quiet a moment while I worked up the courage to say the next thing. “I don’t know how to say this, really. When I shot that man, I was excited. I felt this intense rush, like, ‘Fuck you! I own you , bitch!’ That feeling, more than anything else, is what scares the hell out of me.”

Billy hefted his shotgun and held it out to me. “Hold onto this a second.”

“What?”

“Just take it a minute for me.”

I did. He went to the truck and dug around in one of the plastic bins. I heard the deep clink of a liquid filled bottle. He came back with two plastic cups and a bottle of some sort of hard liquor. “Jim Beam,” he said, “the cheap kind, sorry. I have some better stuff where we’re going. This’ll have to do for now.”

He sat back down and poured us both some cups. He offered me one and took back his shotgun. He saluted me with his cup and took a drink. I did the same, coughed, and shivered.

“Hijole, that’s nasty,” I gasped.

“You get used to it,” he said. After a moment, he cleared his throat. “What you’re dealing with, what’s bothering you right now? It’s a pretty natural thing. In fact, if it wasn’t eating at you, I’d be a little worried. It doesn’t make it any easier for you to deal with, of course, but it’s still a normal reaction.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ve got this book in the library of the cabin…”

“You have a library?” I said, giggling.

“Yes, I have a damned library. It’s nothing crazy; just an office with a bunch of books on the wall. May I continue?”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“Thank you.” He took another drink and snarled. “Oof. This is pretty horrible. So anyway, this book is called ‘On Killing’ by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.”

“Ugh, that sounds lovely,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, but stay with me. He spends a lot of time examining the act of killing and how it impacts people; mostly from the perspective of the soldier on the battlefield. His point is that the vast majority of the population, ninety-eight percent or so, has this instinctive, hardwired resistance to killing its own kind. By and large, unless their life is directly threatened, the act of killing another human is just something they wouldn’t be able to do.

“Now, this makes sense from the perspective of evolution. The ability to easily murder your own kind without any sort of psychological trauma isn’t all that conducive to the preservation of the species. Mother nature has made it so that it’s just really hard to kill something that looks like you.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Ninety-eight percent? How can that be? Our prisons were overflowing with murderers.”

“Well, yes,” he agreed. “But a lot of those murderers came from a culture and society that had been systematically dehumanizing those around them from the time they were able to start watching TV. On top of that, the prisons may have been crowded, but the numbers were still well within the limits of Grossman’s data. Look at this: the population of the United States was some three-hundred-twenty million when the Flare hit, right?”

“If you say so,” I said.

“It was. So ninety-eight percent of that is… uh—three hundred thirteen million, six hundred thousand. Or in other words: six million, four hundred thousand people in the United States were capable of killing without any real remorse or psychological impact, according to Grossman.”

“Well, okay. I’m going to assume all those numbers are correct,” I mumbled and took a drink.

“Oh, they are. I’m good with numbers,” he said, winked, and took a drink of his own. He opened the bottle up and poured some more for himself.