Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

“Well, it said they suspected but I been thinking about it. You think of the timing of everything as it happened: first, the Flare comes and flattens the power grid and, not too long after that, everyone starts getting sick.”

“I know where you’re going,” Billy said. “I had the same thought myself. I just never had the benefit of a newspaper to back me up. Damned sure didn’t think of any kind of chimera…”

“So I figure, someone somewhere was getting up to some business in the lab that they probably shouldn’t have. Don’t even know if they were trying to make a weapon, you know? There were pharmaceutical companies and every other damned thing dreaming up all kinds of futuristic garbage across the whole country; growing noses in Petri dishes and grafting human ears onto mice. All kinds of Frankenstein type foolishness. Suppose the power went out at some critical moment while they was cooking up whatever nasty shit they were working on? Suppose whatever containment they’d put together was only as good as the electricity it was running on?”

“But they would have had backup systems…safety measures.” Jake said.

“Sure. Fukushima had all kinds of backup systems and safety measures, too. Remember them?”

That shut us all up.

“Anyway,” Otis said, “the timing of it all was such that I don’t believe for a minute that the Plague was just something that popped up out of nowhere.” He drained off his second cup and declined Billy’s offer of more with a shake of the head and a “Thank you.”

“None of which helps us today,” Otis declared, raising slightly out of his chair and brushing off the tops of both legs with his hands. He settled down heavily into his chair and grunted. He giggled to himself and said, “That’s good stuff,” while pointing at Billy’s bottle.

“Well, anyway, like I said I wasn’t gonna hang around the place with Ben and watch everyone die off around us. When enough had passed on, the Army stopped trying to keep everyone from leaving. They became resigned. Their primary function became to keep the area sanitary, comfort folks as best as they could, and preserve human dignity as much as was reasonable. They were giving us a safe place to move on into the next world, see?”

I nodded. I had seen.

“I remember being surprised at that,” Otis said as he looked off toward the freeway. “You think back to all the movies and TV shows where all the zombies broke loose: what did you always see the military doing? They was always becoming some evil, autonomous junta, weren’t they? Seemed like every director or screenwriter involved in those damned things had to have that one gratuitous scene with soldiers shooting down a whole crowd of civilians—brutalizing them and whatnot. I didn’t realize how much we’d all been conditioned to expect the worst out of the military until we saw everything fall apart for real. After a while, we all figured it out.”

Otis shook his head and looked back at us. I could see tears running down his cheeks unchecked. He shook his head slowly.

“They was just American boys and girls like the rest of us. They took an oath at some point to protect the rest of the civilians; they families and loved ones. When the end came and they found they couldn’t, they did their best to give us comfort, and then they finally died right alongside of us. Could have left to go looking for they own families—some of them may have, I guess. I heard of a few A.W.O.L. reports. But all the ones I knew by name were all there with us, and I passed by many of them lying in cots. I felt wretched and ashamed for leaving them there like that, but those of them that could still speak were all saying the same thing to me as I pulled Ben past.”

Otis stopped talking and sighed. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve absently.

“What did they say to you?” Billy asked quietly.

“They said ‘Run.’”

We slept in our vehicles that night instead of the tents, due largely to our exposure and proximity to the freeway as well as our proximity to the city of Spanish Fork itself. Mainly we felt safer being encased within the hard cabs and liked the idea of being able to fire up the engines and evacuate without leaving any supplies behind. The flipside to our reasoning (I believe) was that we were also too tipsy to effectively set up the tents in the dark.

I took the first watch of the evening and, after roughly two hours, I tapped on Otis’s window to let him know he was up. My last thought before passing out utterly was to wonder how long it would take to go to sleep in a reclined car seat; I was dead to the world from that point until morning.

I was awakened by the light of the sun shining in through the Jeep’s windows and the heat that it was beginning to generate. Elizabeth was still asleep in the passenger seat, so I quietly pulled on my shoes, slipped out of the Jeep, and saw to my usual morning routine.

The truck was gone; something I had noted when I first stepped out of the Jeep, but Jake was out in a chair between the Jeep and the minivan nursing a smoldering fire. The easy-up was packaged away and strapped to the minivan’s roof. I came over and pulled another chair off a stack that was leaning against the Jeep’s front bumper, opened it up, and sat down beside Jake.

“No rifle this morning, huh?” he asked.

“No. It’s a pain to always be carrying around. It’s hard to pee with it strapped to the front of me.”

“Well…yeah. I imagine it would be.” He sounded embarrassed.

“So Billy and Otis are already out there?”

“Yes. Billy took the last watch of the morning, so when he was done, he roused Otis and me. Just before sun-up, that was. They went off in the truck a couple of hours ago. Shouldn’t be too long, I think. Breakfast?”

“God, please. I’m starving like there’s no tomorrow.”

“How do some eggs sound?” he asked.

“They sound fantastic. Any of that sausage left?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, walking over to the stack of chairs. Next to these were the ever-present pantry and kitchen bins. He popped the lids off both, pulled a camping skillet out of one, and a can of freeze dried sausage and a bag of powdered eggs from the other. He read the back of the bag for a moment, grunted, and then pulled a bowl and spoon out of the pantry bin. He brought these items over to the little cook fire and went back to the bins. Retrieving a bottle of water, he closed both bins and returned to the fire.

“Never made these before,” he warned me. “Bear with me…”

He opened the bag, dumped out about a cup of the yellowish-white powder into the bowl and then poured in some water until it was all fully immersed. He began stirring the whole mixture with the spoon. After all of the powder was mixed in well enough, he began to work the spoon fast, clanging the sides of the bowl.

“How long are you supposed to stir it?” I asked. The whole thing seemed dubious to me; it became runnier and runnier as he stirred it. I was expecting the mixture to thicken up and look like eggs at some point, but it just stayed watery.

“The instructions just said to beat the eggs. It suggested using a mixer or blender, but since we’re short of both, I figure I need to just smack it around for five minutes or so.”

I settled in to watch that transpire. He was already breathing heavy.

As expected, he stopped halfway through to let go of the spoon and shake out his arm. “Here, let me take that a bit,” I offered. He passed the bowl to me with a “Thanks” and went to go get a little camping grill to set across the rocks encircling the fire. I worked the spoon for another few minutes before giving up and saying, “These aren’t getting any thicker…or any more mixed for that matter.”