Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

With this done, I went outside to find Jake, who was just finishing the mass grave he had excavated for Howard and his six men two hundred yards away from the house. It was not terribly large, but it was deep enough and would accommodate them all when stacked in on top of each other. I pulled down the tailgate of the truck in which Jake had transported the bodies, took one of them by the shoulders, and began to pull. He came up next to me to help.

We had them all covered with tamped down dirt within an hour. “Thanks,” Jake said. “Ready to go say goodbye?”

“No, but let’s do it anyway.”

We drove back to the house and parked next to our growing collection of vehicles (the hulking Ford was still stored in the garage), and I helped Jake dig a grave for Billy close by under a large fir tree. We laid him into the ground; covered him over.

Jake briefly rested a hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ll go get Lizzy.” I worried for her as he left, fearing that she would regress into silence again the same way she had done when Eddie died. To my surprise, she emerged from the house with Jake not long after. She was holding his hand; in her other hand, she was clutching something fiercely. As she came closer, I could just make out the brass end of Billy’s old folding pocket knife peeking out of her fist. I realized Jake must have gone through Billy’s pockets and, finding this one personal item, gave it to Elizabeth to remember him by. I met his eyes and mouthed the words, “Thank you,” to him. He nodded and came to stand beside her before the tree.

“This tree is where Billy has come to rest,” he told her. “If you ever feel like you need to talk to him, you come out here, sit under this tree, and talk.”

“Will he hear me?” she asked. She was crying silently and just able to control her voice enough to speak.

“I honestly don’t know,” answered Jake. “But it’s what I intend to do whenever I’m missing him. If there’s a chance, he can hear I figure it’s worth trying.”

I will never forget how they looked when he bent and kissed her softly on the top of her head: my new broken family. He left her there alone and came back to stand next to me.

“She’ll be okay,” he said. “You both will.”

When? I thought but didn’t say.

As though reading my mind, he said, “Tomorrow or the next day. Eventually. There’s much to do. Plenty to keep occupied. There’s always another problem to solve in this world.”

“Jake,” I said. The tone of my voice caused him to look over at me. “Don’t leave us. I know you were planning on it at some point… whenever it was that you thought we would all be settled in and safe, I guess. I don’t know why or what it is that’s driving you but just… don’t, okay? I’m too exhausted to come up with an argument. Just stay here. We need you.”

Jake looked back at Elizabeth standing under Billy’s tree. He drew in a heavy breath and blew it out through pursed lips. I made ready to repeat myself, trying to conjure up in my mind the magic combination of words that would make him understand. Make him see. I was distracted by the thought of the protective vest that I wore the night before and how it had been unnecessary; no one had gotten off a single shot in my direction. I thought about how it would have saved Billy’s life and fought back my own tears. I began to panic inside. I thought: I can’t convince him. I can’t even string two sentences together right now.

Finally, he surprised me by nodding.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

Blake Gibson (“Gibs” to his friends) wiped a forearm across his eyes and blinked as he hauled on the oversized wheel of the school bus, navigating a path up the cluttered debris of garbage and derelict vehicles on Wyoming’s Northbound 191. He hated that God damned bus. It was a big pain in his chapped, finely aged ass to maneuver, was ridiculously loud, and keeping the tank topped off was about as easy as keeping his unreasonable cow of a second ex-wife satisfied to any reasonable degree. He would have given anything to trade down to something more manageable; one of those Fiat clown cars, a motorcycle, even a fucking go-kart. Anything would have been preferable to a massive, fuel guzzling, bright-ass yellow, “Hey-You-Guys!” school bus.

Unfortunately, the damned thing had ended up being a bit of a necessity. No less than fifteen people had barnacled themselves to his hide (man, woman, and child of every age) and this had turned out to be the most efficient way to transport them. They had initially attempted a convoy of several vehicles but that had only worked about half as well as a dick sandwich. It turned out that the time required for the activity of refueling vehicles actually scaled up when the number of vehicles increased—they had eventually spent more time topping off tanks than they had making progress. A compromise was found: this fucking bus. Sure, it was a whore to weave around through all the pileups and the gas tank was virtually bottomless but the benefits seemed to outweigh the negatives in the long run.

Gibs looked up in the long overhead rearview mirror after getting around a particularly nasty knot, having rolled his left rear wheel off the pavement and into the dirt to do so. The bus had lurched sickeningly in that direction, threatening to topple and roll down a shallow hill into a ditch. “We all good back there?” he called.

He was met with one or two smiles. Even Barbara, a little old grandmotherly type, met him with a thumbs-up and a wink.

He nodded and put his attention back on the road. “Rah,” he muttered to himself.

He didn’t know where the hell he was going nor did he have any clue what he was looking for. They had been on the road for weeks now, looking for somewhere to settle down, always finding some reason to flee hopeful looking places. He had lost two of his people in the process of escaping Denver; picked up three new ones not long after. Every day they pushed out a little further looking for that green grass on the other side of the fence, all the while their diminishing food and water a constant worry on Gibs’s tired, overburdened mind. As it happened, the time required in the process of scavenging supplies also scaled up with the number of people for which he had to provide, and some of his people were too infirm to get out there and dig with him.

Sixteen people including him, two rifles, a pistol, and a couple of boxes of bullets between them all. Fuck.

Gibs wiped his forearm across his eyes and blinked again, shaking his head to combat a lack of sleep. Off to the side, a sign approached on his right. It was as blurry as if he had killed off a bottle of Jack that morning, which he hadn’t. Good sweet Christ but he’d butter up a chimpanzee’s nuts for a cup of coffee. He’d even drink that shitty Folger’s crystals garbage.

He focused hard enough that a headache bloomed in the center of his forehead, forcing the sign to resolve.

“Jackson, 65 miles”

“Jackson,” he thought. He liked the sound of that. It brought to mind a favorite Johnny Cash song of his. “Screw it,” he thought. “Jackson it is.”

He repositioned himself in his seat and sat up straight. He lifted up his right hand and waved forward, which conjured his friend Tom Davidson at his side, who he insisted on referring to only as Davidson.

“Think we’ll have a look at this Jackson town coming up, see what we find. Maybe we hunker in there.”

Davidson slapped him on the shoulder and nodded. “Right on. I’ll let the others know.” He turned and made his way back down the aisle, holding onto the seat backs as he went.

Gibs smiled to himself; never much of a singer, he began to tunelessly chant: