Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2)

by Joshua Gayou

  “Crap,” Wang said from behind me. “We don’t have any.”

  “Oh, now I have to call bullshit on that,” said the snorting man. “You all look well fed and strong, just look at how strong they all look,” he glanced back to the others in his group as he gestured at us with a free hand, still holding his pistol in the other; I could see that it was a large framed revolver of some sort, chrome-finished and angry.

  “He just means we didn’t bring any with us,” I said calmly. “Let’s just take it easy, here. We can work something out. I’ll trade you food and water for radios, no problem. We just have to go back and get it. Are you folks willing to wait here while we go?”

  “He said he had a lot more people where he come from, right?” said the other armed man on the left; the one holding the rifle. “Suppose they all come back lookin’ to fuck us up?”

  “Teddy…” one of the women whimpered from behind the table.

  “Hush, now,” said the snorting man. I couldn’t tell if he was Teddy or not; she may have been talking to the guy with the rifle, or just to the third guy hunkered behind the table with the women.

  “Look,” said Amanda before I could respond. “If we wanted to light you up, we would have done that by now. Do you see the hardware hanging off my friend’s chest? He has at least a couple of grenades. He could have happily tossed one in here instead of talking to you guys. I just put my rifle down. What more do you need?”

  “Hard to say,” said the man with the revolver. “Could be ya’ll’s just friendly. Could be, you just don’t like the odds, one-sided or not. Could be you got six or twelve more like yourself…turns lopsided odds into a sure goddamned thing, don’t it?”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” I asked, moving my index finger down over the trigger of my rifle. “You don’t intend to let us leave? Spell it out for me.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” said the man with the rifle. “Nobody said that! Let’s just work through this.”

  “Yes, let’s do,” I growled. “We’re offering to get you all some food and water in exchange for the radios you say you have. Note: I’m not demanding to see them. I’ll go get your munchies without demanding proof, see? What the fuck?”

  “One of you stays here,” said the snorting man. “Insurance, like…”

  “Teddy!” barked the third man behind the table.

  “I said to be quiet, goddamn it! I got this!”

  “If you’re dumb enough to think I’m leaving one of my people here with you, I have to question how it’s even possible that you know how to breathe,” I said.

  Things got very quiet. There was a good five-count where nobody said anything, and then finally Teddy whispered, “I guess we have a real problem, then, don’t we?”

  Without raising the revolver, he cocked the hammer back. Three shots erupted from behind me, fast enough to sound like a full-auto machine gun except for the fact that the report was clearly from a pistol. Teddy dropped his revolver, grabbed at the center of his chest, and fell over.

  I was on my knees and swinging my muzzle out to the left towards the guy with the rifle, only to see that he had thrown it to the ground, put his hands in the air, and was screaming, “NO, NO, NO!” repeatedly. The women and third man had dived out of sight behind the table and were crying audibly.

  I looked back to the left and saw Amanda with her Glock out; sweeping the barrel calmly from person to person (I supposed she was able to see the other three behind the table since she was still standing). Wang, to his credit, had his rifle up and trained on Teddy, who lay on the floor, still clutching his chest with one hand, and moaning, “Ah, fuckin’ shot me. Fuckin’ assholes…what the hell?” Wang’s face had gone white as a sheet and the barrel of his AR trembled visibly.

  I engaged the safety on my rifle, stood up, and sidled over to Wang. Placing my hand gently on his weapon’s rail, I pushed down steadily and said, “We’re good, Wang. Secure that rifle and get a breather. It’s okay.”

  He took a deep, trembling breath, and nodded shakily. There were tears standing out in his eyes, ready to spill over. It was the adrenaline, of course; there must have been about a pint of the stuff chugging through his veins, just like mine.

  I walked around behind Amanda and picked up the cast away rifle without looking too closely at it; I felt a synthetic stock but that was about all I gathered at the time. It turned out to be a Ruger 10/22 Takedown – not exactly an infantry weapon but probably great for small game. I stacked it up against the wall next to Amanda’s Tavor and then retrieved Teddy’s handgun: a Smith and Wesson .44 magnum.

  I dropped out the cylinder and saw that the revolver was empty.

  I snapped my attention up to look at Teddy. “You…stupid…fucking, inbred, extra-chromosomed, sheep-raping, shit-eating, ass clown! Did you really just get yourself killed with an empty fucking gun? Goddamned moron, you should have been a blowjob!”

  Teddy didn’t answer me, as he had expired.

  I stood there, staring at him, wanting to kick his stupid corpse a few times, before I felt something strike the back of my heel. It had been Amanda standing behind me, advising me wordlessly to pull my head out of my ass with a kick to my boot. I realized I’d been grinding my teeth and the muscles in both of my forearms had cramped up due to how hard I was clenching my fists.

  “Gibs?” asked Wang.

  “Yeah, just…just gimme a minute, will yah?” I took a few deep breaths and turned to have a look at the others in the room. I thought about telling the women to stop their crying and just calm down or about telling the remaining two men to relax, that no one else was going to be hurt if everyone just stayed calm. I couldn’t bring myself to say any of those things. Teddy had been a dipshit but he was their dipshit; they were obviously hurting from his loss. I didn’t know who he was to them but they obviously cared. Trying to apologize now or insinuating that everything was going to be okay from here on out would have only been an insult. Instead, I looked at the man crouched behind the table, who could have been my age or twenty years older than me for all I could tell, and said, “You can…see to Teddy, there. I’m not gonna get in your way.”

  He looked back at me with reddened, enraged eyes but did not move. I shook my head and looked at the other man, who remained standing but was backed against the wall.

  “Any more of you here?”

  He muttered, “Naw.”

  Amanda was just slipping her pistol back into the holster on her thigh. She retrieved her rifle, popped her sling swivel back into the stock, and looked around the room impassively. The only thing about her demeanor that betrayed any feeling about what just happened was the jugular vein in her throat hammering rapidly in time with her pulse. She met my gaze, and then glanced away quickly.

  “You two stay here,” I said to my friends. “I’ll go see if there even is a radio.”

  Disgusted with the whole situation, I moved through the remaining rooms adjoining the hallway rapidly and aggressively, first finding a warren-like sty of a sleeping area packed in among some cubicles with a paltry little pile of food and no water that I could see anywhere. The final room, the room I had assumed to contain the security lockers, was located at the end of the hall. My assumptions about security lockers and so forth were apparently off, though; there were a couple of file cabinets and an empty bookshelf that stood about elbow high. One of the file cabinets had been knocked over, its paper guts spilled all over the floor.

  Perhaps even more surprising (or less, depending on how you chose to view the world around you); there were a couple of no-shit two-way radios with matching earpieces all plugged in to a dormant charging station on the shelf. I picked up one of the earpieces and saw a small microphone mounted on a clip; the kind of thing you’d affix to your collar or vest.

  “Well, thank fuck for that,” I said and left the room.

  As I walked in the opposite direction along the hall back towards the lobby, Wang called out through the doorway: “Any luck?”

 
“Yeah, wait one,” I said. I moved back behind the teller counter into an area that had an array of desks and tables arranged at odd intervals. Not seeing what I was looking for, I began to knock tables over, yank drawers out of desks, and generally ransacked the hell out of everything. I was more interested in being fast than careful, so there was quite a bit of noise; enough that Wang came out into the main lobby to see what I was up to.

  “Are…you okay out here, Gibs?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m just looking for a sack or something. Maybe a duffel bag. I recall seeing that kind of thing in banks. I’m hoping there’s something out here because if I don’t find it, I suppose the only other option is the vault.”

  I rummaged around a bit more, my energy beginning to flag as nothing turned up. “I guess it’s not a big deal,” I muttered. “It’s a couple of radios and an AC adaptor. I’m not carrying it all home; it’s just a walk out to the jeep.” I kept tossing the room, regardless.

  “Hey, Gibs?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “You’ve been through that set of drawers three times now.”

  I stopped and looked around at what I’d done. Numerous tables lay on their sides with papers and little shitty ink pens scattered across the floor. Office chairs with broken wheels remained where they’d fallen, resembling either passed out drunks or prisoners too beaten to move anymore.

  “What the fuck am I doing?” I asked myself. “A fucking duffel bag?”

  Wang stood close by clutching his rifle, saying nothing. I met his gaze. The expression of worry or remorse or whatever the fuck it was made me angry and I struggled to hide it.

  “Amanda’s okay?”

  “Those guys aren’t doing anything,” Wang responded. “I think they just want us to get the hell out of here.”

  “I can’t blame them,” I said as I returned to the hallway. “Let’s give ‘em what they want.”

  20 – Squared Away

  Gibs

  We worried about leaving the firearms with Teddy’s group for all of twenty seconds before we just decided to bring them out into the lobby. The survivors weren’t exactly being responsive after Amanda killed one of their own; they mostly spent the rest of our time together alternating between huddling in a corner of the old cafeteria and glaring in our direction with righteous anger. You can’t even apologize to people in such a state or talk your way off the hook. You just have to accept that you’re the asshole and be about your business.

  “Hey, listen, I’m not gonna leave these here,” I said, gesturing at the rifle and pistol that Wang had repositioned on the sink’s counter top, “but we’re not taking them either. I’m going to stack these out in the center of the lobby where I can keep my eye on them. Then, we’ll get in our car and get the hell out of your lives.”

  I grabbed the weapons while Amanda stood in the doorway, her rifle again held across her chest, and made to exit. Before stepping out of the room, I hesitated, looking down at the threshold where cracked linoleum gave way to shredded, low-pile carpet. Damn it.

  “Look, I’m…uh…I’m sorry as hell about what happened-“

  “Please just go,” one of the women sobbed behind me.

  “Right. Fuck me, anyway,” I whispered to myself. I passed by Amanda without looking her in the eye, feeling like an ass, walked through the lobby (dropping the rifle and revolver on the floor as I went), and out to the parking lot where Wang waited by the Jeep. They both climbed into the vehicle after me, occupying the same positions we had on the way out. Amanda sighed, fired the engine up, and drove us out of there.

  We travelled in silence like that for several minutes with Amanda picking her way back through the confused maze of streets and side roads. Wang was so silent in the back seat I forgot he was there; at one point he coughed loud enough to startle me.

  “I’m really sorry,” Amanda said.

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  “I shouldn’t have killed him. He didn’t even-“

  “Hey, knock that shit off right now,” I said. “You did the right thing. He cocked the freaking hammer back. How were you supposed to interpret that?”

  “He didn’t even lift it. It was still pointed at the ground.”

  “Horse shit,” I said. “A person can lift a muzzle and drop someone at that range faster than it takes to respond if you’re not ready to go.”

  “I noticed you didn’t bother to put your rifle on him…”

  “I should have,” I said. “This whole thing was completely screwed up, Amanda, but Teddy died because he was a fucking dipshit, okay? Did he deserve to die? Hell no, but it was his own goddamned fault.” I turned in my seat and faced her even though she had to keep her eyes on the road. “You keep your shit squared away, Rah?”

  “Rah, what the hell does that-“

  “Oorah, for Christ’s sake, Amanda. Say ‘Oorah’.”

  She looked off into the distance, confused. “I’m not a Marine, Gibs.”

  “Hey, neither am I. Marines are extinct. I may be a dinosaur, but the thing that stuck with me from the Corps the most is the concept of brotherhood. Family. My family’s all dead, both blood relations and the ones I signed up for. You people are the family I got now. And I’m giving you permission. Oorah.”

  “Gibs…I-“

  “Oorah, you stubborn little shit.”

  She sighed. “Oorah?”

  “Bullshit. Like you mean it.”

  “Oorah.”

  “OO-RAH!” I barked.

  “Oorah!”

  “Goddamned right. Hey, Wang! Oorah!”

  “Oorah!” Wang called from the back seat.

  “Fuckin’ A,” I growled and looked back out my window. Once-normal houses passed by, now made surreal in a world where housing tracts full of single family homes were a relic of a past era.

  I carried the radios into the garage when we returned, all cradled into an arm like a football. There was a little table close to an outlet by the battery pack array up on the second level that had reliable power since we rarely ever used the electricity provided by the solar panels. Amanda and Wang had gone off to lick their wounds; we were all dealing with the Teddy incident in our own way.

  I set up the charging dock on the table, fished the little AC adaptor out of a pocket in my cargo pants, held my breath, and hooked the whole thing up. To my relief, a little red LED lit up on the dock. I wasn’t ready to deal with the possibility that the gear wouldn’t work.

  Grabbing one of the little radios (they were the size of a small cellphone rather than the big, black brick of a team radio I used to lug on deployments) and turned it over in my hands to inspect it. It had round edges and a decent sized LCD screen which appeared as though it might be backlit, which meant they’d need to be concealed in some way. It was just as well, really. It was clear that they weren’t anything close to being ruggedized; putting them inside of something might help to keep them protected in a firefight. About the only thing the little radios had going for them was that they were made by Motorola, which at least suggested that they wouldn’t stop functioning after a couple of weeks. I seated the radio into the first slot of the charging dock, noting that the LCD screen did in fact illuminate in muted orange. By this point, I was just relieved to see that the thing was taking a charge and quickly seated the other unit.

  They both lit up and began to report percentage complete statuses on their screens. I leaned back in the little rolling chair I occupied and wondered about their service life and who might have carried them. I wondered if there was some sort of logging procedure that might have been in place for the bank’s security staff to first check the units out at the start of their day and then check them back in before they could leave. Or was it perhaps possible that said radios had been the property of the security guys rather than being provided by the bank? I didn’t know how any of that stuff used to work when the world made sense but I was pretty sure that banks just outsourced their security to other outfits; I guessed gear resp
onsibilities might have been handled by the security contractor instead. I wondered what action, if any, these little radios might have seen. That bank branch had been a pretty good size; maybe had to cover the interests of the surrounding farms and ranches as well. Even so, Jackson was pretty small and remote. I had to imagine they hadn’t been used a great deal.

  “Well, you guys are gonna see some action now, anyway,” I said to the little, yellow devices and got up to leave.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I stopped and took a breath. To my left was the palletized food supply that we all managed to build up in the few weeks we’d been scavenging thus far. I don’t remember how long we had been living in the valley by that time; three or four weeks maybe, but I could be off.

  As an individual, that pallet looked like a near-infinite supply of food. Living in a group of nineteen people, I knew how long it was all likely to last. We might make it halfway into the worst part of winter before it was all gone if we started rationing immediately, which we weren’t. Everyone was working their asses off every day, just burning up calories like they were cheap and easily replaceable. This whole plan involving scavenging food from the nearby area simply wasn’t getting it done. Food was only trickling in with this approach and we needed to start hitting on some serious caches really soon.

  At some point, maybe within the next month, we were going to have to arrive at a go-no-go decision. If we couldn’t get enough food to carry us through the winter, we were going to have to pick up and leave for a warmer climate before we got snowed in, nuclear power plants or not. The nebulous threat of possibly being irradiated kind of took a back seat to the guaranteed outcome of starving to death.

  I stood motionless, looking at the group’s food, our food, and thought about the people back at Wells Fargo. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was going through the stack pulling out cans, whether it was fruit, beef stew, hash, or whatever. I figured at least two cans per person, or about seventeen hundred calories assuming the can contained some sort of meat. There were four people left, so eight cans. That oughta do it. Seventeen hundred calories per person was enough to make a difference. It could get those people back on their feet. It wouldn’t save them; they were starving to death – you could see it in their sunken eyes and too tight faces. But this could put some strength back in them. It could get them back in the fight.