Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2)

by Joshua Gayou

  The two soldiers ran Wang out on the stretcher, loading him efficiently into the aircraft.

  “We have a base with an FST not too far away,” Jeffries said. “My buddies are going to take him out there right now to treat him. How are you set for fuel? Can I ride with you in the truck…” he looked towards the Ford, a battered, brutalized shell of its former self, shook his head, and asked, “Uh, will that vehicle even start up, sir?”

  “Yeah, it’s good,” I said in a daze. “A lot of that will buff right out.”

  He laughed and said, “Very good, sir. May I ride with you? I’ll direct you back to our base where we can wait for your friend to recover.”

  The Black Hawk lifted up and away, rendering the Soldier’s question rather a moot point.

  “Yeah, sure, hop in,” I said. “But listen, we can’t stay with you guys for too long.” I hooked a thumb at the truck. “We’re hauling supplies back to our people up in Wyoming. They’re just about out of food and I’ve got to get this all back to them before the snows really hit and fuck the roads.”

  “No worries, sir, I completely understand. Your friend probably won’t be able to travel for a while but he can recover with us in the meantime.” He offered his shoulder to me as I began to hobble back to the truck, which I accepted gratefully. “You can come back for him after the roads open up again. I may be able to get him an escort back to you guys but don’t hold me to that. Diesel’s pretty low.”

  “It’s Jeffries, isn’t it?” I asked as I limped towards the passenger seat of the truck.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Call me Gibs.”

  Epilogue

  Amanda

  None of them really had the stomach to kill Jeff, when it came down to it. What Jake had said to us before he disappeared had hit home and they decided, in the end, that exile was the best solution. It was actually Oscar who made the final decision; even as Jake was walking away, they all made a good show of trying to talk it out, like they were just wrapping up the discussion even though few of them really had any more to say. It’s hard to feel as though you can speak with authority so soon after you’ve been shamed.

  It was an unspoken acknowledgement between us that Oscar would have been the one person allowed to disregard Jake’s words out of hand. None of the rest of us wanted to even imagine being in his place and, being ignorant of the suffering experienced by both him and Maria, we awaited his decision to see what would come next. Even after hearing Jake, after his words had calmed my heart, I was prepared to let Oscar have Jeff. I would have even helped him discard the remains.

  Here’s the thing: certain people will tell you that such things solve nothing. They’ll tell you that they don’t actually make you feel better. Well, speaking from experience, I can say that, in some ways, certain people are right but, in other ways, certain people are very, very wrong.

  Oscar shut it all down, though. As we stood around him, waiting to see what he would do, bracing ourselves, he only remained motionless for a time before shaking his head sadly and saying, “He’s right.”

  Several people sighed audibly, bodies shifting as the tension bled out. He raised his head and glanced from person to person. “I’m not gonna make that decision for you guys. It’s not…” He sighed. “Ain’t my place,” he finally said, and left it at that.

  Alish and a few others wanted to know what could be done to protect future children from Jeff, given that we were essentially going to vomit him back out into the world; giving him over as a problem for some stranger to deal with.

  “Where I grew up,” Alish said, “Jeff’s actions would have fallen under the classification of hadd crimes…but we’ve already decided that he won’t be executed, so that no longer applies.” She looked at Oscar, eyes flashing as the rest of us hung on her words. “My family came here to escape such practices, and I tend to agree, but sometimes…just sometimes, the old ways seem right to me.” She looked towards the silent camper and rubbed her arms as though she fought down goosebumps.

  “We had the tradition of Tazir, which allowed for punishment for those crimes not covered under hadd, meted out at the discretion of the qadi. This could be such a crime.”

  She turned in my direction, fixing her gaze onto mine, and said, “Let him be marked in such a way that cannot be undone or hidden; in such a way that it will be obvious to all he encounters.”

  I probably don’t need to go into how uncomfortable this made everyone else feel, given that she was essentially suggesting that we brand Jeff before sending him out. Some people cried “torture” and “barbarism”, which silenced Alish almost immediately, causing her to retreat back into herself. Honestly, it clarified to me why she kept to herself so much; she and her family had indeed fled to a country that afforded them greater personal freedom – she clearly understood that the everyday realities of her native country were brutal; prone to misuse and corruption. And yet, as she had said, sometimes the old ways are best. We were all living in a brutal world now, with no police, government, or jail system to keep us all well behaved and civilized. A part of me (my American self, I suppose I’d call it) struggled with the idea, foreign and ugly as it was. A deeper part of me, a personal, up-close part, thought specifically of Jeff Durand, and had no reservations at all.

  I did it myself, after sending the others away, with a few ink pens, a lighter, and an X-acto knife. It wasn’t anything you could consider to be artful or clean, and yet the word that I’d partially carved/partially tattooed into his forehead was legible at least. Permanent and inescapable.

  PEDOPHILE.

  Let him be marked, indeed.

  I bound his hands, threw him in the Jeep, and drove him out to the boundary of our territory, dumping him on the 191. Cutting him loose, I said, “If you’re seen in these hills, you’ll be killed. If you’re seen in Jackson, you’ll be killed. If I hear you’re anywhere out here, I’ll hunt you down myself. Is that understood?”

  He nodded without looking up at me; when I went to cut his hands loose he cringed away from me.

  “Where…where can I go?” he asked.

  “Away.”

  He coughed and looked down the length of the highway as it disappeared into the distance.

  “Can I get some food?”

  “You can fucking starve as far as I’m concerned,” I said. I climbed into my Jeep and drove home.

  Jake returned to us a few days later, a little dirtier than when we’d last seen him, with no explanation or comment. He fell back in among us as though nothing had happened and, slowly, we all found a way back to our routine.

  I think the incident with Jeff left my friend marked permanently, though. He began to walk off and disappear for a few days at a time, here and there, just as he’d done that first time he simply walked out of the valley, leaving us to wonder if he’d ever return. I sometimes tried to go see him at night, when all of the work was done and problems solved, standing outside his door but not daring to turn the knob. The remembered words of my mother, about mistakes better left behind, always stopped me. When we finally finished my cabin (much later, this was), it became less of a problem.

  The first snow of the season came, blanketing the floor of the valley in white fluff. Gibs returned to us a few days later with Davidson, Greg, a truck that looked as though it had been bombarded with bazooka fire, and a couple of military vehicles trailing behind him. He stumbled out of the truck on a stiff leg and a single crutch, waving his hands frantically over his head while yelling, “This is okay! All of this is okay! Wang is alive! Nobody shoot a goddamned thing!”

  Several of us ran over to help him, though he shrugged us off and began to hobble aggressively towards the cabin, holding onto the crutch with both hands. It sunk into the ground here and there, and he ended up hopping a lot on one foot out of impatience.

  “Where’s Jake?” he barked. “I need to see him.”

  “He’s in his cabin; we can get him now. Who…who are those guys?” I asked, pointing bac
k at the line of very military-ish looking people climbing out of tan and olive drab trucks to stretch their legs and backs.

  “Drinking buddies. You’ll like ‘em.”

  “Um, okay. Where’s Wang?”

  “Long story. Jake first; I don’t want to repeat myself. We have a lot of shit to talk about.”

  I looked back over my shoulder at Gibs’s drinking buddies, all of them conspicuously unarmed, all of them very conspicuously at pains to keep their hands visible, and said, “Well, yeah. I guess we do.”

  Gibs hobbled a few steps further towards the cabin, nearly losing balance as the greedy earth pulled at the crutch. I pulled on his arm to stop him and said, “Quit it; you’re going to hurt yourself. Just wait here. I’ll run and get him.”

  He nodded curtly as I brushed past, thundered up the steps of the porch, and let myself into the cabin.

  “Jake! Gibs is back!” I called as I plunged down the side hallway towards the library. I rounded the corner into the room and found him sitting at Billy’s desk (now his desk) with his back to me.

  He was nearly reclined in the leather rolling chair, framed in the window behind him, and I could just see the top of his head over the high back. His right elbow was propped up on the armrest and he held his hand in front of his face, as though he were inspecting his fingernails. In the cupped center of his palm and shrouded by the roof of his fingers, a bright, white light flashed in the low rays of the sun as they cut through the un-shuttered window, brilliant enough that I had to squint and shield my eyes. With my hand held out in front of me, the glare hurt less; he dropped his arm out of sight and the sun filled the void it left, now unhindered by his hand, forcing me to close my eyes completely.

  Through my closed lids, I felt the brilliance of the light pass; a sense of darkening fell across my face. I opened my eyes again and saw that he had turned in his chair to face me.

  His hands were clenched together on the desk in front of him, his face a mask devoid of all expression.