Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1)

by Joshua Gayou

  “Naw, those were the first places to get picked over. There was a low-key shipping warehouse that I knew of out there; I used to buy a lot of goodies from the company on-line and noticed that the stuff was always coming to me from Vegas. When the world went to hell, I started looking for supplies in the obvious places like your Walmarts, outdoor stores, and the like. Those places were all picked clean because everyone knew that stuff was there. I figured very few people would know about a nondescript shipping warehouse. Turns out I was right.” He smiled, eyes twinkling.

  “I’m going to get geared up,” Billy said. “Go grab yourself a backpack; throw some food and some waters in it.”

  I walked over to the truck, experimenting with the rifle as I went. I noticed that I could just let it hang from the sling, which was fairly comfortable, but the barrel still bounced off my legs as I walked. I grabbed the grip with my right hand to steady it and point the barrel off at an angle to my left and the problem went away. I suddenly understood why the soldiers I had seen in the footage from the Middle East all seemed to have the exact same stance and posture with their rifles. I feel silly saying this (I never went through 1/10th the training that those people did, not even now with the benefit of Gibs’s drills) but I felt a connection to them at that moment. It occurred to me that this new world was something to which people like me would quickly have to adapt or die. For those men and women who had done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, this would just be like any other day. If they had survived the plague, I imagined they would be doing just fine right now.

  As I began to move items around in the truck bed, Lizzy got out of the cab. She walked by shooting me an angry look as she went, and approached Billy. She spoke to him, her voice sometimes rising, and he nodded to her the whole time.

  I hung my head into the truck to look across the seat at Jake. “What was that?”

  “She’s mad at you for going into town. She thinks you should stay here where it’s safe. I imagine she’s explaining to Billy that there will be hell to pay if he doesn’t keep both eyes on you.”

  I looked back over to her and Billy, who was now squatted down in front of her and talking quietly. “Crap,” I said. “I’d better go deal with that.”

  “This is really none of my business,” he said, “but she’s probably too angry to hear you right now. Might as well wait until you come back so you have the proof of your results to back your position.”

  “You’re right, it is none of your business,” I said. He nodded and looked off toward the city. “But you’re also right about her, as well. I’ll follow your advice on this one.”

  He nodded again, without looking back at me.

  Billy approached as I finished loading my backpack. He had his own backpack as well as a couple of belts full of different colored shotgun shells crisscrossed over his chest and under his survival jacket. His shotgun hung from a sling on his shoulder. A pistol was strapped to his belt on a holster.

  “You look like less-thin Poncho Villa,” I told him, smiling.

  “Watch it, Little Sis. You’re talking about the man I love.”

  He heaved the heavy duffel bag up into the truck bed and then walked around to the driver’s side of the truck and got in. “You ready?”

  I stood there for a moment, trying to process what I was seeing. “Never learned,” he had said. I stared at him, unmoving.

  “Amanda?” he prompted.

  I shook my head and climbed in beside him. Before I could say anything, Jake came to the driver’s side window and said, “Billy, keep your eyes open for a chess set, okay?”

  “A...chess - what the hell for?” asked Billy.

  “I told Elizabeth I’d teach her to play if we could find one. She’s read most of the books I found, it turns out.”

  7 – Car Shopping

  Amanda

  Billy drove away from our staging area due east towards a gentle rise of hills about 100 yards away, over which the roofs of a housing tract were just visible. The ground was fairly gentle and we could see a dirt road out in front of us that angled straight for the homes but Billy took his time, creeping along at an easy pace. I watched as he worked the stick and clutch effortlessly.

  “So…” I said.

  “So?”

  “So, you never learned to drive a manual?”

  He grimaced and his left hand momentarily squeezed the top of the wheel where it had been resting loosely a moment before.

  “Forgot about that,” he said.

  “You want to explain why you were bullshitting me? You get one chance to do this right.”

  He pulled a sigh all the way up from his stomach. “Let me ask you: what do you think of Jake?”

  I was so surprised by his question that my eyebrows rose all the way up my forehead. “You’re playing Apocalypse Match Maker, now?”

  “No, no. Don’t look at it like that. I’m being serious here. Just as one person to another, what’s your impression of Jake?”

  I gave the question due thought because it was obvious to me now that this was bothering Billy. I had the impression that not much bothered him. “He scares me. Or, he scared me at first. Not so much now - I mean, I trust him alone with Lizzy, right? He does make me nervous, though. I can’t get a read on him. It’s like he doesn’t feel a particular way about anything at all.”

  Billy nodded. “Exactly. Now I’ll tell you something about Jake. I haven’t really known him that long, and we’ll just say that he’s always been the private type, but he was different when I found him, all the same.”

  “Different how?”

  “Easier going. He was never what I would describe as chatty, but he spoke with me more than he does now. We weren’t trading jokes back and forth or cracking each other up. Actually, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the guy laugh. But he was communicative. Responsive.”

  “Jake??” I asked. I couldn’t picture it.

  “Yap,” he confirmed. “Listen, we all lost when the world fell apart, right? I know I lost people I cared about, you did too. I don’t know anything really about the kind of life Jake had before; who he knew, if there was anyone special or the like. I do know that whatever loss he suffered, it hit him hard. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet on you being the emotionally stronger of the two.”

  “How can that be?” I asked. “It’s like he doesn’t have any emotion at all.”

  “He does. I was with him when he found some of his people from before…what was left of them.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not my place to say,” he sighed. “What I think I can tell you is that Jake is trying very hard to be someone who doesn’t need people around him. The problem with that is no matter how hard a fish tries, it simply can’t be a bird, as the man says.”

  “You think Jake needs people to be happy?”

  “I think Jake needs people to function,” Billy emphasized. “As far as I can tell, he doesn’t give much thought to his own welfare or safety. It’s like he has to have someone to live for or he just…drifts. Perfect example: after - well, just after, the best I could get him to agree to was to just come with me to Wyoming and see the place. I got the impression the only reason he agreed to come was to see that I arrived safe. I told him to stay with me but who knows what the hell he’s planning on doing when we get there? I’m fairly sure he plans on getting me to the front door and then just disappearing somewhere.”

  “Okay, I get it,” I finally said. “You’re putting me and Lizzy out in front of him as a kind of anchor...or something. You could have told me.”

  Billy glanced over at me with a “who the hell are you kidding?” look in his eyes. “You weren’t exactly in a state where I felt like that was an option when we met.”

  This shut me up.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I can only imagine what you and the Girly went through at the hands of those sons-a-bitches - I don’t want to know!” he exclaimed when I drew breath. “I didn’t know what to expect out of either of you.
I know I didn’t expect you to be as functional as you both are so soon after you got out of there. I think you’re tougher than Jake and I put together.”

  We drove on silently for a while, Billy weaving his way around the odd derelict car in the middle of the road, which had transitioned from dirt to pavement not long ago.

  “Okay, so what now?” I asked. “Try to draw him out of his shell?”

  “Nope. I think just let him keep hanging out with Lizzy. He’s talked more with her in the last 18 hours than he has with me in days. I don’t know if there’s anything else you or I could do.”

  I thought of how hard Jake had blushed when he fumbled at my belt and wondered.

  We drove in silence for a while. The general idea was to cruise through residential areas in search of anything that looked like it could handle rough terrain and, if we turned up nothing useful, to move in closer to the 15 a little bit at a time and find more knots of traffic to try again. Billy was constantly rechecking our position against the Thomas Guide to ensure we maintained a good escape route, stopping in the middle of the street to do so. I had been through Cedar City in the past plenty of times but had stuck to the main drag for the most part; my local knowledge and usefulness as a guide increased as we came closer to the 15. Unfortunately, the 15 freeway was the major landmark Billy was doing his best to stay away from.

  When we weren’t threading our way around cars, we had to work our way through barricades and various abandoned checkpoints - those relics left behind by the now absent military. We attempted to get out and clear a way through the first time we came to one that was blocking our path but soon gave up. Outside of piles of sandbags, boxes, and mounds of garbage that had blown into the area and lodged on the various parts and pieces that made up the structure of the barricades, there was razor wire wrapped around everything. Between the two of us, the effort required to make one of these obstacles passable would have taken the majority of the day.

  Cedar City itself appeared to be in much better shape than some of the other places I had seen both in person and on TV. It was almost a quaint vacation getaway when compared to parts of Salt Lake City, for example, which had seen wide scale rioting towards the end before the inhabitants became too sick to engage in such activity.

  There was the occasional burned out hulk of a building; however the fires themselves appeared to have been extinguished fairly quickly - only the immediate surrounding buildings were affected. It became obvious that, wherever property damage had occurred, the people who were still capable of doing something about it had rallied together to keep things from getting out of control. I can vividly recall looking down residential area streets as we crawled by that, in isolation, appeared to depict any normal American afternoon minus the people or activity. I experienced the unsettling illusion that I was looking at a staged model or a movie set. Witnessing those pockets of sane normalcy bookended by evidence of a dying people and the Army’s best efforts to maintain control and public safety was profoundly depressing. To this day, two years later, such sights still impact me emotionally. The roads now are all cracked and overgrown with the fauna of the locale and those buildings that saw the most damage are just beginning to crumble under their own weight as nature takes back control of the land, but sometimes I’ll see a lone barbeque sitting on a porch or a rusted tricycle left in the middle of the street. Such things can still make me cry.

  We eventually turned onto 265th street off Casa Loma and reset our search, driving up and down the street looking at houses as we passed. The homes in this area were nice; not large palaces of the rich like you could sometimes run into without warning, but it was clear that these people lived the comfortable lives of the upper middle class. The construction of the homes themselves lacked any kind of pattern or sense of uniformity - it became clear to me that they were most likely all custom-built, following various styles and designs. With the exception of some of the trees, which tended to be evergreen, the landscaping was universally brown and dead throughout.

  “This...looks pretty good,” Billy said absently as we drove along. “Keep your eyes peeled. Some of these SUVs we’re passing are okay but let’s take our time and look for something special. We can always come back if we turn up nothing.”

  I would guess that we spent an hour or so weaving our way past houses and cul-de-sacs when something finally jumped out at me.

  “Stop!” I said, patting the dashboard rapidly and craning my neck to look out my window. He complied and I said, “Back up a bit, please. I think we’re in business.”

  He rolled the Dodge back forty feet or so before I signaled him to set the parking brake. “Go ahead and turn it off,” I said.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “What are you seeing?”

  “That car.”

  “The Toyota? You do get what we’re looking for out here, right?”

  I turned back to him with my ‘don’t be a smartass’ face. “Look at the plate,” I told him.

  “I ‘heart’ Moab,” he read. “What the hell’s a Moab?”

  “It’s a city. It’s a major destination for off-roaders in Utah. They even used to host a yearly event where all the big time enthusiasts would get together and drive some of the nastiest trails. I’ve seen some of those guys take their Jeeps up near vertical inclines.” Billy’s eyes widened at this as he stretched his neck out to look past me again at the Toyota.

  “Whoever lived here wasn’t doing any of that in a Camry,” I said, “but I’m thinking we crack open his garage and see what he’s hiding in there.”

  “Ho-ho, shit,” Billy giggled. “Wouldn’t that be something?” He grabbed his shotgun and hopped out of the truck; walked around to the bed to dig around. Finding the crowbar he was looking for, he began to stroll up the driveway.

  I opened the passenger side door and struggled briefly with my new rifle as I swung my legs out (Billy had so far neglected to show me how to detach the sling’s swivel studs so I had just left it hanging off my chest the whole time). Finally situated on the ground while managing not to shoot myself, I closed the door to the truck and followed.

  Billy made a straight line for the roll-up garage door, planted his feet, and positioned the crowbar just past his hips like it was a shovel that he was going to use to take a scoop out of the driveway. Before he could swing, I said, “Wait.”

  He was actually mid-swing by the time I spoke so he had to arrest the downward motion of the very heavy steel bar, grunting out a “Christ!” as he did. He straightened, placed the tip of the bar gently on the concrete, and crossed his arms over the top to lean on it. Thus composing himself, he said, “Yeeess?”

  “What if someone’s in the house? What if someone still lives here?”

  “What…seriously?”

  “We’re here, right? We survived.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “Yeah, fair point. It may be the end of the world but good manners never go out of style.” He shouldered the crowbar, turned, and walked to the front door.

  At the door, he leaned the bar against the wall. He then placed his shotgun next to it. He looked over his shoulder at me. “That gun’s safe is on?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Take it off.” He knocked on the door.

  We stood there a few moments, after which he knocked on the door again. Glancing down at the wall, he pushed the doorbell button. There was no discernable sound from inside the house and Billy muttered the word “dumbass” under his breath.

  We waited another few minutes. Billy finally looked back at me with his eyebrows raised in question. I nodded that we were good and backed up to give him some room. He hefted the crowbar.

  I expected him to slam it into the door or perform some other act of violent destruction but he did the exact opposite. He placed the flat tip of the bar into the crack of the doorframe where the bolt would be, gave it a shove, and began to pry at the crack almost daintily. I was shocked. I had no idea how much noise he had been preparing to make with
the thing over by the garage door, but the only sound he produced here at the entryway as he tickled the door was a mild grinding. I half expected him to raise his pinky off the bar as he levered it around. After about five minutes’ worth of work, he had destroyed enough of the jam, the door, and the deadbolt that the whole thing swung open easily.

  “Hello?” Billy called into the home. The lack of response carried a psychological weight with it, as though the air in the house was pushing back against us. He set the crowbar aside and shouldered the shotgun. Not looking back, he said, “Muzzle, Little Sis. Don’t point that at anything you’re not ready to kill.” He lifted his own muzzle and passed the threshold.

  The inside of the home was unexpectedly tidy. Having been conditioned to find disarray in all things, the cleanliness of the front room was off-putting. I had to force back the urge to look back out the front door and confirm that it was still the same fallen world outside. We made our way from room to room, Billy always in the lead. We stayed in each location long enough for him to clear the area and look in all the closets before moving on. At one point, Billy reached out and tapped my right elbow lightly with his hand and whispered, “Not so high, Little Sis. Makes it hard to maneuver. Pull ‘em in tight to your ribs.” I did as he suggested, noting immediately how the new position felt easier for my shoulders to maintain.

  As we moved toward the back of the house where the master bedroom was, a foul, rotten smell became apparent, becoming more oppressive as we went deeper. I don’t really know that I can do the experience justice through description; it was the smell of rotting meat and sweet, cheap perfume. As we approached the final door at the end of the hallway, I was holding my rifle one-handed by the grip and, with my left hand, holding a tail of the flannel shirt up over my mouth and nose. I had to breathe slowly and shallowly to avoid gagging.

  Billy worked the knob on the door and swung it open. Inside, there were two bodies lying in the king sized bed. Vast expanses of bone were visible among soupy ropes of red, meaty tissue. They were both glued to the mattress by brown pools of congealed liquid and surrounded by a tornado of flies. I just had enough time to make out that something white was moving along their surface before Billy bellowed, “Gah, sonofawhore!!!” and slammed the door. He and I both stumbled back down the hallway, coughing and gagging.