Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1)

by Joshua Gayou

  We almost made it to the Jeep before Jake stopped us to vomit. He couldn’t stand on his own so we had to hold him up by his arms but let him bend over to have it all out. There wasn’t a great deal for him to get rid of, I imagined he hadn’t really eaten all day. While I was waiting for him to finish, I asked Lizzy to go grab a few bottles of water out of the pickup truck.

  “What all was in that van?” I asked Billy as Jake was finishing.

  “Mostly weapons, tools, ammunition and body armor, that kind of thing. It’s nothing we can’t live without but it still hurts. That van constituted a major advantage for us in the way of gear and equipment. The loss of ammo truly hurts.”

  “We’ll make do,” Jake groaned below us. We straightened him up. “We’ll find a way. Besides, we’re not totally helpless. Still have the duffel bag.”

  “Sure, that’s fine,” Billy said as we started walking him slowly towards the passenger side of the Jeep. “We’ll have to get you setup again, though. Your M4 was in the van.”

  “Ugh, damn it! I liked that rifle. Just had it figured out.”

  He groaned enough for all three of us as we got him settled in the Jeep. “There we go. How do you feel?” I asked like an idiot.

  “Like I downed a bottle of whiskey and got horse-kicked in the face.”

  “Lizzy, you get up in the back seat and help your momma keep Jake awake, okay?” Billy said.

  “Why can’t Jake go to sleep?” asked Elizabeth.

  “He took a nasty shot to the head,” Billy answered. “I need to get him to a place where I can check him to see if it’s safe to let him sleep. If I get this wrong he may not wake up.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes went very wide and solemn at that. She jumped into the Jeep behind Jake and put her hands on his shoulders, shaking gently. “Stay awake, up there,” she commanded.

  “I’m serious,” Billy said to me specifically. “Don’t let him sleep at all. I want to look him over before we allow that.”

  “How long will it be before we know he’s safe?”

  “We’ve just got to get to a safe area where I can get a good look at his eyes,” he said. “I’ve never dealt with a concussion directly; only read about them. But the main thing is if his eyes aren’t dilated and he can talk coherently, he can sleep. He’s talking fine right now but I just want to get a look at his pupils. Assuming all is well, we want him to get all the sleep. It still might be as much as a week for him to be back to full speed. Mostly he should find it easier to solve complex problems and use his memory but I think we’ll know we’re through the rough part when he stops talking like he’s drunk.”

  “Do you mean the slurring or just talking way more than usual in general?”

  Billy just shrugged at this and turned to make his way to the truck. “Keep close behind me, Little Sis,” he called back. “Soon as we get away from all these towns we’ll pull off the road and see about stitching him back up.”

  -

  Billy led us about twenty miles North of Cedar City up the 15 before pulling off the road and taking us to a good stand-off distance.

  He jumped out of the truck and came our way, his always present shotgun slung over a shoulder and a flashlight in hand. He opened the passenger side door to gain access to Jake and said, “Okay, let’s have a look at you. Amanda, can you start setting up the tents? They’re in the back of the truck. Alright, look over this way, Jake…”

  The flashlight turned on and off several times with intervals of five to ten seconds in between. Billy let out a sigh.

  “Good news. Here, Jake. Let’s get this seat reclined back. You go ahead and get some rest.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” Jake groaned.

  Billy eased the door shut and came over to where Lizzy and I struggled with the tents. He passed us by and went back to the truck to shift bags around in the bed. I resigned myself to decoding the riot of poles and canvas without help.

  Now, I have since learned to erect all manner of tent, so I know how the things work by now. It’s just that at the time, this kind of thing wasn’t a regular activity for me. We had been camping all of twice since Lizzy was born and Eddie did most of the work putting the camp site together both times. I knew enough to understand how the poles worked, though, so I started straightening them out with Lizzy and laying them aside. The two biggest challenges we had to deal with were that this was during the night (we had to do everything while juggling our own flashlight), and the two tents with their constituent parts had all been jumbled together, so it wasn’t obvious which poles went with which tent.

  While we straightened out the poles, I heard Billy grunt off to my right followed by the rattling sound of a pill bottle. This was followed by the sound of ripping fabric. Billy called over to me, “Hey, remind me to put washcloths and towels on the shopping list, huh?”

  “Uh, okay!” was all I could think to say in response.

  This was all followed by the sound of water splashing onto the dirt for a few seconds. He straightened up, replaced some items into the truck, and walked back over to the jeep. I heard him speaking to Jake but his voice was low so I couldn’t make out what was said. Billy shut the door and came over to check on us.

  We had finished straightening out all the support rods and had the two tents spread out next to each other. Billy bent, picked up one of the rods, and said, “The longer rods go with the blue tent,” before threading his through the green one.

  “Ah, thanks,” I said and meant it. “I was worried about getting one set up halfway and finding out I made the wrong choice.”

  “Sure, no worries. I’ve mixed them up several times.”

  Things were up quickly after that. I was concerned that my tent looked sad and deflated compared to Billy’s until he showed me some little plastic clips running along the length of the nylon that I had missed. I clipped them to the rods and everything looked much more squared away.

  “I think he’s gonna be okay,” Billy said when it was all done. “He just needs a lot of rest. I don’t know how long he’ll be goofed up but we need to make sure he understands that he’s not to push it. He seems to me like the kind that will just try to tough it out through this sort of thing. With a head trauma, that’s only going to make things worse. I think if we explain to him that pushing it will make him a liability, it’ll get the message delivered, yeah?”

  “Right,” I said. “Sounds good.”

  “Okay,” he continued. “Jake and I’ll double up in the blue tent; you and Lizzy take the green. We’re a pretty good distance from Cedar City now, but on the other hand, they do have a really nice van now…assholes.”

  Despite everything we had just been through, I couldn’t suppress a grin at this. Billy really liked his van.

  “Anyway, no fire tonight and I think we’d better keep watch. Let’s get some sleeping bags laid out. I’ll help Jake get settled in and then I’ll take the first watch. I’m not feeling very restful, myself.”

  We went to the Jeep and opened up the door. Jake stirred and mumbled, “Time to get up?”

  “Let’s just start with sitting up, Whitey.”

  “The hell you always calling me Whitey for?”

  “Because,” Billy laughed, “You da White Man, sucka.”

  “Heavens,” Jake mumbled. “Anyone ever tell you that you talk like a teenager?”

  “Look, you gotta hang onto your youth however the hell you can.”

  Jake sat his seat up, grimacing in the low moon light as he did. A wet, folded up scrap of cloth fell from his eyes, which Elizabeth reached out and caught. I noticed that his right hand was bound up in a clean, white bandage. “His nose is all wrong again,” Lizzy said.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “Guess I fell on it a little.”

  “How is it?” Billy asked. “You want to fix it or leave it?”

  “Ohhhhh, man,” Jake groaned. “We’d better deal with it. It’s giving me a nasty headache.”

  Billy motioned for Lizzy and I to back up, then
he raised his hands to Jake’s face. I saw Jake’s hands grip the frame of the Jeep’s door and brace. The muscles in Billy’s shoulders tensed and Jake’s knuckles went white. Jake himself unloaded a growl that sounded like a hot poker had been shoved up a grizzly bear’s behind.

  “God damn it, we’re not quite there, boss. Gotta do it again.” I could see Jake’s head nodding past Billy. Shoulder muscles tensed a second time and Jake howled.

  “GRRrrrrraaaarrrrghhhhh – SHIT!!” Billy pulled back and pointed a flashlight in Jake’s face as he sat there panting. Presently, Jake looked at Lizzy and said, “Sorry for that, kiddo.”

  “Okay…” said Elizabeth in a small voice.

  “Hey,” he reached out and patted her shoulder. “I’m okay. I actually feel better. The worst part of my headache is gone. It feels like he pulled a knife out of my head.”

  Lizzy looked at him dubiously. This probably had to do with the fact that both his eyes looked like someone had been pounding on them with a hammer and that there was blood running freely from his nose, which he dabbed at absently with the wet cloth.

  “I don’t know how well that’s going to heal up,” said Billy. “There’s not much of that bridge left but splinters and floating chunks at this point. I feel like a proper doctor would know how to support it all somehow so it heals properly but I haven’t the first clue how to go about it.”

  “It’s fine,” Jake said. “I wasn’t winning any modelling contests to begin with. Just gimme an old t-shirt that I can rip up and pack up there and I’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah, good idea. I already have one started.” Billy walked back over to the truck.

  I leaned in close to Jake. “You’re going to have to take it easy for the next few days, okay? You can’t push yourself. You might make this worse.” I left the implication unsaid. I didn’t want to bring out the big guns unless he decided to be stubborn later.

  He only nodded slowly. “I understand. Any idea how long it’ll be?”

  “Well, Billy seems to know something about this. He says you’re probably okay when you start acting like yourself again.”

  “Like myself? What does that mean? What am I like?”

  “Well…you know…” I stammered. “Quiet all the time. No expression? Cold and aloof? Block of wood?”

  Jake was silent a moment as he absorbed that. Then he looked down and placed the cloth back under his nose. “Huh…” he said.

  Billy came back with a white, mutilated t-shirt and cut some small squares off of it with his pocket knife. Jake accepted them, rolled them into little tubes, and jammed them up his nostrils. He growled like an old drunk as he mashed them into place.

  “Alright, you guys,” he sighed. “I think I’ve had enough of beating my face up for the night.” He stood up, looking much steadier than he had earlier when we carried him out of the warehouse, and made his way to the tent. Lizzy was there holding the flap back for him. He stopped to look at her, reached out, and cupped her cheek in his hand. “Thanks, kiddo,” he said, and hunched to crawl in. I thought about what Billy had said to me earlier that day about Jake and Elizabeth, deciding that Billy was probably much more intelligent than I gave him credit for.

  “What about his head?” I asked Billy. “Don’t we need to stitch it up?”

  “I cleaned it out with some alcohol and had a look at it,” said Billy. “The bleeding has stopped. There might be a small scar but I don’t think it needs stitches. His hand will definitely need some stitches but that can wait until tomorrow. I’ve got him pumped full of Ibuprofen and Amoxicillin so it won’t go all infected. We’ll keep him on both for another week and he should be good.”

  We got Jake situated in the tent and Billy gave me a new scrap of wet cloth from the remains of the t-shirt to place over Jake’s eyes. As he lay there, I leaned in close and said, “I want to thank you for protecting my little girl.”

  “If I’d been thinking, we would have cleared that damned warehouse before doing anything else. This whole thing was my fault.”

  I boggled at this. I failed to understand how any of this could have been laid at Jake’s feet. It was something we would all come to learn about him eventually. The way Jake sees things, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are – if something went wrong, it’s his fault. His natural instinct is to assume the blame for what happened and find a way to avoid the same mistakes in the future. People around our little commune all have their own ideas why Jake ended up in charge (and some of them are less happy about it than others) but whatever they tell you, this is the main reason: Jake owns everything whether it’s reasonable or not, seeks to improve everything. He’s always looking for failures in himself and ways to correct them. It is easy to follow someone like that.

  “Elizabeth is alive and unhurt,” I told him finally. “That’s good enough for me.”

  I kissed him lightly on the cheek and left the tent.

  Billy was sitting in a folding camping chair outside and facing the 15 about a half mile distant with his shotgun propped on the top of his thigh. “Lizzy’s already turned in,” he said quietly.

  I threw my arms around his neck from behind him and kissed him on the cheek. “The Hell??” he gasped. He came halfway out of his seat.

  “Just thank you,” I said, not letting go. He rested his shotgun across his knees with his right hand; his left hand reached up and gave me a couple of pats on the back of my head.

  “No worries. It’s fine,” he said. I let go and made my way to our tent.

  “I…uh…I had a daughter,” he said before I entered. I froze for a beat; looked back at him. “Mary. You would have liked her. I think her boy and Lizzy would have been friends.” He replaced the shotgun on his knee and said nothing more.

  I climbed into the tent and lay down next to Elizabeth, not taking my shoes off and not getting inside my bag. After a few moments, her hand reached out and found mine.

  I breathed deeply and closed my eyes.

  -

  I lay there in the tent for what must have been at least a couple of hours waiting for sleep to find me before I gave up. Elizabeth’s breathing had become slow and even soon after she rolled over. It amazed me how she could do that after everything she had been through.

  Quietly, I got up, worked the zipper on the tent flap slowly until the opening was just big enough to let me out and then slipped through. I closed the zipper, stood up, and turned to see Billy looking back at me.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Not really,” I agreed and went to the truck. I pulled out another chair while making as little noise as I could and brought it over to open up beside Billy. The air was on the chilly side but I still had the wool-lined denim jacket, which was incredibly warm and comfortable. I wedged into the chair, jammed my hands into the pockets, and sighed.

  “Nightmares?”

  “What? Oh, no. I never got to sleep at all. Too much on my mind.”

  “I’m not going anywhere if you need to unload.”

  I was silent for a while, trying to figure out how to frame my thoughts into words. To his credit, Billy waited patiently while I worked it out.

  “Billy, what did you do before all this happened?”

  “I was a senior member on our tribal council and also served as the chief administrator of our casinos and other related gaming interests,” he said promptly. “Like I said: Indian Gaming.”

  “You…ran the casinos?”

  “Yap. Also brokered the deals with the US government that allowed us to operate. Me and some of the other old farts; we built the whole operation from the ground up.”

  “I…I didn’t realize…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m usually vague about my involvement. It’s an old leftover habit that’s hard to break. I liked to stay as unknown as possible. People tend to be more genuine when they don’t realize you’re the guy in charge.”

  “Well – okay. So it’s safe to say that you didn’t really live a life of, uh, vi
olence? Before?”

  “Eh, define violence. I mean, growing up on the reservation wasn’t exactly a cake walk. A lot of us were hot heads. I used to get in a lot of fights. Even used to win sometimes, too.” He smiled at me.

  “Nothing after that?” I prodded.

  “Oh, nah. Not really. I did a standard four years in the Army but that was after Vietnam was over and before we went sticking our noses into anything else, so that was really just four years of being stationed in various places doing a lot of paperwork. Never saw any action.”

  “So…” I hesitated; took a breath, “never killed anyone?”

  “Ah,” he said. “No, ma’am. Not until after.”

  “I hadn’t really killed anyone until today,” I said.

  “Until…today?” Billy said, confused.

  “James wasn’t a person,” I said. “He was some kind of animal or monster or…something. He just needed to be put down. He was truly evil. I don’t feel anything at all for what I did to him. I’d do it again if I had the chance.”

  “Okay. That’s fair enough.”

  “The people we killed today? They weren’t evil. They were just trying to get along for the most part, like us I think. I got Jake to tell me enough of what happened so I could make sense of it all while we drove over here. It was how we kept him awake.”

  “Well, they did tie your daughter down to a chair,” Billy said.

  “Oh, I know. I also know one of them held a knife to her. Trust me, if I had seen that I would have killed the bitch myself. But aside from her, those guys who came out shooting at us? That was after Jake had killed two of theirs. In fact, no one had been killed before Jake went to work. All that happened was they stole our van.”

  “Are you suggesting Jake was wrong?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m saying we’ll never know how it could have gone because everyone (on both sides) started off by pointing guns instead of talking. I get that we’re living in an extreme survival situation right now and that there is true evil in the world. I just wonder how much we’re giving up if we start each encounter under the assumption that it has to end in gunfire. I wonder if there was anything I could have said in that warehouse that would have made those guys stop shooting long enough to listen to us. It’s bugging me.”