Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1)

by Joshua Gayou

  “So what do you guys see in here?” asked Billy.

  “How much did this place cost, anyway?” asked Lizzy, looking around the room. The outburst was a bit embarrassing and I may have given her a swat on the shoulder.

  “That’s…that’s actually not what I meant,” said Billy. “Take a close look at some of these titles.”

  Jake went over to one of the shelves and started browsing through the books. He stared at the spine of one for several seconds, his mouth working silently, and then said, “I’ll be…”

  “What is it?” I asked. He waved me over and pointed at a row of books. I started to read the titles out loud. “Bushcraft 101…How to Stay Alive in the Woods…Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag…Survival Medicine Handbook. Holy crap, all of this is about survival?”

  “No,” said Billy. “Just that section. I’ve been collecting for years now. How-to guides, manuals, references. This stuff covers everything from electrical repair to engine rebuilding. There are books on tanning animal hide – hell, several books on processing the whole damned animal. One of those even tells you how to make glue out of animal hide. There are books on subsistence farming, carpentry, welding. I even have guides on primitive blacksmithing. I’m not saying I thought of everything, of course, but this is a good start. Anything we discover that needs to be done; there’s a good chance I’ve put a book in here that will give us some ideas.”

  “Is all of this just a bunch of reference material?” Jake asked. “Don’t you have anything that you read for pleasure?”

  “Oh, sure,” Billy said. “Those two sections there behind the desk are loaded with novels. Also on the other side of the window are a lot of classics and antiques. Here, look,” he said, walking over to a shelf to the right of the desk. He tipped out a book about four inches thick. “See? The Iliad.”

  “Oh, man. I think that’s a little heavy for me,” Jake said while patting his legs lightly.

  “You should read this sometime, Jake,” said Billy. He sounded serious enough that we both looked at him intently. “I mean it. It’s very good.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Jake. He sounded as confused as I felt at Billy’s sincerity. “I’ll see if I can plow through it sometime. Might take me a while. I tend to be a bit of a slow reader.”

  “Who’s this in the picture with you, Billy?” asked Lizzy. She was pointing to one in a series of framed pictures on the fireplace mantle. “He looks familiar.”

  “Hey, wow!” I said, coming closer to look. “When did you meet Arnold?”

  “That was back when he was the governor. Had to meet with him to discuss taxes at the time. He was going around running his mouth over how all the tribes needed to ‘pay their fair share’ in state taxes. Obviously, the state government had spent itself into a giant hole so the clear answer was to go after small, deep pocketed groups with little comparative clout to make up the difference on their stupidity. Damned clown.”

  “Why do you have a picture with him if he was such a buffoon?” Jake asked with a subtle grin.

  “Well…I mean…the guy was still Conan, after all.”

  “I thought his name was Arnold,” said Lizzy.

  “Never mind, Mija.”

  “Anyway,” Billy said, resetting our attention, “with Google and Wikipedia being nothing but a forlorn memory, this is what we have now.” He made his way toward the doorway. “You guys make yourselves at home. Pick the bedrooms you want and such – just stay away from the one on the left upstairs; that’s mine. Once you get it all figured out you can come help me unload the cars.”

  Jake looked over at us. “Okay, then. Either of you prefer upstairs? I don’t care either way.”

  “Can I have the room with the bunk beds?” asked Elizabeth.

  Jake smiled at her. “I’m good with it if your mom is.”

  “You…you go ahead, Mija.”

  “Hey,” said Jake as Lizzy bounded out of the room. “You okay? What’s up?”

  I cleared my throat and shook my head. “It was just something Eddie used to say. Whenever Elizabeth asked permission on things – if he didn’t mind he would always check with me first to be sure. He would say ‘If Mom’s happy, I’m good’. It was just a shock to hear it.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jake.

  I was a moment answering, lost in my own thought. Finally, I said, “Don’t be. We can’t all be walking on eggshells around here. This just happens from time to time. I was just doing some math in my head there. It feels like ages but I only lost him like three or four months ago now? I honestly don’t know for sure. Most of the time I’m numb to it or I’m too busy dealing with a problem in the moment. Every so often, though, something unexpected jumps out and reminds me how badly I miss him.”

  “Yeah,” Jake agreed. He took a deep breath; let it out. “I’ll take the upstairs room,” he said as he walked to the door. “I suppose you’ll want to be close to your daughter. I’ll go give Billy a hand unloading.”

  His voice trailed off as he walked down the hallway towards the front of the cabin. I felt as though he had escaped from the room.

  I left the den and followed his path, stopping at the first door on the left to look in on Elizabeth. She was sitting on the top bunk in the center of the room (there were six bunks throughout – two on the left wall, two in the center, and two on the right wall) dangling her feet off the side. “What do you think?” I asked her.

  “This is great!” she said with a smile that nearly cracked her face in half.

  “You just be careful up there, okay? Don’t fall off.”

  “I won’t, Mom,” she called after me as I walked down to the next bedroom and looked in. The décor of the room was very much in line with the rest of the house with rich wood furniture and earth tones in all of the coloring. There was a queen sized bed on the left wall with a lovely Native American painting of some women sitting together at a river bank; they appeared to be making baskets or pottery – it was hard to tell because it was a stylized piece. On the wall opposite of the painting hung a Jackalope head mounted on a board. It was obvious that Billy had done all of his own decorating.

  I exited the front of the cabin to find some of the plastic bins from the truck already stacked outside the door. Worried that they might finish unpacking without me, I rushed down the steps and trotted around the side of the house. They were over by the roll up door of the Butler Building. I slowed to an energetic walk and joined them.

  “I like the bit of taxidermy,” I said to Billy. “You shoot that thing yourself?”

  “Oh, you found Jacky,” Billy said absently. He had a key ring out and was thumbing through various keys.

  “We were just praying that Billy didn’t leave his garage key back home in California,” said Jake.

  “Oh, crap,” I laughed and then looked down at the rollup door. There was a half-inch thick steel plate on either side of the door at the bottom. These plates appeared to be welded to the wall of the building frame itself. Rather than being secured to the door with some form of padlock or chain, there was a heavy duty keyhole lock embedded in the center of the plate. “Oh, crap!” I repeated. “Can we actually get in there without a key?”

  “Not without a torch,” Billy muttered. “Ha! I told you I brought it!” he said, holding the bundle of keys up to Jake’s face with one of them extended out between thumb and forefinger.

  He unlocked both sides of the door and then grabbed a handle mounted to the bottom center. He lifted and the door glided up easily, rolling up some twenty feet overhead. When the door was too high for him to push with his hands, he grabbed a chain to the right of the inside frame and pulled it up a few more feet. He anchored the chain to a metal hook on the wall and walked in.

  The inside space of the building felt more like a warehouse than a garage. The ceiling was set high overhead and the space stretched back far enough that I couldn’t see the wall on the other side. I was straining my eyes to see better and contemplating going back to the Jeep for my f
lashlight when the sound of a switch being thrown came from behind me. The interior was illuminated by hanging lights spread throughout the area.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  “Solar panels,” said Billy. “Lining the whole roof. They charge an array of batteries along the back wall, which will keep the LED lights going all day and night or run the power tools in the back for a few hours straight before drying out.”

  “Does the main house have solar?” asked Jake.

  “Unfortunately not,” Billy said. “It was on my list of things to do but I never got around to it. It was important to get this building online first – all of the critical stuff is here.”

  The first thing to grab my attention after the lights were turned on was a truck out in the middle of the floor. I couldn’t tell what kind of truck it was because it was under a tarp. The only thing I could see for sure was that it was big.

  “This will be our fall back when all the gas stops working,” said Billy as he rested his hand on the hood. “It’s a diesel, four-wheel drive Ford Super Duty. It makes about one thousand foot pounds of torque and will happily pull the ass out of a T-rex without even slowing down. I’ve also added a one hundred gallon reserve fuel tank up in the truck bed with a transfer pump wired into the truck’s electrical system and a full sized ball hitch on the back. There is a twenty foot utility trailer back in the corner of the shop by the drums. We’ll be able to push out over a significant distance in this thing without having to refuel.”

  I stood up on my toes to look over the bed of the truck to the rear corner of the garage. Next to the trailer Billy mentioned, there were six steel drums stacked in a rack on their sides with three on the bottom and three more on the top. Jake was walking back there to look at them.

  “Fifty-five gallons a piece, right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Billy said as he joined him. “I started stockpiling diesel as well as some other items not too long ago. Half of those are empty, which works out for us. I hadn’t counted on prioritizing gas but we’ll need to start collecting gas as part of our regular activities so we can get the most use out of your vehicles while they’ll still run. The steel drums will help. They’re a nice clean environment which will help to maximize the life of the gas we salvage. If we get lucky, we may be able to find some long life additives in surrounding auto shops and the like. It’s possible we’ll be able to extend the useful life out of the gas vehicles by a year or more.”

  “What will you do with the diesel?” I asked.

  “We’ll find something else to keep it in. Diesel will keep for a decade whether you baby it or treat it like shit. It’s a big reason I got the Ford over there; a decade of useful life, assuming you can keep it fueled and in good repair. The problem is finding more. Diesel wasn’t terribly popular so it won’t be as abundant as gas – it will take longer to find it and stock up a meaningful supply. Being in Wyoming will help, though. A lot of people up this way preferred nice diesel trucks. Also, any shipping trucks we can find should be a minor bonanza. Giant fuel tanks in those semis.”

  “You have your own little auto shop back here, don’t you?” Jake asked, looking at the tool boxes and racks.

  “More like a combination garage/woodshop.”

  Jake looked up a set of wooden stairs that ran to a smaller second level suspended over the rear of the main floor. “What’s up there?”

  “Additional storage, a pool table and an old couch, my reloading bench and gun safes, that kind of thing.”

  “I can’t believe all this,” I said. “It’s like you were planning on the world falling apart. I’m not complaining now since it all paid off in the end, but what inspires someone to dig in this hard?”

  Billy nodded and smiled. “Come on, Little Sis. Let’s get all the stuff from Barnes stacked up in the garage. After that I’ll see about getting some dinner going and explain while I’m cooking. Hopefully whoever was here left a little food in the pantry.”

  After several trips between the Jeep and the garage, Billy shut off the lights and rolled the door back down. He locked both sides and accompanied us back to the truck. There were only a couple of plastic bins left in the bed aside from the spare tires, gas cans, and extra tools. He took a bin, handed the other to Jake, and advised us to leave the rest for the next morning. The bins we carried back to the house were deposited in the main entryway along with the others that had been left by the front door from earlier. With that, Billy slapped his hands together a few times and made for the kitchen.

  Jake followed him into the back area but I made a detour to the bedroom recently claimed by Elizabeth. She was going through the drawers of a highboy dresser along the far wall.

  “Hey, what are you doing?!” I blurted. We were clearly operating from different assumptions; to me, we were guests in Billy’s home and to her, she was surveying her new domain.

  She looked up at me with no hint of guilt or concern, showing that she actually hadn’t been snooping around. “I thought I could put some of my things in these drawers,” she said. “There’s nothing in them, see?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s ask Billy about it. I suppose we’ll have to get you some more clothes too. You’re only going to get bigger.”

  “I’m pretty big already,” she said proudly.

  “Okay, Little Miss Big Girl. We’re getting dinner ready in the kitchen. You wanna come hang out?”

  “Maybe later,” she said. “I want to see what else my room has.”

  “Ugh, okay. Just…try not to get into anything that looks like you should stay away from it.”

  I left her room and went back to the kitchen. I saw that the rear of the house opened up into another common area, more private than the front room. To the left was a good sized kitchen (not enormous but plenty of room for four people to move around in it) with an island. The coloring followed what I had already seen through the rest of the house, with rich woods everywhere. To the right was a family room-style living area with couches and a now useless TV as the dominant focal point.

  Jake and Billy were standing over by the kitchen island; the latter had a little propane grill set up on the island over which a pot of water was set. Next to the pot were a small box of pasta and a jar of red sauce.

  “OH, holy crap, spaghetti?! I don’t think I’d planned on seeing that again, ever.” I said as he ground salt into the water.

  “Yeah, don’t get used to it, probably,” Billy said, stirring the pot with a large spoon. “Longer shelf life food is still good right now but that won’t last. Think of it like the gasoline: best to just consume as much of it as we can right now before it all goes bad.” He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “So, I believe you wanted an explanation as to how a seemingly rational man goes bugnuts and starts preparing for the world to explode.”

  “Something like that,” I chuckled.

  “Well, Jake got a part of this explanation but I don’t think even he realized the lengths I’d gone to-“

  “I did not,” Jake chimed in while nodding.

  “-but the simple answer is: it was all a hobby.”

  “A…hobby?” I asked.

  “Sure. One that creeps up on you.” Billy walked over to a pantry, retrieved a bottle of water, and had a drink. “Like I told Jake, I was always preaching self-reliance with my people back home, which was an attitude that bled over into my personal life. At first, it started with the normal stuff, right? I was out in California, so first I had earthquake kits in my house and vehicles. The kit in my house had food and water enough to last three days, or just long enough for emergency services to come in and bail me out if we got a really nasty shaker, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Right, well, then I witnessed how well emergency services did bailing people out of Hurricane Katrina. A few years later I saw them get it wrong again in New York with Hurricane Sandy. The point was that three days (the common doctrine I had been raised on) clearly wouldn’t get the job
done. During the time I was coming to this revelation, I was also thinking about my retirement.”

  “Huh,” muttered Jake. “You don’t look old enough to retire.”

  Billy raised his bottle to Jake in a mock salute. “Younger than most but I’ve still been working my ass off in one form or another since I was thirteen. I was looking forward to slowing down. Anyway, I began work on this place here, oh, I guess four years ago now. A significant wad of my life savings went into this place, even at Wyoming prices, and as I was building it, those ideas of self-reliance were carried forward, resulting in the Butler building off the side of the house.” He stopped talking long enough to dump the pasta in and stir the pot some more. “I was following Mormon principles by this point.”

  “Mormon?” Jake asked.

  “A year’s worth of everything, huh?” I asked.

  Billy pointed at me. “She’s got it.” He looked over to Jake. “The Mormons were a big inspiration in what I was trying to do. The concept of self-reliance is encoded into their faith. They counseled their own to be ready for anything, with supplies laid by for various contingencies starting with the typical three day kits – essentially the bug-out bag concept. On top of that, they kept a three month supply of everyday necessities and a one year supply of long life dried goods like grains, beans, dried milk, and so on. They also stockpiled things like gasoline, tools, and clothes, basically any of the stuff that you can’t easily make for yourself under reasonable circumstances.”

  “That’s quite a thing,” said an impressed Jake. “You’re saying all of them were doing that?”

  “Oh, well, they were supposed to,” Billy shrugged. “I’m sure you had your sandbaggers in their group just the same as you have in any other. But again, this idea of preparedness is baked into their cultural identity, you see? By and large, these people were just about ready for anything.”