Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1)

by Joshua Gayou

  “Weren’t ready for the Plague,” I said.

  “Okay, almost anything. Be fair: no one was ready for that.” He turned off the grill and retrieved a colander from an overhead cabinet, which he placed in the sink. Protecting his hands with a dish towel, he poured the spaghetti in to drain.

  “Sorry, there’s no butter for this,” he said almost to himself. “Still deciding if I leave the fridge where it is or get rid of it. Takes up a ton of space to not be doing anything.”

  He transferred the spaghetti to another bowl, opened the jar of sauce, and poured half of it in. He then looked up, shrugged to himself, and poured in the rest, most likely realizing that he had no cold storage for the opened jar.

  He began to stir the bowl. “Anyway, I followed their lead and ended up here. This was all over time, you understand. I did pretty well for myself. I wasn’t rolling in millions’ worth of cash or anything…in fact, most of the money we made at the casino either went straight for the betterment of the tribe and our lands or was just reinvested back into the casino itself. I did earn a comfortable salary during my time running the place, though. Had some luck with my investments. Even so,” he gestured all around at the house with a hand, “doing all of this at once would have hurt. What you’re seeing is the result of several years’ worth of planning, saving, and building.”

  “Billy,” I said while placing a hand on his shoulder.

  He looked surprised at the gesture. “Yes?”

  “On behalf of Jake and myself, I want to thank and congratulate you for being an obsessive doomsday prepper. It turns out the lunatics were right. We concede.”

  He rolled his eyes and smiled. Lifting the bowl, he moved over to the dinner table dividing up the space between the kitchen and the family room. “Hey, Girly!” he called. “Come have some dinner!”

  “Silverware?” Jake asked.

  “The drawer to the left of the sink,” answered Billy. The sound of metallic jangling came from Jake’s direction while I looked into the pantry for more water. The pantry itself was looking bare – there was a half-empty flat of bottled water on the floor, some jarred and canned goods interspersed throughout, and an opened box of crackers. I grabbed some water bottles and went to sit at the table as Elizabeth came wandering in. Billy pulled a handful of plates from a cabinet and set them out at one end of the table. We sat down and he began to serve out spaghetti to all of us.

  “Like I was saying,” Billy continued, “the hobby started with this concept of food supplies but the more I did, the more I thought of that I could be doing. Suppose I needed something while basic services and infrastructure was down? I could survive here on the food I’d packed in for plenty of time but I might not be able to get my hands on new things that I needed, so I added a woodshop. It had the added benefit that I’d be able to fix things that broke as well.”

  He stopped talking to have a bite. I was shocked to see that a significant portion of the food on my plate had disappeared down my mouth. After weeks of nothing but MREs, canned goods, and prepackaged foods like protein bars, a simple plate of pasta was gourmet eating.

  “Adding in a new feature or capability always exposed another area I was lacking. I added a woodshop but that really only covered the ability to work with wooden things. I should add a machine or metal shop, right? Well, I never got to that – it was just on the list of things to do. I put solar on the Butler Building so that I could power everything in the event of a grid failure, which made me realize that the main house would be S.O.L. I had planned to put some solar on this house as well but just didn’t get to that in time. I had to compromise.”

  “Compromise how?” Jake asked.

  “Propane generator. There are ten, one hundred pound propane tanks lined up along the wall out in that garage; I’ll point them out to you the next time we’re in there. You store propane as a liquid and one tank holds almost 24 gallons. It’s something like 270 times more compact as a liquid, so there’s a ton of gas out there. I don’t recall the math to determine how many joules of energy are stored in one full tank but the answer is a lot. The very best thing is that propane won’t decay like gasoline or diesel will. The stuff will last forever. Our only challenge is finding more when we run out. Our limitation there is that we have to count on all the tanks and storage facilities failing over time, leaking it all away into the atmosphere. I don’t know when that will happen but, when it does, we won’t be getting any more of the stuff until someone figures out how to pull it out of the ground and bottle it again.”

  “Does that mean we could watch movies on the TV in here?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Well, yes, but I don’t think we want to burn up our emergency energy watching movies,” Billy said. At her disappointed expression, he quickly amended: “Hey, maybe we have movie nights every so often, though. We can’t be running stuff around the clock but we’ll have special nights sometimes for movies, okay?”

  Elizabeth seemed to think about this compromise for a moment; finally smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Is it alright if I have some more?” I asked, gesturing at the bowl.

  Jake sat up and looked over the bowl at my plate. “Damn, dude.”

  “It’s GOOD,” I barked defensively.

  “We should eat it all. Anything we don’t finish will just go to waste,” Billy said. Everyone spooned up a second helping.

  After a few more bites, Billy spoke while chewing, unable to contain himself long enough to swallow first. “You know, the other thing about the solar on the garage: it’s not getting the best efficiency. Too many trees around it. Another one of my projects was going to be to take down the trees closest to it. This has the added benefit of providing fresh lumber for anything that may need to be built.”

  “Oh, what do we need to build?” I asked.

  “Anything really. Another building, tanning racks, livestock pens and fences… We’ll think of more over time. A new project always starts with someone saying ‘You know what would make things better around here?’”

  “Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Jake said.

  Conversation around the table stopped at the implied meaning behind Jake’s statement. Finally, Billy put his fork down and looked at Jake. “We do. Think you might stick around to help?”

  Jake chewed for a moment while he considered this. “Well, I did help you get here but there’s obviously still much to do. I can stick around for a while to help you get settled in.”

  “Okay,” Billy said as he wrapped another bundle of pasta around his fork. “I can work with that.”

  14 – Good Times

  Amanda

  I’d love to report that the next few days were happy ones but life is rarely a simple, single-emotion experience. There were definitely periods of happiness but, more importantly, it was also the first time Elizabeth and I had felt truly safe in months. Now that I wasn’t constantly on edge all the time, I finally had the opportunity to get inside my own head to process the grief over everything we had lost, everything we had been through, and (perhaps the worst) some of the things I’d done to survive. The others seemed to sense the need I had to work through these things and gave me a wide berth when there wasn’t work to be done. I spent a lot of time walking by myself around the property within the vicinity of The Bowl (the term I had begun to use for the grounds on which the cabin was built and the surrounding valley almost completely encircled by mountains). Billy told me that the area contained within the valley was a very rough and irregular square mile – he had purchased only a portion of the area when he acquired the land but the concepts of such things like property lines seemed to lack relevance anymore; we just looked at the whole thing as our territory.

  During my walks, the guys both insisted that I go armed as we were all still thinking about the squatters who had been here before us and wondering if they would return. I didn’t want to lug my rifle around, bullpup or not, so we compromised: I wore a Glock at all times, taking it off
only to sleep at night but keeping it at my bed side. Billy had a Glock 17 in one of his safes in the garage that I preferred to the 19 we had out on the road. It felt a lot more solid and substantial in my hands and it also had some kind of fancy glow in the dark sights that Billy had installed after he purchased it. He said they were tritium, which meant about as much to me as if he had said they were super awesome unobtanium – all I knew was that I could see them in the dark and they were a lot easier for me to line up than the 19 with its flat, white dot sights. It also came with a belt and molded Kydex holster that rode comfortably on my thigh, putting it right under my hand when my arm hung naturally at my side.

  Those walks were a big part of what helped me to work through my issues and they are a practice that I continue to this day. Communal living is close living and I’ve found that a regular dose of solitude plays a large role in keeping folks from clawing each other’s eyes out. Gibs likes to say that I’m “going out past the wire”, the old jarhead.

  In the evenings I would spend a bit of time sitting on the porch while the sun went down. The others always detected when I was back, indicating that they were keeping a steady eye out for me, which made me feel good. Lizzy would come to join me around this time. Shortly after she arrived, Billy usually came out to bring us both a mug of hot chocolate like an old grandmother. He would then light some candles for us to see in the failing light and ask to join us, to which we always agreed. We would chat about nothing particularly important and sometimes plan out the following day.

  The days themselves were not just filled with idle soul searching; there was plenty of work to keep us busy. Every day brought a new scavenging run of the surrounding areas, with the rarity of what we were going after dictating how far we would have to push out. Priority one was to get ourselves a decent gasoline reserve. We could all feel the clock ticking on unleaded gas and we wanted to make as much use of those vehicles as we could while they would still run. I personally wanted to drive my vehicle as much as possible. I really loved that Jeep; it was my first new, truly nice car and I only got to use it for that first year after the fall of everything before the gas expired (we managed to extend the life of gasoline with the use of fuel stabilizers – we found box after box of the stuff on one of our earliest runs to an auto shop).

  Before we could go out for gas, we needed containers to store it all in, so our very first run involved heading down to the hardware store and other home improvement stores to get as many plastic fifty-five gallon drums as we could get our hands on. Jake and Billy made that run in the Super Duty with the trailer while I stayed home with Lizzy. We were learning that our small number was going to pose a challenge to our ability to effectively gather supplies in an efficient manner. The evidence of the squatters on the property cemented into our minds that concepts like enforceable property rights were a thing of the past. Our “ownership” of a thing depended completely on our ability to defend that thing from other people. If we left any of it unattended, there was nothing at all to stop others from coming in and taking it. This was, in fact, the very thing we were doing as we ventured out to gather supplies. We didn’t know if we were taking anything that someone else was depending on to be there when they returned to it. We saw something we needed and there was nobody there to claim it; we took it.

  After the plastic barrels were secured with the surplus diesel supply transferred into them, Jake and I went out hunting for gas the following day in the truck while Billy stayed home with Elizabeth. The truck bed was empty of everything at this point with the exception of one of the now cleaned steel barrels, every gas can we owned, the drip pans, the jack and jack stands, and the mallet and taper punch. The mission here was to get as much gas as we could as fast as we could.

  “Fast” turned out to be a relative concept in this case. Finding areas congested with cars was easy; accessing them all as they became bunched up and stacked bumper to bumper less so. The fastest approach by far was to park the Dodge up as close to the target vehicles as possible, which often meant driving onto curbs or sidewalks. In those cases where we couldn’t do that, there was no choice but to walk gas cans into the tangle of vehicles and walk them back out to the truck to empty into the barrel; a trip that got a little further with each gas tank that we tapped.

  We had a fifty-five gallon drum to fill. The average car gas tank holds between ten and fifteen gallons but the cars never had full tanks. Sometimes we got lucky and pulled as much as five gallons out of one car but most of the time it was one gallon here, two there, and so on. Very rarely did it take more than one gas can to empty a tank – we were far more likely to get a tank that was bone dry.

  Dry tanks were particularly frustrating. We could tell if a tank had anything in it by banging on it but, unless we were dealing with a truck or SUV, we sometimes had to go to the trouble to jack the vehicle up onto stands so that we could crawl underneath and give the tank a whack. All of this work added to the total time we had to spend out there. It took us some time to figure out that a vehicle with a corpse in the driver’s seat was more likely than others to have a dry tank; many people seemed to have died in their cars while trying to leave the city. Their cars just stayed in park and idled down to nothing after the driver expired.

  All things considered, getting that fifty-five gallon drum filled took all freaking day.

  The next trip was all about clothes. Specifically, Billy didn’t have any clothes for women or little girls and all the stuff he did have wouldn’t fit Jake because it was too big for him. I was also specifically on the lookout for feminine supplies of all varieties (razors, sanitary items, lotions, and such). This was a bit easier to handle and required less drudgery.

  Jake and I took the Jeep on that trip. There were several good options for clothing stores in Jackson that Billy was able to mark out for us on a map; all of which were, unfortunately, in the heart of the town where traffic pileups began to make the roads impassable. Even so, we managed to find a workable path near enough to Teton Kids that we didn’t feel like we would be leaving the Jeep in a completely unguarded situation. We also learned that going house to house was a very viable solution that had the added benefit of allowing us to scavenge other goods while we were there (in one house we even found a nice bolt action hunting rifle, a few boxes of ammunition, and a heavy compound bow with broad head arrows). Going house to house did have the drawback, however, of putting us face to face with the very unsavory remains of the former residents; many of these incidents were heartbreaking. I remember one particular house in which I found my way into a bedroom with the remains of a child laying in his or her bed. Next to this, an adult corpse sat in a chair, bent over with its head resting on its hands on the edge of the bed. The child was very close to Elizabeth in size. It was unclear who had died first: child or parent.

  I left the house and Jake had me spend the rest of the day standing watch outside with the Jeep while he went room to room in subsequent homes, for which I was grateful.

  The next trip out focused on food. Water was thankfully under control due to both the well out behind the house and the stream running through the bowl but food became a constant concern for us. Our current stores (partly what we had brought with us on the road but mostly the provisions Billy had stashed away before we ever met him) would carry us through six months if we were careful but we knew we wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever. We could only go out to scavenge food so many times before we completely exhausted anything that was left over. Our plan was to stockpile as much long life provisions as we could up front in a frenzy of concentrated gathering. This would provide us with the breathing room we needed to come up with a more permanent solution.

  Billy spent a lot of time pouring through his books on the subject. For all of his interest in self-reliance and preparation, it seems he had never counted on things going so far south that basic services never came back. There was always this inner belief that infrastructure, agriculture, shipping, and emergency services woul
d make a comeback after some reasonable period of time (the concept of “reasonable” being relative to the severity of the disaster that had preceded it). Though he had purchased books on the subject due to a broad interest in the content, he never really believed long term survival would depend on the ability to maintain a subsistence farm indefinitely. He suddenly found himself needing to play catch-up with regard to such problems as production area per person, crop rotation, irrigation, and seasonal crops. Foods like potatoes and beets were planned to be our mainstays but we weren’t convinced that these were crops we could keep going all year round without first building some sort of enclosed green house; the winters in Wyoming were bitter and, unfortunately, the growing season in our area was one of the shortest in the state. Billy spent hours reading through several books, taking notes, and devising planting schedules in a notebook.

  An additional problem to all of this was the fact that we actually needed something to plant. We couldn’t just point at a section of ground and decree that “here there shall grow carrots”. We actually needed some carrots to stick in the ground. When Jake mentioned this at one point, Billy responded by digging a big whiteboard out of a corner in the garage (which had become our staging area for mission-based tasks like scavenging or work projects in the immediate area), hung it up on the wall, and began to divide it into sections with a dry erase marker. Within each section, he added a heading such as “Clothes”, “Shelter”, “Food”, “Weapons”, “Building”, and so on. In the square for food, he began to write entries like “potatoes”, “carrots”, “beets”, and “corn”.

  He turned back to us and said, “The fundamental problem is that to plant a crop of something, you need a bit of that something to start with. That means we’ve got to go out and find this stuff to get started. Now, we can grow just about anything from seeds if we can find the seeds, but we may also be able to just find and transplant living vegetation. There are farms all around the area which may still have viable sources right in the ground. I say “may” because I don’t know where this state was in the harvest cycle when the Plague hit critical mass. Either way, we’ll need to scout and see what we can find. We’ll also be able to look for packets of dried seeds in places like home improvement stores. The people who lived in this state tended toward a self-sufficient nature; there will be all sorts of businesses out there that catered to the home farmer. Keep your eyes open for anything that says “Hydroponics” in the sign. Places like those should be goldmines.”