Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1)

by Joshua Gayou

  The sound of breaking glass came from one of the bedrooms on the side of the house. A few seconds later, a large rock flew through the sliding glass door, sending shards of glass all throughout the combined rooms of kitchen, dining room, and TV common area. The island behind which I hid protected me from the worst of it.

  A shadow appeared in the wreckage of the door frame even while glass was still falling to the floor. It was hunched over and moving fast. I followed the shape with my rifle and fired off several shots, all of which missed (I hadn’t yet learned at this point how hard it was to shoot something moving laterally across my field of view) but the sound of shots fired coming from his right startled the intruder, who drew up suddenly and swung in my direction. This was all I needed to line a bead up on him and I put rounds into him until he fell.

  I recalled hearing the window of the bedroom shatter but I stayed where I was with the barrel pointed back out the frame of the obliterated glass door, wondering if the window had just been a diversion. My answer came when a single gunshot sounded from the direction of the front door, followed by grunting and snarling. I heard the sound of furniture being displaced and the thin, high pitched tinkle of small glass breaking. I rushed around the useless refrigerator and back into the main hall leading to the entryway, only to see Jake in his original position over Billy where I had left him. I could just make out a pair of boots extending from the bedroom hall behind him. They were on their heels with the toes pointed up. I grabbed one of the many flashlights that we kept throughout the house and thumbed it on as I ran over.

  The last man to have broken into the house lay on his back with Jake’s Ka-Bar sticking out of his throat. It was buried to the hilt.

  Jake looked up at me with an expression of complete hopelessness hanging on his face. “He’s going, Amanda. I can’t stop him – he’s fucking going!”

  I ran over and kneeled by Billy. His eyes were shut tight and he was breathing shallow as if it hurt him to take in any air at all. He reached up with a shaking left hand and wrapped it up in the collar of Jake’s T-shirt. He growled and said, “I need you to read the Iliad.”

  “What?!” Jake barked. He laughed, sounding hysterical. “What the hell are you talking about, you crazy old…”

  Billy’s hand twisted in Jake’s collar and pulled hard. Half of the front of Jake’s shirt tore away from his chest. “Don’t argue with me, God damn you. You promise.”

  “I promise!” Jake blurted, not wanting to deny him anything. “You have my word. Immediately.”

  Billy sighed and let his hand go loose. It stayed tangled up in Jake’s shirt, limply hanging off the ground. “Good. That’s good, Whitey.” He rolled his head over to the right, looking up at me. “You…you take ca…”

  The last of his breath escaped in a sigh as he died.

  -

  The next few days were spent recovering from the fight. On the night that Billy died Jake drug all those we had killed from Howard’s group around the back of the house out of sight and hauled Billy out on the porch, covering him with a sheet. He did this while I opened the garage to find Elizabeth, who had been crying and near panic. I did my best to calm her fears before trying to find a way to explain the unexplainable to her. She became even worse at that point, running out of the garage and towards the house to her room. When she got there, she screamed in horror; it was her window which had been broken by the intruder. I caught up to her, collected her, and took her up to Jake’s room. I finished the night by helping Jake drag an old sheet of plywood out of the garage and to the back of the house, which we used to board up the broken glass door. It wasn’t a very good job (we knew we’d have to clean it up later) but it would do to keep animals out of the house overnight.

  When we were done, we both cleaned the blood from our hands using some rain barrel water and a five gallon bucket outside. I went numbly upstairs to Jake’s room to sleep with Lizzy. I believe he spent the night on a couch downstairs, not willing to claim Billy’s room.

  Jake spent the following morning digging graves while I went through Howard’s trucks to see what they had. Among the usual supplies was an acetylene torch and igniter which I suspected they had planned to use in gaining entry to the garage. There was also a dead buck in one of the truck beds, most of which would go to waste as none of us knew how to properly dress a deer or preserve the meat without any cold storage at the time. I stored the various supplies in piled sections in the garage, to stash later in more permanent areas. The firearms and ammunition from the group were collected and deposited on the upstairs level of the garage by the safe.

  With this done, I went outside to find Jake, who was just finishing the mass grave he had excavated for Howard and his six men two hundred yards away from the house. It was not terribly large but it was deep enough and would accommodate them all when stacked in on top of each other. I pulled down the tailgate of the truck in which Jake had transported the bodies, took one of them by the shoulders, and began to pull. He came up next to me to help.

  We had them all covered with tamped down dirt within an hour. “Thanks,” Jake said. “Ready to go say goodbye?”

  “No, but let’s do it anyway.”

  We drove back to the house and parked next to our growing collection of vehicles (the hulking Ford was still stored in the garage) and I helped Jake dig a grave for Billy close by under a large fir tree. We laid him into the ground; covered him over.

  Jake briefly rested a hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ll go get Lizzy.” I worried for her as he left, fearing that she would regress into silence again the same way she had done when Eddie died. To my surprise, she emerged from the house with Jake not long after. She was holding his hand; in her other hand she was clutching something fiercely. As she came closer I could just make out the brass end of Billy’s old folding pocket knife peeking out of her fist. I realized Jake must have gone through Billy’s pockets and, finding this one personal item, gave it to Elizabeth to remember him by. I met his eyes and mouthed the words, “Thank you,” to him. He nodded and came to stand beside her before the tree.

  “This tree is where Billy has come to rest,” he told her. “If you ever feel like you need to talk to him, you come out here, sit under this tree, and talk.”

  “Will he hear me?” she asked. She was crying silently and just able to control her voice enough to speak.

  “I honestly don’t know,” answered Jake. “But it’s what I intend to do whenever I’m missing him. If there’s a chance he can hear I figure it’s worth trying.”

  I will never forget how they looked when he bent and kissed her softly on the top of her head: my new broken family. He left her there alone and came back to stand next to me.

  “She’ll be okay,” he said. “You both will.”

  When? I thought but didn’t say.

  As though reading my mind, he said, “Tomorrow or the next day. Eventually. There’s much to do. Plenty to keep occupied. There’s always another problem to solve in this world.”

  “Jake,” I said. The tone of my voice caused him to look over at me. “Don’t leave us. I know you were planning on it at some point…whenever it was that you thought we would all be settled in and safe, I guess. I don’t know why or what it is that’s driving you but just…don’t okay? I’m too exhausted to come up with an argument. Just stay here. We need you.”

  Jake looked back at Elizabeth standing under Billy’s tree. He drew in a heavy breath and blew it out through pursed lips. I made ready to repeat myself, trying to conjure up in my mind the magic combination of words that would make him understand. Make him see. I was distracted by the thought of the protective vest that I wore the night before and how it had been unnecessary; no one had gotten off a single shot in my direction. I thought about how it would have saved Billy’s life and fought back my own tears. I began to panic inside. I thought: I can’t convince him. I can’t even string two sentences together right now.

  Finally, he surprised me by nodding.

/>   “Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

  Epilogue

  Gibs

  Blake Gibson (“Gibs” to his friends) wiped a forearm across his eyes and blinked as he hauled on the oversized wheel of the school bus, navigating a path up the cluttered debris of garbage and derelict vehicles on Wyoming’s Northbound 191. He hated that God damned bus. It was a big pain in his chapped, finely aged ass to maneuver, was ridiculously loud, and keeping the tank topped off was about as easy as keeping his unreasonable cow of a second ex-wife satisfied to any reasonable degree. He would have given anything to trade down to something more manageable; one of those Fiat clown cars, a motorcycle, even a fucking go-kart. Anything would have been preferable to a massive, fuel guzzling, bright-ass yellow, “Hey-You-Guys!” school bus.

  Unfortunately, the damned thing had ended up being a bit of a necessity. No less than fifteen people had barnacled themselves to his hide (man, woman, and child of every age) and this had turned out to be the most efficient way to transport them. They had initially attempted a convoy of several vehicles but that had only worked about half as well as a dick sandwich. It turned out that the time required for the activity of refueling vehicles actually scaled up when the number of vehicles increased – they had eventually spent more time topping off tanks than they had making progress. A compromise was found: this fucking bus. Sure, it was a whore to weave around through all the pileups and the gas tank was virtually bottomless but the benefits seemed to outweigh the negatives in the long run.

  Gibs looked up in the long overhead rearview mirror after getting around a particularly nasty knot, having rolled his left rear wheel off the pavement and into the dirt to do so. The bus had lurched sickeningly in that direction, threatening to topple and roll down a shallow hill into a ditch. “We all good back there?” he called.

  He was met with one or two smiles. Even Barbara, a little old grandmotherly type, met him with a thumbs-up and a wink.

  He nodded and put his attention back on the road. “Rah,” he muttered to himself.

  He didn’t know where the hell he was going nor did he have any clue what he was looking for. They had been on the road for weeks now, looking for somewhere to settle down, always finding some reason to flee hopeful looking places. He had lost two of his people in the process of escaping Denver; picked up three new ones not long after. Every day they pushed out a little further looking for that green grass on the other side of the fence, all the while their diminishing food and water a constant worry on Gibs’s tired, overburdened mind. As it happened, the time required in the process of scavenging supplies also scaled up with the number of people for which he had to provide, and some of his people were too infirm to get out there and dig with him.

  Sixteen people including him, two rifles, a pistol, and a couple of boxes of bullets between them all. Fuck.

  Gibs wiped his forearm across his eyes and blinked again, shaking his head to combat a lack of sleep. Off to the side, a sign approached on his right. It was as blurry as if he had killed off a bottle of Jack that morning, which he hadn’t. Good sweet Christ but he’d butter up a chimpanzee’s nuts for a cup of coffee. He’d even drink that shitty Folger’s crystals garbage.

  He focused hard enough that a headache bloomed in the center of his forehead, forcing the sign to resolve.

  “Jackson, 65 miles”

  “Jackson,” he thought. He liked the sound of that. It brought to mind a favorite Johnny Cash song of his. “Screw it,” he thought. “Jackson it is.”

  He repositioned himself in his seat and sat up straight. He lifted up his right hand and waved forward, which conjured his friend Tom Davidson at his side, who he insisted on referring to only as Davidson.

  “Think we’ll have a look at this Jackson town coming up, see what we find. Maybe we hunker in there.”

  Davidson slapped him on the shoulder and nodded. “Right on. I’ll let the others know.” He turned and made his way back down the aisle, holding onto the seat backs as he went.

  Gibs smiled to himself; never much of a singer, he began to tunelessly chant:

  “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout. We’ve been talkin’ ‘bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out. I’m go-in’ to Jackson, I’m gonna mess around. Yeah, I’m go-in’ to Jacks-DAH, sonofafuckbitchcocksucker!”

  He hauled on the wheel again, narrowly missing a washout on the road by scant inches. He got the bus straightened out on the other side miraculously with only a minor squealing of tires, the backend fishtailing in sickening fashion. He coughed and took several deep breaths to calm himself. Jesus!

  Having thus regained control, he couldn’t help but finish his initial thought: “Look out Jackson town.”

  A Note on the Narrative

  This completes the first volume of the history of the Jackson Commune, comprising the early days of its founders, how they found each other, and how they came to settle there.

  I have taken some small liberty in the narrative flow of this document for the purposes of grammar and readability. This was done mostly to help obscure the usual ticks and placeholders that people employ in common spoken language (Jake Martin tends to make frequent use of the words “right?” and “you know?” in his conversation, whereas Amanda uses variations of “like” or “I was like” often). In transcribing my notes into a final written form, I found early on that such usage would have to be cleaned up and elected to do so in favor of readability, accepting the minor hit to accuracy. I have secured the approval from my interview subjects before making any changes to their narrative; the initial intent and feeling behind their words has, I feel, been carried forward into the final product.

  -B.C.