Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  Commune

  Book Two

  By Joshua Gayou

  © 2017 Joshua Gayou.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions, see the contact form of the author’s website.

  Visit the author’s website at joshuagayou.wordpress.com

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to my wife, Jennifer, and my friends, Dusty Sharp and Scott Brandt. Anything that I got right in here, I lay it at their feet.

  Contents

  A Note on the Language

  Prologue

  1 – Gibson’s Fieldtrip

  2 – Picking up Strays

  3 – Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus

  4 – The Horse

  5 – Pushing Out

  6 – Escape from Denver

  7 - Backbone

  8 - Amway

  9 – Mouths to Feed

  10 – Proposals and Opportunities

  11 – The Sleepover

  12 – Interviews, One

  13 – Interviews, Two

  14 – Interviews, Three

  15 – Shelters and Shitters

  16 – Pissing Match

  17 – Home Improvement

  18 – Range Master

  19 – Radios

  20 – Squared Away

  21 – The Smoke Pit

  22 – The Oregon Trail

  23 – Powder Keg

  24 – Barn Dance

  25 – Weaponized Super Duty

  26 – Interloper

  27 – Keep Driving

  28 – The Trial

  29 – Apocalyptic Road Pirates

  30 – Wang’s a Bad-ass?

  31 – Gates of Fire

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Language

  A great deal of the research I conducted leading up to writing this book had to do specifically with the character of Blake Gibson. Namely, it was critical to me that I got him right. Owing to an intense and abiding gratitude that I personally feel to the men and women serving in all branches of the United States military, it was a key mission that I set for myself in this story that Gibs not feel like a cartoon. For better or worse, I wanted to do what I could to get as close as I could to a real life Marine. I wanted SSgt Gibs to feel like someone any real veteran might recognize.

  Being a civilian, I had a lot of work to do in order to get him authentic, not the least of which had to do with his speech. For better or worse, Marines curse up a blue streak. Not only that, they do so in some of the most creatively poetic ways I’ve ever encountered. If you, kind reader, are the type who might take exception to such language, I feel it’s only right to warn you right now: Gibs is a bit of a hayride. I’m accepting no complaints on the matter as well; Marines curse, people. This is just the reality of their nature.

  I feel it is also necessary to state here that Marines have several common curses and sayings that are universal to the culture. They all know who Jody is, that bastard; they know how to skate; they’ve all broken it down Barney-style; they all know that field days suck ass. There is a whole language unto itself within their group that has evolved from simply existing in their common family. The act of service in the Corps can be and often is punctuated with misery, and Devil Dogs since the beginning have used this shared condition as a means of bonding. The rest of us are just outsiders looking in.

  I wish I could say that all of the dialog written for Gibs is one hundred percent unique but that would be a lie. The simple fact is that even Marine profanity has evolved and normalized over time; had I written all of Gibs’s lines on my own, he would have sounded like a foul-mouthed civilian…and he needs to sound like a foul-mouthed Marine. Because of this, some of his expressions and stories are lifted directly from the stories of real Marines who served; those who I have spoken with one-on-one as well as those who have published their stories on line, either in blogs or in simple forum posts.

  It is my humble hope that my readers forgive me this minor bit of cheating; I considered accuracy to be far more important than ego in this regard.

  Josh Gayou

  Prologue

  This document comprises the second book of the history of the Jackson Commune, covering its growth from a small homestead to a collective of survivors occupying an increasing footprint in the mile-diameter valley that we have unofficially named “The Bowl”.

  As in the first book, these stories have been collected through interviews with the people who live here and are presented in narrative form for the sake of readability (for my original, unfiltered interview notes, see Jacob Martin’s library – all notes utilize a basic keyscript shorthand, which should be readable with little effort).

  -B.C.

  1 – Gibson’s Fieldtrip

  My understanding is that Blake Gibson’s (who everybody just calls “Gibs”) arrival was something of an unsettling experience for everyone involved. I was not present for this event; I showed up sometime later. From his perspective, he was shepherding a collection of diverse people across the country in a school bus searching for a safe haven, or at least some place they could make into a safe haven. From the perspectives of Jacob “Jake” Martin, Amanda Contreras, and Elizabeth Contreras, they had only recently defended their home from the incursion of a large group of squatters, losing their good friend Billy in the process.

  It is fair to say that relations were tense in those early days. Gibs and many of the people who came with him (such as George, Barbara, and Oscar) have since become integral members of the community, of course, but this was a state that had to be actively pursued by the constituent members (against their own instincts in many cases). There were some key decision points along the way that would play a major role in defining the intra-social relationships of our members as well as what I would personally define as the “karmic balance” of the whole. As is typically the case in life, the answers were rarely black and white.

  Gibs has found a niche for himself in the group as the head of security with a secondary function as liaison between us and the United States Military Remnant under Commander Warren (being a Marine veteran, he speaks their language a lot better than any of the rest of us). In his mid-forties, he stands at six foot two, is fair complexioned, and what hair remains to him is a trim, sandy brown. He maintains a clean boxed beard, some of it grey, and has the physical build of the perpetually thin – meaning that any dietary struggles on his part would have been along the lines of putting weight on rather than trying to work it off.

  He is consumed by an inner, frenetic energy that seeks expression in various ways. The man simply cannot sit still. If he is in a chair, one of his legs must be bouncing. If he is standing, he is shifting from foot to foot or continually walking forward and back for a few steps. When backing up, he tends to run into things that are behind him (often more than once on the same occasion). It takes a directed effort of will for him to put his hands in his pockets (I’ve seen him do it – he jams his balled-up fists in and grimaces).

  Gibs is an eloquent man for the most part, well-spoken and well-read. Even so, it is clear that he has devoted a significant portion of his life to learning how to swear in the most creative (often times surprising) manner, elevating the practice to his own personal art form. An old world chivalry has been programmed into his psyche, both from his time in the Marine Corps and from his mother, who he dearly loves and idolizes (referring to her alternately as “Mom”, “The Kraken”, and “Queen Killjoy”). Because of this, his usual brand of profane eloquence is reduced to stuttering sentence fragments when he is in the company of women or children; hal
f of his vocabulary is rendered off limits. In such company he often lapses into official military-speak – the kind of procedural dialect one used to encounter when speaking with active duty service members or police officers on the clock.

  Gibs lives in a fifth wheel, a forty foot Forest River Sandpiper, which is positioned fifty yards northeast of Jake’s cabin (to the right of the cabin, essentially, if you stand in front of it facing the entrance). The fifth wheel was a special project executed between Gibs and Jake; Gibs discovered it on a particular excursion into Jackson and was unable to forget it once he saw it. Jake was happy enough to go out with him in the Ford and bring it back. He parked it fifty yards out from the main property and embedded back into the tree line. He stated that he preferred the arrangement, noting that it would, “keep the riff-raff off the front lawn.” He refers to his trailer as Casa de Redneck.

  Sitting with him at the dinette inside the impressively appointed camper (it has no less than five pop-outs, two bedrooms, two entertainment centers, two full bathrooms, and an interior and exterior kitchen), I arrange my notebook, pens, and a delicious cup of coffee that Gibs has provided from his personal stores. A self-professed coffee addict, he regularly uses his clout to get the product bumped to the top of any scavenging list, whether it be ground or unground beans, instant, or any of the paraphernalia necessary to brew the beverage. He never has to push very hard to ensure that coffee is looked for on our excursions; he is well loved and we are happy to make the effort.

  Gibs takes a sip from his own mug, leans back in his chair, and says, “Well, what would you like me to talk about?”

  “Anything, really,” I answer. “I’ve found that people often only need to pick a place to start. Once they’ve found that, everything else flows naturally. Just start with how you arrived here.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Gibs

  I want to say we came rolling through here just under two years ago. I’m not certain exactly how long it’s been now…maybe a year and a half. I don’t spend much time looking at calendars anymore. But let’s call it a year and a half for shits. And “rolling” is probably too charitable a word. We were essentially limping along on fumes in a last-ditch desperation effort. Things were pretty bad when we ran into Jake.

  We had been driving around in one of those big, yellow Laidlaw school buses; me and fifteen other people. We punched into Wyoming by way of Colorado looking for somewhere safe to settle. Initially, we had looked into Denver to see what we could find but things didn’t go well there. I lost some people.

  We were in the area on George’s (that’s George Oliver) advice. He had been with me since Texas along with Tom Davidson. In a discussion we’d had very early on, he explained how the entire United States east of Abilene as well as Arizona, the coast of California, and up into Washington and Oregon were basically pockmarked with nuclear goddamned power plants. Now, we had never heard any news about a meltdown in those early days and I guess the emergency shutdown systems in the American plants were pretty good but I’m old enough to remember Chernobyl. In fact, Fukushima was our most recent demonstration of just how nasty things get when a nuke plant goes Tango-Uniform; we had no way to know if an area we were living in or driving into was contaminated with radiation. We wouldn’t know until we started getting sick and by then it would be too late. Old Georgie made a compelling argument: avoid nuclear power plants.

  States like New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah were all free of nuke plants and, according to George, Wyoming was in the dead center of a nuke-free oasis. We started heading in that general direction while keeping our eyes open for a good place to settle.

  We picked up others along the way. We ran into Barbara in Oklahoma. Rebecca, Oscar, and his daughter Maria joined us just outside of Pueblo, Colorado. It was like that – just running into people in two’s and three’s along the way. We’d stop to talk with them, trade news and such. I was always looking to trade supplies but nothing ever came of that. We always just ended up pulling people into our little caravan. Everybody just looked so fucking lost; I wasn’t about to stop, shoot the shit with them, and then leave them behind with a wave and a smile.

  It was in Colorado Springs where we finally had to stop and adjust our tactics. Davidson ran into a big group of eight people living in a King Soopers grocery store while he was out on a scavenging run during a refueling stop. I had a little siphoning tool that I was taking from car to car to fill the gas cans we had with us; nothing sophisticated – just a couple of stiff hoses and a hand pump. It was a pain in the ass to use and took forever but if you were patient, you could snake the hose down past the gas cap and carefully rotate it until it wedged past the roll over valve. You couldn’t get all of the gas out of the tank because there was no way to control where the hose ended up once it was past the valve, so we left a lot of gas behind but what we lacked in efficiency we made up for in volume.

  We were all standing out there together while I cursed up a blue streak trying to get the hose into a Subaru. It was maddening – you can’t rush the technique at all. You twist slowly while you carefully insert the thing and you know if you’ve got it or not; there’s slight resistance but the hose will eventually push through. If you fuck it up you’ll also know because the hose will bind up and go no further; it’s stiff enough that you can tell you need to back it out and try again. I had fucked it up three times already and I could feel Davidson’s eyes resting on my back by that point, which only served to agitate me, which caused me to fuck the job up a fourth time…

  I finally straightened up and took a deep breath, rolling my shoulders. “Hey, Davidson. Why don’t you push out a bit while I’m doing this? See if you can find some water, maybe.”

  “I can do that,” he said. The kid was nothing if not enthusiastic. He reminded me of that little runt dog in the old Looney Tunes cartoons (“Hey, Spike, you want I should pick up some bones for yah, huh?”)

  “Keep within a klick,” I advised.

  He slung the rifle I had given him, a civilian M4 with a Vortex dot optic (he had accepted the thing like I was handing him a Hatori Hanzo samurai sword for chrissakes), and headed out. The M4 was one of two rifles I had brought along with me for the apocalypse. The other rifle (the one I still have and which nobody gets to touch…well, for the most part, anyway) is my baby: a Heckler and Koch MR556A1 loaded up with a 4x32 Trijicon ACOG optic and a Surefire light. This rifle was everything that the M4 I carried in the Corps should have been. If there had been any way for me to get my hands on the 416, I damned well would have but you can’t do much better than the civilian MR556 in my learned (and correct) opinion.

  “You’re really very good with him,” Barbara said. I like Barbara Dennings. She’s a sweet little old lady. I’m not sure exactly how old; you never ask a lady that – Mom would have broken her foot off in my ass if she ever heard of me doing such a thing. Even so, I’m going to guess late fifties to early sixties. I’m willing to bet she was and is a wildcat behind closed doors as she can flirt right alongside the best of the Spring Break college crowd. Better, in fact, because she has a lifetime of education and experience backing her play. No ditzy co-ed, our Barbara. My kind of lady.

  “He’s a good kid,” I told her. “Once he gets a few accomplishments under his belt he’ll calm down a bit. Oh, thank you, Jesus!” I had finally managed to get the hose inserted. I heaved a sigh and began to work the little hand pump.

  “We should see about finding some more of those,” Oscar said to my left, indicating the pump. “I could help you do this.”

  “You are helping,” I told him. “Soon as I have enough in this gas can, you can take it over and fill up our ride while I go get another tank started.”

  “Come on, man, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I agreed. “But for now, I’m happy with you keeping your head on a swivel while I’m bent over this thing. You just keep that M9 handy.”

  Don’t ask me how this had come about but not a one of the
se damned people that I picked up along the way had a firearm of any kind. I originally thought at the outset of this whole thing that bringing two rifles and a pistol was just being dumb but I couldn’t bring myself to leave them behind. If I had known I would eventually be travelling with the 1st Battalion Snowflakes I would have brought a lot more.

  Davidson returned twenty minutes later with a wide-eyed expression on his face. “Uh, Gibs? I think you’d better come have a look at this.”

  I straightened up from the hand pump and rolled my eyes. The kid could be a walking movie cliché sometimes.

  “Really? You can’t just tell me? Use your words, man.”

  “Sorry. I ran into a ton of people living in a grocery store. They seem okay but I figured I’d better come get you.”

  I was not excited to hear this news. The seven of us were already piled into three cars; keeping them all fueled had grown into an operation that could take at least a couple of hours depending on how lucky we got while moving from vehicle to vehicle.

  “Define ‘ton’,” I said.

  “Eight people. All kinds, like our group.”

  “Oh, Jesus bacon-eating Christ,” I groaned. I looked at Rebecca, a knock-out of a red head that was both too damned young and too damned hot for my aged ass (a fact which deterred me not a bit from stealing the odd glance at her turd cutter – I am only a man after all) and said, “Okay, Rebecca, you come take this over, please. Davidson, trade weapons with Oscar and come show me this group. Oscar, you good with that rifle?”

  “Yeah, I remember how it goes.”

  “Good deal,” I nodded. “Lead the way, Davidson.”

  He led me a few blocks away from where we had parked, the both of us weaving around or climbing over the various vehicles that had been pulled up onto the sidewalks. I hated walking through the area like that; hated everything about being in cities. They all felt too much like Fallujah now, with all the damage and all the shit everywhere. Every bit of conspicuous garbage lying on the side of the road made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I just about gave myself whiplash walking down the streets trying to clock every window and rooftop. I just couldn’t help myself. I mean, I knew intellectually that there were no Muj waiting to jump out at us but “old habits”, you know?