Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  I turned to see a horrified Davidson staring back at me. He was frozen in place and clutching his rifle (my rifle, damn it) to his chest. I was annoyed but did not resent his shock; he hadn’t been out there with us nor did he see what happened to Kyle. I waved him out of my way and ran over to Jessica, who was contorted around in a new position owing to all the jostling punishment we had suffered in our escape.

  I knelt in front of her to go over her vitals. As I did, Oscar called from up front, “Hey, someone clue me in on where I’m going up here! Please!”

  “I don’t care,” I called back. “Just get us out of the city and onto some road leading away.”

  Jessica’s skin was cool to the touch. Her lips were blue and there was no pulse to be found anywhere. I looked up to her leg, which seemed to have sucked all of the color out of her body to condense into that one area of deep purple lividity. A set of brown, delicate hands were mashed down onto the bloody leg bandage. They were attached to Alish, who looked back at me with wide and haunted eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she croaked and took her hands away.

  7 - Backbone

  Gibs

  I consider it to be my fault that we continued on to Wyoming rather than adjusting course to travel into Nebraska. As it is, I’ll admit that I felt (and continue to feel) a bit of guilty relief that the decision was taken out of my hands. The deeper part of me, the part that likes to keep all accounts balanced, wanted to drill into Nebraska in search of Jessica’s daughter, Pinch. It was Jessica’s plan, after all, and I felt like I owed her. I still do in some respects.

  At the same time, I had a certain degree of responsibility to the people who were still alive and with me. There were fifteen people with me when we came out of Denver, all of whom I had boldly declared to be my problem. None of them (not counting Alish, Greg, and Alan, who weren’t there at the time) had spoken up to dispute the point when it was made; their acceptance of my position was implied in their silence. They had all agreed together that, yes, this man can be trusted with the safety of the group.

  All I knew of Pinch’s whereabouts was a half-guess her mother had made. Jessica herself wasn’t willing to ask the group to come along with her because she knew how shaky her chances of finding her daughter were. Now with her and Kyle gone, we were left with a bus missing a wheel, enough food and water for one last partial-ration meal, and a tank of diesel that would get us an undetermined distance (I hadn’t been paying enough attention to our consumption to get an idea of the bus’s fuel economy). I had assigned so much hope to topping up our provisions in Denver that I was pretty well out of ideas and was having trouble mustering up enough give-a-shit to dream up any more. Asking everyone to embark on such a quest would have been unfair; they probably all would have said yes, whether they did so eagerly or reluctantly. Jessica viewed herself as a loner but she was well liked in the group.

  Our group was down to the red line on everything imaginable, from resources to morale. In opposition to that reality, I was responsible for the death of two people and owed their memory better than just packing up and moving on. Had I been forced to make a decision regarding our next steps, I would have just frozen up anyway.

  I sat for a long time on the floor in the middle aisle of the bus with Jessica’s head on my thigh. I kept my hand rested on her forehead, sometimes smoothing the hair away but mostly just holding it there, keeping the flesh warm, trying to keep at least some part of her warm. I don’t know what the hell I thought I was doing; I had this sense that I could somehow hold a part of her spirit back inside her body if I could just keep a part of that body warm, like it was still alive. I felt that as soon as I let her go fully cold, I had to admit she was gone. Stupid shit; and it probably had a lot to do with the fact that Jessica was a “she” rather than a “he”. I had lost three buddies in my career as a Marine, all men. It was brutal each time and I still miss the hell out of them all but it was somehow more manageable than this. I’d never lost a woman until that day in Denver. Whether you want to accept it or not, it’s different losing a woman. The relationship is different. All discussion of equal rights aside; I don’t have the words to explain why it should be like that but there it is.

  I’m not sure how long I sat like that on the floor but at some point I felt a hand on my right shoulder. From behind me, Barbara said, “Hey, are you alright?”

  Unsure how to respond, I simply stated the fact: “I got them both killed.”

  “That’s nonsense,” she said softly. “You were trying to teach them. You still need to teach the rest of us. You certainly won’t be able to protect all of us all the time. The only ones responsible for this are the people who attacked us. This is not your fault.” She emphasized those last words in anger.

  I reached up across my body with my left hand to clasp hers. I squeezed it, turned my head, and kissed the back of her soft, wrinkled knuckles in order to remove any sting from my next statement. “Lay off a while, Barbara, and let me process a bit, huh?”

  She said nothing else but squeezed my shoulder before removing her hand.

  In time I realized that I had to deal with the fact that rolling along with a dead body was going to make the survivors pretty uncomfortable, not to mention play some messed up games with their minds. I gently put Jessica’s head aside, leaned forward, and put my right hand up onto the seat behind me to push myself up. This elicited a harsh burn at my shoulder and I remembered the asshole that had grooved me during the gunfight. Sighing, I opened up the blow out kit on my rig and got out some antiseptic wipes, cream, and gauze. Rolling my shoulder, I could see that the damage wasn’t horrible; it probably didn’t even need stitches. I pulled some wipes out of a packet and began to clean the area, scraping out the valley of the wound with a wrapped finger and snarling at the stinging burn that I could feel all the way up in my neck. Completing this, I tossed the wipe aside, squirted some cream onto the area, smeared it in, and began to curse at myself under my breath as I tried and failed to wrap the area up in gauze with my clumsy left hand. Wang, who was across the aisle from me, looked back over his shoulder to see what I was up to. When he saw my predicament, he turned out into the aisle and said, “Let me help with that,” while reaching out over Jessica’s body to take the gauze from me. I grunted and let my hands drop. He started complaining that the wrap wasn’t staying in place so I pulled a small roll of tape out of the pouch and handed it up to him wordlessly.

  He smiled and said, “Handy little kit.”

  “They’re alright,” I agreed.

  With things finally secured in place, Wang handed the remainder of the material back to me, which I stuffed back into the pouch. I nodded my thanks and levered myself up to a standing position. Heads turned back to look at me, which I ignored as I walked up the length of the bus to speak with Oscar.

  “How you doing, bro?” he asked as I approached.

  “I’ll get there,” I said. “I’m not there yet but I will be.”

  “Sure, of course,” he nodded, sounding unsure.

  “Pull us over when you get a chance,” I said. “Something like a field. Try to find someplace nice.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  I went to the rear of the bus and shrugged out of my rig, feeling suddenly forty pounds lighter…mostly because I was suddenly forty pounds lighter. Nearly the whole rear of the thing, including the camelback and plate carrier, was colored a solid, dark brown from blood. Twisting awkwardly, I could see the same had happened to the right side of my back and the rear leg of my pants. Shaking my head, I set the rig aside and dug out the Soldier’s shovel (what we called an E-tool). The bus slowed and came to a stop alongside the road.

  Looking out the side window, I saw that Oscar had stopped us next to a private farm surrounded by acres of grass fields with a large, attractive home out in the distance. The grass was peppered with small white flowers that looked to me like Baby’s Breath in a teenaged girl’s Prom corsage. It wasn’t exactly a sacred shrine but it was
apt to be as good as we would find.

  I moved for Jessica’s body but Fred beat me to it with three strides of his giant, swinging legs. He knelt and collected her into his arms gently, like a father preparing to take his little girl up to bed, and stood without any hint of exertion. She hung suspended well over the seatbacks while Fred Moses’s head nearly scraped the ceiling of the bus.

  “I got you, Gibs,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned and carried her outside. Everyone else remained seated, looking back at me. Waiting. I took a breath and followed Fred down the steps out into the field.

  He had laid her down gently in the field by the time I caught up to him. We stood together a moment under an endless, blue sky heavy with wide, low clouds. A flat horizon surrounded us for miles and the peaks of mountains were just visible in the distance behind us. Fred held out his hand to me for the shovel.

  “No,” I said.

  He nodded without comment and took two steps back. Taking the E-tool in both hands, I began to dig.

  The earth was composed of good soil and was easy to displace once the grass layer was cut through. It didn’t take me very long to cut out a hole that was respectfully deep enough for its intended purpose. I’d guess I was at it for a half hour or so. The others from the bus had filtered out to surround us as I worked; they all stood by solemnly. Waiting. Always waiting. George leaned on his cane, his other arm resting on Davidson’s strong and youthful shoulder. Rebecca and Monica were both crying openly. I looked about the faces briefly, trying to spot Kyle, before remembering.

  I nodded to Fred. Quietly, he lifted Jessica only to lay her back down in the hole. He crossed her arms over her chest and then retreated to his place in the crowd. Without waiting, I began to shovel dirt over her, starting first with her angry leg, following with her body and the tattoos she had displayed so proudly (those that had started as a fuck-you to a better forgotten husband but ended as an advertisement of inner fire), finishing with a still lovely face. I smoothed the patch over and dropped the shovel. I could think of nothing else to do, so I only stood and stared at where she had been along with a spot right next to her; a place that should have held Kyle, who had briefly been my young friend.

  A throat cleared from somewhere behind me. I gritted my teeth and tried not to scowl; I always detested the social requirement to speak at these kinds of things.

  George said: “I didn’t know Jessica…”

  “Collins,” Wang supplied.

  “Collins. I didn’t know Jessica Collins as well as I would have liked. From what I saw, she appeared to be a kind and free spirit. She had a beautiful laugh. I’m sorry that I won’t learn more than that.”

  “She was a good person,” Wang agreed. “When we needed food, she was always one of the first volunteers to go out and find it for all of us. She was always ready to help. She was strong. She, uh, she was a manager at some sort of delivery service. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know more than that.”

  There was a silence weighing down the air around us after Wang finished speaking. It was thick and made me feel as though it was hard to breathe. From the corner of my eye, I could see some folks start to fidget, some of them shifting their stance around. I looked over and saw many of them looking back at me; I realized in horror that they were waiting on me to speak.

  I looked back at the little patch of ground concealing Jessica’s remains, furious that any of this should be necessary. I said the first thing that came to mind. “Kyle was on his way to becoming a fairly good hunter. It was something he did with his father. Though he never said as much to me, I’m certain Kyle loved his father a great deal. I hope he was able to say goodbye to the man properly when the time came.”

  To my left, Rose, little fourteen year old Rose Dempsey with her too skinny arms and shoulders, encircled mocha arms within her mother’s darker, stronger arms, buried her head, and began to sob. Monica held her daughter and rocked her quietly, resting her lips on the girl’s forehead, and shushed her. I wondered at the girl’s attachment to Kyle, wondered at how much was there and how great it may have been. He had been a good looking, kind young man.

  “Jessica…erm-“ I cleared my throat and tried again, almost steady the second time around. “Jessica had backbone.”

  I picked up the E-tool and whispered, “I hope you find Pinch, either way.”

  I coughed and growled out a “Goddamn it” under my breath. I returned to the bus and sat down in the driver’s seat.

  We rolled into Jackson, Wyoming a couple of days later, owing to a whim. I’d been driving pretty much aimlessly for a time, not paying so much attention to where I was going as I was to looking for some place (any place) to stop and kill that engine for the last time. I can’t share a great deal of my thought process from that period, mostly because I don’t think I had much of one at all. The loss of my two friends was eating away at me and I wasn’t devoting a great deal of brain power to giving too much of a fuck about anything, save keeping on the move. Save looking for some place to get the rest of those people that was different from where they’d come. Food was down to nothing and I wasn’t sleeping so much anymore. When I came to a crossroads that was blocked by cars or debris, I just took the easier path without thinking about it or asking for opinions, and no one really offered me any either way.

  I remember driving along, thinking about how I’d been hungry the day before but that I wasn’t hungry the day after, and thinking that was probably a bad thing. At some point I saw a sign that said “Jackson” on it. I recall smiling and singing to myself, feeling better about the whole situation. Don’t know why, anymore, except to say that something that I figured had been dead inside of me woke back up and started kicking again.

  We approached from the south along Highway 191, skirting the edge of a vast expanse of mountains on the east side. The road was just laid right down on the edge of them, like God had traced the whole range out with a galactic crayon.

  I hunched down closer to the wheel as we came closer to the edge of the city with my eyes almost perpetually glued to the gas gauge; there weren’t any lights flashing at me yet but the needle was right on “E” and it was looking like a toss-up between driving or walking into the city. Davidson and Wang stood behind me with eyes peeled either for obstructions or any kind of movement.

  Before the city came into view, I was spending a lot of energy weaving around vehicles in the middle of the road and I began planning for the inevitable point where the road became unnavigable. When it came to that point, I decided we were leaving the bus where it was and continuing on foot. None of us had consumed a full meal for the last two days and the last of our rations were eaten that morning. We were all weak with hunger by this time and needed to be dealing with calorie management; specifically, we needed to not be burning critical calories by pushing cars off the road. Once a new food source was secure, we could always come back for the bus. Secretly, I hoped to leave the damned thing behind for good.

  Just as I was getting ready to call it quits and throw the vehicle in park, Wang muttered, “What the…”

  I perked up and glanced back at him to get an idea of the direction he was looking in, only to find that direction was dead ahead. I faced forward and rubbed my eyes. Just beyond the nastiest snarl of traffic, everything suddenly opened up, offering clear, unobstructed passage into the city. This sudden opening in the road began roughly one hundred yards before we would encounter the first visible buildings. This was disturbing because the cars that had once clogged up the street were all still there; they were just pushed off to the shoulders. At some point, between the final die-off of the plague and right now, the main road had been cleared.

  “Someone’s been through here,” Davidson said.

  Whispers came from behind us; I heard Rebecca hiss, “Did he say someone’s here already?”

  I saw Davidson wince in the long, overhead mirror. He said, “Sorry, man.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I had the bus coasting along the
open road; we weren’t even getting five miles per hour. “They would’ve figured it out without you saying anything. Try to hide something that obvious and nobody will trust you.”

  The pathway into the city stretched before us unobstructed with a bumper-to-bumper wall of vehicles lined up on either side; curbs and soft shoulders alike were completely occupied. We continued on at a crawl, leaning forward as far as we could into the windshield, straining to see onto rooftops as we passed by storefronts. There was no movement to be seen anywhere, which basically meant that I began to see movement everywhere.

  A few blocks into the city, the frequency of cars and trucks stacked up on the sides of the street began to lessen; large gaps of sidewalk and buildings became visible as the cars thinned out. Beyond this point, nearing a kilometer in, the vehicles weren’t even pushed to the side anymore, they just created little island barriers at odd points along the way. I put the bus in park and separated the power lines to keep from burning fuel in idle. Rather than move from my position at the seat, I sat and stared, trying to piece together what I was looking at.

  Davidson finally lost patience and asked, “What now, Gibs?”

  “You guys see anything funny about all these cars?”

  “What, you mean besides the fact that they’ve all been shoved over?”

  “The antennas!” Wang said.

  “Correctomundo,” I said, climbing out of the seat. As far as I could tell, every antenna coming out of every car that was within viewing distance had a little duct tape flag wrapped around the top in plain sight, whether the car was out in the middle of the street or pushed over to the side. I had some suspicions about what that might mean but didn’t care to comment until I knew for sure. I walked to the rear of the bus past questioning glances, dug out the MOLLE gear, and started to put it on. The grenade belt went on after, strapped around my hips. Finally, I grabbed the hand pump along with its hoses and held it out to Oscar as I approached him.