Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  I finally gave up on trying to be clever and let the rifle hang. “Okay, Jake,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

  “I propose we drive back to your bus, fuel it up, and you follow me back to my place. We’ll get your people fed and figure out what comes next.”

  “Why?” I asked, exhausted. When he didn’t answer, I shrugged and looked around. “What is this, a Jesus thing? You’re gonna try to convert us? Cook us in a pot? Sell us Amway? What?”

  Jake looked off in a random direction, apparently to collect his thoughts. He looked back at me, and then began to walk towards me. He held his hands out where I could see them but it didn’t even occur to me to put the muzzle up on him at that point. I had just about surrendered to the stupid by that point. He stopped about a foot away and I noticed he was a few inches shorter than me.

  “I suppose you’ve been shot at? Shot a bunch of people as well?”

  I nodded.

  “Lost some people?”

  I nodded again.

  Jake breathed in deep; let it out. “Me too. I’ve met some good people out here as well, though. Just like you have. You wouldn’t be running yourself ragged trying to protect them if that wasn’t the case.”

  He fished the truck keys out of his pocket, unlocked the Ford’s driver side door, and turned back to me.

  “We’re stronger together,” he said. “We can do more together. How long are you going to stay out here looking? How long have you even been out here looking?”

  I had no answer for him so I only shook my head.

  “You have to take a chance, Gibs,” he called over his shoulder as he climbed into the truck. He shut the door and looked back out at me through the open driver’s side window. “Whether it’s with me or that road, you’re going to have to take a chance.”

  He turned the key in the ignition; the deep, rattling growl of a diesel engine echoed down the street. He faced forward in the driver’s seat and waited.

  I scoffed at myself. Fuck it, I thought. I walked around the front of the truck to hop into the passenger seat.

  It was a quick little drive to return to the bus; Jake pulled us up nose to nose with the grill while Oscar and Davidson stood aside. Both of them looked about as confused as a dog with a bone-shaped dildo. Jake shut off the engine and I spoke up quickly before he could hop out of the truck.

  “Let me go talk to them first, huh?”

  “Of course,” he replied without looking over at me. He was eyeballing the two men standing outside, perhaps wondering what they were planning to get up to with their weapons. His face was passive, with no hint of aggression at all, but I knew mean-mugging when I saw it. I prayed for everyone to just keep relaxed and happy.

  I jumped out of the truck and walked over to them; fanned my hands gently towards the ground in a “remain calm” gesture as I approached.

  “Go back to his trailer, find a drum with a taped ‘X’ on the lid, and muscle it over to the bus’s tank. Get whatever tools you need to fill up, even if you need to transfer to a can first with the hand pump.”

  Oscar looked over at Jake and said, “He’s cool, right?”

  “Looks that way,” I agreed. “Try not to empty the whole barrel, okay? Let’s not start out by being shitheads.”

  They both made off for the trailer; Davidson actually waving and nodding at Jake as he passed. Jake nodded back. I took a deep breath and climbed up onto the bus to address the crowd, who must have been fit to come out of their skins by that point.

  “Hey, everyone, how we doing? Holding out okay?”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Maria whispered to me from the front.

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I guess you would, huh, sweetie? Okay, anyone need a head call? Let’s get that out of the way. Same as before: grownups with kids.” Our kids were really just limited to Maria and Rose, who were nine and fourteen. Greg and Alan both looked like they were in their mid to late teens. Even so, I didn’t want to single the kids out by name. Monica offered to take them both, Rose being her daughter and all. The three of them stepped off the bus and went to go find an open storefront with a bathroom. It had become standard practice by this point; leaving little unflushed care packages in our wake as we travelled. It probably wouldn’t take that much effort for a skilled tracker to trace our journey – just follow the trail of abused toilets.

  “Anyone else need a refresher?” I asked.

  A few heads nodded and George said, “I’d like to hear what we’re doing first.” Others voiced their agreement.

  I nodded and rested my hands on the front seatbacks. “Well, it turns out that this guy isn’t as much of a-. Well, he’s…” I struggled to redirect my train of thought, “he’s not a threat, as I originally may have suspected.”

  “Is that gas they’re moving over back here?” asked Jeff (a skinny, little waif of a man) as he looked out the side window at Oscar and Davidson fighting the fuel barrel into submission.

  “Diesel, yeah,” I agreed. “This guy we ran into, Jake is his name, is helping us to fuel up and has invited us back to his place for…” I struggled to say the next part in a way that didn’t sound idiotic and failed. Drawing a blank, I opted for blowing a raspberry: “ppbbbttt, for dinner, I guess. He’s invited us over for dinner.” I put my head down, waiting for the questions and the arguing and all the other bullshit to commence.

  When none of that happened, I looked back up at them and was met with row on row of curious, expectant faces.

  Edgar (Mr. Asshole himself) said, “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m fairly hungry.” Several others chimed in agreement. Barbara said, “It’s very nice of him to offer. I wish we had something to bring with us…”

  I couldn’t have been any more surprised if they had all spontaneously started sucking their thumbs and farting the Benny Hill theme song. I had been certain I was going to have to swim through a wave of protests and arguments but, apparently, these people were all ready to go out to a dinner party. I turned and sat back down in the driver’s seat, resting my hands on the wheel while slouching into the back rest. I looked out the windshield and saw Jake looking back at me. He smiled and waved.

  I smiled and waved back, saying, “Well, why not? Must be ‘Confuse a Jarhead Tuesday’.”

  Davidson climbed up the stairs into the bus, I suspected to go get the refueling tools from the back. He stopped next to me and asked, “You want me to carry all that back with me?” He was pointing at my chest rig and rifle.

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” I shrugged out of everything and handed it all over, which he slung one item at a time over his shoulder. He wedged my MR556 back behind the driver’s seat, took up the M4, and shuffle-stepped towards the rear of the bus. In the meantime, various folks passed by the front and exited, on their way to go find some relief.

  I felt rather than heard someone sit down behind me. Looking up in the rearview, I was surprised to see a shock of curly, red hair and a set of bright, green eyes looking back at me. I said nothing, waiting for her to talk first.

  “You okay?” Rebecca asked.

  I nodded and said, “I’m just tired. I really need a vacation, is all.”

  She laughed quietly and said, “Some of us are worried. People are talking.”

  “Oh?” I asked, perking up. “Saying what?”

  “They’re just worried about you. Afraid that you’re going to get yourself hurt or killed trying to spread too thin, do too many things at once. I happen to agree.”

  I snorted. “We’ll just ask the world for a time-out, then, huh?” It sounded shitty and petulant as soon as I said it. I was too tired to even try to take it back but, thankfully, she seemed not to mind.

  “I’m just saying you could probably spread the load a little.”

  “I know, Rebecca. I know. I’m sorry. Last time I tried that, though, two of our own bought it.”

  A hand reached out and rested on my shoulder, then my neck. I felt a stirring in my shorts despite the topic an
d tamped it back down in disgusted anger.

  “That wasn’t you,” she said, soft hand squeezing. “You can’t let that break you.”

  I said nothing but shifted around to face her; mostly to get her distracting hand off my neck.

  “You remember where you found me?” she asked.

  “I remember. You weren’t in the best shape.”

  “Well you don’t know what happened before that,” she said and rested her chin on the horizontal bar between us. “Like most people, I had ended up in a tent camp towards the end. You know how it went. There was a small group of us survivors who just weren’t getting sick while everyone else died off.”

  I nodded. I remembered.

  “There were three of us girls, all about the same age. The worse things got, the closer we became. Towards the end we started calling each other sisters. Wanda, that was one of us, even started calling our group The Survivor Sisters. She said we were all going to get a redneck tattoo of our gang name if we ever got to a point where we could settle back into homes again and hopefully find someone who could do the tattoo.” She laughed, face sad. “Rebecca, Wanda, and Emily…”

  I jolted in my seat at the name “Emily”, thinking of Pinch; thinking of the girl I was never going to meet but whose face I could still see in my thoughts regardless. I felt a wave of mental double vision (or perhaps split perception) in my mind as I struggled to track the two different Emily personalities, one established and older by a day, the other newly formed and taking shape as Rebecca spoke to me. I attributed the sensation to sheer exhaustion.

  Rebecca continued on as though nothing had happened. “We left the camp for the road to find a new home. We weren’t on the road for very long before we were found…”

  Her chin remained propped on the bar but her eyes no longer looked at me. They looked inward. Back.

  “They chased us for hours that felt like days. I don’t know where they came from but we knew what they were after. We could hear it in their excited hollering and the jokes they shouted at each other. They were so excited. They wanted to make themselves a…little club.”

  I grimaced. She was silent a short while longer, then, looking back at me, she said, “Wanda and Emily got pinned down but I got away. I…I left them behind.”

  Neither her chin nor lip quivered but her eyes, those dangerous goddamned green eyes, began to well up with water as they stared into my own eyes unblinking. I was held in place by her stare, hypnotized, unable to move, trapped; like I was pinned by the gaze of some half-goddess/half-viper hybrid. She blinked and tears ran down both cheeks, breaking whatever the hell spell it was that held me. It felt like a physical cord had been cut. Heat bloomed in my face as I looked away.

  She continued: “I don’t know what happened to them. If I had stayed, it would have happened to me. I’m ashamed that I ran; I regret that I did and wish I could have stayed. At the same time, the part of me that I don’t really like is grateful…grateful…that I was such a little fucking coward.”

  I looked back at her sharply, opening my mouth to argue but she talked over me.

  “I couldn’t have done anything,” she repeated. “I know that. I’m basically a weak set of tits and a round ass out here. That’s how it is now. I’m fucking sick of it, Gibs. I’ve done that since I grew a set of tits. I don’t want it anymore.”

  She lifted her chin off the bar and the sad, little heartbroken girl wasn’t there anymore. There was fire there, and not just in her fancy hair. She started looking born again hard.

  “None of that shit was my fault; that belongs to the animals that were chasing us.” She leaned forward and stabbed a finger into my chest; it was light, she barely made contact, but it got my attention – I took a moment to determine if I wanted to be pissed or not and decided to let it go. “Kyle and Jessica weren’t your fault. That belongs to those fucks that shot them. A lot of people on this bus feel like I do, Gibs. They don’t like their chances in this world. Now will you man the fuck up and help us or not?”

  I snapped my mouth shut and took a minute to regain composure.

  “Did I just get no-ballsed by the Instagram hottie?” I asked without thinking.

  A guffaw was shocked out of her. She put her hand over her mouth and began to shake violently with mad laughter. She coughed, cleared her throat, and said, “Sure, if that’s what you want to call it.”

  I nodded and put my fist out. She bumped it just like the young guys in the platoon used to do, like even the damned officers were doing, right around the time I left.

  “Let’s get some chow,” I said. “My brain works better on a full stomach.”

  Davidson and Oscar finished fueling up the bus not long after my little “pep talk” with Rebecca. They reported filling a gas can four times and transferring the result into the bus’s tank, twenty gallons in other words, which Jake agreed would probably be enough fuel to get us where he intended to go. I was pleased to see that what we had taken apparently hadn’t put much of a dent in the fuel barrel’s level, based on how hard Oscar, Davidson, and Jake were all struggling to get it loaded back on the trailer; I had no desire to be so deep in debt that I couldn’t climb back out again if I had to – those things add up.

  As everyone else was coming back onto the bus to settle in, I took my opportunity to run off for my own little evacuation drill. It seemed our group had found their way into some sort of vehicle rental agency offering everything from regular street transportation to quads and snowmobiles. I found the restroom sign in the low light and went to go have a look.

  There were two his and hers heads, both with a single commode and one with the standard wall urinal. Between fifteen people (even fifteen underfed, dehydrated people), both restrooms looked like they just came out of the losing side of an abusive relationship. I looked down at a toilet already overfilled with the canned food of Christmas past and shuddered; the smell alone was enough to make a guy second guess his religion. Picturing the process of coming close to that mess was enough to elicit a shiver running through my body and I shook my head in disgust. My gut churned, growling at me in aggravation, and I began looking around the room for alternatives.

  The urinal was out of the question; it was just as bad as the commode and I had no desire at all to take any splash damage. Squatting in a corner was more uncivilized than I was in the mood to be; I hadn’t crapped into a hole in the floor since the Philippines and was in no hurry to resurrect the practice. My gut growled up at me again, a sharp stab driving all the way through to my pelvis.

  I regret to report that I finally landed on the only option remaining to me; the sink. Major drunken tears aside, this was the first time I had ever attempted such a maneuver and it was a learning experience, to say the least. If you think it difficult to get the job done from a handicap John that elevates you a few inches higher than desired off the ground, try doing it sometime from a perch that has your feet swinging out in space. Finding the appropriate…leverage…is a challenge.

  If there’s one thing they teach the Marines, though, it’s how to improvise, adapt, and overcome (Semper Gumby, as the saying goes); in the great battle between the sink and my ass, the sink lost, and I thankfully didn’t take any casualties. Having finished the shameful act (honestly, I don’t know if I’d be relating this right now if I hadn’t spiked my morning coffee with Jack), I hobble-stepped away to see to the aftermath with a trusty pack of wet wipes.

  I returned to the bus with a lighter heart only to find everyone in their seats waiting for me, which was frankly a little unnerving given what I had just been up to. There was no way they could know what I had just done but I felt a little heat in my cheeks, regardless.

  As I sat down in the seat and leaned over to re-twist and tape the power lines together, Wang muttered, “Everything come out okay?”

  “Can it.” I touched the ignition lines long enough to fire up the engine and then taped the ends up as before.

  “You know, you don’t have to be the last
one to go,” he said. “We won’t mind if you take your turn sooner.”

  “No, trust me; it’s really better this way.”

  I could hear the start of laughter in his voice and prepared myself to exercise restraint. I would not let this little shit break me. I was not about to break character and start laughing – that would ruin the whole damned joke.

  “If it’s a question of safety, we could always send someone with a rifle to kind of watch over you; maybe offer a little moral support?”

  I looked up to respond but made sure to keep my voice low. “Wang, just how the hell were you the fastest sperm? You bunch of ratbags don’t have hands clean enough to hold my nose.”

  He cracked and began belly laughing. He sat back in his seat, shaking his head. I turned forward in my seat, allowing a smile only when I knew my face was hidden from view. I waved out the window to signal at Jake, who responded by throwing his truck into drive and passing by on our left. Once he cleared our length, he stopped and waited for me to get turned around. I pulled up behind him and shot a thumbs-up through the windshield.

  He led us back down the highway towards the mountain range we had just passed, now on our left side, and continued on for five miles before turning off a crossroad and driving straight towards the range. In time, I saw that the road actually delved into the range itself; Jake passed through without slowing down.

  I started out by trying to keep track of where we were and where we went but there were so many twists, turns, and switchbacks as we continued on a gentle but increasing grade that I soon abandoned the practice. I heard a few people behind me comment on how beautiful the landscape was and, taking a minute to just glance out the window and see it all, I had to agree. It was subtle and crept up on you as you travelled. At first, the landscape all around us was brown; dotted by barren scrub brush and yet, as we got in deeper, we learned that this was really only the case for the largest mountain faces aiming south and taking the biggest brunt of the sun and wind. Once into the heart of the mountains, much of the landscape was shielded from the elements and we began to see vast expanses of tall evergreen trees spreading out over and covering everything.