Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  A few people nodded to this and considered things silently. I kept my yap shut, feeling that it wasn’t my place to try and sway people one way or the other. If they were going to stay, they needed to come around to that decision on their own.

  “I feel I should point out that this isn’t our only choice,” said Wang. Everyone in the group turned their attention on him and he continued, “This valley isn’t the only place in the area we can stay. I know I saw at least a couple of neighborhoods in the surrounding area as we drove in. We could just drive in to one of those, pick whatever houses we like, and set up there. It’s not like we need to talk to a realtor or anything.”

  “That’d be a little awkward, wouldn’t it?” asked Rebecca.

  “Awkward how?”

  “Well,” she said, “we’d be setting ourselves up as competitors, wouldn’t we? It’s like Jake said; wherever we end up, we need to be collecting as much food as we can to buy enough time to figure something better out. If we do what you say, we’re basically fighting over the same food in this area.”

  “That’s a really good point,” George said. “Things could come to a head.”

  “Not to mention our first night would probably be spent dragging bodies out of homes and fumigating…” Rebecca shuddered.

  “I don’t think going to any random set of homes should be an option,” stated Jeff, surprising myself and others. Jeff Durand, who I’d always thought of as an ageless man-boy, was whisper-quiet most of the time. He was of average height with the build of a perpetually underweight teenager. His bearing and appearance made it damned hard to tell his actual age but, if I were forced to guess, I’d say he was a lot closer to his thirties than his teens. He was exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be playing a high school student in a bad 80’s movie.

  “How would we prevent someone from just coming by and forcing their way in?” Jeff asked. “We need a place that’s protected. Somewhere we can keep the kids safe while we’re out doing our thing.”

  Monica and Oscar both considered this, very carefully it seemed.

  “This whole thing has me pretty concerned, frankly,” Edgar blurted. When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “Go on.”

  He looked at me and said, “Look, I know you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye but just hear me out on this one, okay?”

  “I’m listening, man, we all are. Let’s hear it.”

  “I’m worried about us all becoming a bunch of second class citizens around here,” he said. “They seem pretty friendly but Jake didn’t make any effort to hide their chief interest. They need help accomplishing things here. Labor. What keeps them from setting themselves up pretty while we all bust around like a bunch of worker drones?”

  “Well, there are sixteen of us,” I offered.

  “Meaning what, exactly? You’re suggesting we kill them and take this place?” he asked. His expression was horrified, which went a long way to restore some of my faith in him.

  “Oh, hell no, I’ll break my foot off in anyone who suggests doing so seriously. You,” I pointed at Fred, “I might just have to shoot. You might hurt me.” He laughed and shook his head before shambling over to the other table and leaning his weight against it. He kept closer to the end where he would be over the table legs, and thus the strongest point, but it still sagged alarmingly under him.

  I continued, “I just meant that two people can’t really force sixteen people to do anything, can they? What are they going to do? Hold us at gunpoint? Two people can’t keep sixteen people under control like that and still have them mobile enough to be doing work around here. They’d spend more time guarding us than doing anything else.”

  “It wouldn’t necessarily happen like that,” Edgar responded. “They could do it slowly.”

  His statement stopped me. I couldn’t see how but something about the way he said it tickled something at the back of my mind. “I’m listening.”

  “How do you think dictators and fascists hold onto their power? They used to control whole nations where everyone lived under horrible, substandard conditions. What kept the citizens from rising up against the guy in charge?”

  George was nodding, now, and said, “Primus inter pares.”

  I wasn’t exactly a scholar of extinct languages but I’d caught up with the concept by that point.

  “I’m sorry, what does that mean?” Alish asked.

  “What they mean,” I said, “Is that, over a period of time, they establish a hierarchy around here; a small power structure. Within that hierarchy, some people will enjoy more privileges, get nicer things. We’re talking about a long game, here. This isn’t something where they come out tomorrow and say ‘Okay, Alish, you’re now the President of the well and it’s your job to ration out water’. That wouldn’t work. But over a long period of time, months probably, you could build up enough structures and relationships around here where certain people just have it nicer than others. It might be as simple as job assignments, you know? The idea is that those people with the nicer setups will want to hold onto that and will work for the ones in charge to maintain the status quo.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Monica whispered. “You really think they’d try that?” She looked around at us and a realization seemed to strike her. “Do you really think that would work on us?”

  “Probably not,” George said. “I don’t think the group is large enough for something like that to take hold. We’re too small and too tight. I used to cover this stuff when I taught high school history. I think you’d need at least fifty people to get something like that off the ground. Your population needs to reach some critical mass where folks can exist as acquaintances or even strangers. It’s still a damned good point that Edgar makes. It’s something to keep in the backs of our minds, anyway.”

  “Agreed,” I said, and Edgar looked surprised.

  Davidson chose that moment to speak up. “So, will someone tell me what the hell we’re doing? I feel like we’ve been going in circles.”

  “I vote we stay,” Oscar said. “My man Jeff is right. All this other stuff aside, you can’t beat the area. We can leave the kids here with a small number of grownups while we go out and get the bacon. They’ll be safe here. If that Jake dude wants to get stupid, I can just give him a little beat down to keep him in line, like.”

  “You think Jake is someone you can just give a little beat down?” asked Barbara, who had been uncharacteristically silent since we’d arrived.

  “What’s on your mind, Barbara? You seem worried,” George asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Amanda seems okay. She’s a hard woman but she has a young daughter. I can understand and respect that. Jake is…something else. He makes me nervous.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I just said I don’t know. Look, does anyone else get the impression that something is off with him?”

  “Yes,” Wang said. “I felt like he was playing a role.”

  “Could just be playing his cards close,” Fred suggested. “He did just invite sixteen armed people to come live with him.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Barbara said.

  “I could try to get close to him and see,” suggested Rebecca.

  “What?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Come on. You know…”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Sorry, excuse me. No, you’re not doing that. Nobody has to do that.”

  Rebecca nodded, cheeks burning, looking relieved. I saw Davidson loosen up as well out of the corner of my eye.

  We all had an awkward little silence after that, which I suspect we all needed after Rebecca’s unsettling fucking offer. It made me feel really uncomfortable that we were in a situation where she felt like such a thing needed to be an option. The fact that I had considered it, even if only for a fraction of a second, was equally alarming. I remember feeling thrown way off balance at this point and lost myself for a few moments digging around in my own head; asking myself questions and finding no answers. When I cam
e back to myself, I noticed a lot of faces staring back at me, all packing unanswered questions behind their eyes. This elevated my personal level of agitation even higher, obviously.

  “What? What’s everyone looking at?”

  Davidson shot an exaggerated shrug at me, “Are we staying or not, man?”

  “Oh, goddamn it, that ain’t my call. You people have to agree on what seems right for you. I’m just in charge of keeping you all safe-“

  “Can I suggest,” George cut in over my tirade, “that we play it by ear? It’s late enough now that we’re probably not going anywhere tonight, anyway. It’s just Jake and Amanda. They can’t force us to stay if we don’t wish to do so. It could be that this is just what we were looking for. Let’s sleep on it.”

  Several nodded at this, to my great relief, and the tight little knot of people began to break up. Smaller sub groups wandered off to various areas; I noticed Fred and Barbara began to bustle about the tables, stacking up trays and cleaning up. Most of the cookware was ceramic or Tupperware, yet there was still a good deal of trash out there to be taken care of. I began to idly wonder about how they disposed of trash around here. It wasn’t as though a city trash service came through to offload the refuse and take it to the dump. This thought led me naturally to the challenge of waste disposal.

  Jake’s cabin would have been built with a septic tank; there’s no way a tie-in for city sewage was brought all the way out to this location. So, in a pinch, we could use the toilets in the cabin, assuming we had enough water on hand to charge the tank for a flush. The only problem there was that Jake and Amanda probably wouldn’t be terribly happy about sixteen people stomping through the house all day and night to make a head call. This would be one of those problems we’d need to solve soon to avoid wearing out our welcome. I started looking around the area for a good spot to dig a deep hole.

  “Give us a minute, please, guys,” George said, bringing me back to the present.

  Davidson, Wang, and Edgar were all muttering some form of the phrase “no problem” and moving off to positions of their choice a respectful distance away. I looked to George and asked, “What’s this?”

  “Gibs, I have a pretty good handle on where you’re coming from with these folks, but, well, if you’re going to be in charge, you need to be in charge. You can’t suddenly abdicate if you get asked a hard question.”

  Maybe it was his choice of words or the way he delivered them, but I started to get a little pissed. “Hey, horseshit, alright? This wasn’t some issue concerning the group’s safety, the question under discussion was basically, ‘Hey, Gibs, tell us where we’d like to live’. Exactly how much hand holding do you consider to be appropriate, here? Shall I wipe noses and asses while I’m at it?”

  George had his hands up with the palms extended at me in a ‘calm down’ gesture. “Okay, okay, easy. I’m sure I delivered that wrong. All I’m trying to say is that when you establish yourself as the leader under one set of circumstances, people are going to expect you to take charge under all circumstances. If you look indecisive under any of these, they’re going to start second guessing you when it counts, or at least when it has to do with a subject about which you feel strongly. Can you see what I’m saying? You can’t have it both ways with followers. You’re either all the way in charge or you’re not in charge at all.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “that sounds a lot better than talking some shit about ‘abdicating responsibility’. Nice revise.”

  I was starting to cool off a bit and got a good look at George, who was staring off in the direction of Jake’s huge garage. He had that kicked-dog expression that always drives me up the wall. I used to get it all the time from my Marines after lighting them up for some stupid thing they had done. It used to infuriate me. You walk in on some moron igniting his pubic hair with a fucking zippo, and suddenly you’ve gotta feel like the asshole for spoiling everyone’s fun. I never understood how it was that I ended up being the dick after correcting someone else for their stupid shit, but there it was.

  “Hey, never mind,” I said to George. “I get what you’re saying. But, man, I can’t be the mother duck. I left that shit behind for a reason; poor sleep and premature hair loss are only a part of it. I’ll snap asses back when it comes to safety and I’ll absolutely take a round to keep these people alive. I just can’t do their thinking for them. I’m drawing the line there.”

  George nodded, glanced back at the cabin, and looked back at me. “Well, let’s play it by ear, like I said. Maybe it’s a problem that takes care of itself.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was alluding to but I frankly didn’t have enough energy to give a shit; I just let the comment pass by like so much dust on the wind. My nerves had been ratcheted up to eleven for the last several days. I was only getting a couple of hours of sleep a night towards the end; a combination of trying to rack out on that goddamned bus, worrying about keeping everyone fed, and my stupid brain trying to turn every little sound heard in the middle of the night into creeping bandits. We were finally in a strong, isolated area where provisions were no longer an immediate problem to be solved and I didn’t feel like I had to be constantly looking over my shoulder for an ambush. As I felt my body starting to crash from running too long at full capacity on fumes, I was a little shocked to realize that I desperately hoped Jake was on the up and up. I wanted terribly for this place to work out for us. I couldn’t lose any more people on some endless hunt for a home.

  “Hey, where are you off to?” George asked from behind me; my feet had started moving (almost on their own) without me signaling my intent.

  “I’m going to go tell them it’s a deal and beg for a rack. If I have to sleep in a bus for one more night I’m going to shoot myself.”

  The front door opened almost as soon as I knocked, revealing Jake on the other side. I could see Amanda standing not far behind him. He said nothing; only looked at me and waited to hear what I would say.

  “We, uh, would like to take you up on your offer. I’m not sure where you’re going to put us all but we’re willing if you are.”

  He smiled at me then and I want to say it was the first time I saw him really smile, though he’d been doing it at everyone all day. There was something in the way it made you feel that let you know for sure. There wasn’t a great deal of change in his face when he did it but his eyes let me know it was for real; they made all the difference.

  “I’m glad,” he said and extended his hand to shake. I took it and was mildly shocked at how it felt. His hand was fat and meaty through the palm and, though it was only of average size, I had a hard time getting a good grip around it. The texture of the skin was all leathery and the surface of the palm was sharp with callus. I could feel the bones moving around inside of it until he started to squeeze; when he did, the soft parts broadened and became hard, like his fist itself was expanding. The pressure exerted on my hand stopped just short of discomfort.

  He let go of my hand and said, “I don’t think we’ll ask you to sleep on the bus or outdoors tonight; you’ve all had a rough road. I’m sure we can find room for you all here even if we have to break out the air mattresses.”

  “I assure you,” I said, “air mattresses would be just fu-…just freaking dandy.”

  From behind Jake, Amanda called out to me with a smile, “You’ve done that a few times today; correct yourself mid-sentence like that.” She walked up to stand beside Jake in the entry.

  I grimaced and nodded. “Yeah, sorry. That’s my underdeveloped vocabulary coming through. I only have about half of it available when I’m in polite company.”

  Her smile widened and I saw that she was genuinely, almost exotically attractive. Then again, I’ve always had a thing for the Hispanic girls.

  “Gibs, I can’t speak for everyone else but, as far as I’m concerned, strong language doesn’t bother me a fucking bit. You should have seen the cousins I grew up with. They used “fuck” like a comma.”

  I snickered and said
, “I think I may have served with your cousins.”

  “Well, that’s unlikely,” she said. “They tended to end up in jail every so often. I know the Corps frowns on that. Anyway, all I’m saying is you don’t need to be like that around me. Just say what you’re going to say.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “So, should I grab everyone, then? Oh, hell! I don’t mean to be pushy but what are you guys doing for showers around here? We’ve all got at least a week or more of road caked onto us. You probably don’t want us crawling into beds smelling like bags of smashed ass.”

  “Linens can be washed but we can get a bath going for you guys,” Jake said. “It’ll probably take the rest of the evening for everyone to get a turn. We have a couple of rain barrels outside that we can draw from. This will take a while, though; we should heat it up over a fire or it’ll be like ice. I’m also sorry to say that there won’t be enough for everyone to get a fresh bath…we’ll have to reuse the water a bit.”

  My skin was already starting to crawl before he’d finished the sentence. The thought of sponging off with other peoples’ ass grease set me to squirming on the spot. It didn’t help that I knew, intellectually, that I’d been caked head to heel in some of the foulest material imaginable in my long, lovely career in the Infantry or that I was every bit as nasty as everyone else. Sure I was disgusting but that was all my filth. All that other filth was…foreign filth; tainted.

  I suppressed a shiver and said, “We’ll make it work. I’ll head out and let everyone know.”

  “Excellent,” said Jake. He turned to Amanda and started asking about air mattresses as I walked back out of the house to update everyone on the plans for the night.

  It took the rest of the evening to get all sixteen of us washed and presentable, the whole thing turning into a group effort as we went. They had an old oil drum setup as a hobo fire pit outside between the cabin and garage where they burned most of their trash. There was a good cord of wood stacked up along the wall of the cabin outside just under the bedroom windows; some of the logs were thrown into the drum along with our trash from the evening and ignited. Very soon there was a strong blaze jutting up out of the top of the barrel and over this was positioned a grill and a massive, five-gallon kettle filled with water from the rain barrels. We placed it there long enough to just start boiling (which was a pretty decent amount of time given how much water it could hold), after which two of us would grab it by the handles and haul it inside to the bottom floor bathroom to dump in the tub.