Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1) Read online

  I didn’t have much of a plan at the time outside of getting away from all the dead and dying people. Lizzy and I went back into the city to see what we could find. In the weeks that we had been restricted to the tents, Sandy and the areas around it had changed more than I would have thought possible. The quarantine was set up far away (I think twelve or fifteen miles) on the other side of the mountains from the city, so the most we ever really heard or saw was the occasional “pop-pop-pop” of gunfire at night or perhaps a plume of black smoke rising into the sky from some undetermined place in the distance past Latimer point. It was like a whole different city when we came back to it. There were abandoned barricades everywhere and vehicles in between them, also abandoned. Shop windows all over were broken out with merchandise lying in the street. It was pretty obvious what had taken place but I still remember how hard it was to accept what I was seeing. Riots were a thing that happened up the 15 in Salt Lake City and they were always confined to a block or two. I couldn’t think of a single riot ever taking place in Sandy. I didn’t think our people were like that but then I started to look closer at the businesses that had been hit and things started to make sense. I saw the occasional TV or appliance on the sidewalk but, for the most part, grocery stores and pharmacies were gutted without exception. Other places like outdoor and sporting goods stores were also ripped wide open.

  We walked through the streets for hours. Sometimes, we ran into little knots of people that looked as confused and lost as we must have appeared. We never said anything to each other. It seems crazy but you have to understand the situation: the only supplies any of us had were what we could carry on our backs. Most of us were armed in some way. If we didn’t talk to each other, if we didn’t join up, it meant one less challenge we had to deal with. Other people meant risk. You risked getting involved with crazy or violent people or you risked joining up with people who would need more help or more supplies than you were willing to give. You just didn’t know who they were going to be. And this was universally understood by all of us, so when we saw each other across the street all we did was make momentary eye contact and then look down and move on in another direction.

  Eventually we came to our old apartment. The door hung open with a few strands of orange colored biohazard barricade tape trailing from the jam. I don’t know what I thought we were going to find there. The place was as ripped apart as the rest of the city. All of our things…the things that made the place our home, were destroyed. The couches were ripped up. Picture frames pulled off the wall and smashed on the floor. Every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen had been upended. I picked up a chair that had been knocked over and sat Lizzy down in it. “Stay here, Mija,” I told her. She nodded and then turned her head to stare out the front door. I went down the hall to our old bedroom.

  I don’t know what I thought I was going to find there. Some piece of me was expecting or hoping to find Eddie lying in our bed, perfectly preserved in the state he was in when I left him, so I could finally say goodbye. He wasn’t there, of course. He had been bagged up and taken out to the mass grave where they burned the remains of the infected. Whatever was left of my husband – my best friend who had always been there for me, had always protected and provided for me, who had loved me without fail for as long as I knew him – all that was left were ashes in a pit that I didn’t even know how to find. I collapsed into my bed and had a complete breakdown. I sobbed for I don’t know how long, jamming my face into the one remaining pillow out of fear Elizabeth would hear. She heard me anyway, I guess, because she was there a few minutes later, climbing into the bed behind me and wrapping her arms around me. We fell asleep in the bed that way; her holding me, me holding the rifle.

  We woke up with the sun the next morning. I began moving around our home mechanically, cleaning a little here, straightening some furniture there. I was mentally numb and trying to come up with some idea of what to do next. I think a part of my brain was operating under this assumption that if I could just clean the place up enough, we could hunker down and survive there until whoever was still in charge figured out how to fix everything. I’m sure I would have figured it out eventually once it was clear that the water was never coming back on but Lizzy had two and two added way ahead of me.

  “Can we go get Lelo and Lela?” Lizzy asked me. I didn’t have much hope that my or Eddie’s parents were still alive but it was at least a plan. Things might be better down in Beaver. It was something to hold on to.

  I went through the apartment and collected some things that I couldn’t live without: several pictures from before, our wedding rings, and Lizzy’s old stroller. I hadn’t been able to donate it to Good Will yet and I had always dreamed that Lizzy might have a brother one day, so it was easier to just store it under the stairs. It was one of the huge ones that you get when your baby is newborn; a mother’s rolling toolkit, complete with fully reclining bed, lower shelf space for diaper bag, toys, and doo-dads – even a cup holder. It wasn’t exactly a pack mule but it helped me to get some of the weight off my back. I found some canned food that had been missed in our pantry, so I threw that into the stroller, plus some kitchen matches, extra sweaters, and blankets.

  It was at this moment that I really started to realize what we had lost. The concept of certainty had not just been ended; it had been completely erased. Forget being certain about next year, we couldn’t be certain anymore that we’d have enough water to drink in a couple of days. We didn’t know if we’d have shelter over our heads tomorrow. We couldn’t be sure of our health or security – a simple toothache could become terminal now. My inner scavenger was born that day as we rolled out of the city. Anything that caught my eye as we left that looked useful was thrown into the pile including old batteries and books or loose paper (for starting fires). At one point I hit the jackpot and found a half-empty gallon of water. Anything that looked like it might be helpful was tossed into the stroller. That thing could haul some serious weight, too. God bless Eddie Bauer.

  Since it was only a little bit out of our way, we went back by Cedar City on the way to Beaver. I knew for sure I could get more food and water there and I knew we would need to bring a lot with us to make a walk down to Beaver. I wasn’t looking for any cars at the time because the roads were completely jammed with abandoned cars. I had an idea about keeping my eyes open for bicycles, but I didn’t think I could find one much less two – especially one that would fit a 7-year-old. On top of that, Lizzy was not 100% comfortable on a bike yet. There was no such thing as hospitals or ambulances or casts for broken bones anymore, as far as I knew. Because of that, a bike suddenly became a nerve-wracking proposition. The most popular method of transportation in the world had been downgraded to feet. I had no idea how long it was going to take us to walk all the way to Beaver but it was a little over a 2 hour drive. It wasn’t anything I was looking forward to.

  We loaded up on more of everything at Cedar City. I grabbed more bottles of pills ending in the letters “lin”. I got what I hoped would be enough water to last us a week and stuffed the baby compartment of the stroller full of MREs. Now that I had a chance to think about what I was doing, it also occurred to me to get more bullets for my new rifle (which I still hadn’t the first clue how to operate). I didn’t want to screw it up, so I found more rifles that looked like the one I was carrying and (after fiddling around with one of them for several minutes) found the button that dropped out the magazine. I pulled the magazine out of my rifle to compare the bullets against what I had found and saw that they looked identical. I put the one magazine back into my rifle and then threw three more that I was able to find into the ruck, which I hung off the stroller’s push handle. I had no idea how many rounds a magazine held at the time but I couldn’t imagine needing more than whatever four magazines could carry. I didn’t know any better back then.

  After topping off, we turned around and headed back up towards the 15. I hated taking the time to do it and wasn’t excited about looping around Utah Lake b
ut sticking to the 15 seemed to be the best way to go. I was afraid of getting lost and losing time on all of the backroads and the direct approach along the freeway just seemed to be the safest way to go. We didn’t know about marauders back then – hadn’t heard of any or seen any yet.

  -

  “Lizzy, honey? It’s close to dinner time. Go inside and wash up, okay?”

  Lizzy flashes an angelic smile at her mother and hops up off her stump. She says, “Okay, mom,” while collecting what has become a sizable coil of twisted rope as well as a much diminished pile of leaves. She heads into the cabin, still humming to herself as she passes us.

  “I don’t want to talk about the next part while she’s around,” Amanda tells me in hushed tones. “She has Survival tomorrow with Gibs after her math and reading lessons. You can come back around then if you have the time and get the rest from me.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” I agree. I do not know the details but I have some inkling of how Jake and Billy found Amanda and her daughter - I know it was not pretty. I know there was killing involved, at least.

  “Look, are you sure you want to cover that?” I ask. “I don’t want you to have to relive anything better left behind for this book. A lot of that doesn’t need to be anybody’s business, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “No,” she says. “I want to. The things that happened to us – to me – happened because I was ignorant and unprepared. If this is going to be a part of the new history books, I want it to be perfectly clear what the unprepared can expect out of their fellow man. We all built up a lot of bad habits when everything was easy. We forgot how to survive when easy stops. I want to help prevent that.”

  3 – Primm

  Jake

  I ran into Billy somewhere between California and Nevada. Well, maybe “ran into” isn’t the right expression. “Slowly collided with over a period of days” would be a lot more accurate. We were going in the same direction, you see, so it took me some time to catch up with him.

  When I first spotted him, I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. Between hauling my gear and maintaining awareness of my immediate area, “dead ahead” was not a direction I was spending much of my time with. As far as gear was concerned, essentials like food and water were piled up in one of those…wheeled tent/buggy things that you used to see people stuff their toddlers in and drag behind them when they went on bike rides.

  That’s actually funny. This is the first time I’ve given any thought to what you might call those things. A “bike trailer” I suppose.

  Anyway, among some odds and ends like a flashlight, extra batteries, a spare change of clothes, and so on, was a good sized pile of food (canned food, mostly, but also some freeze-dried rations that I found at an outpost) and several jugs of water. The water was the worst of it. You never think about this when water is plentiful but it really is the limiting factor in everything you do. I can go for several days without food before I start getting into trouble (I’ve done it). Going just a few days without water is bad news.

  Before this all happened, water was the least of anyone’s concerns. You could always get it from somewhere. In fact, all you had to do was lift a magic lever in your kitchen and water just fell out of a pipe and it wouldn’t stop until you pushed the lever down again. I mean…it wouldn’t stop. It would just continue – hundreds of gallons could pass by, unused, until you hit that magic lever. When I think about what we all lost in the fall, I don’t think about all the distractions. I don’t think about the televisions or the cell phones or the ludicrous social media or any of the little gadgets that we thought we needed but really didn’t. I think about a kitchen faucet. I remember water being so plentiful that it was literally the last thing on anyone’s mind.

  As we all learned, water is actually the first thing you consider in a truly natural world. It doesn’t matter what task you’re about to embark on; water is always your first consideration. Where can it be found? How are you going to transport it? How will you protect it from evaporating? Does it need to be purified? How will you purify it? Do you have the equipment necessary to purify it? How much of it can you carry? I’ve since learned from reading one of Billy’s old survival books that a full grown human needs to consume two quarts of water per day to stay healthy. If you’re in deep trouble, you can ration that down to maybe one quart per day but you need to be really careful about how you take it in and limit your level of physical activity or you’ll run into severe issues.

  So, four quarts to a gallon, yes? That means if you’re being good to yourself (and the supply is abundant), you’ll be drinking one gallon every two days or (again, if the situation is dire) one gallon every four days. Now, where this produces a problem is in weight. One gallon of drinkable water weighs a little over eight pounds. This means if you have to make a trip that will take one week you need to haul thirty pounds of water.

  It is possible, of course, to get more water on the way and you always keep your eye out. It can be scavenged, certainly. It can also be found out in the wild (the human race did survive for a period without utilities or irrigation, after all) but unless you find a safe, swift running source, the chances are you need to treat it properly or you run the risk of becoming deathly ill from bacteria or other contaminants.

  Clearly, you could boil the water, given you have a receptacle that will stand up to the heat necessary to boil water for the time needed – about twelve minutes. But then, you need the ability to make fire. You also can’t drink water that has just been boiled, unfortunately, because you’ll burn yourself terribly. You need to sit around and wait for it to be cool enough to consume. This means that if you find yourself having to treat water in this way, roughly half of your usable daylight travel time is eaten up in the process of gathering enough fuel to run a fire long enough to boil the water, not to mention finding water to boil, waiting for it to cool, and so on and so on. Additionally, you don’t know if you’re going to find any water to process on the following day.

  Given all of that, you always need to know the total distance you’ll be travelling, you need to know what kind of terrain you’ll be running into so that you can estimate average distance travelled per day, and some means to carry all of that heavy water you’ll need to survive.

  I knew none of this when I ran into Billy. The only thing that really saved me was that I’d travelled most of the distance to Primm in a car. The main roads inside and around cities were all completely unmanageable. In the places that weren’t blocked off or barricaded, the streets were clogged with those cars that had survived the Flare or those cars that had been repaired since the Flare occurred.

  The sequence of events to which we had been subjected meant that all of the major cities had undergone a double pileup. First, there was the initial traffic jam created by everyone trying to escape the riots that broke out after the Flare hit. When things became bad enough, the military came in to establish some kind of order. They weren’t there to win friendship medals, so the first thing they did was bulldoze all the vehicles off the major arteries for the purposes of securing supply lines and aid distribution networks.

  The second pileup came after the Plague began to burn through what was left of us. The military personnel were just as susceptible as the rest of us and, as they started dying off in larger numbers, the unwatched roads began to bind up again.

  A lot of people in all of the crowded areas where trying to get away. It’s kind of funny…or maybe ironic is the word. As long as society is intact and everyone understands that there’s some sort of system in place to ensure we all play nice, we’ll all cram together in one place like we can’t get enough of each other. As soon as those support systems start to fall apart, we can’t get away from each other fast enough.

  Once you get a ways outside cities or towns and into the big empty of the open highway, it becomes possible to drive if you can find a vehicle. I had found one just outside of Hesperia, only slightly used with the owner still in it. I
pulled him out, set him aside, and then went through the car (it was a sedan) to see what it had in it. There wasn’t much gas in the tank; however I couldn’t be too choosy. Any cars behind me were all blocked-in bumper to bumper and I didn’t have any way to get gas out of them and into this car. There were other cars in sight further up the road but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time shopping for transportation. This car had gas and, because a driver was still in it, it had keys. I was grateful for that.

  Whoever he was, he was less of a survivalist than I was. There was a roadside emergency kit in the trunk that looked as though it had been cannibalized, anything useful having been pillaged with the exception of the jumper cables. I also found a flimsy plastic parka in a clear plastic pouch. I opened the parka and pulled it over the driver’s seat. The previous owner of the vehicle hadn’t started to go all runny yet but he had still been out there long enough to get rather foul, especially in that hot California sun, and I wasn’t excited about settling in to whatever he may have left behind in the seat (visible or otherwise). I threw my rifle in the front seat, my supplies in the back seat, and folded up the bike trailer and tossed it in the trunk. I settled in behind the wheel, turned the key, and the engine started up with no complaints (most cars would still do that in those early days if you could find them in an un-fried state). I pulled the column shifter down to “drive” and proceeded on down the road, rolling all the windows down as I went to try and air out the evidence of the previous owner.

  I didn’t realize it at the time but finding that car probably saved my life. I made it all the way to Primm before the engine finally gagged and died from a lack of fuel. This would have been days’ worth of travel on foot, requiring water that I didn’t have with me. Not realizing this, I shrugged, set the brake, and went about the business of removing all of my things from the vehicle. Once all was resituated and I had my rifle slung over my shoulder, I gave the front tire a light kick (see yah ‘round, partner) and continued on my way. The sun was low in the sky and it would be evening soon so I wanted to see if I could find somewhere in Primm to settle for the night.