Commune: Book One (Commune Series 1) Read online

  “Uh, yeah. Well, I saw you on the road,” I offered as a lame answer.

  “Yap. I seen you too.”

  “Yes, well, I was just curious and thought I’d poke my head in. See what’s happening.” I was wracking my brain for something that sounded better but anything that I could have said that made sense was a little complex for the current situation. This was not going well.

  “Curiosity can be a dangerous thing, these days.”

  This was really not going well at all. Deciding to cut my losses, I said, “Okay, look. I’m not here to start anything or bushwhack you or any such thing. Just saw another human on the road and thought I’d see about…seeing about you, I guess. I’ll move along and leave you to it.” I turned to leave.

  “You thirsty?” he asked.

  I turned back. “Well, thanks but I have my own water. I’m not here to beg for supplies.”

  “Water…” he scoffed. “I said ‘are you thirsty’?” He emphasized the last word and swirled a large glass bottle half filled with a rich, brown liquid.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “C’mon, Whitey,” he said. “It’s just chilly enough out here that we can pretend we’re drinkin’ this shit to stay warm.” He had a deep, hollow voice. It had an almost hooting quality, like he was speaking from inside the chambers of some massive, dead redwood. There was an accent that was nearly Hispanic in flavor but he shaped his words differently, clipping the hard sounds off in ways that I was not used to.

  He lifted the shotgun up off his knee and laid it on the ground beside his leg; gestured to a spot by the fire beside himself. I pulled the bike trailer a bit closer to the fire and then circled around it to sit down. I remembered the Glock just then and stopped before lowering myself to the ground.

  “Hey, listen. I have a pistol in the back of my jeans, here. I don’t want to forget about it and have you see it later. Don’t want you to think I’m being shady.”

  “I figure you’re probably okay,” he said with a grin. “And if you’re not, I’ll put money on my 870 versus your pistol. Sit down, Whitey. Don’t shoot your ass off.”

  I was starting to like this man. I pulled the pistol from my back and laid it in my lap as I sat down. There was nothing to lean against so I just sat cross-legged in the dirt. As I did, he reached over to a man-sized pile of dried brush (I’m pretty sure it was dead sagebrush) and pulled out what once must have been a complete plant. He tossed it onto the fire, where it flared up almost instantly.

  “We won’t have a fire for very long tonight,” he said. “There’s not much good fuel out here. There’s plenty of this dead brush around if you’re willing to walk a bit for it but it burns up fast. It’ll go down to ember pretty quick after we pass out.”

  “It’ll be okay, I think,” I replied. “It wasn’t so bad last night, anyway.”

  The man held out his hand to me, which I shook. “My name is William,” he said. “Everyone has always called me Billy.”

  “Jacob. Jake,” I offered in return. He took back his hand and then sent the bottle my way. I wasn’t much for hard liquor but I took a knock to be polite. There was a bit of a burn and a hint of charcoal to the flavor. I guessed it was whiskey.

  “Well, Jake,” he began before taking a swig himself, “what brings you out this way? I can’t imagine it’s the Craps tables.”

  “No. I have some family out this way, just North of Vegas. I want to see if they’re still there.”

  “I see. Siblings? Cousins?” he asked.

  “Parents.”

  “Oh. Well then…” he muttered, and handed me back the bottle.

  I got a good look at him in the dying light as he passed the whiskey my way. I’d learn later that he was a pretty high-up tribal elder in one of the Mission Indian bands out of Southern California – Cahuilla (assuming I’m pronouncing that right). He didn’t look Indian at all to me, though. His skin was rather light in color and he didn’t have what I had been conditioned by movies to think of as “Native American” features. He looked a lot more Spanish than anything else. He had several days’ growth of facial hair like all the rest of us but I could tell that he had cultivated a mustache before things like daily grooming became a luxury. He was somewhere in his 60’s, with hair almost entirely gray. Between his fair skin and white hair, the only color in his face was in his eyes, which were brown. His face itself was inviting and friendly.

  He was not fat but he had run to portliness in his old age. He carried his fat like most men; big barrel chest with the extra meat slapped around his gut and back. What could be seen of his legs through his pants was well formed and muscular even for a man of 30, never mind a man old enough to be a grandfather. His hands were massive, nearly enveloping mine when we shook – I judged from this and his legs stretched out in front of him that he was rather tall.

  I threw back a drink, coughed, and shivered a bit as I passed it back. Billy politely made no mention of this though I’m sure I could see his eyes twinkle as he took the bottle.

  “How about yourself?” I asked. “I haven’t run into many people out here.”

  “Ah, but you have run into people?” he responded (ducking the question a bit, I noticed).

  “I have.”

  “They’re not with you now, I see.”

  “No.”

  He scratched his chin; hesitated a bit. “Are they with us at all?”

  I looked at him straight on. “You know how it is now,” I said, gesturing to his shotgun.

  “Yeah, okay. I guess I do,” he said, nodding. “Fine. I’m making my way up to Wyoming. Have a patch of land up there with some supplies laid by. I think I can settle in up there and either wait for the rest of the world to pull its head out of its ass or at least live the rest of my days peacefully without being bothered. What?”

  I must have telegraphed surprise on my face. “Wyoming is a pretty good distance from here. You plan to walk that whole way?”

  “Naw,” he said, smiling. “I plan to walk into Vegas, spend some quality time shamelessly looting the place for anything I can find, and then throw what I do find into a vehicle and drive the rest of the way.”

  “Oh. Well, that makes more sense, certainly,” I said.

  “What about your plan? What comes after you look in on your people?”

  I took another drink. Billy was right: it was warming me up rather well. “Hadn’t thought much about that, honestly. I don’t really know. I suppose I’ll solve that when it comes.”

  “There’s always another problem to solve in this world,” he agreed and threw another brush on the fire, illustrating the point.

  “That fuel isn’t going to last much longer at that rate,” I said, getting up. I was a little shocked at how I felt once on my feet. I didn’t think I had drunk so much. I could feel my teeth buzzing.

  “Oh, better not go out looking for more, Jake,” he said as I moved over to my trailer.

  “It’s fine. I have a flashlight here somewhere.”

  “Sure, but you don’t know what’s out there,” he warned.

  I stopped and looked back at him over my shoulder. “What’s out there, Billy?”

  He threw his hands out. “Well, how the hell do I know? Coyotes and shit, maybe. Point is: neither of us knows. Could be people out there drawn to our fire and waiting to see if one of us does something silly like walking off into the distance looking for firewood. Could be nothing, I guess. Hell, you could put a foot wrong and twist or break an ankle in the dark.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at him. I was just getting to know who he was but I got the impression that he tended to get agitated when people resolved to engage in what he considered to be “foolish behavior”.

  “I’ll keep to the road. You can usually find trash along the highway. I might get lucky.” I pulled the flashlight and rifle out of the trailer.

  “Say,” Billy said, “where’d you get that AR?”

  “Is that what this is? I took it from a friend who passed away back
home. He was a soldier.”

  “Oh? Would you mind if I had a look at it?” he asked. He seemed pretty interested.

  “Sure,” I said. I took the rifle by the barrel and stock and passed it over to him.

  He took it and looked at the grip closely by the fire light. “Damn. This is an M4. You know this thing’ll fire full auto?” He pulled the rifle into his shoulder, looked through the optic, and whistled softly. “ACOG,” he whispered. “Nice.”

  “I suspected but wasn’t sure,” I said, crouching down next to him to look. I hadn’t been much of a gun person before and knew next to nothing about modern weaponry. It had taken me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to extract the magazine when I acquired the rifle.

  “Yeah, it’s the safety selector here. Lever-back is safe, straight down is normal single fire. All the way forward in this direction will shit a whole mag before you know what happened.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I’ve always just been leaving it down.”

  He looked at me with a blank face. His Disapproving Face was always a blank stare. “I’ll have to show you a few things, it seems. For now, keep the lever back if you’re not planning on going to work, okay? I’m not interested in being shot.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. I took back the rifle and set the switch as instructed.

  “How many rounds do you have for that?” he asked as I straightened up.

  “I have 6 magazines for it. They each had 28 rounds. I have a number of loose bullets in the trailer here, too, in a box.”

  “Pretty good,” he said, nodding. “You certainly lucked out with your choice of rifle. The Stoner platform ended up being just about the most popular rifle in the country before the world shit itself. We should be able to find you plenty more rounds in Vegas.”

  “You think 150 or so isn’t enough?”

  “One hundred sixty-eight,” he said promptly, “and, no, I don’t. They’re not making bullets anymore and you’re always going to run out. The world is such now that you want to be looking for bullets as much as you’re looking for water. It’s a challenge because everyone else will be looking too. 5.56 is a popular round though, like I said. We should be able to find some even if we have to go door to door to do it.”

  “What about yourself?” I asked. “I don’t know very much but I know a 12 gauge when I see it. Any reason you have one of those instead of one of these?” I gestured to my rifle.

  “Yeah, there are a few,” he nodded. “I’ll tell you about them later. For now, you better go looking for that fuel if you’re going at all. I’ll start heating us up some food.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “I have some edibles in my trailer as well. Feel free to rummage around for anything you think you might want to eat tonight.”

  He pinned me with that blank stare again. “You know, some asshole’s going to kill you if you don’t exercise a little more caution.”

  I was sure now. I really liked this guy. Smiling despite myself, I said, “Are you an asshole, Billy?”

  “I am,” he responded without hesitation. “I’m not a murdering asshole, though. Even so, you can’t know that.”

  “The fact that you even bring it up gives me a pretty good idea. Besides, suppose someone does kill me because of a lack of caution? God forbid I miss out on a moment of this veritable paradise we’ve all inherited!”

  “Wiseass…” I heard him mutter after I turned my back to leave.

  I wasn’t searching along the highway very long before I got lucky and found an old wooden pallet on the road side. I hauled it back to the fire where Billy still sat with a couple of cans of food cracked open and sitting near to the embers. The look on his face was rather priceless.

  “The hell did you find that?!” he exclaimed.

  “Further North up the 15. I told you: you find a lot of garbage by the road side.”

  “Huh,” was all he said. The wood was old and dry and there wasn’t much holding it together anymore. There was a moderate amount of effort with the flat end of the hatchet to knock the thing apart. When I was finished, I threw a couple of planks on the fire. They didn’t flare up like the sagebrush but they did get burning fairly well in short order and continued to do so evenly for much longer.

  Billy and I sat back to eat the canned food (beef stew, in this case – he advised waiting to eat the MREs until we had a situation where no fire was available). We talked about more things as we finished off the whiskey, some important and some not. We laughed from time to time at our own nonsense and pretended for the evening that the world was still sane. When the whiskey was gone, we set down sleeping bags close to the fire, put some more planks on, and turned in for the night.

  4 – Self Reliance

  Jake

  We were up just before dawn the next morning, which was actually a lot easier than you’d think. Dry desert ground is quite uncomfortable when you have nothing but a sleeping bag. This all took place a couple of years ago now but I remember that morning vividly. I had been so exhausted the night before that getting to sleep had been easy – I don’t think I could have stayed awake if I had tried. On the following night when I met Billy, I had a hard time drifting off due in large part to the novelty of having company again. That and the hard ground meant that I only found sleep in brief, thirty minute stretches before parts of my body started aching enough to wake me up and force me to move.

  The Nevada sun was just coming up over the horizon, turning the blue-black sky blood red, when we were rolling up our sleeping bags. I was stuffing mine back into the trailer and Billy was strapping his back onto his hiking rig; a massive backpack that hung lower than his backside and peeked up over the top of his head.

  He looked to the sunrise and said, “Dawn stretched out her fingertips of rose.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s Homer,” he said, standing up and setting his hands on his hips. “The Iliad. It was just one of those lines that always stuck with me. The phrase is used in the story almost every time a sunrise is described.”

  “What, you mean over and over? That’s a pretty flowery line to go around repeating all the time, isn’t it?”

  Billy chuckled; pushed his fists into the small of his back and leaned into them, growling as he responded. “Yeah, well, Homer didn’t actually write the Iliad. He composed and recited it. It was an epic poem and he was a famous poet of the day, sort of the equivalent of a big time actor or rock star. People like him would be invited to entertain important people. Kings, wealthy land owners, you get the idea. The performance was the recitation of sections of these heroic poems that were kept memorized. All written down, the things span hundreds or thousands of pages but Homer kept it all in his head.”

  “Man…” I muttered.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “So in order to make it easier you see a lot of the phrasing in these works take on a formulaic quality. Whole passages turn into a kind of mnemonic device. People like Homer must have kept whole paragraphs in their heads and shuffled them about at need to make a meaningful story in the same way we use words to make a coherent sentence. It suggests an incredible amount of genius.”

  I didn’t quite know what to say to this. Up until now, Billy had shown a simple, easy manner that almost bordered on “backwoods bumpkin”. His speech and pronunciation suggested a blue collar education but when he started talking about a nearly 3,000 year old poem, it was like listening to a different person. His demeanor changed to that of a professor. His elocution became precise and clear – nearly musical.

  I said, “Billy, go ahead and say this is none of my business if you like, but what exactly did you do before things went south?”

  “I was involved in the casino business. Indian gaming.” That twinkle in his eye again.

  “There a lot of call to read ancient Greek poetry in your line of work?”

  Billy leaned in conspiratorially and said in a low voice, “You know, the Greeks loved their games…” He gave me a light slap on the should
er and moved by me to walk over to the bike trailer. Right, I thought. Take the hint.

  “So, we’ll make it into Vegas today,” Billy started. “How did you want to run this? We can push straight through and check on your parents but I had planned to take some time moving through the area, keep my eyes out for supplies, like. What kind of a rush are you in? Also, how far north of Vegas is their place?”

  I decided to answer the questions in reverse order. “It’s not that far, just on the north edge. It’s up Decatur, if you know the area.”

  “I do, and that’s good news, I think. That’s close to the shooting range. It would be good to go through there; we might get lucky. They always sold range ammo in those places.”

  “That sounds fine,” I agreed. “Aside from that, if you have places in mind that you want to check on, let’s do that. Just about anywhere you’d want to go would be on the way to my folks’ place. We might as well handle your scavenging on the way.”

  “Okay, deal,” said Billy. “So let’s run through the gear you have so we can figure out what you need. Put a shopping list together, see?”

  “Right. So with this trailer I have the rifle and the ammunition that goes with it, obviously. Then I have the canned food, the MREs, and the protein bars and those water jugs, there. Spare clothes with jeans, sweater, some socks and underwear. I have this little flashlight here with some extra double A’s to go with it. Aaaand, I guess all that’s left is the sleeping bag, hatchet, and the pistol with however many rounds are in that box.”

  Billy didn’t say anything for a few moments after I finished speaking. He just stood there next to me with his hands on his hips, staring at the open flap of the bike trailer, and nodding.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “Oh, it’s fine,” he said, making a shooing motion at me with his left hand. “You’re missing some important items but you kind of make up for your lack of gear with this trailer thing. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t think of it; it’s pretty smart. We’ll keep our eyes open to round out your kit. There should be plenty of room to carry it all, I think.”