Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  Wang continued. “And how many of us have combat experience?”

  Nobody raised a hand this time. Wang looked back at me along with everyone else.

  “As you say,” Wang said, “we need you to teach us how to fight effectively as a team. We need to learn from you so we can survive. You’re kind of a VIP now. You’re not going to be good to anyone if you do something stupid like get killed.”

  Jesus, I thought. You morbid little asshole.

  I thought about it a minute and then shook my head. “Look, it’s probably a moot point, anyway. We haven’t seen a single person since we got here, and we’ve driven all over the place. I’m sure it’s safe out there.”

  “If that’s the case then leave the weapons behind,” said Wang. “You’ll be able to carry more back here when you return.”

  Goddamn it, the cagey little bastard had me pinned. I was strongly considering just overriding everyone and forcing Kyle bodily into the gear if I had to. Edgar spoke up before I could.

  “You do know that we’re right, of course. You wouldn’t look so uncertain otherwise.”

  I held back anger at his insufferable, know-it-all, little comment. Maybe they were right. Maybe the best way I could do my job was to start by ensuring that I stayed upright. It was a bitter damned pill to swallow, though.

  “Fine,” I growled. I pulled the whole works over my head and started strapping into it, adjusting the mag and grenade pouches as I went. Things were a little moved around from what I was used to when I wore one of these for a living but I decided to not eat up the next several minutes repositioning pouches on the webbing. Instead, I started opening and inspecting each pouch to verify what I had. In addition to the usual stack of PMAGs wrapped around my belly, I located fragmentation, flashbang, and smoke grenades. There was all the other usual crap that I was used to seeing too; the flex cuffs, flashlight and chemlight, a blowout kit (I found that it was outfitted with the newer QuickClot gauze, which was a good thing; I’d never experienced this personally but the older pads used to burn the hell out of people) – I noted, however, that the standard CAT (combat application tourniquet) was missing. I also located some partially filled out casualty and witness cards, now rendered useless by the fact that there was no one to submit them to in the event that we took any casualties. I stuffed them back in their pocket, not wanting to explain them to anyone else for fear of spooking them.

  I looked around. “Okay, I’m wearing the damned thing. Is everyone happy now?”

  Barbara smiled at me. “I’m happy. You’re looking yummy.”

  I restrained a laugh. “Later, Barbara. Not in front of the children.” I turned back to the pile of gear on the aisle floor, crouched down to the food duffel, and pulled out the last of the food and water, which was distressingly little. I handed the empty bag up to Jessica and said, “Here, you can pack mule for us. If we luck out and find a large cache somewhere, we can come back for more people to help us carry it all out.”

  She took the bag and I nodded to both of them, confirming it was time to head out. I paused by Davidson as I went and said, “You stay away from those grenades, okay? Don’t let me come back here and find that you’ve blown half your face off.”

  “Understood, boss. Not until I’ve been trained.”

  “Good,” I said, feeling a little guilty. Davidson was eager but he was no dummy; I’d ordered him to keep off already, and so that was very likely what he would do. I felt as though I needed to loosen up a little and stop expecting the worst possible performance out of everyone all the time. The fact that none of these people were Marines didn’t make them five year olds. In fact, a lot of the guys in my platoon had demonstrated several times that they were perfectly comfortable operating at a five year old level – all they had to do was get a little bored and the shenanigans would ensue.

  “There isn’t really any place to get elevated around here,” I said to him. “At the same time, the buildings we do have around will limit your field of view. I recommend you just position yourself outside the bus so you have good visibility running up and down the street. Keep everyone else close by.”

  He nodded and grabbed the grenadier’s M4 to follow us off the bus. I walked up the aisle towards the exit, having to rotate around the people in the seats to keep from smacking them in the heads and shoulders with all the pouches hanging off my torso.

  Outside of the bus, I looked at my two new teammates and said, “Let’s just stick to Washington. We’ll head south and keep our eyes open for anything good. Keep on the lookout for the standard stuff like grocery stores and the like, but also look for larger businesses or office buildings. Most of those places had employee rec rooms or cafeterias. They would have food and Coke dispensers we can break open.”

  We walked south together for several blocks, looking for things to jump out at us. Kyle gestured to several buildings as we went but I shook my head to indicate we should keep moving. The businesses in the area were small; a lot of them were little Mom and Pop take-out joints that would have either been cleared out or stuffed with rotting food. There would be more hope for water in these places but we had a good distance to go into the city; I didn’t want to load down with bottles of water here only to have to carry them double the distance. Besides, I was still dreaming of an Army checkpoint.

  Being younger and subject to less aches and pains (and perhaps also because he wasn’t humping another forty pounds of combat load), Kyle began to drift out ahead of us as we walked. I appreciated his drive but called out to him anyway, advising that he not get too far ahead. He waved back to me and slowed his pace. Jessica stayed by my side as we walked, the tattoos on her bare arms standing out in the daylight. She had the long strap of the duffel bag crisscrossed over her body with both of her hands wound up in the strap at the center of her chest, keeping the bag up high on her back rather than slapping around at her hip.

  I stole glances at her out of the corner of my left eye as we walked, trying to get some kind of read on her. I could tell she was younger than me but she was a lot closer to my own age (forty-two at the time) than she was to Kyle’s; I’d have to place her in the early- to mid-thirty range. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had a serious face; a face that described a certain familiarity with getting only slightly less than what was needed from life. It struck me, then, that she was an attractive woman in all of the ways that Rebecca was not. Rebecca had a lot going for her including an unlined, baby doll face and a body loaded down with curves in all the right places; but her attitude was basically still that of a kid. Taking into account her flash of insight at the tent city, I had begun to suspect that the whole “helpless bombshell” thing might be more of a performance on her part; a calculated persona designed to attract those of the White Knight mindset. I wasn’t anywhere near certain if this was actually the case but if it was, my estimation of her would be knocked down a rung or two; I am not an admirer of feigned incompetence.

  Jessica’s beauty, on the other hand, had its core in the competence she expressed. Her face carried life experience in the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth as well as the deeper wrinkles of her forehead, and yet these only added to her appeal. She looked like she had probably hit some rough patches along the way and had been blessed with the inner drive necessary to push through. On the road in a pair of dirty, stale jeans, a sweat stained shirt, greasy unwashed hair, and grime highlighting all the cracks of her skin she yet managed to be striking. I imagined that once she cleaned up, dressed nice, and applied a bit of makeup, she could turn some serious heads.

  “Uh, you see anything you like?” she asked, shocking me out of my thoughts. I had been convinced I was being all stealthy but apparently I was staring like a dumbass.

  Having enough experience to answer with neither “yes” nor “no”, I said, “Sorry. Don’t take it wrong; I was just curious about who I’m travelling with. I have a pretty good lock on Kyle since we had a chance to talk a bit up at the airpor
t. I was just wondering about you, that’s all.”

  Apparently not willing to let me off the hook, she said, “Ah…nice dodge but you still didn’t answer my question.”

  I blew air out between my lips in an obvious stall for time. Rather than going for a gambit in either direction, I decided to hedge by calling attention to my position, hoping for a little pity. “Okay, well if I say ‘no’, I’m the rude prick that thinks you’re not much worth looking at. If I say ‘yes’, I’m that creepy old guy that likes to get the ladies separated off from the group so he can ogle them and start making propositions.”

  “I don’t think you’re old at all, Gibs.” She didn’t look at me but the corner of her mouth pulled up in a smile.

  Well…damn.

  I decided to put a pin in that train of thought and see if I could press her for background. I’d be coming back to this, though. There was charming to be done here. Oh, yes.

  “Okay,” I said, scrambling to pick the main thread back up, “all that aside, I’m basically walking into an undefined situation right now with a couple of armed strangers and Kyle is slightly less strange than you. No offense; I just mean that you’re unfamiliar. I don’t know anything about you. For instance, have you ever fired a gun before?”

  She tilted her head and nodded off into the distance, body language indicating that she considered this a worthy line of inquiry. “I have,” she answered, “but I was not the best at it nor did I enjoy it.”

  “Oh, what happened?”

  “Bad case of a shitty instructor,” she said. “It was my ex-husband. He was dead set on having his ‘woman learn how to handle a weapon’.” She said the last part of the sentence in a mock-basso voice while puffing out her chest and widening her elbows far enough to encroach into my space, which didn’t bother me in the slightest. “Then he let me rattle my fillings loose with his .44 magnum.”

  I grimaced and said, “What a douche.” Realizing what I had said out loud, I quickly added, “Uh, excuse me.”

  “It’s no problem at all; he was, in fact, a massive douche.”

  I’d seen videos with people like this guy on the internet before. The pinnacle of humor for them was apparently to take a waif of a girl weighing in at about ninety pounds soaking wet, hand her a goddamned hand cannon loaded for bear, and then sit back and laugh their asses off when she’d inevitably shit herself in response to the concussive forces unleashed by the monster. More often than not, the subject of all the laughter ended up hurting herself in some way; either by falling down or smacking herself in the head with the barrel as it rotated violently back in her hand. As someone who strongly believes that a good citizen is a well-armed citizen, videos like that used to make me all stabby. You simply could not devise a better means to make the average person terrified of firearms nor find a way to better condition them to believe that guns are evil.

  “Well, I won’t pry,” I continued, “but if that’s an indicator of the man, I guess I can see why his title is ‘ex’-husband.”

  “Oh, that’s a small, small part of it. But in general, yes. He never laid a hand on me or anything like that. He was just a controlling prick. I spent more time than I care to admit being worn down by him, being told ‘I couldn’t’, believing I wasn’t worth anything. You see these?” She held her arms out in front of her, indicating the various tattoos that wrapped all around them. They weren’t quite sleeves but if she managed to cram any more in there, they would qualify.

  “I got these as a big F-you to my ex. I’d wanted a tattoo ever since I was in high school. It was nothing elaborate; just my father’s name on the back of my neck…he died when I was fourteen. Whenever I dreamt about him, the back of my neck was where I could still feel his touch on waking. He always had his hand there. When I was a little girl, it was how he guided me through a crowded area. During dinner at the end of the day, he’d reach out to pull me over for a kiss on the cheek; he’d do it by gently pulling me over by the base of my neck. If I close my eyes right now, I can still feel it. I wanted his name inked right where I could feel his touch.”

  “Damn,” was all I could think to say. It was a heavy thought.

  “Anyway,” she continued without acknowledging my interruption, “my ex forbade it. He said that no wife of his was going around with some bullshit trailer trash badge of honor stamped across her neck.”

  After hearing the deeply personal reason behind her desire to get the tattoo, this last statement made my blood boil. The thought that anyone should be roped into wasting time with such as him was galling. Keeping in mind, of course, that there are two sides to every story; I’m sure she had her moments when any sane man would favor jumping out of a window to dealing with the worst of her tirades…most women do in my experience. But still: that story about her dad was a heartbreaker, even for a salty old Marine. Reducing it down to “trailer trash shit” was indefensible in my view.

  “It sounds to me, if you’ll excuse me saying so, that you made the right choice for yourself. So all that ink was before or after you broke it off?”

  “In the process of,” she answered. “I actually wish I had left it until all the proceedings were done. It might have helped in the custody fight.”

  “Oh, no, there were kids tied up in it?”

  “One: my daughter, Pinch.”

  “Pinch?” I asked. I was unable to keep amusement from my voice.

  “Yeah,” she smiled. “My baby girl. Her name is Emily, after the asshole’s mother. I could never bring myself to call her that. I called her Pinch instead.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  Jessica looked me over up and down, appraising. “You have any kids?”

  “No, ma’am, thank God. I like kids just fine, you understand. I’m just lucky I never had any with the women I married.”

  “Plural, huh?” she said with an impressed air.

  “Uh, yes. It takes a special woman to be married to a Marine and remain faithful, especially when you spend half your marriage deployed. Unfortunately, young Marines don’t have a lot of luck at picking special women.”

  “Ah, none of it was your fault, of course.”

  “Oh, hell no! There were all kinds of fu- uh, things I could have done better. It’s just that they weren’t giving me a whole lot to work with either.”

  “Well, in either case, you’re probably right to be thankful,” she said. “An ugly divorce is a hard thing for a kid to go through. Anyway, I called her Pinch because that’s all I wanted to do to her when she was born. Fat little arms, fat little legs, her fat little cheeks…I don’t know what it is but something about all that screams PINCH ME to a mom.” She started to giggle, recalling some private memory.

  I thought back to the holidays of my formative years and the outright beating my cheeks took at the hands of my sadistic Aunt Angie, deciding that Jessica’s statement must be a true one.

  A thought occurred to me during this lull in the conversation. From what all of us survivors had seen, immunity to the plague was a guaranteed deal through maternal heredity. “Jessica, where is Pinch now?”

  She sighed. “Her father had her for a few months out of the year; it’s why I made the comment about waiting until after the custody battle to get my tattoos – things may have gone better for me. She was with him when the plague hit.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. Knowing what we all knew about the statistics behind the plague, there wasn’t a lot of hope that the father was still alive. If her kid (Pinch not Emily, I reminded myself) was still alive, the chances were good that her father wasn’t around to look out for her anymore. “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen,” she said.

  “Goddamn. Well, where was she last?”

  “He lived in North Platte, Nebraska. There was a FEMA camp up by Sioux City, so I imagine they must have ended up there.”

  “Well why the hell didn’t you say something sooner?” I asked, feeling agitated. “We could have been making plans to go that way!”

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p; “You’ve been going my way so far,” she answered. “I wasn’t going to ask anyone to make the trip with me; Sioux City is a really good distance from here. I was going to help you get some supplies here in Denver, claim my share, and go my own way up the 76. It’s why I wanted to come out with you guys. It gives me a better claim on taking some of the food and water with me.”

  “Damn, man,” I said. “Just…damn.” I looked out ahead to see Kyle still maintaining a good distance out in front. There wasn’t a great deal of anything in the immediate area that looked like it was worth stopping for so I put my attention back on Jessica. “Well, crap,” I said. “And here I was under the impression that you just came out for the company.” I glanced at her sidelong.

  “Oh,” she laughed, “that was just a bonus. You can always break off from this group and come with me, you know.”

  “Well, yeah, what about your group?” I asked, coming back to reality for a moment. “I get why you’re going for your kid but can you really just bounce on them like that? Why wouldn’t you ask them to come? It’s not like they’re going to be dead set in going anywhere else.”

  “They’re not my group,” said Jessica without any malice. “I had only been with them a couple of days in Colorado Springs by the time you showed up. I was there to rest and hopefully resupply before heading out; I think they were getting ready to vote me off the island, honestly.”

  “Oh, why is that?”

  “Because I wasn’t planning on sticking around and they knew it. Why should they invest time or resources into keeping me healthy if I was just going to bounce? There would be no reason to do that if they couldn’t rely on me to stay and pitch in.”

  I chewed all this over in my head for the next hundred yards or so. Finally I said, “Well, let’s get this food situation handled. After we get that under control, I might just tag along with you.”

  “Hey,” she said, sounding genuinely excited, “no shit?”