Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

He knew they were not, of course. He knew what was sane and what was not sane. He knew the difference between sense and senseless. Even so, in the dark, he did not care. In the dark he could let all those things go; those petty concerns regarding what was and was not, what could and could not be. Down there in the perfect dark, pretense was as meaningless as infinity .

When the agony passed, he resumed his upright position and took a long breath that quivered like thistledown on a low wind. He said he had to go, told his absent girls he loved them so and found the opposing entry door. It was identical to the outer door, secured with the same combination, the sequence of which was unnecessary when opening it from the inside.

He stepped through into a small concrete chamber no bigger than a closet, shut the door, and spun the wheel to reset the lock. He turned and rested his hands on a stair railing; the stairs themselves were so narrow and steep that they might have more accurately been referred to as a ladder. He ascended, found the wood-panel wall’s release lock, and pushed gently. It swung open without noise, and he was momentarily blinded by the glare of sunlight cutting in through the cracked shutters. He closed the panel and then stood patiently, blinking as he waited for his sight to adjust.

When it did, he crossed the room and found the old, familiar book on the desk. He pulled the folded slip of paper with the keypad combination from his pocket, placed it back between the pages, and closed the book. Finally, he returned it to its home on the shelf next to its companion, The Odyssey.

He filled his lungs with as much air as they would hold, pulling in more and more until it began to hurt, and then relaxed, letting the air flow slowly out of him.

He took a moment to remind himself who he was before leaving the room.

In a depressing little shit stain of a hotel buried in the forgotten regions of Clark County, Nevada, bang in the center of the bizarrely named Sunrise Manor, Clay Barton groaned the wounded call of an aging man who had stubbornly refused to accept the fact that his liver simply no longer performed at the bygone levels of yesteryear. Or, being realistic, maybe it was better to say “yester-decade.” As the song went, Clay was not as good as he once was.

An insistent series of thumps rattled the hotel manager’s office door in its frame and Pap’s muffled Texan drawl filtered over from the other side: “Baws! Y’all said not to let you sleep in, now! Day’s a-wasting!” More thuds pounded from across the room, lancing directly into Clay’s brain from his supine position on the couch. With each bang against the door’s surface, he believed he saw a little green flash of light explode just under his eyelids.

His jaw creaked open on rusty, ill-treated hinges, and he attempted to answer. No sound came out; the sides of his throat had collapsed together and were sticking against each other as though he had drunk an ounce of superglue. He tried to swallow through a mouth gone all cottony, failed to get the necessary reflex rolling, and then lay there gasping when he was finally forced to give up. All the while, that fucker Pap was beating hell out of the door and calling for his Baws in that Podunk, shit-kicker accent of his.

Clay opened his mouth again and, instead of trying to say anything, went instead with roaring in an alien voice (he was a man normally blessed with a rich, Shakespearian baritone) that sounded like he’d been gargling with broken glass and gasoline. He instantly regretted his decision, though the beating at the door ceased; the sudden expulsion of outraged air and sound from his lungs felt as though it tore every last centimeter of lining from the inside of his esophagus; just felt as though someone had poured boiling water down his throat and then scraped the son of a bitch with a copper wire brush. He lay there gasping for several seconds, head throbbing so violently that he squeezed his eyes shut for fear they would pop out, and finally whimpered a defeated, “Cock… sucker !”

“Okay, Baws!” Pap’s voice barked from outside. Clay heard the sound of the other man’s boots as he moved down the hall towards the main lobby.

He lay there on the couch a moment more, trying (and failing) to reconstruct the previous evening. Just what the hell had happened, anyway? He was mildly alarmed to realize he could not remember; he thought playing cards might have been involved, but he just couldn’t be sure.

He tossed his left leg off the couch, letting the booted heel clomp onto the carpeted floor, and left it there a moment. When he’d screwed up enough courage, he sent the other leg down to join it, sat up, and immediately put his head down between his knees. He panted hard and saw a little shimmer across the seesawing floor; realized a moment later that it was a runner of drool stretching down from his bottom lip.

“Gggeezish…” he panted.

From his bent-over position, he could feel his bladder wedged down hard under his gut, bitching up at him, “Hey, asshole!” in an attempt to get a little relief. He gagged a bit and decided the bastard could just wait a minute; in his current condition, he was almost positive that a bout of dry heaving would result in him simultaneously pissing and shitting himself, possibly tearing a muscle or two in the process. Head still down between his legs, he reached a blind hand out in front of himself and waved it around angrily until it collided with the wastebasket. He dumped its contents out over the floor and then held it up to his face like a feedbag. He burped, the flavor seeming to him to be as close as he’d ever get to understanding what it would be like to suck on a dead horse’s testicles without doing the actual deed, stood into a half-crouch, and duck-walked over to the five-gallon night bucket in the corner of the room.

It was everything he could do to get his britches down around his ankles, keep the wastebasket leveled under his chin, and sit down onto the thin rim of the bucket without just falling all the way into the damned thing… or soiling himself mid-squat. He let go at that point and was overcome by the most horrifying and psychologically taxing excretion of his life. It was a full-body expulsion and, if there was any part of him that featured an orifice, there was something coming out of it; even his ears, which leaked out a kind of greasy-clear liquid. The dark-orange urine that tore through his urethra felt like rock salt, moving at high pressure and sending stabbing lances of hellfire shooting back up his cock and deep into his belly. He didn’t even want to think about what was happening with his ass; he was remotely aware of a warm splattering against his thighs and wondered if he would prolapse before he got it all out.

Dwarfing all of the horror occurring below his waste was the all-consuming need to heave, that uncontrollable gagging reflex that originated deep down under his diaphragm, constricting around his guts harder than the world’s greatest anaconda, crushing everything inside him in an insane, insatiable, instinctive fucking need to purge every last picoliter of whatever poison it was that he’d crammed down his stupid, yawning gullet; that miserable cocksucking tooth-ringed asshole—sweet merciful Christ how he hated his own mouth for having been available for his need when a bottle had been at hand. Long, thick stringers of drool and snot sagged into the wastebasket, refusing to break off, but no vomit issued forth; it seemed his stomach had checked itself out of this whole event some time ago but, like the outright forgetful bastard it was, neglected to disable whatever circuit was telling his brain it was still there in need of emptying. His ribs creaked alarmingly in his chest, each heave accompanied by a matching splash deep down in the night bucket, and he suffered a moment of true panic, wondering if it was possible to do… whatever the hell it was he was doing… to death. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a breath. How long had this gone on?