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

He saw what he at first mistook for two pink, quivering Hostess Snowballs, hovering out before him, blurred by a thick layer of tears covering each eye. He blinked hard, causing the liquid to spill down his cheeks, and realized he was looking at his bare kneecaps. Slowly (great god almighty, was it slow), his midsection began to unclench, apparently deciding that the only thing it was going to be able to eject from Clay’s mouth was pancreas, and he probably still needed that. He took a shuddering, grateful sigh, wiped his sleeve across his face, and began to look around for his roll of toilet paper. After a moment of casting about, he located it… six feet away on a bookshelf well out of his reach.

It was therefore understandable, perhaps, that Clay was not in the best of moods when he finally emerged from the manager’s office of the Marriott nearly an hour later.

He stood out in the hall for a moment, swaying, and waited for his roiling gut to catch up with him. He heard voices creeping up the hallway; they had a remote, echoing quality and he wondered how many people were waiting for him out in the sterile, tiled lobby. It seemed like each morning brought just a few more of them, just a few more people who desired his input on some mundane shit. He thought miserably of his couch and forced himself to stumble down the hallway towards the low, reverberating conversations.

He was nearly blinded when he emerged into the lobby; a wide open area of inoffensive earth tones, cheap import furniture, and Formica countertops. To his left was an expanse of miraculously intact floor-to-ceiling windows stretching some fifty feet across the room’s width, in the center of which was the main entrance door. The harsh rays of the late morning sun cut through the glass and into his eyes just as easily as a heated razor blade would have sliced through an egg. Clay groaned, threw a hand up to shield against the assault, and said, “Christ’s sake, someone draw the fucking curtains, huh?”

He squeezed his eyes shut against the brightness and waited for someone to rush over and save him. A moment later, he sensed a coolness settle over his face and tentatively opened one eye to confirm that the situation had been rectified. While there were no longer a sufficient number of curtains to cover all the windows, there were enough to reduce the encroaching light significantly, rendering the room at least manageable. Clay shambled forth into the center of the room and settled into a rolling office chair that had been positioned as though it were a half-assed throne delivered on behalf of Ikea. Ahead of him, both on his left and his right were an array of couches, chairs, a few low tables, and a bunch of people just waiting to fill his day up with their needs. He blew air through his lips like a horse.

The arrangement reminded him of endless, useless meetings once held in another life, where spineless and ineffective folk used to sit around big, fancy tables and feebly attempt to “reach quorums” and “determine the path forward.” His mouth twisted in a sneer as he recalled the gutless affectations of a culture perpetually terrified of putting a foot wrong or taking things just a touch too far, a culture having spawned supposed men that used phrases like “loop me in” and “breaking down silos” as they stared down distractedly at their bullshit, little smartphones; their obnoxious action items, bureaucracies, rambling meeting minutes, and fucking synergies. All that phony pomp hung out like a curtain of veneer—armor against the ever-present fear: for God’s sake, don’t let us have to take a trip to HR! Not that, oh Jesus (or whatever deity you may or may not happen to follow, I certainly don’t want to assume, you understand), please don’t threaten the labeling of a hostile work environment because someone happened to show a slight ounce of passion!

He’d begun to suffer stomach problems for a while there, just before the Flare. Every day another imposition, another bit of bile he had to swallow each time he was forced to watch another inept clown near the edge of understanding on some crucial matter and then, on the very precipice of revelation, put a foot wrong and go off on a tangent, completely missing every relevant point that mattered. They were all his problem, ultimately. As the senior guy, it was his job to pull them back from their own plodding, tone-deaf assumptions; to school them along the proper course. To win.

And every time he did it, it was like watching simple-minded three-year-olds attempting to color inside the lines.

When his doctor had told him outright that he needed to find some way to reduce the stress in his work life or risk the onset of hypertension and eventual heart attack, Clay had laughed hysterically. How, exactly? He said, “Doc, I’m awash in a sea of jackasses too timid to tell you what color their socks are without first checking—a bunch of decision-adverse lemmings—and if I reach a point where I finally lose my shit on any one of them because I’m tired of all the spoon-feeding, it’s my ass, not theirs. Now, I ask you, exactly how would you recommend I reduce stress in a situation like that?”

“Might I suggest that you care less?” the doctor asked.

Clay had snorted out a spasm of dismissal at that. He finally said, “Just give me something for the indigestion, and we’ll call it even, huh?”

Things had changed a bit since those days. The world had changed. HR departments were now extinct, along with sensitivity training, political correctness, the psychology of imagined offense, and any other artificial shackle the prosperous developed world had dreamt up to restrain itself, having eliminated any of the shit it was actually worthwhile to be concerned over decades ago. It was all gone, now. The needless complexity, the social tap-dancing; all of the bizarre, askew little white-collar power dynamics.

It was simple now, all so beautifully simple. At some point after the end of the world, around the time he’d realized he wasn’t actually going to get sick and die, Clay had undergone a renaissance of self; a kind of awakening. And the more he could wallow in the messy simplicity of his place within this new world, the cleaner he felt. So long as he wasn’t shitting himself silly over a five-gallon bucket, anyway.

Presently, he was disturbed from his inner thoughts by a tap at his elbow and looked down; saw a cup of coffee held out to him by Pap. “Oh… God bless you…” he whispered in his rolling, mellow voice—now smoothing out a bit despite a hitch here and there. He took a sip and sighed deeply.

“Okay,” he said clearly so that the whole room could hear him. “First thing’s first: is Ronny back?”

“He ain’t,” answered Pap, who had walked out into Clay’s field of view to sit down in a chair on his right.

Clay nodded and said, “Uh.” He had a peculiar way of using that simple, inarticulate expression, thought Pap. Most people said “uh,” and they sounded like clueless morons. Pap liked the way Clay said it. Clay didn’t express “uh,” he declared “uh.” He made it sound like the thing any normal man would say when he heard exactly what was expected, the sound of a man in control of things. And such a thing was just fine by Pap; a fella who knew what the hell he was doing seemed like a good thing to have around.

“So be it,” Clay continued, oblivious to Pap’s undivided attention, “let’s get the morning’s business situated and then we’ll see about sending some folks after him. We’ve waited long enough. Doc, you look like someone’s wired a car battery up to your butt cheeks; you wanna go first?”

Casey, the closest thing their moderately sized collective had to a doctor, bristled at this and said, “I really wish you wouldn’t call me that, Clay. I was just a nur—”