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

“How do they look, Beau?”

The man’s head came up out of the compartment so he could glance over his shoulder. Recognizing Clay, he put on an oily, disagreeable grin. Clay hated that smile, wanted to knock it off the man’s face with a hammer every time he saw it. There were few people in the world with which Clay couldn’t find a way to get along, but on rare occasions, there were folks he ran into of whose very existence he disapproved. Beau was one of those. He pulled himself off the front of the vehicle and clomped down onto his feet. Now that he faced Clay, the tangle of ridiculous tattoos that crawled up his neck and onto his cheeks was fully visible. Inbred shit-heel , Clay thought to himself, while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that the shit-heel was also a gifted mechanic.

Beau set his socket wrench down and began wiping the grease off his hands with a rag. He said, “This one wants a new alternator and some belts. Alternator shouldn’t be too hard, but I can’t say about the belts. Maybe you find ’em in a store somewhere’s, maybe you have to pull ’em out of another truck. But any trucks you find out there’ve just been sitting around in the sun drying out, you know?”

Clay nodded. “Will it run with the belts it has?”

“Oh, sure. They’re starting to crack along the ribs, but she’ll hold. Gotta get that alternator, though. She’ll keep dying on you if you don’t.”

Clay looked at the truck a while, thinking. Finally, he asked, “What’s easier, Beau? Fix the alternator or just find a new truck?” Beau opened his mouth to answer almost immediately, but Clay interrupted him by holding up a hand: “Understanding, of course, that I’ll send you out to find either the alternator or the truck, fucking regardless, huh?”

Beau snapped his mouth shut and gave the question some serious thought, which was all Clay wanted. “Probably the alternator,” Beau reluctantly admitted. “This truck’s a known quantity with a nice, powerful engine. It’ll take some looking to replace her; everything else on her is just about tops. If we go to find another truck, there’s no telling what kind of unknown issues we’re signing up for.”

“Now that’s a fair answer,” Clay said. “How about the rest of them?”

“Some of them are salvageable, some not. Some could get rolling again with the right parts.”

“How long?”

Beau wobbled his head in a noncommittal expression. “Couple of weeks, maybe?”

“How many can you have rolling in two days?”

Beau’s eyes bugged a bit. He rubbed a damp hand down his sleeveless T-shirt and said, “What’s the rush, there, Chico? Somethin’ you ain’t telling me? We wear out our welcome with the locals?”

“Just how fucking many, Beau?”

“Half,” he bit off, putting on his best “I don’t give a shit what you say” face. It was an expression that said, “Go ahead and argue with me, shit-for-brains. Just go ahead, and see who else you can get around here that can turn a wrench.”

Clay nodded, suppressing an urge to slap the look off the other’s face, and said, “Hang on a while.” He walked across the shop floor to the row of roll-up doors, all opened as far as they would go to keep the air fresh. He stood at the door a moment and looked around at various people as they bustled from place to place, waiting patiently until he saw someone who fulfilled the double requirement of being from the correct group as well as someone Clay knew by name. He eventually saw someone who fit the bill and called out to her: “Hey, Regina!”

She stopped and waved at him.

“See Elton around?”

She gave him a thumbs-up.

“Tell him to come over here, huh?”

She smiled and ran off. Clay leaned against the open garage door, taking in the late morning air, seeing all the people so busy and ordered. It made him feel good to see the big machine moving along on its own, no longer requiring constant direction or massaging. A machine that ran on its own was a beautiful thing.

“Whatcha want that nigger over here for, anyway?” Beau spit from behind him.

Clay grimaced. It must have been some sort of genetic defect with Beau; the man absolutely couldn’t open his mouth without being infuriating. “I told you about that shit, didn’t I?” he warned.

He heard Beau scoff from behind him. “Yeah, just tell him to keep his monkey hands off my tools. Son of a bitch’ll probably try to pock—”

“I’m not going to tell you again, Beau. I’m done warning you.”

The mechanic went deathly quiet and Clay, who stood with his back to the man intentionally, could feel hateful eyes drilling into the back of his neck. He breathed deeply, trying to calm a racing heart responding to both anger and a very real threat, and listened intently for any footsteps approaching from behind. He counted to ten, and when he heard the socket wrench resume ratcheting from behind him, he ran a weathered hand through the thick, black hair on his head (mostly black, at least; there was a lot more gray than he liked to see at the temples these days).

He hooked his left thumb in his hip pocket, and then pulled it out again when he lifted his hand to wave at Elton, who came trotting up.

“What’s happening, Clay?” he asked happily. Elton was always a happy man; it seemed. This could also become incredibly annoying at times, Clay well knew, but ultimately he decided he’d take an insufferably sunny shmuck to an underhanded asshole any day. You simply could not argue with that kind of positive attitude; there wasn’t anything Elton wasn’t willing to attempt, no matter how hopeless. It was the chief characteristic that made him so effective at running the scavenger parties. Clay wished he had ten or twenty more just like him, golly-gee Andy Griffith attitude or not.

Clay slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Come over here a minute, Elton. I’ve got another special hunt for you.”

Elton’s grin spread even wider, and he said, “Music to my ears, man! Music to my ears!”

Clay walked up to stand on Beau’s right side, who had not emerged from the engine compartment to look at either of the other men and said, “You have that part?”

Without looking up, Beau’s hand pointed back in the general direction of a folding table. “Over there; big, gray, round hunk of metal. Looks like there’s a fan inside it.”

“I know what an alternator looks like…” Clay muttered under his breath. He lifted it with both hands (the damned thing was heavy) and passed it over to Elton. “We need another one of these. Take a spare set of sockets and box wrenches with you, just in case. Stick with Dodge diesels.”

“You got it, Clay,” Elton said. “We’ll get right on this.”

He turned to leave but only made it about five steps toward the exit before Beau said, “Yeah, hop-to, nigger…”

Elton froze in his tracks and whirled around, his face covered in a mask of shocked rage so murderous that Clay hardly recognized the man. His left hand had curled into a fist so hard that it bled to white around the edges and Clay realized that he palmed the heavy alternator in his right hand easily, as if it were a softball and not a twenty-pound engine component. Elton took a step towards Beau and Clay realized that twenty-pound alternator was about to become a twenty-pound murder weapon. Clay opened his mouth to speak but, before he could get a word out, Elton froze again and looked right at him. His gaze traveled back and forth between the two men, and he forced himself to relax, rage slipping off his face like silk slipping over smooth skin.

In a flash of intuition, Clay read what must be going on in his head: Two white men. Old boys’ club. On the outs. Don’t look for no justice; won’t find none here.