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

He went over to see Corina, who was stationed in her regular spot working a big kettle over an open fire. Like the laundry and the newly established brothel, Corina was another enterprising member of the group who had begun to wring out a living on the credit system. She was a sweet little thing, in her forties or fifties, who had been with Clay nearly since the beginning. It was this long association, in fact, that explained his ability to remember her name. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone else (not even Pap, who knew just about everything else there was to know about Clay), but he had begun to regard her as a kind of good luck charm. They had all gone through some hard times. Good times too, sure, but most of it had been hard. Through everything had been Corina, cute little smile always ready to shine no matter how sour Clay was feeling, ready to cook up a meal and get something in his belly, and he figured that as long as she was still kicking things must still be okay. Truth be told, he admired the hell out of anyone who could keep a sweet attitude up amidst the broad, exciting selection of day to day shit through which they all slogged, so long as they didn’t get insufferable about it. Corina hadn’t been a woman that brought a great deal of skills to the table; she wasn’t particularly strong or able, didn’t make much of a hunter or a gatherer. Despite these realities, she had carved a spot out for herself rather expertly.

Folks brought her things they found, things like small game, meat trimmings from their kills, wild vegetables, herbs, and the like, and they’d spend some time haggling over price, but these little affairs almost always ended up at a quarter or half credit. She did some fantastic custom with small game; critters like squirrels, possums, and even rats. Every so often someone would get lucky and bag a raccoon; for which she would spend as much as two full credits, bountiful as they were for usable material.

Whatever it was she got her hands on, she could usually find some way to prepare it in a stew. This was especially true on the smaller creatures, which perhaps weren’t a terribly impressive meal on their own but made a fine meat stew if enough of them were jumbled together and boned out. Most of the time, Corina could even save the small organs (assuming she didn’t foul them with fecal matter when she gutted them; she got better at the process all the time). It all went into the pot, ultimately, and made decent fare for the rest of the group; people who hadn’t enough time to devote to cleaning and preparing their own kills (those who took the time to hunt, anyway) and still complete all of the other critical tasks to which they must attend to keep the little tribe running.

So, they brought the roadkill to Corina for a quarter or a half, who would take the day to prepare and cook it up, and then sell it back out again at a full credit per bowl. And this was a decent bowl, mind you; not apt to split your gut when you took it all in at once, sure, but it kept you moving happily for the whole damned day. The equivalent of an hour’s work for a meal that kept you hopping until dinner; people happily paid it and never gave a second thought to the fact that Corina’s account was probably ballooning.

“And why shouldn’t it?” thought Clay. That kind of healthy supply and demand was exactly what allowed a system like theirs to thrive. A whole new market had even sprung up among the children in response; most of them hunted small vermin with air rifles just to sell them off to Corina for a bit of extra scratch. Sometimes the kids ran short of BBs or pellets; a few of the industrious ones had learned how to make darts out of nails feathered with a bit of yarn and a scrap of electrical tape. It seemed roofing nails worked the best; they just cut the head off with some heavy dikes, attached the feather, and stuck them into the breach-loading air guns pretty as you pleased.

That was yet another market, then, that had sprung up as well: the replacement air gun projectile market, with its own little microcosms of trade, demand, and normalization, which thrived among the children. A little economic system Clay never would have dreamed of on his own, not in a million years, just popping up out of nowhere and thrumming along, another wheel turning in the machine. It made him grin despite his aching head and temperamental innards.

Corina smiled at him as he approached and tapped her ladle against one of the big pots she had running behind her table. A thirteen-year-old boy she had adopted, named Gerome, handed her a bowl.

“Morning, Clay. Getcha a bowl?”

“Hey, sweetie. What’s on the menu today?”

She grinned and winked at him, sawing her head back and forth. “A little of this, a little of that. Mostly ground squirrel and a bit of cat.”

“Ugh, Jesus, we’re doing cat now?”

She stuck her lip out and said, “If you taste anything wrong with this, I free you from any obligation to finish the meal.” She poured a giant ladleful into the bowl and passed it over to him.

Clay looked at the gray-brown broth for a beat before nodding to a girl behind Corina, who tallied the sale in a notebook. He took the bowl and scribbled down his initials when the girl held the notebook and pencil out to him.

“My kingdom for a fucking cheeseburger,” he said woefully.

“Well, you have someone from Elton’s crew find us some cattle, and we’ll see what we can do,” Corina smiled. She glanced down at his hands, and the smile wilted from her face immediately, replaced by the little “O” her lips formed.

Clay followed the direction of her gaze and saw the line of blood along the back of his right hand, much of it now drying to a muted brown color but some of it still vibrant red. He resisted the urge to hide it or rub it off on the side of his pants. Instead, he ducked his head slightly to catch her eyes; when he had her looking back up at him, he straightened and said, “You’ll hear about it soon enough from the others, and I’m sure you’ll draw your own conclusions. I’m not gonna try to beat the story to you. All I’ll say on the matter is that certain shit becomes necessary of a time, huh?”

She closed her mouth and looked down at his hand again, her worry plain in her eyes and beetled brows. She passed him an old towel and asked, “Did you have to kill someone?”

He accepted the towel and placed the uncomfortably hot bowl down on the table long enough to clean his hand. “Not yet, anyway,” he mumbled.

She nodded and forced the smile back onto her face. “Well, there’s that, then!”

“Sure, there is that.”

He looked down at his steaming bowl, at a loss for anything to say.

“I’m going to take this back at my place, huh? I’ll have the bowl sent back around to you later.”

“Sure thing,” Corina nodded. “Enjoy!”

“You bet,” he called back as he walked away.

He entered the Marriott lobby, now empty of people, and walked down the hallway to the manager’s office. He tossed open the door without thinking and was instantly assaulted by the aromatic horror of the night bucket. He spun on his heel fast enough to slop some of the near-scalding broth over his hand and yanked the door shut, hissing the word, “Je- SUS !” through clenched teeth. He would need to deal with that soon before the aroma became a permanent feature of the room for all time until the end of days.

He retraced his steps to the lobby, shaking off his right hand as he went, and finally settled for a chair behind the front desk. The desk itself was high enough that people wouldn’t be able to see him as they passed by outside and, if he was lucky, he might get through the meal before someone needed him.

The stew had cooled to a point where he’d managed to suck down half of it (surprisingly, it was actually pretty damned good, cat or no cat) when Pap burst in through the front door and made a bee-line for the side hallway, hollering for his “ Baws! ” as he went. Annoyed at the interruption, Clay considered just letting him go have his own little night bucket encounter. He ultimately decided against it, thinking to himself that some things were just too damned cruel, regardless of how funny they might be.