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

“How many?”

Ronny cleared his throat. He scratched under his chin idly and asked, “Can I get some water? Hell of a dry mouth here.”

“Sure thing,” Clay said, and got up to go grab it himself to spare Pap the indignity of waiting on Ronny, a man he detested in the best of moods. He retrieved a blue Igloo cooler from behind the front desk and brought it back to place at Ronny’s feet. “Pass a few around to the others as well,” he advised.

Ronny nodded, took a bottle for himself, and handed the cooler back up over his head, where one of his flunkies (a sandy-haired kid with acne and a spare tire around his gut) received it and set it down behind the couch. When it looked like everyone had settled into wetting their chops, Clay loudly wrapped his knuckles on the armrest of his chair.

Ronny took another swallow and said, “There was a truck and three cars whizzing around it like P-51’s around a bomber, okay? And the thing you have to understand outright was that these people were prepared and well-armed. Every one of those vehicles was armored; real D.I.Y. shit, you know? It was like they went out, found a bunch of steel plating, and just welded it on all over the place. I guess there were at least four people per vehicle, though I can’t be sure, so sixteen people total. All of ’em armed for bear. All of ’em coordinating their defenses with radios, just like we were doing with our attack.”

Clay’s eyebrows rose. “You catch any of these people? Question them or anything like?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know they had radios?”

“I’m getting to that, man. Just let me tell it my way a minute,” Ronny said impatiently. He took another drink, glanced around at some of his people with narrowed eyes, and continued. “So, there’s four of them vehicles, all of ’em looking just mean as hell, but we went ahead and did like we agreed, right? The whole procedure; waving flags at them from the side, firing warning shots, everything we could come up with to try and scare ’em into stopping before we had to get messy.”

“Tires?” Clay asked.

“Sorry?”

“Tires. Did you try shooting their tires?”

“Oh, no, they were armored.”

Clay cocked his head, struggling to keep the disbelief from his face. “What?”

“Well, the cars’ tires were armored, anyway. They had these kinds of, like, round steel plates hanging out over the wheels, right? The truck didn’t have them but it was going really fast; I think we clocked a hundred and twenty at one point. It had this big monster trailer on the back of it that looked like it was loaded up with all kinds of good shit. Anyway, they were going so fast that we didn’t want to try for their tires, either on the truck or the trailer. We were afraid we’d roll the truck or spill the goods all across the desert, isn’t that right?” This last bit was directed at one of his guys to Clay’s left. The man nodded without looking up and mumbled, “Yeah, s’right.”

Ronny trailed off a minute, looking down at a spot on the floor. Clay leaned forward in his chair and said, “Keep going.”

“Well, all I can really say is that it went bad. I signaled over the radio for some of the boys to start taking pot shots, like we do, and next thing we knew we were bombarded with a hailstorm of bullets from all directions. You wouldn’t have believed it. Rifles and shit came out of all the car windows like they were porcupines and just started slinging a wall of lead downrange like they had an infinite supply of ammo, and these guys were packing way better hardware than any of us, let me tell you. We had our shotguns, that handful of assault rifles, and a bunch of those hunting rifles and such. Those assholes started firing grenades back at us!”

“No shit,” Clay declared in a flat voice.

“None at all!” said Ronny. “They had full on machine guns and grenade launchers, I kid you not.”

“Why didn’t you break off?”

“Why… what?”

“ Why didn’t you break off ?”

Ronny seemed to be genuinely perplexed by this question, so Clay elaborated: “It sounds to me like the risk wasn’t worth the reward. Given that, why did you continue to pursue them?”

The other man took a moment to recover. He glanced around at some of his people again, none of whom returned his look. Finding no help, he looked back at Clay and said, “Well… we… I mean, I…” He took in a breath; let it out again. “Well, we’d lost some people by then after that first almighty volley; they shot the shit out of a few trucks and killed plenty of my guys. I just… I just didn’t want to come home empty-handed after that. I know how badly our people depend on my group’s haul, and I just didn’t want their sacrifice to be for a fucking goose egg.”

Ah, nice one , thought Clay. It was an ugly fact of life they all understood; ever since Ronny had started hijacking along the major highways, the group had begun to do better than just barely scraping by. They weren’t yet at a point where they thrived, strictly speaking, but the more Ronny’s crew went out, the better they supplemented Elton’s scavengers back home, and more people had begun to sign on for the duty as a result. Ronny’s crew had come to hold positions of respect and admiration in the group. They were the heroes that always brought home the bacon; that saved everyone’s bacon, really, whenever things became most tight. A good haul from the road crew usually got them all back in black in those times when belts had to be tightened. Their ranks had swelled to a point where Ronny had about thirty regulars and another twenty floaters at any given time (all hand-selected by Ronny himself) and, while they definitely were not successful enough to keep everyone fat, dumb, and happy on a consistent basis; they did manage to pull Clay’s collection of stragglers and misfits out of the fire on more than one occasion.

There had been an epic bitch-out when Ronny first brought the idea up, having started amongst all of them; Ronny, Clay, Pap, Johnny, and Elton. Pretty soon, though, it had just been Clay and Ronny screaming back and forth at each other; Ronny yelling that people were starving bad enough that some were beginning to fall sick, that they were apt to start dying off soon if they didn’t do something drastic. Clay roared back that the son of a bitch was going to turn them from a group of survivors into a bunch of blood-sucking bandit cannibals before they knew what was happening.

Clay had eventually lost that argument in the end, primarily because he failed to provide a workable alternative. The best he could do was to lay out all of the reasons why it was a thing that shouldn’t be done, but Ronny’s counter was so brutally effective: “That’s true, Clay, but our people are starving right now. What are you going to do to fix that right now?” It was one of the few times in Clay’s life that a shit-heel like Ronny had been able to outmaneuver him, and it soured his guts every time he considered the event.

Consequently (and almost certainly intentionally), Ronny made it a point to bring this up every chance he could find.

Clay had finally given in but squared the practice with his own moral requirements by defining the rules of engagement that Ronny and his people must follow on these encounters; rules stating that every measure must be taken to ensure that no one was hurt except in moments of utmost need, that travelers never be pillaged down to a destitute condition, and so on. When Ronny had resisted Clay’s suggestion that they never take more than fifty percent of someone’s supplies, Clay drove home how serious he was by declaring that they would take only forty, and would he like to see that number reduced down to thirty? He could just keep arguing, if he liked, and it could be so. Ronny knew when to shut the fuck up, and Clay reminded all of the Parasites (as he had come to think of them) that any violation of his rules would result in them learning how to eat, shit, and jerk off thumbless.