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

Clay waited for several seconds, his eyes never leaving Ronny’s. His eyebrows were raised in question and, between the bags under his eyes and the wrinkles spread across his cheeks, he did indeed appear to have come to the end of his rope. Finally, Ronny swallowed and said, “Suppose he had it coming, huh?”

“Well, I certainly don’t derive a sexual charge from correcting dumb fucking inbreeds, Ronny.” He looked back out the lobby window again, having decided that no physical threat was forthcoming. “The point is I think I’m going to give being talked into dubious shit a bit of a rest for a spell. I don’t know what the fuck happened out there, and I suspect I’ve heard only half of the fucking story. Fine; I’ll let that go for now. My price for not locking you…” he pointed at Ronny, “…and you…” he pointed at Riley, and then pointed at the other Parasites in succession, “…and you, and you… and all you cunts, into separate rooms and interrogating the shit out of you all until I get a story that adds up, is that we’re just going to keep to the original plan, huh? No fucking Jackson, no questions fucking asked. We’ll pack up and make for Colorado Springs, just like we agreed.”

Ronny muttered, “Can you really be sure you’ll find what you’re looking for up there?”

Clay looked back at Ronny with that same watery, tired, unblinking gaze, but instead of answering he said only, “Pap?”

Without hesitation, Pap responded, “Well, Lead Devil mightn’t be up there anymore, but who knows? His museum’ll still be there. It may or may not be picked over; there was a big damned Army detachment up at his property towards the end when the looting happened, keep all the scary shit outta the publics’ hands, ’n such. I reckon there might could be a few good things out his way.”

“Colorado Springs first, Ronny,” Clay rumbled. “Then, and only then, do we discuss what comes next.”

For Wang, the worst part of any day was the moment immediately after he awoke. The rest of his day could, in general, go either way. Sometimes the tasks awaiting him in the morning were limited to only a few items, and he found there was idle time, though these instances were admittedly rare. On other days, it seemed to Wang as though the work never stopped, running the entire array from laundry to food preparation to assistance duty over at the armory. Occasionally, he would serve as a runner for Commander Warren (ironically enough); transferring his orders to different locations in the camp and relaying responses back to him. He had received some tense, sideways glances from some of the others when he initially volunteered for that duty, just as he had when he offered to take a turn burning out latrine cans alongside some of the other grunts. No one had resisted his offer, at least not vocally, but he could sense resistance all the same… or perhaps reluctance was the better term. He remembered preparing to make his argument for being allowed to at least attempt the work, finding that his effort was pointless when Warren gave a terse nod and said, “Sounds good. Get after it.” Everyone else accepted Warren’s pronouncement; if he was good with it then so were they.

Wang preferred the busy days to the idle ones. The nature of the work or its inherent difficulty mattered not at all to him, so long as it kept him active; so long as he could stay focused. It was the idle moments that bothered him, that threatened to pull him down into a black study the likes of which his friends back in Wyoming would have hardly recognized. Those idle moments were the in-between times when he recalled what had happened and what reality now was as a result. It was during idle moments (those vacant, floating periods) that he turned bitter and angry. The analytical side of him felt a kind of confusion at this, noting that the reasonable supposition would have had him going into a depression during those periods where he was instead most physically active. During the times, in other words, when he would have encountered the greatest impediment to his intended purpose, whatever it happened to be for the moment. It was a symptom, however, of his own internal makeup that the pursuit of such activities, difficult though they might be, provided enough of a distraction from the very nature of the situation, the inescapable way things were , that he simply forgot to be miserable.

It’s the idle times that’ll kill you , he thought. Those four AM times when you were still trying to nod off but all you could really do was lay there and think about how much had changed in your life and what it all meant; and not just what it meant for tomorrow but what it was going to keep on meaning for the rest of your life no matter what you did or how you struggled to adapt.

Those times, just before sleep found him, and again in the morning, when sleep abandoned him to reality, were a special kind of Hell; during that vanishingly small transient period where all seemed well and unspoiled, where he stretched and he felt all of himself stretch. Only that brief period before the dull ache in his hip reset his reality, before his heart gave the alien-yet-familiar mule-kick to his ribcage, and his stomach rolled over his liver, before he reached down and felt only the fabric of his bedding and the thin sponge pad of his cot where his left leg should have been. His fingers always found and traced the puckered scar running down the side of his hip, around that pelvic curve that he at no point in his life should have ever been able to touch with his own fingers, and straight into his genitals, completely and irrevocably unobstructed in their searching path.

It was not as horrible as it was that first time he awoke, of course; the shock he felt now was only a sad shadow of an approximation compared to the utter horror of that first awakening. Before that point, his last clear memory had been of driving the Ford up the 15, Gibs cursing frantically through his earpiece. He could recall another pickup truck full of people (both in the cab and the bed) pulling up alongside of him, having just enough time to lock up over the steering wheel before the gunfire bloomed in his peripheral vision; of scrambling around in the cab for a pistol just as he felt the sledgehammer blow along the entire left side of his body.

Things became hazy after that. He seemed to remember a point at which Alan sat beside him in the cab, yanking the wheel around while kicking Wang’s own leg out of the way. He had tried to say, “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be back at the Bowl,” though he was unsure if he had actually succeeded in saying anything. As he stared through gummed, unfocused eyes, Alan’s face appeared to go all runny and change into Greg’s face, changed back into Alan’s, before it all went black again.

There was a flash when he was on his back, along with a tremendous, screaming rush of air all around him as though he’d been dropped into the center of a tornado, and he was surrounded on all sides, hovered over by silhouetted men with oversized cartoonish heads. One of them had been holding something up above Wang’s face, something silvery and thin. It made him think of winning a goldfish at the county fair.

As he looked at it, it went suddenly bright; so bright, in fact, that he had to squint his eyes nearly shut, which was a good thing, because someone who looked like a doctor but who was wearing camouflage pulled something over his face—it rubbed against his eyelids as the doctor wiggled whatever it was into place and he thought absently about how much that would have hurt scraping up against his eyeballs. The light brightened even more, and he realized the roaring sound was gone, having been replaced by a slow beeping noise and lots of shouting voices. He lifted up into the air, floating weightless for what seemed like a very long time; Wang thought to himself, “ Well, floating is nice. I certainly like floating. I should do that more often ,” but then he came thudding back down onto some surface that was flat and cold but crinkled like paper. Having had enough at that point, he tried to say, “Hey, what the fuck is going on, anyway?” He realized he couldn’t form words; something was in his mouth getting in the way. He tried to bite down and spit just so he could talk, so he could make himself heard enough to tell all of the goofballs swarming around him to go ahead and do whatever you like, sure, but get me up there floating again, will yah? I liked the floating part… whatever you have me on right now sucks balls, already! Those goofballs who were so busy flitting around him seemed to dislike what he was doing and started fluttering even more around his face, raining rapid, staccato feather touches all around his cheeks.