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

“What about him?”

“Well, how does he strike you?”

Ronny didn’t give the question a great deal of thought. “He reminds me of Piglet from those old cartoons.”

Clay snorted and took another sip. “I’ll give you that one, Ronny, that’s absolutely dead-on. Fucking Piglet. Now put that aside a moment. What else about him?”

“Well, I guess I’d say he’s about the smartest dipshit I’ve ever seen…”

“Explain please.”

“Well, you saw it. What the fuck was he doing shooting at us, and him by himself up on that goddamned roof? What was he gonna do, kill all of us on his own ?”

“Well, I expect he was afraid, Ronny—”

“Afraid…” he scoffed. “Afraid’s one thing. I know what afraid is; I’ve been there. That was just stupidity. That was asking to get killed.”

“And you were gonna give the poor cocksucker his wish, huh?”

Ronny glanced at the other man in annoyance. “Son of a bitch was shooting at us. What was I supposed to do?”

Clay cocked his head and took a drink as he looked out into the distance. After a moment, he said, “Okay, this is what I mean by civility, alright? This isn’t me trying to start up some shit; this is an honest question: Did it occur to you at all to hail the man and see what his deal was? I ask you this only because it actually worked when I tried it.”

“No, Clay, it didn’t. It didn’t occur to me to ask the asshole trying to shoot me why he was having such a bad day. I apologize if that’s such a big surprise…”

“Okay, okay, calm the fuck down, now. Civility…”

He drained his cup again, considering how he wanted to proceed. Not wanting to be outdone, Ronny sucked the rest of his down as well, and the two men quietly traded bottle and cups between each other as they worked in tandem to set up the next round.

Clay scratched his chin thoughtfully as he considered the problem. “Okay, let me try from this angle. What did you think of that wood gasser of his?”

Ronny had another pull and nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, you got me there. It’ll be pretty fucking cool if it works.”

“Pretty fucking outstanding, I’d say,” Clay rumbled, his orator’s voice enriched by the mellow burn of the alcohol.

“I was thinking we could run the generators off something like that,” Ronny continued.

Clay snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “Think about it, Ronny. Imagine we all moved into some plush neighborhood somewhere, with one of those nifty little doo-dads in every backyard? We could get the power back on again. A lot of things change if that happens, huh?”

“Yeah… yeah, that’s right. Hey, shit, I bet we could get a for-real laundry running, couldn’t we, with machines and all?” Ronny took a drink, mind starting to roll along as new possibilities occurred. Before long, he realized that playing a videogame was suddenly within the realm of possibilities again.

“And we almost killed him.”

Ronny jerked in his chair. He glanced at Clay, now barely able to make out facial features in the nighttime darkness. He looked around at some of the others as they moved about the area, floating flashlight spot-beams hovering along over the dirt. “I guess we almost did,” he muttered.

“Oh, so you agree it would have been a bad thing?”

“Yes, goddamn it, I get it.”

“Well, thank Christ. And that brings me to the crux of the issue, Ronny. You and I have two very different approaches to things. We’re both aware of this, we don’t like each other; but then, we don’t have to like each other, do we? Not to be effective, we don’t, anyway. But your approach, disagreeable though it may fucking well be, has its uses. It’s why you’re still around, huh? Only… if you’re going to insist on being such a vengeful twat all the time, I have to start asking serious questions about your place here. It’s fine when you piss me off a little, we all do that to each other, but you almost button-holed the golden… fucking… goose , Ronny. Even after I had him settled, Pap had to lay you right the fuck out because you just wouldn’t be controlled, sweet Christ no! Now, I ask you: what the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

Ronny only shook his head, looking off in another direction.

“Hey, I’m serious, here. What is it with you? Why is it that every time an obstacle is stood up in front of you, your first fucking response is to blow its brains out through its asshole?”

Aggravated, Ronny glared at Clay, squinting hard to make out the hidden details of the man’s eyes. “You so fuckin’ sure you got it all figured out…”

“Explain it to me. I’m making an honest try to understand.”

Ronny looked away again out past the gate into the hidden void of that invisible no-man’s land. He couldn’t see the bodies out there now, hidden as they were by the cover of night, but he could sense them. He sensed them as they lay bound up in the razor wire or tumbled out in the dirt over piles of their own desiccated guts, and he wondered about the long series of decisions that had taken them all from the time of their birth to that one final moment just before death found them. He wondered what the final decision had been that resulted in the inevitability of the last critical bullet; wondered if that decision had been a good one.

“You don’t start out like this; nobody really does… unless you were one of those ghetto shitbags, one of those wetbacks out of Corona or something. It’s something you pick up really quick once you realize all the rules are gone. I had to learn…”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

Ronny sighed.

For my sister and me, immunity came from our mom, even though Mom didn’t make it past the Flare; she was killed in the riots. Clara always said that it was the last thing she left to us… like it was some kind of tool that she passed down on purpose so that we could survive. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me—still doesn’t—but Clara was smarter than me, too, so maybe she had something there. She was five years younger, though, so maybe it was just the age talking.

They had us rounded up out in Riverside Quarantine towards the end; her, me, and our dad. Dad didn’t make it. We hoped maybe that he might; we didn’t know for sure yet if he was safe, or even if we were safe—everyone was getting sick at different times, so we just kind of… waited to see like everyone else. It looked like Dad would be okay for a while, there. He seemed to hold on longer than most, but then eventually he was choking to death on his own fucking lung paste just like the rest of them. Clara figured he must have been hiding it.

So, at some point, Dad finally went, along with just about all the rest, and Clara and I decided to pack up our shit and get the hell out. We didn’t go too far, though; there was a lot of city in Southern California—a lot of food and everything else just lying around. So we just kind of hung out around the area. We started heading back to our old house, on foot because all the roads were jammed. It was, like, twenty miles or more away, though, so we took that trip a day at a time.

We didn’t have much of a plan, back then, and things were in such a way that we didn’t really need it. Grocery store shelves weren’t overflowing with food since all the shipping lines had been so fucked up for months, but there was still actually stuff in the stores; it was all just spread out among a lot of empty shelf space. And then there were the distribution points, so those helped too. But we started at the stores first. We were even able to find some bread in a few of those places; you could eat most of it if you pulled the moldy slices out first.