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

“You lying bitch! My Sam loves me! What the hell does he need with a bunch of whores? I take care of him!”

“Hey…” Clay groaned.

“Don’t see how you take care of anyone with those jagged fucking toothpick legs of yours…”

“Hey, goddamn it…” Clay growled, louder this time.

“Well I guess the only way someone like you could think to take care of a man would be with your pussy, wouldn’t it?”

Clay began clapping his hands as loud as he could and bellowed, “HEY, YOU DIZZY FUCKING BITCHES! AM I IN THE FUCKING ROOM? I CLAP MY HANDS TOGETHER; I WANNA HEAR TWO CUNT MOUTHS SLAPPING SHUT!”

They ceased immediately, leaving him to settle back and nurse his now throbbing head.

“Jesus Christ…” he whimpered. He covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head.

“What do you wanna do, Baws?”

“I knew this was gonna happen,” muttered Clay, seemingly to himself. “I knew it. It was a bad idea to let a whoreshack go into operation, and I let myself be talked into it. Mother Christ.” He glanced up at the two women, both of whom regarded him warily. “Sam is the asshole in question?”

Pap nodded.

“Who the fuck is Sam?”

“He’s new,” said Doc.

Clay rested his closed eyes back into his palm. With his free hand, he gestured vaguely in the direction of the door and said, “Well, bring him the fuck on…”

A few moments later, Clay had Isabella, Bobbi, and Sam sitting across from him, all wide-eyed and innocent looking like they had no idea what all the fuss was about. He shook his head and said, “You three are sincerely dicking up my whole morning, you know that?”

“Why isn’t Amy in here, since the rest of us are?” Bobbi hissed.

Clay’s eyes widened. “Shut the fuck up,” he whispered.

She did.

Lips twisted as though he’d sucked a rotten lemon, Clay looked at Sam and demanded, “What the hell did you do?”

“I… I didn’t do noth—”

“Stop,” Clay interrupted. He glanced up to a point just behind Sam. Sam, who was already intensely uncomfortable, felt the heavy hand of the one they called Pap alight on his shoulder. It was hot, completely enveloped him from his neck to the end of his clavicle, and the simple heft of it pushed down enough that he felt his back begin to bow in its direction.

“I’m all out of patience this morning,” Clay advised. “I want one story, and I want it right the first time. I have witnesses, and if your story doesn’t add up, I’m not gonna waste any time going around in circles over it. I haven’t even had breakfast yet, Sam. I’m just going to start shooting people, okay? So just do me a favor and tell the truth.”

Sam glanced uneasily at Bobbi and sighed. “I started visiting Amy a while ago on the sly. Bobbi found out and, uh, went after her.”

Clay looked at Isabella. “How bad?”

“Nothing permanent. A black eye and swollen lip. No one wants to have her, though, with her face banged up like it is. She can’t earn until she’s healed up a bit.”

Clay jerked his head towards Johnny. “Does Bobbi have any scratch in her account?”

Johnny bounced in his seat, startled at having been addressed, and began to thumb through several pages of his spiral notebook. He finally came to the page he sought, ran a finger down its length, and said, “Thirty-three credits.”

“Oh, good,” Clay nodded. “Take half and move it over to Amy’s.”

“What!” Bobbi barked.

Clay was up out of his chair, across the room, and had the woman pinned to the wall by her throat before anyone else in the room realized what was happening. Recovering from his shock, Sam braced to go after them but then Pap’s hand clamped down on his shoulder like a hydraulic vise, causing the bones to grind painfully against each other. Sam groaned and went as limp as a wet noodle.

Clay edged his fingers up around the sides of Bobbi’s jaw and began to squeeze. He waited for the panicked moan that would indicate she felt the teeth at the front of her mouth beginning to flex away from each other. He let the pressure off as soon as he heard it.

“Got your fucking attention now?”

She nodded. Her eyes were dry and bright. Clay took a moment to admire this before saying, “Your choices are half your credits, half a finger, or exile. I’m trying to let you off with a warning, here. Now, will you take it or tell me to go fuck myself?”

“I’ll take it,” she gasped.

“Good,” he purred. He let her go and stepped back. Still staring at her, he said, “Johnny?”

“Transferred, Clay.”

“Good. New fucking rule: any man or woman as wants to partake of the whorehouse shall be fucking single. If they’re already living with someone else, they shall vacate to their own goddamned establishment immediately before purchase of snatch is transacted. Punishments for violations to be meted out according to standard practice, at the fucking behest of the yadda-yadda…”

He glanced at Pap, who was scribbling furiously in a tiny black book with a knobby, tooth-marked pencil. “You get all that?”

“Is ‘establishment’ spelled with an ‘e’ or an ‘I?’”

“Christ have mercy; a fucking ‘I,’ Pap.”

“Good, thought so. Just looked funny on paper…”

Clay closed his eyes and shook his head as gently as he could. He said, “You three piss off, now, huh?” without indicating which three should leave. He waited, keeping his eyes closed until the sound of shuffling bodies and footsteps ceased. When he finally opened his eyes, he saw only the people he wanted to see. He thanked the heavens for this simple kindness and poured himself another cup of coffee.

“ I keep making concessions ,” he thought to himself, “ and every time I do, they return again out of the goddamn misty shadows to befoul my fucking digestion. ”

He glanced at the others, the majority of whom pointedly avoided his gaze; all of them except Pap and Ronny. He thought, “ My two most dependable men; one of them dependable to the grave, one of them dependably a pain-in-the-nuts cunt. ”

He sighed.

“I believe I’ll have a walk.”

He asked Ned to come with him when he left for his stroll. He found himself spending more and more time with the timid little man. Clay liked talking to Ned; found him to be more than just an idea guy. Ned was a man of implementation; the kind of person that took a thought and ran with it, saw it through and refined it until it had grown into something better than originally envisioned. Implementation bored Clay. He knew this about himself and had struggled against the characteristic for years. Having an idea was only the start; it got the ball rolling, sure, but didn’t actually produce anything. Clay had the little suckers constantly but, perhaps only a few minutes after they were born, they bored the hell out of him.

“ You need a guy like Ned around, ” Clay thought as they walked along the rows of shelters, shop stands, stations, and gathering places that had sprung up on the once vacant expanse of property; those parts of it that weren’t occupied by museum, gun shop, firing range, garages, or machine shop. “ You gotta have Neds in your life to see jobs through. They make sure things don’t fall apart. Get out of hand.”

He looked up at the copious strands of Christmas lights webbing the space overhead, strung from shack to shack, wound about poles, ringing buildings and doors. They must have gathered hundreds of yards of the stuff over the course of weeks, ransacking from house to house in the residential areas. It turned out they could find Christmas lights just about anywhere, and they were able to be choosey, grabbing only the good shit that would continue to stay lit even if a bulb in the strand went out. They’d left bundles and bundles of the low-rent garbage lying around down in the city, and there had still been plenty to wind around the joint two times over.