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

“What… I’m just a… all I have is a fucking clipboard…”

“Don’t worry,” Ronny soothed. “You won’t have to do much, okay? All it really amounts to is fucking up a decimal point. Several times in a row.”

“Oh… oh, Jesus…”

“Cheer up, Steve,” Riley hummed from the couch, his face flat and severe. “You work for the government. A certain amount (right?) of incompetence is just a given, isn’t it?”

It had been a good day. Leaning back in his chair, Elton removed his battered old ball cap to mop the sweat of his brow with a forearm. He let his head tilt back and closed his eyes against the high sun, enjoying the buffeting sensation of the wind as it rushed by. He pulled the hat back on, mashed it down tight, and looked out over his right shoulder, beyond the tailgate at the laden trailer they pulled along the 94. It was piled to the top with a whole mess of good things, from clothing to food to tools, and Elton smiled broadly at the sight of it. A very good day.

Mason sat across from him, reclined down in the bed rather than in a chair, with his elbow slung over the wall of the truck bed. He looked out beyond the road into the miles of flatlands surrounding them and hummed soundlessly in the rushing wind. Elton waved a hand to get his attention; when he had it, he pointed at the bucket full of wood blocks by Mason’s hip and then flapped his hands in a “give it here” gesture. Nodding, Mason passed the bucket across. Elton placed it between his feet, scooted his chair up towards the truck cab, and stood carefully, bracing his hip against the steel tube railing. He produced an iron tool that somewhat resembled a fire stoker, though it had been hammered out from a concrete reinforcement bar, and used it to open the top of the wood gaser’s hopper. He tossed the contents of the bucket into the top of the unit, shut it, and began the careful process of moving his chair back toward the tailgate where there was less heat and more wind. He didn’t have to be terribly careful—they rarely did more than forty.

After he finished arranging himself back into the chair, Mason nodded at Elton with his chin and shouted, “A little early, no?”

Elton smiled, shook his head, and shrugged. He pulled in a lungful of air and yelled, “Good a time as any! Just wanted to enjoy the ride home without worrying about it!”

Mason smiled and waved Elton off. It was a characteristic he appreciated about the man; the fact that he always worked to accomplish as much as he could immediately just to ensure he had the time to kick back later on. He looked down at Elton’s forearm, at the angry gash stretching nearly to his elbow, and asked, “How’s that doing?”

In answer, Elton lifted his elbow, grasped the skin around the cut, and twisted toward his face to get a better look at the damage. “Clotting up. Looks like it won’t need stitches.”

Mason grunted. The blood at the tip of his friend’s elbow had gone all thick and dark, a final drop frozen in a hardened little ball. “You need to be more careful, man. If anything happens to you, I’ll get stuck with Bradley. Please, do not let that happen; it’s just one fucking Bro-Country song after the other with him.”

Elton smiled and straightened in his chair to look over the top of the cab. Out in the distance, maybe a mile up the road, he saw the plumes of black smoke and sighed. It was always nice to come home.

They parked the truck at the machine shop not long after. The guys offered to take it from there, but Elton was in far too good a mood by that time to just stroll away, so he stuck around to help them unhitch the trailer. He threw his back into it alongside the others and hauled it by hand over to Distro, where they began the process of unloading and cataloging everything. They were met by Stacy Morris, who called out enthusiastically as he approached them. He was flipping through the pages of his notebook and eyeing the fast-growing piles of plunder with clear delight.

“So this ought to help get us back in black, huh?” Elton laughed.

Stacy dug tentatively through a cardboard box full of clothing, blew a raspberry, and nodded. “Well, it sure as hell isn’t going to hurt! How much of this is food?”

“Eh, less than a third but it’s good food. A lot of canned stuff but we found some big bags of dry goods, too! Staple type stuff, you know?”

Stacy had moved over to the trailer and was pawing through the items it held. He grunted to himself. After a few moments, he said, “Well, let’s get it all laid out. We always get our hopes up, but we keep finding how thin it all really is once we spread it out, don’t we?”

Elton leaned an arm on the trailer and said, “I can pull another twenty off hunting…?”

Stacy jerked in his direction, expression stunned. “Oh, don’t do that! That meat’s keeping us afloat right now.”

Slightly deflated, Elton sighed and said, “Yeah, yeah, okay. Sure.”

He reached for another box, but Mason shooed him away. “Go on, get the hell out of here. The boys and I got this.”

“We aren’t done here—”

“Go on! Get the fuck outta here!” Mason laughed. “We know you want to. We got this, man, go have your party. Get that arm cleaned up while you’re at it.”

Elton’s teeth flashed in the noon sun. He grabbed the two bottles he’d set aside from the trailer, pointed at his boys, and said, “I owe you guys.”

“Fuckin’ A!” Bradley shouted. He was wrapped bodily around an overstuffed box coming apart at the seams; duck-walking it over to the pile for Stacy to review.

Elton turned on his heel and trotted out of there before his conscience could get the better of him.

He didn’t have that far to travel to get back to his place; perhaps only a couple hundred yards. Out past Ned’s slowly growing pocket of engineers (more or less a collection of trained manufacturing monkeys, in Elton’s opinion), a little boom town had emerged; a disorienting visual mishmash of shacks, outbuildings, half-assed cabins, and other semi-permanent dwellings—it all looked to Elton like an old west town, if the town had been built using a bunch of pre-made shit that was already laying around. Never mind a common design running from building to building; the buildings themselves weren’t even composed of common materials, many of them starting off as wood or cinderblock and morphing into shingled pallets and corrugated steel. It was as though some giant had bulldozed a city blocks’ worth of properly constructed buildings and used the debris to build up a child’s approximation of a mining settlement. None of the places had any stairs because no one had the courage to try adding a higher level. The sound of a collapsing building followed by shouts and curses was not an unheard of phenomenon. There were at least two instances of Elton pulling people out of the damned rubble his own self.

His camper was at the end of The Row, opposite the laundry, laid out in a kind of cul-de-sac next to the homes of a few of the other heavies; guys like Johnny and the Doc. Their homes all tended to be close in proximity since their homes had been established first—Elton had to admit the Old Boy shit could be pretty nice when it worked in your favor—with additional shelters just kind of fanning out from the core. It worked out that the newer homes existed to the outside edges of the natural ring that had cropped up, but there were a few folks in the town who valued their privacy—they settled on the outskirts. The only exception to this had been Clay and Ned—they both seemed most at ease in their own natural environments, with Ned choosing to abide in the machine shop and Clay himself making his home up at the front office. The arrangement confused Elton, who preferred to get as close as he could to a sane and proper home—as close as any man could hope to get, under the circumstances—but then he didn’t really feature ever knowing the minds of men such as them.