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

Edgar thought it might.

Without acknowledging that he’d crossed an invisible threshold, Edgar began to explore the ways in which it might be done. No one ever came to see him anymore; no one except for Fred, who brought him food and sundries. Fred came around like clockwork though, on the same day of each week. He could wait for Fred’s next visit, couldn’t he? And then just wait for the cover of night and walk right on out through the cleft. It was a bit of a walk, yes indeed, but it was only a walk, after all. He knew where he was going; knew who to ask for. And he knew the value of what he had to offer. Whichever way it went—whether he was the cause of a newfound, mutually beneficial relationship between two peoples, or if he ended up the newest member of a new group, complete with all of the farming knowledge he’d developed over the last year—it was fine with him. He liked win-win situations, did Edgar, and either outcome seemed just fine.

He stared into the tiny flame and watched as it danced about.

They’d been chasing the kid on and off for weeks now, always coming just a hair’s breadth away from catching him before he managed to slip away up some street or wall or side alley. They didn’t even know when he’d joined their number or if he belonged to anyone at all. They suspected he did not. The kid had an unkempt appearance; an unloved appearance. If anybody had been looking out for him at all, they, sure enough, wouldn’t have allowed him out in public so. He was in need of a good scrubbing down—perhaps two or three—to get all the hardened and encrusted layers of his long, tired history to come loose of his body.

There was no telling how old he was. Nobody had ever heard him speak before; they didn’t even know if he could speak, he only ever grunted when they got in close enough to lay a hand on him. He’d grunt and snarl and twist in your hands like a writhing viper on such occasions, clawing and scratching at you with jagged, uncut nails; biting and kicking and yanking. Sometimes when he made good his escape, they came away with a tuft of his greasy hair clenched up in their knuckles.

Uly didn’t even bother to guess at the kid’s age, and Uly, being the oldest and strongest of them, had something to say about everything. The kid was underfed and undersized, no matter what his age might be. Pavo figured he would have been big for a four-year-old, but he sure didn’t move like one; he was way too quick and surefooted. They figured he must’ve been some kind of runt.

The pack of children chasing after him had made of him good sport whenever they chanced to see him, so long as they could be secure in the knowledge that they were not being seen; a pastime like a game of Tag or running down the odd cat. They were fairly sure that the grownups hadn’t caught wind of the kid or, at the very least, the grownups pretended this was so. Grownups were funny about children, sometimes. It seemed that they liked to spend a lot of time talking about how important children were, all of them nodding and agreeing with each other the way they do, but that they only really ever managed to see their own children, all others being invisible. Grownups didn’t see all children, clearly, as any of Uly’s pack could attest; this kid seemed to flit through the town like some sort of ghost and was seldom if ever mentioned… even if voices did tend to go quiet for a spell when the kid was somewhere close by.

Outside of those times in which they’d managed to lay hands on him, the game usually shook out as a lively bout of chase; maybe some juicy curses thrown his way but that was all. Sometimes he’d fall down in his mad dash to get away, and then they’d all lay over against a building side somewhere and just about laugh until they’d pissed themselves.

They called the kid Ratshit.

Something had changed though, two days after that initial meeting between Clay and Gibs out on the southern border of Lower Jackson. They were hard pressed to say what it was. Either they had gotten better at the chasing, or the kid had gotten lazy… or maybe he’d gotten hungry and was just weak, or maybe it was a little bit of all these things. Either way, they all found themselves in a bit of a pickle, with Ratshit backed into a wall he couldn’t scale and a ring of boys standing around him wondering what the hell they were going to do, now they had him cornered. It all seemed to be a bit of a Mexican standoff for a while, and so it remained until Uly picked up the first rock.

It wasn’t terribly big, but it struck the kid in the shoulder, knocking a little grunt out of him and leaving a red mark on the skin. The second one was flat and smooth like a river stone. It cut in from the side and cracked him in the belly, and that one fairly doubled him over. More and more began to fall after that, like sharp and bitter hail, and when the chip of granite split his scalp open, that’s when the kid began to howl.

That howling surprised Uly’s gang out of themselves; a sound so terrible and terrified that it forced them all to stop a moment and look inward, shining a spotlight onto their withered souls. They looked inward and saw the ugliness of themselves, saw themselves for what they were, and were enraged. A look of numb, stupid murder bled into Uly’s eyes; seemed to fan out from his person and wash over the others.

They dropped their rocks—their hunks of mica-scaled granite, sandstone, and quartz—and advanced in an ever-tightening, choking pocket. Fingers hooked over like claws preparing to reach out and grab and pull and batter. The kid saw them coming between the useless cover of his upraised arms and began to weep silently.

Uly reached out to take him by the edge of his ratty, muck-smeared shirt. The boy cowered, covering the back of his neck and skull with his hands as he’d been instructed to do in a time and life that seemed so long ago he often wondered if the memory of it was only just a dream. Then a shadow fell over them all, and the kid heard a scream. Uly’s fist never found him.

It was the screaming that Pap heard first, coming from somewhere close by, yonder up the Upper Cache Creek drive. It floated out to him from somewhere deep within the single-wides, and it was a sound he’d heard before. It sounded to Pap like a sheep getting pulled down by a coyote; a screaming sheep wearing the body of a human child. It kindly sounded to him like murder.

He’d busted into a run, taking labored strides up the middle of the street with his Lucchese Crocodiles clocking hard up the potted, uneven pavement, barreling in toward the source of the commotion. When he came around a bend in the road, he saw them all cloistered up against the wall of an old blue unit with white trim and a beat-to-fuck Subaru up on blocks. They didn’t even see him coming, so intent were they on the child crouched in the middle of their mob.

He got a good look at the prey as he came hoofing up through the gravel and dead grass; saw how small he was. A fury like dripping liquid pig iron washed all through his body and by the time he reached the group, he didn’t bother with trying to grab any of them. He shot a leg out at the closest one he could get at, fetching him a boot heel straight to the tailbone. The one he kicked lifted up off the ground by a good two feet and went sprawling.

The others started to turn at that point, their faces still twisted in hateful killing stares, ready to deal with this new intruder. Those looks of evil slackened out to dumb shock when they saw the infuriated Texan standing over them.