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

He clapped eyes on the biggest of them; Ulysses, as he recalled—he knew his father. He backhanded him, dragging knuckles across the side of his face and splitting his lips at the very least if he didn’t knock a few teeth out besides. Most of the others had scattered by then, running out to all points of the compass, while a couple hung back to attend the two that Pap had just seen about.

When they had their two miserable friends dragged away to a safe distance, one called out, “I’m telling my dad about this, you fat asshole, you wanna go around beating up kids!”

“You go get ’im for me, you little sumbitch! An’ after I finished kickin’ his ass, I’ll wear my foot out on yours a spell!”

He shuffled after them and kicked a patch of gravel in their direction as they scurried away.

“You go find ’im! In fact, never you mind! I know who he is, I’m comin’ to see him an’ tell him what a shit job he done on his boy!”

They disappeared around the corner of the mobile home, and after a little while, he could no longer hear their retreat. He looked down at the boy they’d been attacking, only to find he’d gone.

“Son of a—”

Whirling, he looked across the road past the opposing line of homes. There was an old split rail fence between two of them and, beyond that, the finer hillside homes stacked on the slope that arched up to the Snow King summit the way a woman laying belly-wise out in the surf might arch to pull her breasts up from the water. He saw the kid beyond the fence, scrabbling up the side of the slope like one of those chimpanzees on the nature programs, before winking out behind a thicket of trees.

“Awe, hellfire—Hey, kid!”

His voice echoed back at him, though only slightly; there was too much greenery and soft growth out there to get a goodly reverberation on but his voice quivered in the emptiness, all the same. He and the kid were alone out there, and if he stood around like the damned fool he was for much longer, he’d be by his lonesome, sure enough.

He spit in frustration and made off for the fence. When he came to it, he saw the rails were nearly eaten away with dry rot; he grasped the top of one in his hand and squeezed, pulling away a handful of grainy dust. He kicked out the two top rails, stepped over the bottom, and cut through the shared yard of the homes he passed between. Beyond the yard; a mild slope covered in a thin layer of scree. He picked his way along carefully, stiff-legged with hands splayed out to the sides against the danger of his feet going out from under him. He slid the last couple of feet into a dry gulch, absorbed the impact through flexed knees, and straightened to look up the hill. It seemed a great deal steeper now that he stood at its root.

“Ya’ll’re gonna make me climb this damned thing, aint’cha?” he called out into the emptiness. The hill, and then the mountain beyond the hill, watched him silently.

“Sure, I’m a damned fool, alright,” he muttered. The opposite wall of the gulch was nearly sheer, but it was soft and came only waist-high. He leaned forward and placed his hands into the soft, cool grass blanketing the ground. Grimacing at the insult he was about to visit on his boots, he kicked the toes of each deep into the soil, making for himself natural ladder rungs to climb out of the ditch. He gained the top and stepped a few paces away from the edge and looked down at the toes of the crocodile hide boots, taking in the sad state of muck in which they were caked.

Pointing down at this atrocity with a finger, he reared back and hollered, “These‘re better ’n twenty-four hunnerd dollar kicks, boy!”

He stood there waiting, perhaps expecting some sort of apology. None floated down to him from the trees. Grimacing, he passed the toe of each boot over the back of his calves to dislodge the worst part of their profaning and began to work his way bow-legged up the slope.

It was awkward going. He found himself forced to point his toes outward so that he could dig the sharper boot heels into the slope; the smoothed soles cradling the balls of his feet slipped over the grass of the hill like silk, threatening to pitch him over onto his face. He did go over a few times, regardless of caution, and he soon abandoned any attempts to re-tuck his chambray shirt were it pulled loose at the waist.

He passed the first cluster of the more traditional homes—the stick-built permanent structures that could not be relocated and so had required no registration tags or skirts—and at another fifty yards beyond them, just gave up entirely on making it any further up the slope. It came up at a hard angle (the shoulder blades of her back, he thought) and there was no amount of crawling or scrabbling he could do on his part that didn’t feature him rolling back down that old hill and breaking his neck for his trouble.

He put his hands on his hips and craned back his head to look up the slope, nearly overbalancing backward and falling down the hill anyway; he pin-wheeled his arms a bit to set himself back to rights.

“Hey, kid! Come on down, will yah? I ain’t made fer this kind of terrain, now!”

He waited on the hillside a while. When he heard nothing, he called out, “I know yall’s hungry, now! I seen them ribs through yer shirt when them others was whuppin’ on yah!”

The mountain stood above him looking down, impenetrable.

“They’s gone, already! Come on down and see me; I’ll get’cha fed up!”

He imagined the boy clinging on the slope somewhere up there like a flea burrowed up under the muscle of the mountain’s neck… or maybe he’d gone up a tree somewheres. He wondered what kind of bed the boy could look forward to, even, or if he had a roof to shelter him from the rain.

“Well, I just ain’t goin’ nowheres, kid, that’s all there is to it! You goan an’ be mule-headed; that’s what you wanna do. I’ll be right’chere when y’all come to your senses!”

He turned to look back down the slope, encountered a heart-stopping moment when he again nearly went ass-over-teakettle down the mountainside and dropped to his ass before the landscape could get the best of him. He added grass stains to the injuries he’d suffered; that and his beautiful pair of boots with the hunks of mud drying in between the cracks. He leaned back onto an elbow, pulled a long shoot of grass from the ground, and clamped it gently between his teeth. He began to whistle down along the shoot, a tune he remembered his daddy used to whistle, long and long ago when they’d sit around a campfire out under the stars, and would together just be boys .

He tilted his hat back and leaned over on his elbow, muttering to himself irritably from time to time. Sometimes he would turn to holler back over his shoulder up the hill, reiterating his position, as it were. The grass was cool under his body, and he thought he could just detect a hint of moisture beginning to seep through to his hip. A soft breeze moved down the hillside, setting the long grass to swaying, making the limbs of the trees swing to and fro lazily overhead. The air had a tinge of sweetness on it; a light and natural smell that carried pine and pine sap, good rich earth, and the breath of God.

Pap lay down in the grass, knocking his hat forward, and pillowed his head on crossed arms. Endless blue sky overhead, interrupted by thick wisps of cloud stretched out to streamers by high winds across the firmament. He felt his heart ache at the sight of it, and so closed his eyes. He dozed before long.

When he awoke, the first thing he noticed was that the day had darkened around him, coming on soon to dusk. The breeze, at once cool and refreshing, now had a bite to it. As he came up into full wakefulness, he realized that his arms were cold and wished for his jacket.