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

Ronny was the next to show, followed later by Elton and the Doc, and finally Ned. They didn’t even wait for Ned to get through the entryway; Clay just began laying the situation out as the little man shuttled along the floor.

He placed his palms down on the bar and stood from the stool. Looking at each of them in turn, he declared, “As it happens, there is no fucking food in this city.”

“Wha— bullshit!” Ronny bawled.

Clay looked down at the board and pointed at Johnny by way of answering the challenge.

“It’s true,” Johnny confirmed. “Elton came to me with it a couple of days after we’d settled in. He said his guys were getting nervous about the haul; said they were looting everything but food. So, just to be sure I went down to Distro and went through it all pile by pile and matched what I found against the manifests. It’s no mistake, guys. We’ve taken in a little food but nothing like what we should be.”

“How bad?” asked Pap.

“We hadn’t even hit numbers this low when we finally decided to vacate Nevada.”

“Ho-ly Christ…”

“That’s… that’s bad?” Ned asked.

Elton nodded vigorously and Clay said, “Yeah, pretty fucking bad, Chief. So! You can all appreciate why I’ve decided to celebrate this auspicious bitch of an occasion with a sniff or two, huh?”

He bent behind the board to the underbar and the rest of them heard a clinking of glasses from somewhere out of sight. When he stood upright, his left hand held five shot glasses pinched together along their sides, each one socketed at a fingertip like an outsized thimble. He knocked them down on the board, lined them up in a line, bit the cork from his bottle, and zipped it upended down the row. Thus filled, he pushed the glasses out a few inches and settled back onto the stool.

He said, “And here I have a quandary, boys. Let’s us not recount verbally the circumstances under which we merrily traipsed our way fucking hence, huh, nor cover the undiscovered bouts of giddy, schoolgirl optimism thus exhibited, so assuredly did we pack up the various sundry accoutrement of life and fucking war, and fire fucking engines, and brave the goddamned roads and wilderness alike. I’ll hear no fucking argument on opportunities lost or futures squandered—”

“Clay…” muttered Ronny.

“—Not one… fucking… word! I swear to Christ, I had a dream last night, this fucking night terror, sweating away in my bed like I was wasting away from diphtheria or some other such goddamned ailment of the body; had this dream where all I could say was how many times I foresaw a fucking thing coming, cursed as I was with a farseeing eye like some kind of headdressed snake eater reading chicken bones in a fire pit and laying down the fucking doom. I kept seeing what was coming in this dream, huh, kept trying to warn every son of a bitch that would listen, and they were all deaf, god help me, every one, and me kept on running my fucking mouth in an endless stream of fucking words just like I am right now. Not another fucking word, I say. I’ve read that script enough, both in life and in my recuperative fucking twilight periods. Next… fucking… item! ”

He threw back his shot, gasped for breath, and refilled his glass. He stood there a moment, panting, and wiped at a fleck of spittle at the corner of his mouth. Clammy beads of sweat stood out all across his forehead.

“Uh… hwas you done, Baws?”

“Sure, for now.”

“Y-you mentioned a quandary…” Ned muttered.

“Had I? I’d totally forgot!” He threw back the shot he’d just poured; poured another soon after. He looked around at them and demanded, “Why is nobody drinking?”

“Uh… I think the point is that we need to be figuring out what comes next?” Elton tried.

Clay’s head swiveled around and locked dead-on to Elton. He smiled, the upraised corners of his mouth pushing wrinkled cheeks up into the whites of wild, crazed eyes. “Well, thank the almighty Christ I’m not in this alone. Here, don’t drink that, Elton. It’s piss.” He grabbed the shot glass away and swallowed its contents before disappearing behind the board again. While he was down there, they looked around at each other nervously. When he came back, he was holding some other bottle—some brand of liquor Elton had neither heard of nor seen—and slammed it down on the board in front of him. “Drink that. Like honeyed milk squirted straight from God’s own nipples.”

“Okay, okay,” Ronny said. “Can we start dealing with this, then? How bad is it really? What kind of timeline are we looking at?”

Johnny sighed and said, “We’re living almost exclusively off the stores we brought from Colorado as well as what we managed to scavenge along the way. We do get lucky here in Jackson from time to time, but the kind of numbers we’re talking about—what we find versus the sheer number of people we have to feed… well, it’s like a saltine cracker divided up at a dinner table between twenty people.”

“Specifically,” Ronny said. “How long?”

“We need to start heavy rationing right now. If we do, we’ve got three and a half weeks, maybe four and then we’re done. And I mean serious rationing; like, folks will be fighting malnutrition on the other side of this. If we don’t ration, a week and a half at most.”

“Alright, alright, calm down, now,” Elton said. “We can prioritize. My people’ve been taking in everything they see. We can put all the other shit on hold and go for food only.”

“No, it’s not going to work,” said Johnny. “The percentages don’t add up. The ratio of food to non-food items we have so far—it doesn’t line up with what we’ve seen in the past. It’s not that you aren’t finding anything, Elton. There’s nothing out there.”

“You think those sons of bitches we ran into already cleaned the area out?” asked Clay.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Ronny asked.

“Ronny… if it was obvious I wouldn’t have fucking asked. I’m trying to reconcile right now why we didn’t find any of those people in this town when we came in here. They’re somewhere local, I imagine, but were they not living in this town because there was never anything here in the first place or because they took it all out already?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because, you obtuse fuck, it would go a long way toward explaining what they do or don’t have. There might be a whole lot more incentive to trade with them. Might just be they have a hell of an upper hand on us, huh?”

“I think we must assume they cleaned out the area,” Johnny said. “They’re living off something, wherever it is they’re at, aren’t they? If they’re not coming down to the town to vie with us over the area, they have to be sitting on a stockpile back home.”

“Well, that and the farming,” Clay muttered.

“The what?” Ronny asked.

Straightening up, Clay narrowed his eyes. In a low, smooth voice, he said, “The farming, Ronny. That you made it such a frequent point to bring up?”

“Oh, right. Of course.”

“Of course,” Clay repeated. His fingertips drummed slowly across the runner and he did not look away. After a moment’s thought, he said, “By the way, if we are going to start any kind of trading with these people, I’m gonna need you to quit eye-fucking a hole through Gibs’s skull, huh? He’s liable to start asking questions if you keep that shit up, you know? Questions like, ‘Hey, have we met somewhere before?’ and fucking so forth. At some point he’s bound to figure out as how you were the selfsame assholes that chased his crew of sixteen up the highway, isn’t he? And that’s not going to do such an awful lot to recommend us to him on the basis of our character, is it?”