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

“I told you I was sorry for that…”

“Don’t be sorry, Ronny, just don’t fucking do it. Or do it, and fuck this up for everyone and see what happens. See if I don’t just have you strapped down and take a running start at those oversized balls of yours, huh? And have you hobbling up the street all cripple-cocked for the next month.”

“That’s not the first time you’ve brought up trade, Clay,” Elton prompted. “You have some idea where these people are at?”

“Not a fucking clue, Elton!” He drained his glass.

“Well, hell, that’s not a hard problem to solve,” Ronny scoffed.

“Oh? There’s some sort of app you can download?”

“No, come on, Clay. Let me just get a couple of teams together, go out and find them.”

“I imagine these are well armed teams as apt as you to be sniffing around for a little action like dogs jamming snouts up assholes, huh?”

“Clay…”

“No, Ronny. Just… no. Not this time. No fucking marauding, piracy, theft, or any other goddamned catastrophe. You lost sixty some-fucking-odd people the last time you tried it; I’m not having another twenty or thirty or whatever number you’d imagine thrown down the well after them.”

“But should we not be trying to find them?” asked Johnny.

“Maybe,” Clay allowed. “But I’d say unarmed and flying white flags at every angle, huh?”

Pap shivered at this as though a witch had stepped over his grave. “Not so sure about the unarmed part, Baws. Hwhite flags; fine. Unarmed’s just askin’ fer it, though.”

“Okay, well we can discuss that a bit. Whatever it is, they just have to know we want to talk, is all.”

“This is a damned waste of time, is what it is,” Elton said.

Ronny nodded and hoisted his glass to the man, but Elton shook his head. “Not for that reason, Ronny. What I mean is why the hell are we even bothering? What, three and a half—four weeks of travel? That covers quite a bit of ground. We didn’t do so bad on the road on the way up here, right? Well, let’s get out of these goddamned sticks and go find somewhere with thicker cities. More to pick over. I say we get the hell out while the getting’s still good.”

“Aren’t you tired of that, Elton?” asked Clay.

“What, eating?”

“No, goddamn it, of drifting. Of coming to an area, building it up, and then just abandoning it all later on? This last time, with Colorado… well I don’t mind admitting it hurt. Quite a bit. I’m sick of it, boys. I’m sick and tired of pouring my heart and soul into an area and then just disposing of it later when it stops being easy. I know I’m not the only one. Jesus Christ, aren’t most of you living in houses now? When was the last time you lived in an actual goddamned house?”

“Has been perty nice,” Pap nodded.

“We have us a whole fucking town here, huh? Nearly cut to size for us. Ned’s got his shops, nobody’s living in hovels anymore, there’s a hospital up the way for the Doc—”

“That’s been fairly picked over, itself,” Doc interjected.

“Fine, but it’s still a fucking hospital that you don’t have to drive out to from a camp. Everything we need is right in this little two or three mile radius, is the main point. Hell, even Isabelle’s whores have their own hotel, now, instead of a flea-bitten pile of tents.”

“We don’t have everything,” Elton insisted. “Food is still a problem.”

“Well, we’ll make it less of a fucking problem!” Clay barked. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how many thousands or millions of fucking years have human fucking beings fucking survived without a lootable fucking supply of fucking food! You’re telling me none of us can figure this out? After everything we’ve managed? Across this whole country!”

They lowered their eyes from his glare, wild-eyed as it was. Sweat was dripping inexorably from the hair at his temples and he panted gently as he raged. Pap noted with some alarm that there was a small and insistent wheeze couched deep in the man’s throat, hiding just around the corner to peer out when it thought no one monitored for its occurrence. As he listened, it became clearer still in his hearing and he wondered how he’d ever missed it before.

“We can get this figured out, goddamn it, there isn’t any need to run from this!”

“Clay,” Ronny hissed. He leaned forward with his fist posted on the bar top, intense eyes like lances reaching out to pin the man in place. “We’re gonna be starving soon. I can fix this. Let me take my people out and fix it.”

The panting stopped. The wheezing stopped. Clay stood motionless, mouth partially ajar, eyes draped and tired, as he regarded the man, looking him slowly up and down as though he were of no more consequence than a road sign rendered in a foreign language.

“Grab him, Pap.”

Ronny tensed and made to jerk away from the group of men bellied up to the bar but Pap got a paw wrapped around the scruff of his neck before he could push off. The Texan squeezed hard enough to make his eyes water and shoved forward so that his ribs jammed into the board. He had nowhere to go but over, and over he went, until his cheek was mashed against the mirror-slick wood; drops of whiskey on its surface threatening to seep in through the corner of a sealed eye. His left eye pin-balled around in its socket, capillary-laced white flashing in the manner of the panicked animal to which he’d been reduced. His hand spidered out in search of a vulnerable target on Pap—perhaps a rib or even his groin—but the man just seized his wrist with a free hand and yanked his arm behind his back until the shoulder sang.

“Don’t break it, Pap. This isn’t about punishment; it’s more of a school lesson, huh?”

Johnny and the Doc looked on in horror at what was happening, though Ned had gone by then; he ran from the room as soon as the first aborted shout issued forth. Elton regarded the interplay stone-faced. After a moment he strolled down to the other end of the bar and put his back to them all.

Clay grabbed the whiskey bottle by the neck and took a second to read the label. “No,” he said thoughtfully, and began to rummage around on the shelves. Finding something more to his liking a moment later, he reversed it in his hand and brought the square body of the vessel down on the edge of the metal basin inside the race track, where it exploded into a shower of glass fragments. In his hand remained the bottle neck, terminating in a jagged riot of razor sharp curves and shards. Grasping it overhand, he rested his elbow on the surface of the bar north of Ronny’s head and lowered the neck until a needle-fine filament rested upon the skin of Ronny’s eyelid, just shy of encroaching into the hairs of his eyelashes.

When it made contact, Ronny ceased all efforts to free himself instantaneously, even despite the cold ache of his shoulder, and caught up his breath—not by means of holding it at the throat so much as a total discontinuance of that action to which his diaphragm must normally be applied. His eye was a great, shimmering orb with dilated pupil rolled all the way over to fixate on that horrific guillotine.

“Don’t move, now, Ronny. This could take a nasty turn if you do. You won’t move now, will you?”

Ronny grunted.

“Good, I’ll assume that’s ‘yes’. Now. You’re probably wondering why I’ve taken such a proactive stance on this topic, Ronny. That’s just fine; I’m happy to share my reasoning, here. You see, the reason you’re in the situation that you find yourself right now is that you’re a stubborn fucking cunt. You’ve proven yourself to be in the past and… well, let’s just get it all out there on the table, huh? I’m not convinced you’ve always taken my directions seriously. I know, I know, it’s fucking crazy and I’m probably just being paranoid, but then a chap tends to get paranoid when he’s forced day in and day out to deal with stubborn fucking cunts.”