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

She turned to look at Edgar, who remained outside.

“Come on. This isn’t the main guy but he’ll take you to him.”

He glanced nervously at the guards before nodding. He stepped through and the man in the chair swung the door shut behind him.

Danielle stood with Riley outside the main office of the cinema. She maintained her position just inside the lantern’s sphere of influence, looking down over her crossed arms at the mottled carpet between them. He stood in front of the door like a sentinel, partially shadowed by the bulk of an old cardboard movie cutout. Dimly visible in the light was the display’s subject: a shirtless, muscled man standing within a dark cluster of gorillas. Jane stood behind him, her darting eyes betrayed a distinct lack of trust. She glanced back at Riley; shadowed as he was behind the cutout, she could see him in detail only from the waist down. All above this point was darkness.

The manager’s office door framed a wire-mesh-reinforced window in its center, through which she could see Edgar, illuminated by the room’s own lantern, fidgeting uncomfortably.

“You’ve done (yeah?) a very good thing, here, Dear Heart. A very good thing, indeed…”

“What will you do to him?” she asked, unsure she wanted the answer.

The shadow of his head tilted. “Do to him? Well, nothing. He wants to be put in touch with the boss man, hey? I’ll do that, right? Everyone wins.”

“Whatever,” she said, brushing hands over gooseflesh. “Well anyways… you have him now. I’m out.”

“Oh? Not going to stay for the big meeting?”

“No, Riley, I mean I’m fucking out entirely. I could have just taken him straight to Clay. Consider this my exit; I’m cashing out on this last act. I’ll tell Ronny later on if I don’t see him on my way back.”

“Out,” Riley said. The word slipped from his mouth before it clapped shut, just as the cinema’s back door had clapped shut only a few minutes before. “Ohh… no. No, no, no, no, no… hrm-ah… No. Nope, no, no. Huh-uh. Erm… hey?”

“Riley…?”

“No,” he shook his head. “I can’t even imagine, right? You’re far too valuable. Far, far too valuable. Danielle… who the hell (yeah?) can we rely on to- It’s… No, simply not. We’d miss you. Yeah, we’d miss you far too much. Maybe around the next performance review period, hey? H.R. paperwork and all that? See, the way I see it (yeah?) is that you go somewhere and signal your desire to leave (okay?) and then, in the meantime… in the meantime… I… well, I guess we go and make up some more rules disallowing such a tragedy, okay?”

“Are you fucking serious?” she barked.

“Of course,” he nodded, sounding truly hurt. “This way (okay?) this way, you’ll feel as though there’s some sort of process in place. You’ll be able to maintain the illusion of control, won’t you?”

She shook her head, unable to speak. She could feel her jaw bouncing in place like a broken trap door, hating herself for her total loss, and began to stammer. “What are you… you can’t… how can you fucking even…”

He came forward out of the shadow. Stepping into the light, she saw the look in his eyes, saw the smile trembling on his lips as if he fought some internal struggle to hold it in place. It made her think of rotting meat.

His voice did not purr so much as buzz like the low register of exceptionally high voltage. “Danielle… whyyyy would anyoooone want youuuuu after you set that fire? ”

Icy heat exploded in the center of her chest, spreading out through her extremities like poison, numbing her fingers and toes. She hissed, “You… f-fuck! I had nothing to do…!”

“ Proooove ittt .”

“Fine,” she growled. “Let’s go to Clay right now. You fucking prove it!”

“Clay?” he laughed. “Oh, you beautiful thing, Clay’s done now. He’s done and it’s just nobody’s realized it, yeah? I would have called it a week (right?) before they started to figure it out, but now… I think your little poker chip might just cut out a lot of wasted time. The power structure will be changing around here soon enough; a bit of a re-org, okay? And when all the dust settles and the paperwork is signed off, you and I (yeah?) you and I don’t have to prove anything to Clay. You’ll need to prove it to Elton.”

She blinked furiously against the doubling of her blurred vision. She felt a dry, cold slither moving down her arm; realized immediately that it was her hand lowering.

Riley’s eyes darted down toward her midsection and the smile of his face tensed so violently that the blood was forced from his cheeks.

He said, “Or I suppose you could go for that rifle, sure. And then you won’t be here to protect Elton at all, will you? We could leave him alone, you know. After all the dust settles? Then you could both fuck off to wherever your heart desires, yeah? Come on, you don’t want to do this right now. Go home—he should be back from his shift by now. Go make love (right?) go make love to your man, make some decisions about what’s important? You leave the rest to us, sweet pea. Go on! Go on, now!”

Her feet were moving before Danielle realized she’d willed them to do so. She plunged through the theater lobby and out the exit, breaking into a trot as soon as her feet hit the pavement, intent on getting home to Elton as soon as possible. She was driven by the unrelenting need to see him, to put her hands on him and confirm he was safe; the gut-churning compulsion to search everywhere around their home and confirm that no one hid out in the darkness, watching. The trot quickened into a jog and then a run, her gripping the rifle to keep it from ramming into her body, and she saw within her mind the last cogent image from that theater; the last thing her eyes had processed and understood before the instinct to vacate erased all else. The questioning gaze of Edgar through the manager’s window, eyebrows raised in concern as he shrugged at her as if to say, “What is it?”

She ran away from this image as much as she ran towards Elton.

Back at the theater, Riley stood as she’d left him, tapping his index finger thoughtfully along the length of his nose. He remained standing in this manner for perhaps two full minutes before he was disturbed by a knock on the window behind him. He looked back over his shoulder and saw Edgar looking at him through the glass; a hairless animal staring mournfully out through a pet shop window. He winked and mouthed the words, “One moment, please.” Edgar smiled nervously, nodded, and disappeared. Riley continued to stare at the window a moment longer on the off chance that Edgar would return. When he didn’t, Riley snapped the fingers of both his hands, turned, and went to the lobby. Seeing the two men stationed outside the door, he knocked on the window and beckoned for Marshall to come join him. Marshall nodded, stepped through the doors, and said, “Need me?”

“Yeah, Marshall, come on over here,” Riley waved. When the man approached, he said, “I want you (yeah?) to run off and get Ronny, okay? Don’t tell anyone where you’re going, now. You just run straight there, tell him Riley needs to see him urgently, and come straight back, right? There and back. Don’t tell anyone, don’t stop and wave, and no eye contact.”

“Yeah, of course,” Marshall nodded. He turned on his heel to leave but Riley pulled at his elbow to stop him.