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

David crouched next to Riley, hip and back wedged up against a tree trunk to help maintain his balance against the plunging slope of the mountainside. He strained his eyes as he stared into the black emptiness of the lower valley. In the distance, hovering out in that dark sea like moonlit satellites, he could see low, orange flickering; possibly cook fires or lanterns.

He shifted his rifle over the tops of his kneecaps and muttered, “There could be any number of people down there. What the hell are we supposed to see?”

“I expect (right?), I expect that we’d start just by seeing where they are,” said Riley.

“Well, there they are!” David waved a hand down the slope. “Whatever good that does—we should have been up here at dusk when there was still enough light to see down there.”

Riley shook his head and sucked at his teeth thoughtfully. “Nah. They’re out and about during the day—”

“How the hell can you know that?”

“I can smell them, hey? They smell like daytime people.”

“Jesus…” David muttered, and shifted away from the other man.

“Nope,” Riley sniffed.

They sat quietly for a while, Riley relaxed on a rock cleaning underneath his nails with the tip of a knife by feel alone. He hummed tunelessly to himself at times and, at others, knocked his teeth together rhythmically, as though he were clicking out a drum beat. David continued to stare down into the valley, struggling to note any movement or change at all until his eyes washed out and what little light he could detect faded away entirely to match the surrounding night. He blinked several times and shook his head, yawning as he did so. When he looked back down into the valley, the lights were back. They were all as he’d left them.

“Well, what now? Are we spending the night up here?”

Riley pulled his eyes from the stars so he could look out into the emptiness between mountaintops. He thought it over for a moment; then said, “Ronny asked me to do a few different things, yeah? We still need to keep it all quiet (right?) otherwise he would have brought the whole crew through here. We’re not ready to go straight at Clay ourselves just yet; that’s likely to be a grand fiasco.”

“What does us being ready to mix it up with Clay have to do with being up here?”

“What if we could draw them out, sonny, and point them right at Clay? What if we could have our two little problems sort each other out and then just clean up the mess, yeah?”

“It would be magical,” David grumbled. “Accomplished how?”

“Well… that’s what we’re here to ascertain, young squire,” Riley smiled. “Targets (right?), targets of opportunity. One must sometimes needs be creative when assaying to coax out some… violent creature. Creativity, Gussy. It’s why I get paid the medium bucks.”

“You’re creatively staring at a big fucking hole in the Earth, just the same as me…”

The cheeks on Riley’s face began to cramp again. He opened his jaws up as wide as his physiology would allow, groaning slightly as the hinge cracked; it sent a tone through his ears like grinding beach sand. He flexed his mouth in wide, exaggerated circles and said, “We’ll give it another twenty minutes or so and then head down the back end of the ridge. After that, I think we’ll poke around the area and see what else we can find, yeah? That might not be the only little enclave, no matter what our pigeon claims. Have a little look around (hey?), and see just what’s out in these mountains…”

He massaged his cheeks with the knuckles of his hands and concentrated very hard on not laughing.

George was the first of them to awake on the following morning. He lay in the dark of the tent for a time and listened to the soft breathing of Lum by his side. He thought about the feeling of his spine against the padding on which he slept; his back was a little stiff but nowhere near as bad as he’d feared. He was relieved at this, having dreaded on the previous night the prospect of crawling down onto his bedding only to find himself assailed with the numerous aches and pains of age; dreaded the thought of having to admit that he might have actually been a fool. Laying there in the darkness, he flexed various muscles in his back and sides, angled his hips in various directions, and noted there were no new ugly surprises waiting to seize upon him in his predawn ambulation. George required movement of his body, and it seemed as though his body would respond when prompted. It was a good thing.

Having determined the state of his own fitness, he lay a while longer and thought about the dream he’d been having just before he awoke; the dream, rather, that had awakened him. He was dreaming of his wife again, as he so often did these days; her smell had pulled him up out of sleep. It had been so real and vibrant that he’d expected to find that cherished face hovering over him when he opened his eyes—not visible in the blackness, of course, but present and known, regardless.

She had not been there. The face and mind and body and hands and eyes and shoulders and skin and all of the other exquisite parts at once both crucial and meaningless, those parts of her that had made the world seem to him a redeemable place that made sense—perhaps not all of the time but enough of the time—those innumerable little individualities that were the least part of her and profoundly all of her; these had all passed from the world years ago. His eyes would never see her nor would his hands ever feel her again—not in this life, at least. He hated going to sleep most nights. Hated it because he knew there was a better than average chance she’d be waiting for him underneath the conscious world. Hated it because he knew he’d eventually have to wake up and readjust to the fact that he no longer had her with him.

Hated it because he was terrified that someday it would come to pass that he no longer dreamed of her.

He sighed and rubbed at his eyes. The lids made wet popping sounds as they were pulled from the surface of his eyeballs. A few moments after that, his bladder finally caught up to him, and he was forced to get moving. He unzipped his bag, groaned up to a sitting position, and patted around gently in the dark. As he searched, Lum’s hand reached out and found his elbow. It was holding George’s knee brace.

“Thanks,” George whispered. He heard a soft grunt and Lum rolled away.

He wrapped it tightly around his knee over the pant leg, pulled his boots on, grabbed the cane, and lumbered up to a kneeling position; bad leg shot out straight before him. He balanced there like a panting old dancer, having just completed some performance culminating in an impossible feat of acrobatics. Bracing himself against the cane handle, he unzipped the tent flap and strained up off his feet and out into the morning. He turned and refastened the flap as quietly as he could, the zipper offering up a high-frequency whine as it ran down the track like a miniature formula one race car.

He stood there looking out into the darkness for a time, wondering how it could be that the early predawn looked exactly like the black of the evening and still be distinguishable from that period as something wholly unique. He wondered if there was some internal process of the body, not the time sense but something akin to it, that informed the mind of such distinctions or if it was just the cold, bleary feeling of wakefulness surrounding the eyes that made the world seem new. His aching bladder shot a line of ice through his middle, prompting him to pull a flashlight from his sweater pocket and begin the journey out to the edge of the trees some two hundred feet away. As he saw to this need, he cast out along the internals of his body to see if it might be required that he do more and found that with the exception of the water, the rest of him seemed empty enough. He wondered if anything would move at all before they returned home and smiled tiredly. Less of everything was needed, as always.