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

She turned and looked over at him; saw his vacant, hollow expression as he stared into the fire pit. Saw his mouth working dumbly like a broken animatronic. Looking closer, she thought she saw a line of red running over his ear in the dim, shifting light. “Lum!” she barked.

His head turned in her direction but his eyes were tracking everywhere, passing over and around her, and she heard another of those coughing zips out in the trees. A red bead no bigger than a corn kernel appeared at his temple, and he tumbled from the chair to land face down in the dirt.

“Lum! LUM!” she screamed, scrambling from her chair to fall upon him. She heaved against his body to roll him over, but he was so heavy and unresponsive that she might as well have tried to push over a tree. A set of gnarled hands appeared under her vision, and she looked up to see George down in the dirt before her, bad leg awkwardly jutting out to the side. He tugged at Lum, adding his strength to hers to try and get him onto his back.

“Quit messing with that, hey?” called a cheerful voice. Both of them flinched and turned in its direction; the same direction as those unholy coughs from a moment before. There were two men out there. It was difficult to discern any detail as they stood outside of the influence of the firelight, but it was clear they were both armed with rifles. The voice that had called out to them continued: “It’s rude (right?) to disturb the dead.”

They stepped forward into the camp, one positioned slightly before the other. The one in front was a skinny man with long brown hair, frightened eyes, and a smile pulled so wretchedly over his face that he appeared to be in some degree of pain. His clothes were ill-fitting; too-tight denim with a faded Mickey Mouse t-shirt. The man behind him seemed to Elizabeth to be much more normal, though sullen and dark.

The one who smiled said, “Honestly, stop playing with that. It’s gross.”

She heard George panting from somewhere behind her position before realizing with a flash of panic that the man was probably crying. The blood locked up inside of her like congealed ice at the sound of it, and she thought it might be possible that hearing a man that she loved like a grandfather, a revered person of dignity, break down in such a way might possibly be worse than seeing him killed.

“Wha… you… you fucking bastards…” George heaved.

The man in the Mickey shirt ignored this completely, instead squatting before Elizabeth, his rifle resting across the tops of his knees. He said, “What would you say, David? This looks like a bit of an opportunity, yeah?”

She looked over at the .30-06. It had pitched over into the dirt as Lum had fallen from his chair. She would have to lunge a good six feet to get her hands around it, and she was fairly certain there wasn’t any round in the chamber. There was Lum’s sidearm as well, except that he’d fallen in such a way that his hip was wedged down over it. She could go for the pistol and then she’d be stuck tugging on the thing trying to wrestle it free, probably firing a few rounds off in the process. After a moment she realized that might not be a bad thing; the discharge of a decent caliber had a better than average chance of being heard over in the Bowl.

She took a deep breath to calm herself, to bring her racing heart down to something she could handle and looked the other man dead in his eyes. In response, his smile widened further, though such a thing seemed absurdly impossible. The darker, sullen man behind him moved around the back of the camping chairs and retrieved the .30-06 from the ground. The one who smiled said, “Ooooh… I saw that, little girl.”

He reached behind himself, hand coming back with a sleek, black semiautomatic pistol. He pointed it right at her face.

“You take that gun off her, goddamned coward!” George snarled. “You put it on me if you have to put it on anyone, you hear! Get it off her; I swear to Christ I’ll kill you myself!”

The smile faltered on the man’s face, and his shoulders slumped. Sighing, he looked over at George wearing an expression of mild distaste, as though the man had burped at his dinner table. He said, “Fine,” swung the gun over, and shot George three times in the stomach. The lightning cracks of the pistol’s report reverberated out over the campsite, sounding small like blocks of wood clapping together.

“GEORGE!” Lizzy shrieked and lunged in his direction. The smiling man shot out with his free hand, caught her by the shoulder of her sweater, and threw her backward into his friend, who took her by the arms and held her in place. She continued to jerk and twist in George’s direction, spitting and screaming and crying.

The longhaired smiling man rose from his crouched position, approached her, and said in an almost prissy voice, “Stop that, now!” He slapped her across the face hard enough to split her lip.

“STOP!” George gagged. He was laid over on his side in the dirt, head rested atop Lum’s back with hands holding onto his guts like they were fighting to escape his body. He panted and moaned, “No more! Lizzy, stop fighting, honey. Stop, stop. Just… just stop…”

His head dropped against the shoulder blade of his dead friend, and he writhed around in pain, wincing as his shredded stomach muscles sheared against each other. He lay there panting; blinking hard to work the sweat from his eyes, wincing and moaning by turns.

“Jesus,” whispered the man holding Lizzy. “Just kill him, why don’t you?”

“He hasn’t got (yeah?) a great deal of time, Davey. A bit of pain never hurt anyone, right? It’ll be over soon enough for him.”

Lizzy had stopped fighting, though she maintained a tense resistance against the other man’s pull. She sobbed openly and called out to both George and Lum, blood and spit running out over her fattening lips, and the breath escaped her body slowly in a long, dying wail.

“We probably want to get moving, yeah? The others might’ve heard. Let’s… oh, let’s just gag her up for the walk home, shall we? I wish we’d brought a sack now, but there’s no help for it, I suppose. We’ll just have to make sure none of them see her.”

Rose Dempsey recognized the chug of the rifle just before breaking through the last patch of trees into the clearing, the .22 having been her favorite round when her mother took her out to the range. She reacted without thought, dropping low and scrambling behind one of the thicker trees. She nearly wailed when Lum pitched over into the dirt and when the smiling man with the long hair shot George, she wet herself a little even though she’d only just seen to that need a moment before; the low warmth spreading along her inner thighs, smelling of fear and shame.

She remained hidden for an eternity after the two men left with Elizabeth, panting rapidly—trying to pant quietly. When she felt certain they’d really left the campground, she crept out from under the tree cover and moved toward the coals of their dying fire hunched over at a near crawl. The night air blanketed her skin in chills, icing the dampness at her thighs, and she began to shiver despite her sweating. She felt exposed out in the open as if all the world were perched over her like a great congress of devil-eyed predatory birds; hateful creatures that regarded her numb-footed fear with oily eyes, looking down on her with the wordless malice of starving old men, poised to fall on her with the slightest provocation. She felt incredibly small as she passed over open ground… and then when she came close to the fire and saw what was left, she felt her whole existence compress down into a quiet, frozen misery.