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

She could tell Lum was dead without even getting close. The only things she’d ever seen in the unwinding of her life that laid as still as he were rocks and felled trees. She stared at the Lum-thing in the dirt for a considerable time, though she didn’t know how long that might have been—didn’t even care how long it might have been, nor did she trouble to notice that she was standing there and staring at all. All normal cognition was, by this point, newly extinct.

She heard a groan at her feet; saw the darkened clearing before her tilt and swivel up into the sky as her head rotated down of its own volition to look at George. He lay over on his side, clutching at his gut with both hands, teeth bared in silent pain as his breath whistled through the sides of his cheeks.

“G-George…?”

He opened his eyes and looked up at her, vision unfocused and uncomprehending. After a moment, recognition came, and he gasped, “Did… you see them?”

She jerked her head in a nod, lower lip quivering as if it were controlled by an intelligence not her own.

George nodded and closed his eyes again. “Good. G-Good. You need (hngh…) you need to wait here a while. N-need to wait long enough for them to be gone. So you d-don’t… ugh, God Jesus… don’t run into them in the pass.”

He let his head drop and began to pant.

“I need to go get Olivia…” she whimpered.

He shook his head. “Can’t do anything for me. Shot through… the liver least twice… uh!… bleeding pretty good. Just wait, Rose. Just wait. Just wait… just wait… just… wait…”

His voice trailed off into panting again, and his head rose and fell gently over the dirt floor at every cycling of breath. She stared at him a moment, frozen in place. After a while, she crawled into his tent, retrieved one of the pillows, came back out to him and sat down by his head. She laid the pillow over her thigh and wedged both under his head, lifting it gently and setting it down, heavy and wet with sweat, and she began to pass her hand over his brow in the same slow, deliberate motion she’d used once upon a time to pet her cat, Miz. The frown on his face seemed to soften as she did this, so she kept it up. She looked down at his hands knotted up into his belly, saw they were slick and shiny, and babbled, “I-I-I need to g-get you something. I-I gotta get a bandage or-or something…”

He shook his head against her leg and whispered, “Just stay with me a while. I’m feeling better. It’s not so bad. What time is it?”

She looked at her watch.

“Eight twenty-seven.”

He nodded. “Okay. Okay. At… at eight forty-two, you’re gonna get up and leave—”

“I can’t leave you, George!” she sobbed.

“You have to, honey… you have to. You saw who took Lizzy. You can… can describe them?” He turned his head back to look up at her with his left eye.

She nodded wordlessly, tears rolling down her cheeks; tracking them in the salts of her body.

George let his head roll forward again and sighed. “Good girl. Lady. Young woman, Rose, that’s you now. Young woman… like Mom… strong like her. You’ll need to run… run back to the others and tell. Tell what you saw. Who you saw. Only you can’t leave until… until… what time?”

“Eight forty-two.”

“Good,” he whispered through his panting. “Good. You have to wait and be sure those men are gone. So they don’t… find you. But… not so long they get too far…”

He lay there breathing, each gasp coming at a slower interval than the previous, and his eyes began to flutter slowly under her hand. He began to hum tunelessly on his exhalations, and then unexpectedly—horribly—the corner of his mouth pulled back in the shadow of a smile. The sight of it made Rose’s stomach turn; she didn’t understand how he could begin to think about smiling at a time like that, but she was somehow sure that it meant nothing good. Instinctively, she knew something was changing deep inside of his mind, and it was terrible. She understood that he was beginning the process of leaving.

A moment later his eyes shot wide open, causing her to squeak in alarm, and he whispered, “The pistol! Lum’s pistol! You know how to use it?”

Her chest had constricted down over her lungs; the mindless controls inside her own body seeming to understand that the very act of breathing was undue torture, and so sought to spare her. She could only nod, and her voice croaked out from her throat in a trailing moan.

“Good, Rose. You get it when you leave. Keep it with you. See anyone on the way you don’t know… shoot them.”

“I caaaan’t …” she wheezed, nearing panic.

“You can, Rose. You can. You will. You’re the only one who can save Elizabeth, now, so you will.”

She sat out there for a time, George panting against her thigh, the legs of her pants drying against her thighs, beginning to chafe. His eyelids resumed their fluttering, and each breath came slower and slower and slower. After only a moment of this, she glanced down at her watch. It said eight forty-five. She pulled air into her lungs, deep and long, and the exhalation quivered like the shuttering rattle of a frightened hummingbird, and fresh tears spilled from her eyes. She said, “It’s time.”

George nodded.

Cradling his head so it wouldn’t fall, she crawled out from under him and wedged the pillow down into his neck and shoulder, trying to keep him as comfortable as she could. She went over to the Lum-thing and crouched beside him, seeing where the sidearm was wedged to the ground beneath his hip. She reached out for the grip of the weapon, careful to grasp it in such a way that her finger wouldn’t accidentally encounter the trigger, and pulled. The weapon moved but would not come, and she was forced to push against his body; it felt alien under her touch, like a softened block of clay. It moved only a little, and she was forced to brace against it, and it felt as though the flesh beneath his shirt would eventually ooze through the cracks of her fingers like dough. Just when she thought she might start to scream, the pistol came free. She released the Lum-thing with her hand, and it rocked back into the dirt.

She came back to George and knelt before him. He was no longer grimacing, now; his face had gone calm and smooth. It was clammy like a slick of mud, but it was certainly calm now. His breathing was very slow.

“I’m gonna go get them, George. Someone’s gonna come back for you real soon.”

That ghost of a smile crept over his lips again, and he nodded. “Go on…” he whispered. She could not hear him; only saw the shape of the words as his lips traced them into the night air.

She leaned over and kissed him on his temple, resting one hand along his jaw and the other over his brow. When she pulled back, she saw that the places her hands had touched were now smeared red; she looked down at her hands and saw they were covered in drying blood. She tried to think about when that might of happened but failed. She wiped the palms of her hands on her thighs absently.

“You just hang on,” she ordered. “Just wait for us, George.”

Rose stood and ran, swinging her arms like an athlete, clutching Lum’s pistol in a shaking hand.

The fire had died down enough that he was able to watch her retreating form on the other side of it, long and limber with the careless grace of youth, and he smiled at the woman she was becoming. It brought images and thoughts, memories and dreams to him, and he was grateful for that one last visitation.

She grew smaller as she ran, which confused him for a moment, until he realized that she was only getting further away, which was good, and he sighed, and he felt like all the air of his body passed out of him in a cool wind, and it was beautiful, and he knew peace. The edges of his vision clouded over into black, irising closed in a constricting tunnel, and he felt the cool touch of the night air on his skin, the soft caress of a hand on his cheek.