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

“You’ve taken someone from me, Riley. I intend to have her back. Now.”

Riley dropped his head back and panted. His cheeks contorted for a moment as though he’d smile, but then the misery of his face hit him again, and tears of pain streamed from his eyes. He gasped as his head throbbed, sending sick waves of hot fury down his body, where they joined with the writhing of his knees. He shut his eyes against the hollow light of the room and focused on breathing, though each indrawn breath sent icy stabs of pain jabbing through the exposed nerves buried in the sockets of his gums, driving up into his brain. He turned his head to spit out blood, and that too was a misery, and he could only succeed in letting it dribble out onto the floor through the destroyed structures of his lips.

The door behind the man pushed open, and there was suddenly a woman’s voice filling the room, quiet and prodding like a nurse presiding over a dying patient.

“Jake? She’s… not here, is she?”

“Stay out there and keep a watch, Amanda. You’re right; she’s not here. I’m going to find out where she is right now. Stay out there a while, and make sure no one interrupts.”

Sound of the door softly closing.

Eyes still crammed shut, Riley gurgled, “ Jage? Igth Jage…? ”

More noise, like metal dragging over linoleum, and the creaking settle of cheap plastic accepting the burden of a body.

“You’ve killed some people that are very important to me, Riley. And you’ve taken my girl. I’ll have her back now.”

Riley tried to draw in breath to speak but only pulled down a mouthful of blood. He gagged and coughed repeatedly, convulsing on the floor as he struggled to roll over and hack up as much as he could. He saw a growing muddy red puddle on the floor out of the corner of his eye; it was alarmingly large. He flopped back down to his shoulder blades, wheezing laughter at the thought of how so clean a plan could have gone so incredibly wrong.

“Howdjoo know where t’find me?”

“The girl, Riley.”

He closed his eyes a moment, tried to breathe through his nose, and failed. Everything in his head felt pulped and mashed together—a throbbing ache in the center of his brain pulsed into the base of his neck like someone had driven a steel wedge into his crown all the way to his root and was now flicking it maliciously with a finger. What little of his mind was left to him began to race, and he struggled to find some way in which to salvage the situation.

“I gan geght you da gurrl. Eathy ath piiee. (Ggguh!) You wogn’t fine ’er on yer owgn, but we’ll tell yough. Jutht need to tage a goughp uh people to the rethort an’ kill a few guyghth…”

“You… want me to kill someone?”

“Yeagh… yeagh… kachk !” He leaned over and dribbled out some more blood. “Glay… an’ his bidge Pap an’ anyone elthe getsth inyur waygh…”

“Clay. You want me to kill Clay. And then you’ll give her back.”

“Yeagh… yezth… ugh!… Jeethugz… pay to playgh. Fuggin’ Christh, I’m gunna be thig…”

His head dropped, bounced off the floor, and he moaned wetly as he screwed his eyes shut. He lay there several seconds, panting. He felt the man’s presence hovering above him like a solar eclipse.

The fire in Riley’s left leg flared as he felt it hoisted up into the air by the ankle. A moment later it was settled down, but it rested on something high and hard at his heel. He opened his eyes and saw the great, cyclopean mass of the man floating above him, silhouetted from the lantern light by the door such that only the edges of his scalp and ears were visible and all between was black and formless. He sat in a beat-up office chair, the kind with the legs rather than wheels—the kind Riley used to tip back to balance on the rear legs when he was a child, and his mother would shout at him for doing so and he would continue to tip back and balance on those legs and smile and laugh at her anger.

He looked down at his elevated leg and saw that it was resting atop a few stacked reams of printer paper.

The man was leaning forward, elbows resting on knees, considering him the way a scientist might consider a dissected frog pinned out on a board. Then he straightened up, lifted his leg off the floor, and drove his boot down squarely on Riley’s kneecap, snapping it unnaturally into the floor and efficiently severing every bit of ligament and connective tissue for all time.

Something like pain—and then again very much more than pain—exploded inside of Riley. It wasn’t pain as he understood it, precisely—it was far too electric and rapid, traversing his nervous system with such aggression that his spine bowed backward on itself, turning his entire form into an upside down “U.” The cords in his neck stood out, pulling the corners of his mouth wide, and the split running along the top of his lip tore further under the tension that was forced upon it while a long, grating scream rang out from the very pit of his throat. He continued to scream, twisting around on the floor as though he were on fire trying to roll himself out, and all the while the man sat there in the chair looking down on him, waiting, with that horrible boot braced atop Riley’s obliterated knee.

He eventually stopped screaming when he could no longer bring himself to do so; when it felt as though his ribs would crack or his heart would stop, and he lay there panting, sobbing, and twisting around on the hard floor. In his tear-blurred vision, he saw that horrible black head hovering high above.

“You’ve stopped smiling now, yes?”

He lay there panting a moment longer, slowly reeling his control back in, working with everything he had to deal with the signals his body was sending to his brain but it was so hard; so very hard. It seemed there wasn’t the least part of him that didn’t throb in outright horror. Through deep, sucking breaths he said, “ I dogne ’ave th-fuggin’ guurrlll… ”

“Who does, Riley? Tell me where I can find her, please.”

He clicked around the blood in his throat, gurgled, dribbled some of it out, and said, “Yougg can… t tage ’er. Shjee’s deeper in… too many waghtching ’er…”

“Who, Riley? Where?”

That clicking sound came rattling forth again and Riley suddenly realized that he was laughing, laughing just as he always did; despite the pain, because of the pain, because he was going to die and he knew it and oh thank Christ because all of this hurt was going away as soon as it was done. He laughed, thinking it couldn’t get any worse than it already had, and said, “Fugggyou… Thteve…”

The man seemed to nod at this and sigh. He reached over and grasped the ankle of Riley’s destroyed leg and began to lift, keeping the remnants of the knee pinned in place with his boot. He bent the leg to a full ninety degrees before drawing broad circles in the air with it and, in a voice far too calm, coaxed, “Tell me where, Riley. Tell me how many. Tell me, and I’ll stop.”

He may have said other things as well, but Riley heard none of it. He screamed again and again, until he ran out of air, inhaled, choked on his own blood, and then he continued on screaming. He screamed until all he could perceive was the act of doing so, and the world began to fade out, and his vision failed him. And, thank Christ, the awful, nightmare pain began to go with it.

The excruciation of his leg brought him back out of the swoon; throbbed him up from the blackness before he had any chance to regroup or recover. The world swam back into focus, and he felt as though he may not have been out very long at all. The great, black mass was still up above him, and he whimpered as soon as he saw it. He saw that it had him by the arm now; that his arm was stretched out into the thing’s lap, that the thing’s own hands were clamped around his wrist. Slowly, he came to understand that his arm burned like fire up to the elbow and he soon saw that blood was running in thin rivulets from a cut that started behind his knuckles and ran down the length of his forearm to where it stopped below the joint. Another bleeding red cut intersected this line, running a full bracelet around the circumference of his forearm.