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

“I’ve been jealous of you, too,” Rebecca whispered.

“Of me! Whatever the hell for?”

“You… you’re who I want to be.”

Amanda didn’t know what to say to that. She turned away and looked out into the same wet emptiness as Rebecca and struggled for something to say with a mind rendered empty from shock.

The door behind them pushed open a moment later, and Jake emerged from the building. Amanda whirled on her heel, ready to come flying out of her skin, and nearly barked, “Well?”

“You’re not going to like it,” Jake warned. “We need to head back to the Bowl.”

“Bullshit…” Amanda snarled.

“No, hear me out, please. They have her in another location up the road; that old church off the extreme west edge of town. But they don’t have her there to hide her from us—they’re hiding her from their own people.”

“What?”

“When I asked Riley to tell me where I could find her, he first tried to bargain with me. He said if I took some people up to Snow King Resort and killed their leader, Clay, that we could get Lizzy back.”

Amanda shook her head, her mouth twisted and sour. “So…?”

“Consider, please. Riley… and whoever he’s with, want Clay dead. That’s the group’s main leadership. If that’s their goal then why did they take Lizzy? They wanted us to go straight after Clay. They didn’t realize that we had Rose to identify them. They didn’t know that we’ve been watching their movements with spotter scopes from the summit, nor that we’d placed specific people in a good number of locations on a map. As far as they knew, we would have learned only that two of ours had been killed, your daughter was kidnapped, and they expected us to go straight for the leadership. And then, when that didn’t work, Riley tried to cut a deal with me to salvage the plan.”

“Goddamn…” Rebecca whimpered in a shaking voice.

“Jake… so what? What the hell does any of this have to do with getting back Elizabeth?”

“They don’t have the full support of their people, Amanda. They’ve been trying to do this quietly . It means that we don’t have to calculate for the entire crew.”

“Well, great!” Rebecca laughed nervously. “So let’s go straight to Clay, then, and tell him what’s up. If this Riley guy and whoever else he’s with doesn’t want the rest of these people to know, then let’s tell them!”

“No,” Jake said.

“No?”

“No. We’d be dropping a massive amount of leverage right into his lap. Let’s remember that these people will be starving soon if they’re not already. We need to keep out of their control as much as possible.”

“So then what are we doing, Jake? You just want to go home and leave my daughter down here?”

“Amanda, no. I know where she’s at and have at least a halfway-decent estimate on the number of people there with her. It was really just Riley here. Along with a small handful of others? There could be as little as ten at the church; as much as twenty, assuming my information is accurate. Quite a few more than who we encountered here.”

Jake reached up with a hand, fingered the lapels of his sweater on either side of the zipper with a thumb and forefinger.

“I took two rounds to the chest as I was moving through tonight. There are a lot more people up at that church, and the three of us aren’t enough to get the job done. So, we’ll go home along the fastest route possible, get Gibs, put a serious cleaning crew together, and roll out in the Humvee. We’ll take the back way up along the 221 and be up there before four. We’ll run through in a blitz, and we won’t have to worry about making any noise because we’ll be long gone by the time anyone else shows up.”

Amanda chewed her lower lip, insides twisting in on themselves, and she wondered if she might scream or vomit.

“Just a little longer,” Jake whispered, glancing briefly at Rebecca, who stood rooted to the ground in a wide-eyed panic and then looked back at Amanda. “Give me just a little more time to stack the deck in our favor. One way or the other, we’ll have you back together before the day is over.”

Mitch didn’t know how long it was that he’d stayed locked up inside the cleaning closet, hands pressed against his ears while that horrible shrieking pushed through the door, forced its way through his barriers, and drilled into his brain. The time had seemed interminable, as though the dark, faint chemical smell would be his new reality until he died, doomed to live out the rest of his life listening to that helpless screaming. He tried humming at first to drown it out, then collapsed under a wave of panic as he realized that any noise he made might ultimately be heard by whoever had intruded upon the theater, and then there he would be, just another screamer down the hall. He scrabbled through the edges of plastic, shafts, and hard angles, seeking to bury himself far in the back of the closet—a back that was far closer to the door than he would have preferred—and attempted to pull various “things” over himself for concealment, not wholly sure what those “things” were. In the pitch black, he wasn’t certain if he was doing an effective job or making a fool of himself.

In time, the screaming had stopped, and it was followed by a silence that seemed somehow louder than the hollering, and that was even worse. In the absence of all that horrific noise, he was able to think clearly, and soon realized that he’d have to come out of that closet at some point; that or he’d eventually just starve to death. He sat paralyzed, willing himself to move, believing that the very second he did so, whoever it was out there would hear him and come looking. His stomach writhed in nausea and, shortly after this, Mitch realized in dismay that he desperately needed to urinate.

An age seemed to pass while he sat in the dark, straining his ears and his eyes, opening his eyes as wide as he could, as if this would somehow give him the ability to finally see in all that blackness, as if opening them so wide could give him the ability to hear more than nothing. He allowed a long, quivering sigh, shifted under the pile of “things” he’d stacked up, and the movement dislodged it all so that it toppled loudly around him, making such a clangor that he wondered how the sound could be missed three streets over. He whimpered, feeling dizzy, and then his bladder finally let go, seeping through his crotch in a sickly warm wave and spreading out into a puddle beneath his ass. It began to cool as soon as it hit the air and clung to his skin in a chill, membranous layer of chafing, stinking filth. He wallowed in it, waiting to be discovered, panting as quietly as he could. Each breath was a waiting torture, and he thought that the remainder of his life was measured out in each fleeting exhalation.

Eventually, he was forced to accept the fact that no one was coming for him.

Mitch poked his head out into the theater lobby, not really knowing what he’d find yet still not expecting the bodies laying out in the open. He half-gagged, half-coughed and covered his mouth with a hand. He stared at the remains briefly, then hissed, “Jenkins? B-Bruce?”

The bodies on the floor might as well have been canvas sacks filled with sand. Mitch stood there a while longer, halfway out of the closet, and darted his eyes around the room. Outside of the dead, very little else was out of place. The card table was right where they always kept it; there was the cooler over in the corner. You could almost pretend that all was as it should be. Almost, except for the bodies.