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

She felt a little dizzy, as though her world were tilting out of control; as it surely was. “But… then why did you allow…?”

“I was lonely, Danielle. Shit. I was just feelin’ lonely. At first, I knew what was up, and I figured, ‘Okay. Ain’t much she can get outta me—I’m not that high up anyway. This’ll just be some fun for a while.’ Then, you know… Things got kinda serious. After…”

Her hands were shaking. She wanted to reach out to him, to grasp his own hand to steady her own, but she was terrified he’d pull away. She settled for rubbing her palms along her thighs.

“Uh… guys? We really need to—”

“Shut the fuck up, Mitch,” Danielle grunted. “You knew. You… you knew…”

Elton looked down at the floor between them—a conspicuously empty space—and nodded. “I did. At first, I didn’t care so much because I figured it was just fun. And then I didn’t care so much because… well, because I started lovin’ you. Wasn’t ever sure if you loved me back—”

“I do!” her voice broke out, despite will or intent. It squeaked a little like she hadn’t enough air to move the words.

“You do?”

She nodded sharply, tears running easily now.

“Alright, then. If that’s so, it’s time for you to make a choice, Babe. We can’t keep on like this. You got to come clean, now. About everything. And you got to choose to start making things right, whatever the hell it is you did. But we need to have the truth out first. What’ll it be, girl? God help me, I think I’ll love you to the grave, but I won’t stay with a woman as won’t be honest.”

She nodded silently, breathing deep, ragged breaths and wondering why it still felt as though she couldn’t get enough oxygen. The sensation of pins and needles tumbled lightly over her cheeks and forehead, an experience akin to inebriation, and she wondered at the rush of fear that assailed her as she attempted to get her wind moving again; tried to force her mouth into the shape of true words. She broke eye contact with Elton, fleeting eyes stuttering around the room for some anchor, and she felt her man stiffen at the loss of that connection. Her mind spun wildly, a serpent devouring itself by the tail, and she thought a litany over and over, the words turning like the broken gears of her consciousness; a scrabbling attempt to grasp the slope down which she tumbled, over and over and over…

Just gimme a minute; let me get my feet set; just hang on; I need a minute; just a quick minute; hang on, baby; just hang on for me…

Her breath caught deep in her throat, and she jerked her head around to Mitch. “We’re going to get Clay. All three of us; right now.”

“Well, praise Jesus!” Mitch practically whimpered and trotted back out the door.

She grabbed him from the stoop and pulled him back into the house. “We need to get dressed first, Mitch. You can wait in here a minute.”

“Right!”

She looked at Elton. “Come on; let’s get some rain gear on. I’ll explain everything when we’re in front of Clay… I only want to go through this once.” She looked back at Mitch and said, “We’re taking the truck, too… there’s plenty of diesel for this; so don’t go running out there like a putz again, okay?”

The three of them were piled into Elton’s truck less than ten minutes later; Elton driving with Danielle in the passenger seat. Mitch sat in the back, almost trying to stretch his head up into the front between them. The road reached out in front of them like a ghost’s arm, obscured by the light-reflecting rain—air filled with a hundred thousand falling white pinpricks in the fabric of reality—and the weak beam of the truck’s headlights was pressed down under the weight of the rain, so that they saw only a short distance ahead, and all the rest of the world around them was shouting darkness.

It was shortly after two in the morning that the three of them stood together in front of what had become Clay’s de-facto office: the bar of the one-time restaurant at the Snow King Resort. They were awkward in their silence, wishing they had some way to kill the time they spent standing around, while Pap and a number of the other men he’d called at their insistence stood around with them. The boy that followed Pap everywhere lay curled up on the couch under a thick quilt, snoring quietly and twitching every so often, like a dog chasing after something lovely in his sleep. After several minutes, Mitch finally lost all semblance of self-control and asked, “Uh, he did say he was coming, right?”

Pap pulled the old beaten cowboy hat from his head, threw it on the bar top, and scratched habitually at the crown of his head. “Yeah, Mitch. Give ’er a h’while.”

“A while” occurred some ten minutes later. They were alerted to his presence by the slow-shuffling sound of slippered feet, which was, in turn, interrupted periodically by a low moan. When he came into view, they saw that he was wearing a cheap, monogrammed hotel bathrobe tied loosely at the waist, beneath which a baggy pair of pajama pants protruded. His hair stuck out greasily in various angles, curls bouncing lightly at each step, and his tongue worked around in broad circles between his teeth and lips, attempting in vain to dislodge the fur it encountered on each swish, deposited there by the nightly, vile march of oral bacteria that had been active since he’d finally lost consciousness on the previous evening. He veered to his left as he approached, refusing to look at anyone, and then rounded the end of the bar to walk up along the inside, settling at the stool by the race track. When his ass was firmly placed, he sighed.

“There he is,” Pap said unnecessarily.

Clay didn’t look up at any of them; only continued to sit on his stool and stare down at the faucet before him. He looked lost and perhaps a little sad, and he breathed heavily, such that the upper half of his body rocked gently against the stool’s backrest. When no one spoke, his eyebrows arched and he said, “Apparently there’s some fucking business as can’t wait until the sonofabitching sun comes back up; yet another in the stream of impositions to which I must bend my intellect, all the while my asshole’s throbbing like it’s been fucked by a horse cock wrapped in fiberglass, everything in front of these beleaguered eyes might as well be viewed through shit-stained gauze, and my head’s pounding I swear to Christ so fucking hard that I might just retire from this gig altogether and go seek a new career as a fucking human railroad spike just to get a little relief—please don’t concern yourself with explaining the situation in a timely fucking manner such that I can solve whatever simple cocksucking problem it is seems to be keeping you awake at night, so I can fall back to achieve my piddling four hours’ sleep before Pap, or somebody like him is beating on my goddamned door for Christ, and all His Angels knows what other mundane shit; take all the time you need to collect yourselves! You… cunts .”

“Jesus…” Mitch whispered in awe.

“Y’all better git to it,” Pap warned. “He’ll start to git rude if’n you don’t step ’er up!”

Danielle shook her head, wondered if she was a few minutes away from being shot by the man who sat before her in forlorn misery, staring at his faucet as though it would somehow help him through whatever ordeal it was in which he currently found himself locked, and sighed.

“Clay… Ronny—and Riley, and a few others too and… and me… uh, Jesus… we’ve been plotting against… well… you.”