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

“You just wait the fuck there!” Clay barked. He had his index finger out, pointed right at the center of Pap’s chest, though he still looked down at the faucet. Danielle looked over at the Texan and saw he’d lifted off his stool and had his revolver halfway out of its holster and fully cocked. She hadn’t even realized the man had moved; thought it was impossible that someone so huge could have moved so quickly and quietly, but there he was, poised on the balls of his feet like an obese, hairless cat, his face a thundering shade of red. He lowered the hammer of his pistol and slipped it back into the leather carrier at his hip but did not sit down. She realized just how close she’d come at that moment and her hands began to shake far beyond her control to stop them. She looked back over at Elton and saw that he had his rifle up, his face a pure expression of raw murder.

When it looked like things wouldn’t be going any further, Clay retracted his finger, bent over at the waist, groaning, and retrieved a water jug from under the bar. He removed the cap, slung the jug over his forearm like an old moonshiner, and sucked down half a gallon before any of them realized what had happened. He panted loudly when he pulled it away, big runners of water dripping from the corners of his mouth and running dark lines down his robe, and set the jug on the bar top.

Bringing his breathing back under control, he finally looked up at Danielle for the first time, sucked air loudly through his teeth, and said, “You’ve got my attention. Proceed.”

She felt weak in the knees and so lowered herself to a stool. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, nodded the way a skydiver might nod before jumping through the fuselage door, and said, “This all started back in Colorado Springs, okay? I’d joined up while you were all in transit toward the city, in fact—”

“I remember,” Clay said softly, nodding to himself under tented eyelids.

“So, I naturally fell into Ronny’s group, since I could operate a rifle, didn’t mind mixing it up, and didn’t really know how to do anything else the group needed. Well, that’s not completely true; I knew how to do laundry and that other stuff. I just didn’t want to.”

Clay made a twirling gesture with his hand, and Danielle took a moment to swallow past a dry throat before continuing.

“He seemed like a reasonable guy when I first met him; he suggested we do reasonable things. He kind of brought me into the fold, you know? Made me feel like I was included; that he was listening to my input. And then at some point, he tells me about the friction between you and Elton—”

“Friction!” Elton coughed.

Clay looked at him and said, “Beau.”

“Oh… Well, there wasn’t any friction behind that, though…”

“No,” Danielle agreed, “but he didn’t give me details at the time. He just said we needed to keep an eye on things to keep them from coming to a head between you guys and suggested it would be a good idea if I got close to you in order to help keep out in front of anything going bad.”

Scratching his chin, Clay said, “He told you to keep an eye on Elton in order to keep my ass covered? From Elton?”

“Yeah,” Danielle nodded. “I didn’t find out until later what had actually happened by talking to some other folks and I didn’t see how that event—what had happened between you and Beau and Elton—I didn’t see how that translated into Elton making a play. So then I talked to Elton about it, round-about like, and figured out he didn’t have any hard feelings behind anything. So then I go back and talk to Ronny about it and ask him. ‘How is it you think Elton’s gonna go after Clay if it was Clay standing up for him in the first place?’ It was actually after this when I found out that Beau was Ronny’s guy all along, but I didn’t know this at the time that I confronted him.”

“And he said?” asked Clay.

“He said that sometimes people act funny when it comes to race and it never hurts to be proactive about such things.”

“Hell…” Elton scoffed.

“Yeah, I know, I know,” Danielle said, looking back at him. “I didn’t know you well enough to know any better at the time. Ronny has this way of talking a thing in circles and wearing you down though, you know? He’ll just keep chewing the issue over and over until you find yourself pointed in the direction he wants—”

“Well, that’s the fucking truth, at least,” Clay nodded and took another swig of water.

“It wasn’t until later… once we’d really settled in Colorado… that things started to change between Elton and me.”

Clay’s eyes squinted down to gleaming points of light, and he sighed wearily through his nose. “Skip the love story, huh?”

“Right—well, at that point he was talking less about Elton getting back at you and spending more time asking me about what was said between you and Elton, or between Pap and Elton, and right away I knew why he’d set the whole thing up. I was pissed off and started cursing, calling him a fucking tool, and then his story changes from ‘We gotta keep Clay protected from Elton’ to ‘We’re gonna starve under Clay if we’re not careful’, talking about all the food running out and how there wasn’t really a game plan to address the problem.”

She fell silent, looking down at the tops of her hands as they rested on the bar; knowing that if she lifted them from the surface, they would shake.

“Go on,” Clay coaxed.

“This will be the point where I went from being a dupe to active participation. I’m, uh… I’m a little worried about just coming right out with it.”

“Do it anyway. Nobody’s gonna kill you at least until you’re done talking.”

“Nobody’s gonna kill her, period,” Elton growled.

“Oh, Jeez-shut the fuck up, Elton, huh? And let her talk…?”

Danielle pulled in a deep, deep breath and held it. Then she let it out, and as the air rushed out, she lay her words over the air so that they spilled from her mouth like discarded bodies tumbling over a waterfall.

“He said that we needed to accelerate the process in order to help you to see the writing on the wall as quickly as possible; so that you’d get us moving again before we got in so deep that there wouldn’t be enough food to get us to where he claimed the farmland was—where he said he knew it would be. He had me work on it with Riley, but it was Riley that finally found a target: Stacy Morris.”

Clay nodded and leaned toward Pap. “Who the fuck is Stacy Morris?”

“That was one-uh them Mini-Johnnies; he an’ his old lady was barbeque ’fore we left Colorado, ’member?”

“Ah… that’s right,” nodded Clay. He looked back at Danielle, eyes twinkling, and asked, “I’m about to find out that fire wasn’t just a sorry accident, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, that was Riley that set it up. I didn’t know he and Ronny had done it until later—”

“That’s true,” Elton interrupted. “I remember that night; hell, I was on the fire line after the alarm sounded. Danielle didn’t leave my side that whole damned day.”

“Alright, damn it, I believe her.”

Danielle continued: “Stacy was seeing one of Isabelle’s girls, see? While he was with that other woman… what the hell was her name?”

She looked around at the others in the room, but nobody could seem to recall anymore. She finally shrugged sadly and said, “So we blackmailed him. He was breaking the rules by seeing a hooker on the side, so we threatened to out him unless he played ball.”

“Right,” Clay said thoughtfully. “You got him to underreport the take, fuck about with the numbers and so on?”

“Yeah, so things looked worse than they actually were… though they were getting pretty bad, anyway! I mean, we were making a dent with Stacy’s help—we had to shift a lot of that stuff around to keep anybody from figuring it out—but it was already going bad without us goosing it alo—”