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

He thought about that girl, handcuffed by the ankle to a metal bed frame, and wondered how long he’d be forced to keep her so. Ronny calculated he had at least until midday before he was discovered missing from his own territory; might go as far as that evening or the following morning before Clay got really serious about looking. Would Gibs and his people come down out of the mountains before that point? Ronny certainly hoped so; had no reason to doubt that they would not. He thought he had a good handle on who Gibs was as a leader. Gibs would come streaming down the mountainside like Greek Fire at the head of a column of warriors bent on vengeance; he had no doubt of this. It was absolutely what Ronny would do.

Only the question remained: when? When would they discover the bodies? When would they discover the absence of the girl? If luck was with them, the revelation would come that morning followed by a rapid sneak attack as early as noon, though Ronny found such good fortune to be unlikely. It was more believable to him—content as he was to perform his own secret, distasteful acts in hiding—that the attack would fall under cover of night.

Logically speaking, the best possible outcome had his people holding position until that evening at the earliest, after which the lid would be blown off, and then it wouldn’t matter who knew what. In a worst case scenario, they may be waiting a few days for the shit to hit the fan and he wasn’t so sure how to handle such an outcome. He would need to get back out into the open to avoid suspicion, which meant he’d need to post someone he trusted back here at the church to keep an eye on the girl and hold the others in line. Unfortunately, the only one he really trusted with such a responsibility was Riley, and he was just as well-known these days as Ronny; his absence would be noted. Danielle wasn’t even an option; her loyalties had become far too ungovernable.

Ronny rolled over on the mattress, sneering at the jags of spring coil digging pressure-points into his body, and shifted around until he found some position that wasn’t infuriating. He once again underlined Danielle’s name on the mental list running through his mind on a continual loop—a list that seemed to him to be ten thousand items long, all of them at critical priority. She was a loose end that needed to be tied. Very, very soon.

Who to put in charge if he was forced to leave suddenly? David, perhaps? It made sense. He’d gone with Riley for the initial killing; was certainly in as deep as the rest of them—those who had been brought up to speed on all the messy details. The only real problem was that David suffered from a profound lack of imagination, sadly, but such things could be worked around with careful instruction.

Yeah. Maybe David.

Ronny’s lower back twinged, and when he extended his pelvis to try and stretch out the muscles of that area, his bladder awoke for something like the twentieth time that night and insisted on being emptied. Sighing, he rolled and hobbled up to his feet, shifted carefully across the littered floor of the dark room, and pissed into the night bucket from memory alone. His hearing met with the dull patter of droplets hitting drywall, and he adjusted his aim until he was rewarded with the hollow splash of the bucket filling up by another minuscule degree.

He stood there a while in the corner, unhappily experiencing the fumes of his own potency, and sighed again. He said, “I’m just not getting any sleep tonight. That’s all there is.”

He shuffled back to the mattress, dug around its edges until he encountered the flashlight, and turned it on. Then he set it down and pulled on his pants. He smacked his lips a few moments, looking down at the flashlight and noting the disconnected fuzz that seemed to pack the interior of his skull, wondering how it could feel as though he’d been sleeping all this time when he had a working memory of every moment since he’d turned in for the night—after the mad dash over, tracing the outer edges of the city to avoid detection, of course—and decided it must be some symptom of exhaustion combined with an active mind spinning out of control.

He was standing in front of the door to the adjoining office with his hand on the knob before he truly understood what he intended to do. Now with the coldness of the knob filling the palm of his hand, he found he could not will himself to release it. He turned it and pushed.

The beam of his light found the girl in the bed as he’d left her. She was uncovered; her bare brown legs the only thing visible under his beam as he checked the handcuffs around her ankle, and he grimaced. Sweeping the light around the room, he eventually found the collection of blankets heaped atop each other in the corner. He heard rapid, frantic creaking coming from the bed. He swung the light back over to see her balled up into a knot at the foot of the bed, hugging her knees against her chest with her ankles crossed to account for the lack of slack between her left foot, the handcuffs, and the bed frame. She appeared to be shivering.

Shaking his head, Ronny asked, “If I get you those blankets, are you going to throw them across the room again?”

She said nothing in response; only burned hatred into him with those enraged, unblinking eyes.

He sighed and said, “Right. Well, I’ll get them anyway. You must be miserable.”

He walked to the corner, grabbed the Afghan and two heavy woven blankets, and brought them back to the bed. There was a chair close by that she must have managed to kick over with an outstretched foot; he set this back upright, sat down, and held the jumble of covers out to her. When she didn’t reach for them, he snorted and arranged them over her bare legs. As he bent over her to do so, he waited to see if she’d try to claw for his eyes again. She did not.

That was an improvement, at least.

He settled back into the chair, looked about the room, and noticed her pillow lying in another corner.

He laughed hollowly at this and said, “My dad used to tell me about a cat that my great grandmother owned a long, long time ago. I don’t remember its name anymore, but I remember the impression it left on my dad. He said the thing was a Manx… or maybe it was a Lynx? You know, I’m not sure anymore; it was one of those. He’d seen it when he was a little kid.

“It was huge apparently, see? For a cat? They used to keep it tied up in the backyard like it was a dog. They tied it up on a rope that was attached to this big metal stake driven right into the center of the yard. And my dad swore that nothing—and I mean nothing—would grow inside of the circle that rope made, not even the grass. It was just this barren circle of dirt, and anything that animal came into contact with was straight up murdered. He said its paws weren’t even like cat paws; they were big and wide like bear claws.

“The problem with the damned thing, apparently, was that it would chew through its rope, escape the yard, and make a kind of game of going around and killing the local neighborhood dogs. I guess they got a chain for the little fucker the first time he got loose, but that didn’t matter. It found a way to work through the collar, eventually; I don’t know if it managed to chew through or what. But that thing would get loose, have a grand old time of killing off the local dogs, and be home the next morning like nothing had happened, though of course, they knew something had gone down since it wasn’t tied up anymore. That and the pissed off neighbors coming around beating on the door. I guess the city had to come around eventually and take the cat away. I’m not sure if they put it in a zoo or destroyed it; Dad didn’t seem to know either.

“You kind of remind me of that cat,” Ronny said, smiling. He leaned out of the chair until he could just pinch the corner of the pillowcase between thumb and forefinger, dragged it back, and tossed it at the head of the bed. He looked down at her feet poking under the blankets, squinted, and then reached for them. She jerked hard against the chain in response, kicking out wildly. Ronny winced at her leg jarring against the cuffs and hissed, “Calm down, goddamn it! I’m not trying to mess with you, okay? I just wanna make sure those aren’t on too tight!”