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

“What are they going to find, Ronny?” The voice came from the window. It was flat and empty, like a photograph faded away to achromaticity under too much sun.

Ronny’s eyes narrowed involuntarily at the sound of the man’s voice. “You think you fuckin’ know me? Don’t talk to me like you know me. Fuck you.” He stretched out with his leg, groping uselessly in the darkness.

A scream erupted from somewhere in the building, and Ronny smiled again. “Seems like Gibs has found some answers,” he giggled.

“Mmm. You and Riley have much in common, it seems. Or had much , I suppose. I wonder who learned more from the other.”

That fucking voice.

“That was you?”

He heard a sigh like the silence before an avalanche, then, “It was.”

“Huh,” Ronny grunted, straining. “So you’re… what? (Oof) Gibs’s attack dog?”

Out in the dimness of the occluded window frame, Ronny thought he felt the blackness smile. His foot struck something, and it clattered away. “Damn it!” he hissed.

“I’ll give you the same chance I gave Riley,” said the presence. “Tell me where I can find Elizabeth, and this need not escalate any further.”

“ Aha -I told you,” Ronny laughed in a gasp of exertion. He’d slid far enough that his hips were floating out in space now, shackled arm stretched to its full length as his foot fluttered out in nothingness. “All the answers are at the end of the hall…”

“No. All of the answers are right here in this room. All of the answers that matter.”

“ Hrrnnnnghh … fffuuuuuck… yoooou…” Ronny strained.

He detected a lumbering, floating movement from the corner of his eye, almost as though a section of the room had detached itself and began to drift idly toward him, casting a shadow through the already voided space; a sleeping, titanic consciousness passing overhead like a drifting airship. He perceived it drawing nearer, felt the chills as they ran over his skin like sluggish lightning, and began to quiver as his body hovered out in space, collapsing slowly toward the floor in a cramping mass of failure.

He felt a hand bind itself up in his shirt and heave. He was lifted up into the air and tossed back onto the bed like a child, the back of his head bouncing hard enough against the wall that he saw lights flash momentarily in the lightless room. Before him, the black thing warped in on itself, shrinking, then lengthened again to full height. He felt the cylindrical weight of the flashlight placed in his lap.

“Clay got to you before I could,” it said. The voice felt familiar in the way that the hateful, unseen monster that chases you through your nightmares feels familiar; a dimly remembered calamity, intimate as cast-off skin. “He has her now, doesn’t he?”

Ronny scoffed bitterly in the darkness, thumbing the flashlight on and off and sneering at its outright refusal to function. He said, “Yeah, he’s fucking got her now. Wanting to cut some kind of a deal again, the way he always does; gutless fucking weasel. That reasonable streak of his’ll get him killed soon enough; just wait and see. Just like he should have killed me… but he’s fucking gutless. You’ll see. If you assholes don’t kill me, I’ll end up killing him just to prove the fucking point. Goddamned gutless. Everyone… oh, fuck this flashlight, anyway!”

The void warped again, and the flashlight was taken from his hand. He heard the hissing whisper of plastic threads sliding against each other along with that voice. “Where did he take her?”

There was a click, and then the flashlight was suddenly back in his lap. Shrugging, he thumbed the switch, and to his surprise it turned on, flooding his eyes with blinding light. He grunted, looking off to the distance to blink away the purple globs that turned cartwheels wherever his eyes tracked. Still blinking, he looked back towards the man in front of him, illuminating the body with the beam’s light. He perceived square thickness, as though a stylized, earthen golem stood before him. He tried to look up into the thing’s eyes, but those purple blobs refused to swirl away.

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out,” Ronny said, his words distorted by stretching lips as he rolled his eyes in exaggerated, blinking circles. “He’s taking her back up to your valley, isn’t he? In fact… I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t got your little neck of the woods fully under control by now…”

The man said nothing; only stood there at the bedside. Ronny laughed again and rubbed violently at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger until further stars burst behind his eyelids in shades of blue and gold. He pulled his hand away, waited for the aching hole in his vision to subside, and looked up again at the man. For a moment, he was completely confused, seeing only a thickened expanse of chest topped by the impression of a pink, veined neck and a tuft of wiry brown hair, looking for all Ronny could tell as though the man had been made headless by some violent truncation. Then the hair began to move, to roll forward and down toward him. The tip of a nose appeared over the top of the hair—there was a brief flash of pink bottom lip—then the hard, angled plains of cheekbones, the black hollow of eye sockets, and then cresting over the top like the discovery of some distant planet rotating into view under an alien sunrise; the bulk of forehead and skull. Ronny shifted the flashlight in his hands to better illuminate the face… and saw . The eyes looked out at him dead and deformed; opaque cataracts as lifeless as the milked-over eyes of a bloated carcass putrefying in diseased swamp water.

“ You—” Ronny gasped, but then it was falling on him, coming down atop him like the visitation of a biblical plague. The hands were upon him, doing things to him, but he felt nothing; could only see in the chambers of his mind those lifeless, remembered eyes. He saw only these, even after the flashlight failed again.

Amanda reached the end of the hallway and found a singular door at its termination; a square expanse of wood that stood before her mockingly, jeering without sound in the still air. She felt a terrible apprehension as she stood looking at it, roving over its surfaces and angles with her eyes, searching for some hint as to what might linger behind it. There was the handle, as modern and unpleasing as the rest of the lines of the church—unpleasing, at least, to Amanda’s traditionalist Catholic mind, which desired a proper nave, aisles, the transept at the crossing of the nave, the altar, the comfortably uncomfortable line of confessionals. At the center of the door: a pale rectangle exposed by the light of her rifle—a discoloration of the wood surface hinting at some covering that had been there for years, only lately removed. Some sign intended to indicate the office of the dweller within, torn away now to be delivered only God knew where.

“Amanda…” Gibs warned, standing behind her.

The radio barked, causing them both to jerk in place. Wang’s voice: “Hey, uh, guys? We okay in there? What’s going on? I thought we were supposed to be hauling ass back home by now.”

“Wait one,” Gibs said, voice creaking like an old hinge. He stared at the door along with Amanda, through Amanda, and wondered.

Abruptly, she nodded. She pulled the Tavor up and tightened her grip upon it, reached out with her left hand, and turned the door handle. It rotated freely. She pushed the door open and swept the room with her light. When she saw what waited for her, she froze.