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

“You left him back at your place? Alone?”

“Naw,” Pap scoffed. “Too young.”

“Well?”

Pap shrugged. “Left ’im with Elton.”

Clay’s mouth hung open in shock despite the distaste he held for that very same expression when worn on the face of anyone he had to deal with for longer than twenty seconds.

“Elton? Jesus, Pap, you were set to throw down on him last night.”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t matter. He’s still one of the better fellas we got. Leastwise, ain’t too many others I’d trust to do it.”

“Even with Danielle being-?”

“Especially with her. Man’s got a level head and a good heart. All that shit last night was just bi’ness, Baws. Don’t change who he is.”

“And they agreed…” Clay said in a wistful, trailing voice. He was looking back out the windshield again, eyes tracking aimlessly over the scenery.

“Yep. Like I said: good fella.”

“Uh.”

They drove on in silence for a few minutes, Clay looking out the windows in a daze, partially dazzled by the alternating shadows as they were banished away by the rays of the low-slung sun, only to return a moment later when the truck passed around a new bend. Pap hummed tunelessly to himself as he drove, his old and formless straw cowboy hat mashed down over his head, brushing the ceiling of the cab periodically as he watched the trail. Charlie continued to watch Elizabeth warily. He kept his hand settled at the peak of his bent knee where it would be closest to his pistol if she freaked out and went for one of them again. The kid was unsettling as hell, shifting from brat to viper with barely a moment’s hesitation.

For her part, Elizabeth seemed to have lost interest in Pap’s headrest, choosing instead to look out her own window at the passing foliage, neck craned back at an angle so she could look up the sides of the steep slopes climbing above them, higher and higher into the sky. Charlie could see in the reflection of the window that her eyes were sharp and unblinking, as though she struggled to focus on the dizzying letters of some unreadable text.

“What’re you looking at, kid?” asked Charlie. “See something up there?”

She ignored him.

“I suppose we must be getting close to home, huh?” Clay tried.

She said nothing to this as well; only continued to look out the window at the undulating mountainside.

“Sure we’re on the right track?” Pap asked. “Whole damned drive’s got us all twisted up like a catawampus intestine.”

“No,” Clay grunted. “But… all the lefts and rights have showed up where they were supposed to, so far.”

Clay heard a snicker from the backseat and realized it was the girl. He felt a deep, inexplicable frustration at her laughter, as though he were being fucked with in some hidden way and just couldn’t find the angle. He swallowed his annoyance down the way you might swallow down a bit of burped-up, undigested food and sighed. He leaned forward in his seat to wedge the bend of his ass deep into the crease at the backrest, then sat up as straight as he could to relieve the ache in his lumbar spine. The truck hit a bump that shifted him hard enough to slide his hips forward, bringing the pressure on again, and he cursed softly under his breath.

They broke through the cleft not long after. Out in the distance (the measure of which was great enough that Clay found himself genuinely surprised at the size of the valley he now occupied), he saw the long, white half-cylinders of the greenhouses laid out in neat, orderly rows. He leaned forward until the whiskers of his chin grazed the dashboard and whispered, “I didn’t realize they had four of them. How… how big do you think they are, Pap?”

“Hell, I can’t tell. We’ll have to git down there an’ pace ’em out.”

“Four…” Clay repeated softly. Beyond the object of his desire lay more buildings, rectangular and brown in the distance. Their windows reflected a retina-scraping glare from the sun, which hung in the sky behind their truck. Further still, Clay thought he saw the cabin and garage socked back in the trees, just as they’d been described to him. Then he realized a moment later that he didn’t see any livestock anywhere at all. He snorted and laughed, “Lying bastard…”

“What’s that, Baws?”

“Nothing. Just another mark in favor of my own fucking stupidity.”

“Well… have ’er yer way, then…”

“Chuckles,” Clay shot back over his shoulder. “Tell, uh… Reggie? Is it Reggie?”

“Perry, Clay.”

“Fuck it. Tell Perry to hoist that flag, huh?”

“Not sure how I feel about this, Baws…”

Clay rolled his eyes and said, “What? It’s a white-fucking-flag, Pap. It doesn’t get any more basic than that. They know we’ve got this kid, huh? We’re signaling we want to talk with ’em. This’ll be what they’re hoping for.” He twisted to look back out the cab’s rear window. “Has he got it hoisted, or what?”

Charlie craned his neck back to see through the window, the majority of which was obscured by denim-covered thighs, crotch, and a belt. “He hasn’t.”

“Well, tell him to fucking hoist, already.” He cupped his hands around his mouth, “Hey! You-oh, Christ…” He rolled the window down and leaned out. “Hey, goddamn it!”

“Yeah?” came the reply.

“Put that machinegun aside a while and hoist the flag, huh?”

They heard the sound of a heavy rattle followed by a hard, jagged clank from the truck bed.

“I’m wavin’!” Perry called out.

Clay rolled the window up and nodded at Pap. “There. He’s waving. Proceed.”

Pap sighed, crossed himself twice in short, jerking motions, and took his foot off the brake. The truck idled forward at a crawl.

Elizabeth kept her eyes locked forward when the truck began to roll. The one across from her—Charlie—had stopped paying attention, truly paying attention, as soon as the cowboy gave the engine its first goose. From the corner of her eye, she saw both hands come off his knees and rest on the shoulders of the seat in front of him. The muscles along her spine went taught like a network of bowstrings as she struggled to keep her attention pinned to anything but that gun. She’d gotten a good look at it, saw how it operated, and understood that she could make it work. A sheen of sweat blistered out on her forehead and upper lip, and she relied upon the men to be so focused on the buildings ahead that they wouldn’t realize what was coming. She focused on her breathing, mostly, and the pounding of her heart, and the struggle to keep her hands limp in her lap. The bearded one (she knew somewhere deep inside that his name was Clay, though she refused to admit this knowledge to herself for reasons she could not yet understand) had insisted on having her restraints removed; something about conveying the right sort of imagery when they brought her home.

Idiot.

She felt a roiling in the pit beneath her stomach as the truck roiled about on its suspension; a gassy feeling threatening the need either to fart or crap, and she understood from her time with Gibs that this was nerves. It was natural and had to be masked for as long as possible.

She worked on masking everything. She thought of Jake, and how he moved; how he smelled. His glass eyes and exquisite control. Fingernails like thick chips of wood jutting from square, beaten fingers that only moved when commanded.

Elizabeth kept her hands folded in her lap and focused on breathing at a controlled rate. She held on to her insides and did not look at Charlie’s gun.

She did not look at Charlie’s gun.

She waited.

“What the hell is this now?”

Otis’s voice was elevated in alarm, breaking up in Greg’s earpiece as the peaks of the transmitted signal clipped outside the range of the little speaker’s abilities. He reached down with a hand to give the volume knob a bump before looking again through the rifle’s optic. The intruding truck was still out by the valley entrance, and though the optic helped, the low magnification did not provide very much in the way of fine detail. He braced the handguard of the weapon against the windowsill of the home he shared with Alish—the mother of his soon-to-be child and (he was pretty damned sure) the great love of his life—to further steady the picture.