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

In the center of the valley, standing between commune and Hell, Otis threw his hands wide and screamed the only word he had left, buried inside the primal chambers of his heart.

Please.

Otis first argued with then shouted at the others to put up their weapons, and even then they refused to do so. They shouted back at him to get under cover, and when he’d traveled far enough out into the open that screaming was pointless, they began to scream into their radios for him to come back. The others in the garage were able to listen to this over their own radios as well, and when he heard Ben’s voice pleading with him to turn back, that his boy couldn’t stand to lose both parents, Otis pitched his own radio out into the wheatgrass like it was some filthy lump of pestilence.

The people who had escaped the truck heard him as well, hollering as he was across the valley floor. Eventually, they stopped running and looked back—most likely realizing they were no longer being shot at—and waited. Otis saw they stood in order of descending size; one man who appeared to be very large, almost comically so, another man of average size, and there was, indeed, a girl with them. They were too far off to make out any features but Otis recognized the shape of her, and in that recognition, he worked through a debilitating wave of nausea. What if she’d been hit? What would he have told her mother? He thought of his own son, closed his eyes, and shook his head slowly; not a shudder… just a slow, sad, exhausted negation. He did not believe he was man enough to deliver such news.

The two men and Lizzy stood out there in the distance, not running away but not coming closer, as well. They only waited. Otis held his hands out, as he had once done so long ago under so very different circumstances, the entirety of his body language sculpted with the intent to convey one simple message.

Let’s try this one more time.

After a while, the people in the distance began walking toward him, the smaller of the two men holding Lizzy by the hand. He held her stiffly away from himself as though she were a bomb likely to detonate at any moment. But they kept coming his way, by God, and the shooting hadn’t resumed. Otis figured that was alright.

Details resolved as they came closer. At first, Otis had eyes only for Elizabeth, searching her from head to foot for evidence of any hurt or mistreatment. Eventually, he saw the damage to her lip and another of those hot waves boiled through his guts. Had those people done that to her or had Otis and his people somehow caused that in the firefight? He felt emotionally deadlocked at the sight of it, unsure if anger or remorse was the correct response. He looked away from her to focus on the others.

The size of the tall one became even more apparent as he approached; he might even be as tall as or taller than Fred. He was perhaps the whitest man Otis had seen in recent memory, so white his skin was given over to bright, strawberry blotches of red. Some sort of Irish giant, perhaps, dressed up like a backcountry cowboy with his busted straw hat, shiny brass belt buckle, and a pair of boots that had the high-classed money walked right off them over some long, hard miles.

The one next to him was darker and more subdued. He had skin heavily tanned like brown leather, wrinkles spreading over his face like deep fissures, and the salt and pepper beard riding his cheeks couldn’t mask the fact that they had gone jowly with age like those of an old bulldog. His hair was oil-black—as dark as his eyes, which were shrewd and piercing—save for the streaks of grey, which diffused into the sides of his head like dirty smoke. He stood only as high as the middle of his friend’s biceps, and yet he was clearly the one in charge. He strode forward with Lizzy in tow, blue jeans hanging loosely from his hips as though he’d lately been missing meals. He wore a black leather vest—something a biker might have worn—unbuttoned at the waist. It flapped as he walked, exposing some sort of pistol worn under the arm in a shoulder holster.

They met near to the GMC now fifteen yards to their rear, separated by a distance of ten feet. The two men regarded Otis for a time before the shorter nodded to the oversized cowboy and said, “Call the rest of ’em in, huh?”

“On it, Baws…”

The big one stepped double-time to the passenger side of the truck, opened the door, and dug around beneath the dashboard out of sight.

“We’ll have some friends joining us shortly,” the dark man said. “Whichever ones as managed to dodge a fuckin’ bullet.”

Otis ignored this. “How you doin’, Lizzy?”

“Better than these,” she said, jerking her head at the men that brought her. The cut at her lip separated and flexed as she spoke, weeping a fresh trickle of blood down the corner of her mouth.

Otis winced at this. “Happen’ to your mouth, girl?”

“About that…” Clay interrupted. “We didn’t do that to her. Or I didn’t if we’re being technical. Two of mine went off-reservation, is what it was, wanting to shit-disturb and the like, huh? I took care of them—”

Elizabeth scoffed, and the warping of the cut at her lip brought tears to her eyes, but the pain seemed not to bother her otherwise. “Not what I heard…” she muttered.

“Oh? And what did you hear?” Clay asked.

She didn’t answer but winked up at Otis with her left eye; the eye her captor couldn’t see.

“Watch yo’sef girl,” Otis thought, devoting more energy than he realized to controlling his breathing. “You gettin’ too sly by half. Someone like to slap a muzzle on you an’ go in for a whoopin’…”

“Anyways,” Clay continued, “I brought her back to you people in the interest of making some kind of amends; civilized fucking behavior is the main intent. Start talking about how one group supplements the other, how everyone makes it through the winter? Maybe go over how everyone quits fuckin’ killing each other?”

“Yeah…” Otis muttered, thinking fast. “Alright. Sounds fine. You just leave her here, then, and head on back down. We’ll talk it over and come see you.”

The coal black eyes narrowed, twinkling under the shadows of his tangled brow, and his mouth cracked open in a lazy smile. The tip of his tongue, very sharp and red, poked out to run along the edge of his bottom lip, fanning out the stubby black bristles of his beard as it passed.

He tossed Elizabeth’s hand forward in Otis’s direction; a carefree gesture that implied he never really held her in his possession at all. Still smiling, he retracted his tongue and said, “Don’t think we’ve met. The name’s Clay. Clay Barton. You’ll pardon if I don’t shake—not sure that we’re on those kind of terms yet.”

His voice was smooth and sonorous; the measured delivery of a dapper man selling elixirs out of a cart in a carnival back alley lined up among the reeking shit piles and broken bottles.

“Otis.”

“Otis,” Clay repeated seriously. Then the smile returned, and he said, “We won’t be going back down the hill just yet, Otis. We tried that before, giving you your fucking space, and all, and that didn’t get us so very goddamned far. A few dead bodies, a few more empty bellies, and a colossal set of first date blue balls. I don’t like blue balls, Otis, and I’m now too advanced in years to turn my own crank, huh? It’s simply not dignified.”

“Baws!” called the cowboy. His head was peeped up over the truck looking back at them. “Radio’s done in! Cain’t call no one!”