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

“Took a round, huh?” Clay called back, still eyeing Otis. Otis didn’t much care for the way he was being looked at. He felt as though the man knew a punchline to some secret joke and refused to share.

“Don’t think so… Reckon they shot the battery up some.”

“Well, wave your arms and do a little dance if you have to; you know they’re watching right now.” Clay lowered his voice back to a conversational level and said, “That’s Pap. Good fella. He can be a little slow on the uptake, but he’s solid. Fast as they come where speed matters, too.”

“Who you tryin’a call?” Otis asked, eyes drifting to Pap.

“He has a bunch of others up in the mountains, Otis,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t get how many. Sorry.”

“She’s a quick one,” Clay nodded. “You’ll see how many soon enough.”

“Baaaws!” Pap called suddenly. His tone elevated as he spoke like the inner workings of his lungs were a steam boiler building up pressure. Clay looked off in the direction that Pap waved, saw O.B. advancing on their position with his ever-present M60 swinging easily on its sling, and sighed.

“Here comes one of them now in fact…” He sounded disheartened as he said this. Continuing to face in the direction of the advancing newcomer, he cleared his throat and said, “More’ll be coming down to join him. They’ll be okay. What we’re gonna do, Otis, is go back and join up with your others, see what the toll for today’s latest round of horseshit comes out to… do you have any dead or wounded?”

Otis coughed and nodded. “One wounded for sure. We… we suspect some more’s dead. Didn’t answer us when we tried to call ’em, leastwise.”

“Radios, huh?” Clay grunted.

“Yeah…”

“Yeah. Fucking radios. Marvelous little invention. Okay, like I was saying, we’ll get that all sorted out, and then I think we’ll just wait for the rest of your friends to come home, huh? Gibs and, uh… what was your momma’s name, sweetie? Amanda?”

Elizabeth didn’t bother to respond so Otis said, “Yeah, that’s right. What about Jake and the rest? Tom? Oscar and Rebecca? Wang?”

“Easy, easy,” Clay said. “That’s a lot of names, and I’ve only heard less than half of them. We’ll all have a chance to get acquainted. We’ll be working pretty close together in the coming months, huh? Main thing is to sit down with this guy of yours, Gibs, and lay out the groundwork.”

“Gibs? Why Gibs?”

“Well, he’s your fucking Chief, isn’t he?”

“Nah, you mean Jake.”

“Jake?” Clay looked back at Otis. He still had time before O.B. came close enough to require undivided attention. “Hadn’t heard that name yet.”

“Well, he’s the guy you’ll be dealin’ with, all the same.”

Clay looked away again. “Uh…”

O.B. was close enough now to hit with a rock, but he made no move toward his machine gun. He just kept striding toward them, eyes fastened directly to Clay’s. Pap put his hands up, stepped between them, and began to say, “Okay, pops, let’s all just calm d—”

It was impossible for Otis to see what happened next due to Pap’s enormous frame obscuring his view. From his perspective, it appeared as though the older man coming at them jerked mid-step, or maybe he’d sneezed, but then Pap’s hands were clutching at his midsection like he’d been stabbed. He went down to one knee immediately and exhaled a long, continuous groan like an old engine winding down to failure. The old man continued to advance without even looking at Pap, his face a bright red fury.

Two steps beyond the buffaloed Texan, the old man took hold of the giant machine gun swinging at his hip, which caused Clay to tense up on the spot. The response elicited a wry grin from this aged newcomer. Grasping the sling at his shoulder, he lifted the weapon over his head as he shrugged out from under it and dropped it in the grass. The tightness in Clay’s shoulders drained out at this, and a moment later he pulled the pistol from the holster at his arm and dropped it at his heels. Then he nodded and said, “Well?”

Otis had expected a hard, grizzled voice from the older newcomer; perhaps something like Clint Eastwood or maybe even Gene Hackman—this despite the brightly colored Hawaiian shirt he wore. The man’s actual voice was as unlike his appearance as his shirt—high and reedy, tapering off to whispered gasps at the end of each sentence.

“Make your explanation a good one.”

Otis saw the curled, black hair on the back of Clay’s head cock to the side. “Oh, of course, your fucking lordship. Shall I put out refreshments for you and enact a little play?”

“I expect you remember our deal.”

“Yeah.”

“And here we are today, shooting up women and children.”

Through grinding teeth, Clay muttered, “Certain extenuating circumstances have come into play, huh?”

“Exten…?”

“Yes, goddamn it. I somehow feel this isn’t the best place to go over it all but I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version: that cocksucker Ronny decides he wants to edge out the current leadership, me, by instigating a little gunplay between our group and this clutch of clueless cunts up here in the mountains, okay? So he and the rest of his merry band of assholes come creeping up into the mountains of a night for a bit of a raid, only things work out better for them than they could have hoped in the form of this little girl falling right into their laps. Being just the kind of bastards that such a proposition would seem like a grand idea, they kill the people she’s with and drag her back as collateral, or… some fucking sort of bargaining chip—look, don’t ask me to explain what passes for thought in the minds of stupid sons of bitches, huh? The mountain cunts responded near about as well as you’d expect, stealing back into town presumably to get the kid. Only when they didn’t find her, they contented themselves with shooting up the whole goddamned cinema.”

“The… cinema?”

Clay tilted his head back and sighed. “Yes, the fucking… I told you this was the short version, O.B. Riley made his home there. Riley was one of Ronny’s, see? You get it.”

“That doesn’t add up…” O.B. muttered thoughtfully.

“Oh, Jesus…”

“How did they know to find Riley at the movies? In fact, how did Ronny and whoever else it was know how to find this valley? Nobody knew that location. You want me to believe they just stumbled on this girl wandering through the mountains? ’Cause that smells like bullshit, Clay.”

“All of these are fantastic questions I’d love to spend the next interminable period of my shortened fucking life examining ad nauseam, O.B., honest to Christ, but we’re in a bit of a bind right now. This isn’t everyone out here, huh? There’s a contingent of these people coming back in our direction right now, and they are fucking pissed. We have a very limited amount of time to get ready for their arrival and the more of it we spend standing here running our mouths like idiots, the greater the ass-pounding we’re likely to enjoy.”

More people started coming out from the surrounding trees as Clay spoke, spread out at regular intervals like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Otis saw the first of them emerge from the dry stream bed a few hundred feet south of Gibs’s firing range; a collection of some five men dressed in shades of green and brown, stern-faced and well-armed. He began to turn in place, looking around the rest of the surrounding mountain walls, seeing similar groups of people emerge at various points, even close by the cabin. He passed a hand over the thinning hair of his head, fingernails scratching lightly along the scalp of his crown, counting silently. Each group appeared to have between five and eight armed men, and there were ten such groups hiking out over the valley floor to join them; anywhere between fifty and eighty men, all told. Otis began to understand how the morning’s attack could have gone and felt his legs go weak. His right knee actually unhinged and he crouched down on the spot to hide this. Resting an elbow on his thigh, he hung his head and continued to rub habitually at his scalp while the inner workings of his mind played and replayed gruesome scenes of wholesale slaughter over and over and over again.