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

“They coulda had us any time…” he muttered. The others didn’t hear him, it seemed; the cowboy had finally regained his feet. He was approaching the old man Clay referred to as O.B. from behind, rubbing at the point between his belly and his ribcage with a freckled hand as wide as a ham hock. His other hand drifted smoothly toward the wooden grip of the revolver slung low on his hip.

“Pap…” Clay warned. O.B. seemed to sense he was coming but made no move to respond. His eyes only drifted from looking at Clay to a point in space off to the left of Clay, as though he smelled the man creeping up from behind. The corner of O.B.’s mouth pulled into a satisfied grin as he waited to see what would happen.

Pap paid no attention to the warning. His fingers encircled the revolver’s butt while the pad of his thumb touched down delicately on the hammer like the leg of a spider sensing out some tremor on the lines of its web.

And then O.B. did a thing that Otis would remember for the rest of his short life. The grin slid from his face like an old cloth from a table, revealing the truth beneath. The sharp widow’s peak of grey hair at his forehead retracted toward the back of his head like the scruff along a junkyard dog’s neck, and the whole expanse of his forehead flushed red like a fire engine. His shoulders drew up to the bottoms of his ears and a pervasive sense of “coiling” was hinted at from the twitching of his limbs and body.

Looking at the man as these changes occurred, Otis realized instantly that he was only a breath away from killing Pap, perhaps Clay as well. Maybe anyone around him possessing a look of which he disapproved. The sudden sense of danger kicked Otis’s instincts into overdrive, and his mind instantaneously understood two truths so fundamental that they might as well have been basic laws of nature.

This man, a stone-cold killer, was the most dangerous thing in that valley.

And on the heels of that: This man and Jake are the same person.

Which was nonsense, of course. The man standing before him now, this O.B., had to be in his early seventies at least. Jake was more than a few years younger than Otis, and they’d been friends for at least a couple of years, now. The insistence that Jake and O.B. were somehow the same person was a kind of mental hiccup, akin to déjà vu or the disorienting bout of vertigo you experienced when faced with an optical illusion that the mind simultaneously insisted must be and must not be .

As his mind insisted now, while he witnessed the compression of O.B.’s body; subtle as the changing of the seasons; message as obvious as a rattlesnake’s ratcheting tail.

It’s the same man! God have mercy… that is the same man!

“Jesus Christ, Pap, stop before you get killed!” Clay shouted and, for a wonder, Pap did.

The first of the arriving groups of men had reached them by then, and a good percentage of them appeared to have their rifles trained on Pap while a few others pointed weapons at O.B., Clay, and Otis, clearly confused at the situation and not knowing who should be covered. Pap noted the number of barrels trained on his person and slipped his hand off the revolver slowly. After a moment, when he saw the cluster of rifles had not been pulled away, he undid the buckle of his gun belt, removed and rolled it up, and tossed it to the ground.

“Right, goddamn it, now point’cher heat somewhere’s else,” he grunted. Some of the rifles were lowered in response to this, though not all.

Clay began speaking again, picking up from where he left off as though they’d never been interrupted.

“Look, O.B., believe what you want. I’m too tired to give a fuck at this point, okay? The main thing is that some of our people did some underhanded shit and these people retaliated—and rightly fucking so, huh? And left to their own devices, things were likely to just keep escalating until there was one great goddamned bloody massacre. Well, I’m not having it, okay? The point of all this…” he swept his hand over the surrounding area of the valley, ending on Otis and Elizabeth, “…is for us to return this girl to her people and see if we can’t stop the bullshit before it picks up any more steam.”

“And yet we still managed to shoot the place up,” O.B. wheezed. “Regardless of your noble intentions.”

“Hey, what the fuck do you want, O.B.? There’s no right or wrong, here. There isn’t any way to reel any of this horrible shit back in. It’s isn’t good or bad up here; all we have is keeping people safe and controlled. That’s it. What do you want me to tell you? A fucking fairy tale?”

“What is it that you want here, Clay? What are you trying to achieve?”

Clay’s hands flexed into fists at his sides; he clearly felt the seconds ticking away into the past, clearly understood that the rest of the valley’s people must be speeding back home up the mountain pass in his direction. A part of his mind wondered how things had played out back at the church if there yet remained a mess back there that must be cleaned. He’d left Ronny behind as the beginnings of a kind of peace offering but now wondered if he’d made a mistake. Perhaps it would have been cleaner to just stack him up among the rest of the lackeys on the firing line behind the chapel.

Too many decisions. Too many ways for this whole thing to go spiraling out of control.

Clay closed his eyes and groaned, “O.B… right now, all I really need is for you to fall in and obey orders. Once we know for sure that the situation is under control, we can all hash this out thoroughly—and that includes their people as well as ours. I’m confident you’ll have the answers you want when we do.”

O.B. stood quietly for a time considering these words while everyone else waited in the loose circle that surrounded them; Otis, Elizabeth, Clay, Pap, and O.B. They remained silent either out of respect or fear, wondering what the outcome would be while struggling not to fidget or shift around in their discomfort. O.B. seemed not to notice any of this nor did he appear to understand he was surrounded by a large group of armed men and that some fraction of that group was, at the moment, struggling with the concept of loyalty and where it should be applied.

The moments marched on until O.B. finally grunted; the sound somewhere between a decision and a resignation. He stooped to grab his M60, straightened, and passed his head through the sling, unconsciously leaning his weight toward the left leg to balance out the weapon’s weight.

Clay nodded in approval and said, “Alright, fucking O.B. Let’s start discussing what happens when they- Hey! Hey, O.B.? Where the fuck are you going! Where the fuck is he going?”

O.B. had begun walking off toward the south mountain wall as soon as the machine gun was settled comfortably. He traveled a rough distance of seventy feet, allowing Clay to continue calling after him, before shouting back, “Blow it out your ass, Clay.”

Clay leaned back on his heels at this, momentarily shocked into silence. He looked around at the others and said, “Blow it out my…? Is he fucking serious? Are you fucking serious! Hey! I’m talking to you, asshole!”

Clay’s only answer—the only one he needed, really—was the silence of O.B.’s retreating back, growing ever smaller as he paced away the distance. Clay watched after him, some corrupted form of admiration taking hold inside before his frustration could overwhelm it, and he laughed.

“Well, the bastard certainly gets along by his own set of rules, there’s no denying it.” He glanced at one of the men that had come down from the surrounding mountainside and nodded in O.B.’s direction. “Run out and grab him, will you? Bring him back so we can get this sorted out.”