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

The man shook his head slowly and said, “Not me, Clay. Sorry.”

“Jesus fucking… did I ask if you felt up to it? Get the fuck over there and bring the man back!”

“Or what?” the man demanded.

“ Or what? ”

“Yeah, damn it. You’ll kill me? Well shit, if I go out there and try to make him do something he doesn’t want to do, he’ll probably kill my ass too. Only difference’ll be that if he kills me, it’ll suck a lot more. Do what you gotta do, Clay, but I’m not going.”

Clay laughed again, his voice high and disbelieving. Before he could claw some kind of response together, another of the older men said, “I’ll go, guys. O.B. and I got along; toured a lot of the same country back in the day. I’ll see if I can talk him into staying a bit. Maybe I can get him to just sit the next round out until he’s satisfied, you know?”

He started off after O.B., who had already grown small in the distance, now closer to the foot of the mountain wall than he was to the group of men he’d just departed. Clay stood and watched as the volunteer followed after, struggling visibly with his own annoyance. He tried to calculate when the volunteer, who was shambling along in a kind of old man’s double-time limp, would reach O.B., who was ambling in a relaxed fashion as though he was just out to tour the countryside. The distances were tough for him to eyeball, but he imagined O.B. would be hitting the trees before his buddy caught up to him. Infuriated at the time he was being forced to spend on this fiasco, Clay cupped his mouth and shouted, “I don’t appreciate the fucking histrionics you obstinate prick!”

He drew in breath to shout again. Before he could tense his diaphragm for an additional shout, O.B. disappeared into the trees. The shout died in his throat like a deflated balloon, and he dropped his hands to his sides. “Motherfucker…” he muttered absently.

“Houdini’ll get him,” one of the men behind him whispered.

“Houdini?” Clay grunted, eyes still pinned on the trees in the distance. He thought he saw a flash of brightly-colored shirt through the branches up the slope but could not be sure.

“Yeah, just a nickname. He’ll find him, though. Houdini’s the shit. He can track and all. Guess he was FORECON back in the day; ran a lot of Key Hole patrols and whatnot. He’ll get him.”

The man named Houdini plunged into the trees, disappearing entirely from view.

Clay nodded his approval, failing to understand half of what he’d just been told. “Why Houdini, though?” he mused, mostly to keep his mind occupied.

He heard the sound of a throat clearing from somewhere off behind him, and another voice spoke up.

“Well, when he was back in country there was this whore he liked to spend a lot of time with on The Strip; he said she was his special girl, and all. Wouldn’t go to anyone else. She used to get after him all the time about what he was gonna do if she got pregnant and so forth, you know? Hinting at marriage and him taking her and the kid home after the war… there was a bit of that going back then. Anyway, the guy apparently takes his condom, ties a big-damned knot in the middle of it, and says, ‘Tell you what, Mamasan, if he can get out of that, we’ll name the little bastard Houdini and go from there.’”

There was a smattering of laughter, and one of the men whispered, “Fucking Houdini… epic…”

Clay only muttered the word, “Whores…” and fell silent. They stood that way a while longer; a period of time Otis estimated to be five minutes or more. He shifted from foot to foot, squeezing Lizzy’s hand while he thought about the wounds in Alish’s legs and the rest of his people still locked up in the garage. Nobody had told them anything yet, as far as he knew. They must be about ready to have a fit; probably all locked and loaded and just waiting for someone to make the mistake of trying that roll-up door. He figured he’d have to convince Clay to let him radio ahead to keep things from coming to a head; hoped desperately that he could keep the situation under control. He was getting ready to bring the subject up when Houdini returned into the valley, exiting from the trees a good hundred yards due south of where he’d entered.

He was alone.

“Well?” Clay shouted, placing his hands on his hips.

Houdini waved back at them, shook his head, and then threw a handful of air in their direction, a clear indication the man was huffing for breath and preferred not to shout on his way back. Clay struggled to keep from exploding as the man hobbled in, opting instead to trot out to meet him halfway. When he closed to a regular speaking distance, he tried again.

“Well? Where is he?”

Houdini shook his head again, panting heavily. “He’s not up there.”

“What the fuck do you mean he isn’t up there?”

“I… mean… wuff … he’s not up there. There were some tracks that went up for a bit, but that ground isn’t so great. A lot of hard soil and rock. After a bit, all the sign was just gone.”

“Fantastic. Now what?”

“Nothing, Clay. I’m sorry, O.B.’s about as wily as they come. If he doesn’t wanna be found, you’re not gonna find him.”

Clay looked past Houdini—another old fart about as grey and wrinkled as O.B.—up at the mountain wall and sighed. The long strands of his eyebrows drooped low over the constriction of his eyes, mouth hanging open in a frozen picture of tired acceptance. His cheeks had gone craggy over the last few months, due either to a lack of food or an abundance of stress, and he was showing his age more than the people around him would have liked.

“Fuck it,” Clay whispered. “We’ll settle it without him.”

They took the mountain pass up to the valley at speeds rather less than safe but Gibs, who spent the entire ride in a silent brown study, failed to voice any concern over the extravagance of speed, as he usually would have done. He reached out with an arm every so often to steady himself against the doorframe—predominately around the harder hairpin turns running over loose earth that all seemed to bank in the wrong direction—but he gave no indication outside of these abbreviated physical acts that he was aware of his current position or bearing in the world around him. He looked out his window despondently with the air of an abandoned creature, any attempts by his friends to hail him being met only with a grunt.

Wang suffered no such compunction on the long drive home; freely voicing his concerns to Tom as he chased the Ford ahead of them around switchbacks and heady curves, tires sometimes fishtailing sickeningly beneath them. He called out several times for Tom to ease off the pedal; that they’d be good to no one at all as a wreck at the bottom of the gorge.

In answer, Tom flexed his hands over the Humvee’s pitted wheel and snarled, “I’ll be dipped in shit if they get home without us to back ’em up. Just buckle your seatbelt and SITFU…”

Wang had the urge to comment on the fact that Tom had essentially parroted one of Gibs’s favorite sayings (Suck It The Fuck Up) but stopped the words before they could climb past his teeth. From his position in the back seat, he could see only the back of the Marine’s head as he stared out the window, uncharacteristically quiet at a time in which fire would almost certainly be billowing from his nostrils. A malaise of fear and uncertainty hung in the vehicle like heavy gas, muting their tempers, sucking the air from their lungs and the life from their hearts. They did not understand why Gibs behaved as he did; all attempts to sound out the cause were rebuked. They knew only that their good friend—their beloved Devil Dog—had thus far chewed through the very worst of the new world with a scream and the thundering of weaponry… and had now fallen silent.