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

Here, now, was a room that had lately seen use. There was no specific thing that stood out to Clay’s reckoning that separated it from the first; the bed was perfectly made, there were no clothes lying about on the chairs or the floor—the bathroom, bigger than the last, had an uncluttered and spotless sink. He pulled open various drawers, finding only a razor, a toothbrush, and a grey-green, rectangular lump of what Clay at first mistook to be some sort of wax but later realized must have been homemade soap.

“ Well, that’s a fucking thing… ” Clay thought. He was down to using Irish Spring every third day in a bid to preserve the supply. He sniffed at the irregular lump and detected a hint of rosemary.

The closet was likewise bare. There were clothes, of course, all neatly arranged on hangers along poles; a line of various types of shoe and boot dutifully arranged along the floor. A few shirts; a few sweaters; a few pairs of jeans.

Everything a man would need to live, yet nothing further. There was no personality here. No soul; no essence. The room felt to Clay like something a film director would stage for a background shot. Where were the books on the side table? Where were the pictures? There weren’t even picture frames with stock images; every fucking surface was bare and innocent of dust.

And it was that lack of dust that convinced Clay he was on the right track; the other room had boasted a healthy layer on every flat surface. In this room? Not a speck, as if the world still had housekeepers going from joint to joint doing those things that housekeepers do.

“Not even on the goddamned mantle,” Clay whispered thoughtfully.

He left the bedroom and returned to the lower level, scouring it over at least three complete circuits, followed by a few partial trips when he became convinced that a selection of the places he’d checked only a few moments ago had been somehow missed, despite his clear memory of having searched them. He discovered the free-standing liquor cabinet toward the back of the sitting room—a glorious find to which he intended to return at the earliest opportunity—on the first trip and became distracted by the reading selection offered by the library on the second. He tapped the spines of books with an index finger, whispering the titles of each as he did so (Exorcist… Necronomicon… Papillon… The Sun Also Rises; beneath these, a selection of action novels little better than pulp comics).

He turned to look at another shelf and noted an array of classics: War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Divine Comedy, Tales from the Decameron, The Odyssey and The Iliad both. Clay scoffed at these, writing them off as pretentious horseshit, and left the room.

It was after he’d completed his third circuit and before he’d resolved to begin a fourth, starting this time at the top level and going over the whole fucking thing yet again, when he found the unlocked window in the room crammed full of bunk beds.

“ Here we go… ” Clay thought and slid it open. There was no screen to contend with on the other side, and he saw how someone climbing through it might drop down behind the woodpile, effectively obscured from watching eyes—not that any of his men had been watching for any such thing. They were likely relying on Clay to keep the situation in hand, the dumbasses, and more the dumbass him as well, trying to take that great ox of a man aside and have it out with him one on one. He shook his head and winced.

“Should have my fucking head examined…” he muttered to himself; a favorite refrain.

So, that was it then. Jake had buffaloed him, escaped through the side window, and had vaporized up into the surrounding hills. Fine. They’d keep an eye out, and shoot hell out of anything that went on two legs and didn’t self-identify early and fucking often.

He went back outside to see about the others.

The common area had been cleared of all people some time ago, though a collection of folding chairs spanning various shapes, sizes, and manufacture remained clustered together in the worn dirt patch at the foot of the porch steps. Clay regarded these a moment, thinking how they all looked like a failing, lonely party abandoned by its guests, and then lifted his head to swivel eyes over the grounds. He braced to move off in the direction of those lovely, lovely greenhouses but saw Pap coming in his direction before he could take the first step; made the snap decision after identifying his friend and right-hand man to resist the urge to review the most critical item first, desiring not to appear overeager. He settled back onto a heel and waited for the cowboy to reach him, after which they stood together a moment. Clay moved his eyes first to the medic’s home (Linda… or Ophelia… or some goddamned name)—the two shipping containers butted up together like giant Legos and perforated with what appeared to be some rather high-class windows. He noted as he stared that Pap’s eyes followed the direction of his own, though with less deliberation.

Clay turned his head to the right, back to the greenhouses.

Pap’s gaze followed.

The corners of Clay’s mouth tightened… and yet he exercised a concerted effort of will to resist smiling, not wanting the man to catch on that his manipulations were of an intentional (or even comedic) nature. He thought of an old hound dog out of memory—a grandfather’s—that had been as loyal to him as any creature he’d ever met or would ever meet in his protracted tragedy of an existence. The animal would even insert itself between Clay and his parents if he was being scolded, hackles raised and growling behind ancient, red-rimmed, rheumy eyes. He could still feel the cold lump of the dog’s nose as it jabbed into the back of his thigh, herding him effectively toward the kitchen refrigerator in search of the hotdog package. The absence of that prodding nose—when Granddad had been forced to send that hound dog on to the next world—had been a hard thing.

Scrote had been the dog’s name, Clay remembered; named so after the prodigious set of testicles swinging between the creature’s legs—the first thing anyone in his family could recall noticing about the poor beast when he’d turned up on Granddad’s porch, streaked in motor oil and crusted blood. Clay’s Granddad (himself a famous drunk, having inherited “ The Gene ”, as his mother was fond of repeating) had applied the moniker on a whim, and so he had been named from the day he joined the family to the day he’d departed; when his hips had gone crippled with arthritis and he couldn’t so much as drag his ass across the porch.

Putting that dog down had been the first and only time Clay had seen his father cry (Granddad himself assimilated the experience through the liberal application of Rye Whiskey). He sometimes still came jolting from a cold and panting sleep with that image turning in his mind.

Pap reminded Clay of Scrote in a lot of ways, though Clay made goddamned sure not to say as much, and it was this comparison that brought a smile to his mouth now. He reminded himself not to put too much into the imagery; reiterated in his mind that his easy assumption of superiority over others was so often what got his titties bound up in vise grips to begin with. And Pap deserved more than the comparison, anyway. He was more than a loose-skinned mongrel with catastrophic breath and a set of regenerative organs so monstrous they were best transported by means of mechanical conveyance. Yes, he dressed like a fucking cartoon character out of a western, but he was a man. He was Clay’s man.

“Pap, I… wanna apologize for earlier, huh? The yellin’ and the carrying on.”

Pap looked almost scandalized at the statement. “Oh… hell naw, Baws. That weren’t nothin’ no how…”