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

Elton sighed and massaged his temples. “Can’t say I’m proud of what I wanna do but… people talk in bed, you know? Some of them might be talking pretty big, running their mouths. I just feel like we’d better be keeping our ears open.”

Johnny nodded at this. “Yeah, that’s a good point. I’ll go see Tad later today; ask him to bring it up with her. He’s been handling accounts over at her place a while now.”

Elton sniffed loudly, shifted in his chair, and lowered his hand. His head hung far to one side, and his eyes appeared to be closed. “So let’s have it, guys.”

Horace, a man, recently promoted from the Wrecking Crew to Elton’s own spot, cleared his throat and said, “We had to put down a fight this morning, brother.”

“More than a fight…” said Doc.

Elton opened his eyes and looked around the room. Doc noted the watery, dark irises floating in a sea of red sclera and looked away in discomfort. “More than a fight?” Elton prodded.

“Fifteen people,” Horace clarified. “Out on this morning’s food line down in the Lowers. I guess one accused the other of either getting a double helping… or maybe the complaint was just that one fella got too large a ration—I honestly couldn’t say; the report was so damned confused when we got there. But it was an almighty dogfight when we showed up, let me tell you.”

Elton winced, feeling the stirrings of a low-grade nausea in his guts. The food lines had been an unfortunate measure resorted to a few days ago when supplies had gone down to critical levels. Personal stores were exhausted a long time ago, and people had been whittled down to paying credits for every meal; heading out to Corina’s twice a day. Corina herself had come to see Clay just before the shit had hit the fan with the mountain people, in fact, frightened at the rapid depletion of her stock, and enquired into the possibility of setting up other kitchens in the town. The question had rattled Clay; a shrewd businesswoman in her own right, her request to install her own competition into the market had served to illustrate more than anything else the situation they were in.

And the answer had been every bit as unsettling. No, we cannot set up any more kitchens. Not unless the menu is to consist only of air and water.

They’d established the food line as a sad, inadequate means to forestall the inevitable. Allowing people to come for a meal whenever they pleased had produced a rapid depletion of supplies so unnerving that folks toward the top of the power structure had begun to discuss possible exit strategies. An immediate solution was needed, and rationing was the answer upon which they could agree for the short term. They’d swept over the town gathering up every morsel they could find, sometimes under the color of authority, locked it all up at a single location (down at the old Post Office in this case because… why not?), and distributed it out twice daily in free though painfully small parcels.

Under the circumstances, Elton supposed violence had been inevitable.

“You lock anybody up?” he asked.

“No,” said Horace. “That just would have made things worse. You didn’t see it, brother. There were those down there that fought… and then those as wanted to fight. They were out there on the edges looking at us with some goddamned ugly faces. The ones that wanted to mix it up the most; we cracked ’em over the heads and gave ’em a ride home, but that was it.”

“Good,” Elton nodded. “Thank you.”

“We have to do something,” Johnny prodded gently. “You can’t legitimately classify fifteen people as a fight. That’s more like the start of a riot, Elton. Might be the only reason Lower Jackson isn’t on fire right now is due to how fast Horace got it under control.”

“Yeah…” Elton agreed. His voice quivered, sounding somehow older, and the near-constant knot in Danielle’s stomach awoke and began to churn sickeningly for her man.

“What about hunting?” she asked. “Can’t we step that up?”

“We have,” Horace said, shrugging. “In fact, one of the main reasons we still have food to hand out are the kids, bless the hell out of ’em. We had a couple of old-timers show ’em how to set up slings and deadfalls and such, and then there’s the crew under Taylor that goes out with the air guns. That Taylor’s a good kid; you know he’s only thirteen? And taking on that kind of responsibility? It’s a hell of a thing, Elton, the way they’ve pulled together. All thoughts of money have been waved aside; they’re just going out and killing what they can to fill Corina’s pots.”

“Can’t we have more hunting parties go out?” Danielle asked. “The kids are great, but we can’t put it all on their shoulders.”

“That’s… that’s trickier…” Ned muttered. Elton prodded him for more when he didn’t elaborate. “Well… there’s a small number of… of people with us who kn-know how to hunt. We-we’ve tried to have… have them teach others b-but hunting isn’t something you can t-tell a person how to d-do. You… you have to learn through ex… perience. But you c-can’t send out a large group t-to hunt for larger g-game because they make too much… noise. And… and there’s too much odor. The game knows their c-coming… see? They know…”

“Getting people up to speed on hunting is a long process,” Horace added. “And we’ve grown faster than we, uh, maybe should have.”

Danielle nodded slowly. “Clay’s drive for constant growth…”

“I wish I understood what the hell that was about…” Johnny muttered. “I mean, even as a numbers guy I still don’t get it. It’s like a nervous tick with him…”

“Just never mind all that right now,” Elton said. “We’re in the mess we’re in. Gotta deal with it now. So… hunting is too slow.”

Doc nodded. “Too slow, too irregular… and even if we could take in more meat, we still have malnourishment problems to address.”

The others fell silent at this statement, glancing around the room unhappily. Doc continued without mercy, feeling his responsibility to clarify the point like a physical weight pressing down on his chest.

“Vegetables have gone down to critical levels and, as we all know, the scavenging crews have been unable to make up the difference. We were already in bad shape when we left Colorado, but it was at least manageable at the time. But… the fact remains: we’ve been fighting malnourishment for quite a while now…”

“How bad?” Danielle asked.

“I’m lately seeing more instances of sprains and lost teeth. There were two fractures as a result of this morning’s disturbance; sustained not from the fighting itself but from the simple act of falling to the pavement, if my reports are accurate.”

“They are,” Horace grimly confirmed.

“Production has gone down across the board, too,” Johnny said. “Lots of reports of sickness, dizziness. People with the most physical jobs have to cut their time down to a few hours at a stretch, or they tend to faint.”

“How… shit. How many days’ worth of food is left?” Elton asked. He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, head hanging low between his shoulders.

“Not a lot,” Johnny said. “It’s a hard question to answer because we still have a minimal intake. We have to look at this more as an equation of calories in versus calories out. Right now, we estimate people are getting about eight or nine hundred calories per day. Now, that number is declining rapidly. If things continue on the way they are, we’ll be down to six hundred per day by the end of this week. By next week, the intake will have dropped to such a level that the people still bringing in food will be too weak to go out for more.”