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

“What the hell is he gonna do?” Doc whispered. “Why even bother giving them a week? There’s no way.”

“It’s-It’s how he works…” Ned said. “He’s ho-hoping they’ll join us. He w-wants to absorb their knowledge. If he forces them to work on the p-problem, th-they should see through numbers… there’s no hope. Of remaining separate? Ah-ah-attrition…”

Elton closed his eyes against what Ned was saying; shook his head slowly in a liquid swishing of thoughts that felt disconnected and loose. “Stay up there and lose everything or join up and hold onto scraps. Good God…”

Danielle stood abruptly and left the room. They watched her go, slender back disappearing down a dark hallway, her shoulders hunched as though in anticipation of chasing recrimination. They looked on after her until the bedroom door shut, closing them off.

“Don’t leave her alone, Elton,” Horace warned. “She’s taking a lot of blame onto herself.”

“Yeah, I know. I will.”

“So… is everyone good with this?” asked Doc. “I mean… these people are being robbed on our behalf, right? Is that something we can abide?”

“What other options do we have?” Johnny responded. “You know the situation down here. Some three-hundred-fifty or more people? What’ll we do about that? We literally just had this discussion.”

“Yeah, but… but fucking theft?”

“Easy, guys. Easy,” Elton said. “Nothing’s happened yet, okay? They have a week, and if I know Clay, that week’s as much for him as it is for them. He doesn’t want to put the hammer to them any more than they want him to. He’s taking that week to work on them; to talk it out and bring them over. He’s done it before; we’ve all watched him do it. Let’s give him the time he needs, I say.”

“And if he fails?” asked Doc. “What then? What about the bikers in Colorado? That wasn’t a negotiation, Elton.”

“They were different.”

“Why? Why were they different? Because they were loud about their business? Trying to stake out a territory? How is that any different from us?”

“Doc…” Ned interrupted. His voice was whisper-quiet, but they all heard him. The way Doc fell silent on that tiny utterance, it might have been a gunshot.

“Do you want to starve or live?”

“Jesus, Ned…” Chills broke out over Doc’s arms, and he rubbed at them absently. It wasn’t just the question. The smaller man’s stutter had disappeared. Such a thing happened only when his mind was totally engaged; when he spoke only the deepest truth.

“The history of the world is one long, drawn-out example of large groups depriving smaller groups of resources to survive. It’s the process of growth, like a dumb organism. Bacteria. Or… Manifest Destiny, if you prefer. It’s not right or wrong, necessarily—this is a construct we overlay on simple binary equations so that the convoluted turnings of our conscience can perceive peace. A digital true/false outcome masking an underlying analog spectrum. These things can be abstracted beneath as many layers as one finds necessary to obfuscate the truth, but eventually, the truth must be faced. The question must be answered. Who will live? Us? Or the Others?”

He fell silent; an engineer from a left-over world somehow diminishing into a lesser version of himself. He picked at an imagined spec of dirt on the patched knee of his pants and then fell to fidgeting, clicking his fingernails together. He looked at no one else in the room; gave no indication he even realized they were there.

The others only stared; first at him, then each other, and then in insignificant, meaningless directions. Doc wracked his brain for some useful answer but found only blackness. He felt like crying.

“Guys…” Elton began, then trailed off. He cleared his throat and began again. “Guys… we have a week like we said. Let’s give the man some time to work his magic. I’m still gonna send those four teams out in the meantime, even so, okay? That’ll be our hole card. Between Clay and the search parties… well, that’s a lot of opportunity we’ve created for ourselves, isn’t it? There’s a lot of possibility there.”

They nodded quietly at this, none of them quite willing to say anything else; not willing to ignite another round of questions that had no answers… or worse, questions yielding answers they were unwilling to face. With nothing substantive left to cover, they excused themselves with apologies for bringing such poor tidings and departed.

They’d forgotten, in the tumult of their worries, to discuss Jake.

Elton shut the door behind them, leaned his forehead gently against it for a twenty-count, and concentrated on breathing easily. He stopped when he felt the floor begin to slide out from under him, realizing he was dangerously close to passing out on his feet. He went to the bedroom, tapped the door softly with a fingernail, and entered.

Danielle was in the bed facing away from him, laying on her side toward the far wall with her knees drawn up to her chest. Elton regarded her a moment, eyes trailing over the swell of her hip—the image of it calling to mind some hardwired initiative to shelter and protect his woman… before he remembered who she was. He frequently had to remind himself; she’d been in more fights than him, had killed more than him.

But her hands were so soft!

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, realizing he was running in discombobulated circles. He said, “How we doing, girl?” and realized only a moment later he’d called her ‘girl’ for a reason, intentional or not. He was cementing her in his mind. Reminding himself of her femininity; her softness and good heart. Reminding himself she was not a killer.

Or… not just a killer.

She sniffed wetly, and he realized she’d either been crying or still was. “Let’s go, Elton.”

“What’s up? Where to?”

He’d misunderstood, she realized. She wiped at the corner of her eye where the tears had pooled up on the bridge of her nose and said, “No… I mean away. Away from everything. Just pack up and get the hell out of here.”

He hung his head. “You wanna run out.”

“You don’t understand…”

“No, Baby. I do. It’s okay; I do.” He climbed into bed behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist. Her arm snaked out from under the blanket, and she clutched his hand, claw-like.

“We can’t run off, Danielle. We have to stick this out, see? This is what we started when we came clean. We started back to putting things right; we gotta see it through. We can’t give up now. We’ll just be running away. Only problem with running is, it doesn’t really get you anywhere… except deep in a hole. Run far enough, and you won’t be able to climb out again. It’s like—”

“Elton.”

“Yeah?”

Her head shook gently against his chin. “You… you can be really dense sometimes. She rolled over to face him; kissed him to take the sting from her words. He caught a whiff of her breath, which had gone stale in the evening, though he’d gotten used to it. Most times all they had to brush with was water. It had stopped bothering him long ago, just as he’d gotten used to hairy legs and hairy armpits—just as, he was sure, she’d gotten used to the things that happened with a man’s body in the absence of constant grooming. Manny’s installation up at the barber shop had helped in some regard, though he still had a bit to learn about working with the hair of a black man, but shaving was a damned hard thing to keep up with. Razors were hard to come by, anymore. Soap as well. There were a lot of shiny, oily faces traveling hither and yon in Jackson (bringing along the various skin problems you’d expect), and a hard scrubbing with a bucket of hot water only got you so far.