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

Clay fought the smile threatening to bubble up from beneath the surface but ultimately decided the situation was too good to deny; showing teeth, he said, “Pap, how about we retire to the fucking couch, huh?”

“Oh, sweet Jesus, thank-ya Baws. Thank-ya kindly…”

Pap let go of his ankle, and the leg shot forth as if struck by a physician’s mallet. He was still climbing from the chair by the time Clay was closing in on one of the Windsors by the couch. He’d stopped by a sofa table pressed against the wall on the way, grabbed a bottle of Grand-Dad and two tumblers, and lowered himself into the chair facing the door as Pap eased onto the cushions, a look of supreme satisfaction upon his features.

“Better?” Clay asked. He poured out a couple of fingers into each glass; they were both balanced together in his left hand, and he expertly guided the rich, brown stream between them like a master. Not a drop was wasted.

“Hell yes. ’Preciate it.”

Clay passed the glass along and asked, “What’s on your mind, big boy?”

Pap tested himself against the drink, shivered daintily, and said, “Don’t like it up here, ’s’all. Just tryin’a get a sense-ah what we’s doin’.”

“I’d have thought that was obvious by now…”

“Naw, I get that. Just don’t like bein’ nobody’s jailer. Gets me hoppin’ like a toad. They’s ever’body lookin’ at me as I go ’bout my bi’ness. Sour looks an’ whatnot. Well, it makes a fella kindly pissed, don’t it? Make a fella wanna knock them damned sour looks off them sour faces; I don’t need that shit. Wouldn’t be in this damned bi’ness if’n they’d jus’ helped to begin with, no how.”

“Pap? You’re not to go around abusing these people.”

“I knowed that, damn it; ain’t my damned desire! Ain’t what I’m saying…”

Clay took a drink and looked at his friend closely. The man was troubled in ways Clay found to be familiar.

“Well, what the fuck are you saying, Pap?”

Pap took another swallow; shook his head. He decided to pursue a different tack and said, “What’d the lady wanna see y’all about?”

Clay paused briefly as he considered pursuing the original point… but only briefly. He could appreciate a bit of dissembling in the day-to-day workings of a man’s life. Christ almighty, but wasn’t dissembling one of those magical acts that made day-to-day life a remote fucking possibility anymore?

He drained off his glass, noting how even now he could feel the stirrings of his earlier headache slowly ebbing away under the drink’s influence, sucked air through his teeth to clear off the last tendrils of bitter residue, and poured a refill.

“These people are for Jesus, Pap.”

“H’what?”

“Bible studies and so on. She was coming for permission to assemble the fucking flock.”

Pap appeared stunned. His mouth hung slightly ajar, and he allowed his head to track around to center, looking not at Clay but across the room at his giant desk. “I’ll be damned…”

“Yeah, but they won’t, apparently.”

“Huh,” Pap grunted. “Well… good on ’em I suppose, but…”

“But?”

“They strike you as religious folk?”

Clay snorted. “Is that a subclass comes with a unique color? Or fucking smell?”

Pap’s eyes narrowed in a rare display of dwindling patience. “Eschewing goddamned murders might be the first indicator, you reckon?”

“Uh. Maybe they’re Old Testament types. I’ll tell you, hoss, I’ve met some Jews in my time made Rambo look a fucking twat.”

“I was bein’ serious, damn it.”

Clay reached across the floor and slapped the man on one massive knee. “Alright, Pap, alright. Here, I’ll let you in on a working theory I’ve got going, okay? It goes like this: we’re dealing with two classes of people up here in this mountain, huh? Some of them are killers; hard bastards like the fellas O.B. lined up.”

“Deserting sumbitch…” Pap grumbled.

“Oh, preaching to the choir, my boy, but credit where it’s fucking due. But put that aside for now; they got their others up here, as well. The Corinas of the world. The fucking Johnnies and the Neds. Such as them seem like the meek, prayerful type to me. And, for lack of a better option, my only recourse in judging the motivations of these mountain-bound assholes is the prepackaged model of our own population.”

“Don’t see many of our’n getting’ together to praise His name,” Pap noted.

“Well, you’re not keeping your fuckin’ eyes open, Pap. Isabelle holds a meeting with her girls every Wednesday.”

Pap sat up at this news, fairly shocked. “Isabelle, the whore?”

“Madame, Pap, and semantics aside, is there any other Isabelle in camp? Whores can praise Jesus, too; hell, a whore was one of Jesus’s best companions. And if they can do it, why not the mountain-bound assholes?”

Pap looked down at his glass, swirling it idly as he thought. “This wants ice,” he mused.

Come on, fucking Pap , Clay thought. He wanted desperately to get back to the notebook in the desk.

After a few more seconds of rumination, Pap ventured, “Seems spooky lettin’ ’em all get together. Ought to put one of our’n in with ’em to listen.”

“No, Pap. You’ll keep your men out of it.”

“Well, h’why not?”

“I have my reasons, huh? There’s all sorts of lovely ways to describe the fucking point, but I’ll summarize it as follows: in the course of bringing a group of people under control, what’s the best way to keep them from resisting?”

Pap shook his head irritably. “I ain’t read them fancy-pants books y’alls talkin’ ’bout all the time…”

“No books, Pap. Basic human fucking nature,” Clay purred. “You keep them from resisting by not giving them reasons to fucking resist. We can turn the screws down on them, sure, but then what? We won’t get anything out of them that way. This isn’t just about the food in the ground today, huh? It’s about the food that needs to be planted in the ground tomorrow. If I want to bring these people in, they need reasons to come. It needs to seem to them like it was their idea. Otherwise, they’ll just dig their heels in like fucking mules, and then they’ll be nothing but a pain in my nuts forever after; for as long as we keep them around. You remember the bikers out of Colorado? Willy Dingle and his rat-fuck band of degenerates?”

“How could I fergit?”

“Uh. Well, sometimes I wonder. I wonder how things would have gone if I’d taken a gentler hand.”

Pap laughed softly under his breath. Sensing he’d not been heard, Clay whispered, “Ain’t a one of them around anymore, Pap.”

The cowboy considered the warning, working the various meanings over in his deliberate mind the way he tended to work over the brim of his hat in two kneading fists when it wasn’t on his head. An idea occurred to him—Clay saw it flash behind the man’s eyes like a magnesium flare—and he asked, “What kind of group d’you reckon Ronny was in?”

Pap seemed to have a fondness for bringing Ronny up when trying to make a point. It wasn’t quite an insinuation that Clay had once fucked up… and that he’d been warned of doing so… but, it came fairly close. It was Clay’s way to let Pap have that minuscule lever; a form of atonement, perhaps, if not just a convenient means of keeping himself honest. It grew tiresome at times, though, especially when Clay was certain of his own position.

“Ronny was an outlier,” Clay slowly said.

“Okay. Reckon they got any outliers up’ere?”

Clay thought of the scene he’d encountered out at the movie theater; Riley’s remains along with everyone else. He thought of the condition of Riley’s remains. His hooded eyes blinked slowly as the molars buzzed faintly in his skull.