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

He sniffed against a running nose and said, “I’m working on that part. Don’t worry about it for now.”

Mason shifted around in the folding chair he’d placed at the junction of South Park Loop Road and Route 191, annoyed at his need to be there. Well, that wasn’t strictly fair; he understood the need. Had to admit it was damned well warranted. Especially after the attacks and the later… civil disorder, guard duty was admittedly critical.

He just wished he hadn’t pulled guard duty with freaking Tod .

Tod was a special case; the kind of person one made allowances for in the old world, if only for the preservation of one’s own moral high ground. He was the guy that boasted the friendship of hundreds yet seemed forever unable to find a single one to give him a ride to the airport; the one who always had a contact that seemed to mysteriously disappear when his expertise was needed; the party crasher who sucked the life right out of a room on arrival, causing the other guests to grimace into their palms and ask of each other in hushed voices: “Well, who the hell invited him?”

Tod was an expert on all manner of subjects—you had only to ask him to see his credentials certified. He knew all of the secret methods of long-distance running champions, though a flight of ten steps rendered him breathless. Given the slightest provocation, he would gladly instruct prospective disciples on the practices most assured for losing weight quickly and finding that long-forgotten abdominal six-pack, despite his own spare tire. He’d once been on his way to becoming a wildly successful screenwriter, had you not heard? If only he’d not been screwed by that shyster of an agent, who had taken Tod’s good work and fraudulently sold it off to Universal and pocketed the cash. Ah, well. It was to be expected, was it not? Tod had only been seventeen when he wrote his masterpiece; he was not yet as wise in the ways of the world as he would later be. It was, at least, a learning experience most instructive—critical information for his future business dealings in life.

What was the movie, you ask? It was a smaller arthouse film. You wouldn’t have heard of it.

Tod had played the stock market once upon a time and made a killing. He was well on track to retire by the age of forty-five; right on schedule according to the plans he’d laid out on his twenty-first birthday. Never mind the fact he lived in a studio apartment on the end of town where you never parked on the side of the street—not unless you didn’t give a shit about your radio or wheels. Never mind the fact that the wildly-successful investor lived in a room crammed full of ten-year-old Ikea furniture falling to pieces with shelves full of Collector’s Edition action figures that never saw the other side of the blister packaging; another brilliant investment on his part, potentially a hedge against his Bitcoin interests going upside down.

The fact that such things no longer held a lick of value (if they ever actually did in the first place) seemed not to deter Tod to any degree. He persisted in sharing these amazing facts with anyone who would sit still enough to listen; a condition that sometimes shocked Mason speechless. The end of everything had seemed, to him, to be an incredible leveler of bullshit. A mechanism whereby the incapable and clueless were weeded out and extinguished through attrition, and yet there he was, the very Avatar of Bullshit himself, sitting across the way from Mason, aimlessly regaling him with heroic tales from his time spent as a bartender.

Mason smiled dully to himself as Tod prattled on. It had been one of those rare moments in his life in which the result of an endless line of bullshit was his own amusement.

Mason had once been a bartender, it turned out, and when he asked Tod the ingredients of a Tom Collins (simplicity in itself, really—consisting of gin, lemon juice, some sort of sweetener, and soda water), the other had only stared, blinking like a buffoon.

Actually… as it happened, Tod was not really a bartender. It seemed he was more of a barback, never mind the fact that he would use either word interchangeably. One term was as good as the other, apparently, to old Tod.

The others in the outfit called him the Re-Tod, and snickered into their palms as they did so. It wasn’t in Mason to refer to anyone so, despite the degree to which Tod aggravated him. Mason was annoyed by bullshit, it was true, but he disliked being hurtful even more. He sat there quietly, enduring Tod’s manufactured war stories—apparently, he’d dated a model at one point; had abstained from marrying her only because he feared her interest in his amassed fortune. It was almost too much for Mason to take. He scratched at the back of his head habitually and heaved a deep sigh to relieve the pent up tension within.

It was when Tod moved on to the topic of anal sex—specifically: the conceit that his model girlfriend had demanded the act of him at least once a week during their time together—that Mason sprung from his chair as if by pain of electrocution, loudly proclaimed, “Need to have a fucking piss…”, and excused himself to the back alley of the Super 8 across the way.

Mason spent more time behind the building than was strictly necessary; more time than could be explained by the simple voiding of one’s bladder. He did not care. That last line of creative storytelling had gone a might further than he would have preferred, inspiring him to wonder if the stories would get more and more outlandish if he persisted on in silence. He guessed that at some point he would have to bring an end to it, that he’d need to halt the constant stream of anecdotal diarrhea by uttering the thought dearest to his heart whenever he found himself in the company of the Re-Tod for any length of time.

“Hey, Tod, not to make things weird, or whatever, but… do you think you could try to SHUT THE FUCK UP A WHILE?”

He looked up at the bright moon overhead, framed by the high walls of the Super 8 on his right and the U-Haul storage facility on his left. The Snow King was out there, observable only as an irregular void in the star field, and Mason scoffed at the idea that anything so like a hill should be termed a mountain. He pulled a priceless pack of stale Camels from his jacket pocket, fished out one of the remaining three smokes he had left in the world (a price well worth paying, in his regard, to delay his return to stories of Tod’s fictitious anal escapades), and cupped his hands around the tip as he thumbed the wheel of his lighter. Then he drew in the murky, dead flat flavor of expired nicotine, held it, and on exhaling muttered, “Mountain isn’t two thousand feet if it’s a foot.”

No, sir. Calling that piddling hill a mountain was just another Tod story.

“Horseshit,” Mason coughed. He took another drag while reminding himself not to hit it so hard. He dreamt of a long vacation and decided he probably must have taken a protracted shit up alongside the building—such would be his excuse for being gone so long.

The thought ignited in him a sense of balanced satisfaction—this concept of fighting bullshit with bullshit. He felt justified in the lie, considering it was for the sake of self-defense.

Mason sighed and stubbed out the smoke, wishing again for a fresh pack that, as far as he knew, would never exist again in his lifetime. Just as well, perhaps. He’d always meant to quit.

He came around the side of the Super 8, passed by the collapsed overhang of the burned-out Loaf ’N Jug on the corner, and made for his chair at the center of the intersection. He noted with some distaste that Tod was there, looking directly back at him, no doubt waiting to question him on the amount of time taken for a piss or to regale him with more exploits from his Herculean past life. Mason grimaced without thought, not caring if the expression was detected, and continued walking.