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

He slowed again within the next ten feet. Something was wrong with Tod. He hadn’t started talking yet, and that was very wrong; talking was something he did the minute he saw you, almost as if he was some Penny Arcade curiosity that activated whenever it detected motion. Silent Tod was a new thing; a thing with which Mason had no experience at all. He wondered guiltily if Tod had detected his annoyance and was hurt.

He walked another five feet and learned a new thing: Tod’s head was not moving.

“Hey… Tod?” Mason tried.

There was no answer.

“What the fu—” he began and trotted over to the man’s side. When he reached Tod, Mason staggered to one knee and felt a tickle low in his stomach; a sensation he’d last encountered on a roller coaster ride—just as they crested the first hill and the bottom dropped out from under him. Mason’s palms broke out into an instant sweat, and he began to hyperventilate. Incredibly, he noted his own condition in detached fashion as soon as it occurred; admonished himself to slow down before he passed out, except he kept right on breathing at his current panicked rate.

Tod’s body was still facing in the same direction, south along Route 191. His head faced north, having been sawn halfway through the middle and twisted around past one-hundred-eighty degrees. The skin around the back of his neck had stretched as far as it was able before sheering into a jagged tear and blood wept freely down his chest and right shoulder.

His eyes were lax and subdued, as though he was mightily tired and fought to resist sleep.

Mason struggled with his backpack for several seconds before upending the thing over the pavement. He clawed through the resulting pile of garbage until he found his radio. Fighting to bring his shaking hands under control, he squeezed the talk button and began to bellow into the mic.

The community had grown to such a degree that finding space for everyone in Amanda’s cabin, second largest home in the Bowl though it may have been, became something of an undertaking before too many had arrived for their first-ever study of God’s good word. She’d started by laying out some scavenged chairs and benches, then found a little more room thereafter by sitting folks up on the table top, feet planted on the aforementioned benches between strategically-spaced bottoms. The children, who they’d been forced to admit out of necessity (owing to the fact that excluding them from worship would have been suspicious), were all cloistered back in Elizabeth’s room. Despite the fact that Amanda had given her daughter the largest bedroom in the cabin, the number of children now in the valley had grown beyond the simple count of Maria, Rose, Ben, and Lizzy. There were now Patricia’s children to contend with as well; Brandon, Piper, Dominic, and Haley. All in all, the little log home was strained to the point of abuse, and they quietly agreed while jockeying around for space that if they ever had been religious in nature, they’d better damned well build a gathering hall.

The pronouncement of such created an uncomfortable silence in the gathering. They all seemed to wonder silently about the nature of their would-be jailers; their gullibility in particular. If they’d been questioned on the matter, the planned response was that the construction and maintenance of the greenhouses had relegated the founding of a gathering hall to a secondary concern. The question posed by Brian had been fairly simple and to the point: if they were to be considered devoutly religious, wouldn’t they have made an appropriate place of worship a priority?

To which the rest were forced to answer: No clue.

All except Otis. He’d remained quiet through the small pocket of conversation in which he’d been included, shaking his head gently while suppressing a smile, and when the others noticed this reserved behavior and inquired to its source, said, “A man… or woman… as makes it a point to talk to God don’t need any kind of fine buildin’ to go stand in. You’ll meet in a damned tent if you gotta. You jus’ get together, ’s all. Get together, make a joyful sound, and praise His name.”

And that logic spread out to the others in whispered conversations, stretching from home to home under the noses of Clay’s men like a viral infection, and those that heard it agreed the logic was sound. They went ahead with the plan; not free of fear—that would have been idiotic. “Assured in their course” approaches the mark.

People crammed into corners, stools, chairs, tabletops, and upended logs over a goodly interval, muttering quietly as they did, like they assembled for a musical recital. Gibs was the last to show, and when he did the others breathed a collective sigh of relief, having wondered if he would come at all. He appeared… haggard… and somehow less of himself than they were accustomed to seeing. His eyes had lost their hardened glare; darting around the room rapidly like entrapped dragonflies. He rarely looked up at anyone to acknowledge them, and he responded to queries with grunts and gestures rather than cogent words. The one exception to this was when he’d first stepped through the door into the common room. Ignoring the reserved greetings of the others, he crossed the plank floor to Amanda, leaned close, and whispered, “Three of ’em. On my ass since I stepped down from the Casa . I think they must be logging an entry every time I pinch a loaf.”

Her eyes widened slowly as he spoke. The others saw this reaction, and the room appeared to hush even further.

“Outside right now?” she asked through a constricted throat.

“Count on it,” Gibs responded under his breath.

She looked around the room at the others, fighting to maintain control, to continue breathing at an even rate.

“ Christ, ” she thought, “ what if we can’t… ”

She jerked her head hard to the side, refusing even to consider the possibility. Then she looked at the others closest to the front wall and said, “Well, I guess we’d better open this up with a reading.”

A few of them—folks like Monica, Oscar, and Alan—jerked in place as though startled, their mouths dropping open in dark, little “O”s of confusion. Fred and Rebecca responded immediately by pushing the shutters open to the cool night air. There weren’t enough Bibles to pass around by half, but they made do with those that were on hand, despite differences of wording between King James and Gideon varieties, and shared copies between laps wherever space and supply allowed. Amanda nodded gently to Otis, who bowed his head, solemnly folded his hands within each other, and said, “Book of Matthew. Chapter six, please…”

He quietly waited for those with a book to thumb through the pages to the requested passage. When enough people had settled back to looking at him, he cleared his throat and said:

“When you pray… don’t be like them hypocrites, who do it out in the open where e’ybody can see. They’ll get what’s comin’ to them anyway. When you do pray, goan someplace quiet, shut yo’self in, and pray to your Father. He sees e’rythang, even what’s done in secret; he’ll hear you. When you pray, don’t run yo’ mouth like a pagan; they think they’ll be heard ’cause they say so much. Your Father knows what you need ’fore you ask. Instead, you should say: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’ For if you forgive others when they do against you, your Father’ll forgive you too. And if you hold onto that hate, your sins’ll go unforgiven as well…”