Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

I felt a barrel press into the side of my neck. “Easy, there, shit for brains. You don’t get to talk to her like that.”

“I haven’t decided what happens to you… yet,” the lady said to me, hanging on that last word. “I do know that I can care for this girl better than some caveman who runs around killing people he doesn’t even know…”

“Yeah, again, people who were stealing our supplies!” I interrupted.

“We stole. You killed. Who’s the real bad guy here?”

“Well, I would have been pleased as punch to let them live. All they had to do was not stick guns in our faces.” Her superior, schoolmarm attitude was really starting to get under my skin. “Besides, where the hell do you come from talking about her wellbeing? One of us has saran-wrapped this girl to a chair, and it sure wasn’t me.”

“None of this conversation matters. The girl stays with us.”

“Now listen, you…” I groaned as I started to get out of my chair. When I came to a standing position, the entire planet (never mind the room) tilted on its axis. My thigh slammed into a desk, and I had to brace my hand on it to keep from going over. I leaned forward again because that seemed to be the only position my inner ear was happy with. The pressure in my sinuses immediately built up to intolerable levels. It seemed that no matter what position I put myself into, there was some portion of my body waiting to tell me why my ideas were stupid. I reached my hand up to my nose and fingered around the wreckage gingerly. It felt all crooked and mashed in again. I gave a gentle squeeze, and pain blossomed from my nose and wrapped all the way around my head. The tear ducts in my eyes shot water like a couple of sprinklers.

“Which one of you schmucks broke my nose again?”

“S… sorry,” a voice said from my left—who I guessed was the guy standing next to the door to the main warehouse floor. “You fell on your face when I clubbed you.”

“Yeah, about that…” I began, “what did you club me with anyway, a Volks…” I had raised my head to look forward. The woman I had been talking to was standing behind Elizabeth. She was holding a knife pointed at the girl’s eye.

I froze. The guy behind me said, “Hey, Brenda, come on…”

She silenced him with a look. Turning her attention to me, she said, “Not another step now.”

“What happened to looking out for her wellbeing?”

“Well, it’s clear you have no regard for your own safety. Something had to be done to get your attention.” I scanned her face for any trace of shame or guilt for what she was doing. There was none. If I made a move on her, that knife was going in Elizabeth’s eye, best as I could tell.

A great sense of calm and acceptance came over me then. It’s the kind of feeling you get when you realize what comes next will be ugly but that there is also no other alternative.

I had resolved at that point that either I was going to be killed or I was going to kill everyone in the room not wrapped up on a chair. There was no reason for me to say anything else.

“What, that’s it? Nothing clever to say?” she asked.

I didn’t need to say anything else. The sound of vehicles approaching outside could be heard through a small window set in the concrete wall of the office. It immediately became clear to me what had happened. These people had been in this building when we arrived; probably doing the same thing we were…scavenging. They must have heard us pull up and watched us the whole time we were out there making plans, waiting to see what we’d do. Billy and Amanda drove off, and two people appeared much easier to handle than four.

But if that was the case, why the whole line of questioning about the girl just now? What was the point of that? I decided I didn’t care. I looked down at the knife hovering by Lizzy’s left eyeball. No matter what else happened, there was only one possible outcome for Brenda, assuming I lived.

“That’ll be her mother,” I said. “Here’s your chance to straighten all this out.”

She looked at the two men and said, “Go look. I’m fine here; he can barely stand up without holding the edge of the desk.”

Both men went to the door and exited, disappearing into the shadows of the warehouse as soon as they left the lantern light in the office. In the distance, a door opened to admit two shadows and closed again.

“You’ll be giving my friends the same warm welcome, I take it?”

“If they come waving a white flag I’m sure it will be fine.” She removed the knife from Elizabeth and stepped away. She lifted her other hand to show me a revolver, which appeared to be the same one I had in my back pocket a moment ago.

“Nothing stupid, huh?” she said. She was interrupted by several loud reports of what I had learned to identify as Billy’s shotgun, peppered with higher pitched bursts of gunfire.

Brenda jumped and turned to look out the office window. She didn’t exactly have her back to me, but I decided it wasn’t going to get any better. I rushed her. Halfway to her, the world made another one of those asinine tilts, and my vision started to swim with blackness. I could see her turning toward me, raising her gun in slow motion, her face drawn up in shock and anticipation of a body check.

I slammed into her head and shoulders first. From far, far away I heard screaming and the sound of my name. I fought to keep from passing out, certain I would lose consciousness at any second. I felt something writhing under me, and I realized it must be the woman I had just smeared across the floor. I brought my hands up in front of me and started grabbing blindly, trying to find anything to hold on to so I could rest a second and catch my breath. Maybe wait for my vision to come back if I was lucky.

Something stung me across the back of my hand, which immediately started to burn afterward. This concerned me, so I gave up holding on and instead began to punch in the direction I deemed most likely to contain her head. I connected a couple of times, and I felt the body under me jolt like it had been electrocuted with each hit.

I sat back and rested on my knees a moment. Having gone from prone to vertical, the vertigo wave returned, and I had to wait yet again for it to pass. I finally opened my eyes and was able to see in front of me without a bunch of black spots whirling around in my vision. Brenda was on her back on the floor holding her hands to her face and moaning. I noticed that her knife was close by. I lurched to my feet and kicked it away. I saw the revolver lying on the floor by the door. I went to it, braced myself for the nausea wave I knew was coming, and squatted to pick it up. Squatting seemed to help with the dizzy spell; it didn’t seem so bad that time. I turned back to Brenda, thumbed the hammer back, and pointed it at her face.

“We weren’t going to hurt her. I was going to take care of her.” Her voice was pleading now.

“Maybe or maybe not,” I said. “Regardless of intent, the one thing you never do is fuck with a kid.” I pulled the trigger.

Billy and I returned to the meeting area by the warehouse not long before dusk. I was following him in the Jeep, and when we came over the hill and brought the area into view, he immediately sped up. It caught me by surprise, but I soon saw what he was doing. We were at least a hundred yards away, but that was still close enough to see that the van was gone and that there was a body in the dirt.

We both pulled up to the body and jumped out to examine it. I was so convinced that it was Jake when we came up that I became confused at the unfamiliar face. I stood there a few beats trying to reconcile what I was seeing. My brain kept telling me that he must have been beaten unrecognizable, but that didn’t make any sense; there was no trauma to the face outside of the small hole just underneath his chin and the larger, baseball-sized hole in the top of his head.