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

She frowned and said, “I’m sorry to hear that. Still, she raised you up. She got some things right.”

Let’s hope so, I thought. The discussion died down for a bit, and we just concentrated on moving around, me taking it easy owing to Barbara’s older age and weaker bones. Don’t get me wrong; she moved well at her age, but you could tell the old girl had a bit of a hitch in her get-along. One person on a cane was enough as far as I was concerned. I didn’t need to do something stupid and make that two people.

I looked out over the crowd as the song played out, saying the words to myself in my head and discovering with some small amount of joyful surprise that I still remembered them all. Amanda appeared to be taking a break by the food table, getting a bite to eat. Oscar came over to say something to her, and she looked back toward the stage, mild concern showing in her eyes. She looked back at Oscar, smiled, and shook her head politely. He held a hand up to her, palm out, and nodded before backing away.

“Huh,” I said. “Some people can only move fast, I guess.”

“What’s that?” asked Barbara.

I smiled at her and said, “Nothing.”

Per Jake’s suggestion, I selected my team based on factors such as ability, group need, and group dynamics. As far as ability was concerned, I needed to use people who had demonstrated solid aptitude with regard to small arms training and fire team tactics. This didn’t mean I just got to grab the best of everyone, though. As I said, the needs of the mission had to be weighed against overall group need, or rather the needs of the entire commune. I couldn’t take Amanda, for example; she had proven to be the best gunfighter after me, mostly due to my years of experience… she certainly wasn’t lacking in killer instinct. At any rate, I wanted her to stay back and keep an eye on things. Oscar and Fred couldn’t go either; they had way too much work to do back at the valley.

After careful consideration, I selected Davidson, Wang, and, after a great deal or argument with some of the others, Greg to accompany me. They had all come along nicely with a rifle, the community wouldn’t take too bad of a hit for their absence, and the four of us worked pretty well together. Every one of them agreed to come along without the slightest hesitation.

Greg was a hard choice for me to accept; I originally argued with Jake that I’d do just fine with only two other people, which he vetoed outright. Greg wasn’t even eighteen yet at the time; younger than Kyle was when I’d lost him. He reminded me too much of Kyle… reminded me too much that I couldn’t keep people protected.

The decision was finally settled when Jake made it clear that, one way or another, there were four people going on that trip, and I’d better get busy selecting the last person for the team before I completely pissed away our time. I was in the process of talking myself into taking Monica, who I also didn’t like for the fact that she had a daughter depending on her, when Greg apparently got wind of the discussion and informed me in no uncertain terms that I was gonna have to break his legs to keep him from coming along. I had a hard time saying no to that kind of resolve. I finally agreed and shook with him on the matter, though it twisted my stomach into knots to do so.

It was thus that the day after our little barn dance, the four of us stood in the dining area of the cabin accompanied by Jake, Amanda, Otis, and George with several fold-out maps spread across the dinner table. These showed the states of Utah and Nevada at various levels of detail, some of them focusing just on the interstate highways while others dived into specific detail along areas such as Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, with additional street maps covering some of the cities in between. We had attempted to arrange a number of these in such a way that the interstates matched up, succeeding only some of the time but getting close enough that we could at least get a general idea of spatial relationships. We had a red Sharpie marker that kept getting passed between Jake, Amanda, and Otis as they recalled important landmarks, particularly bad traffic snarls, and other points of interest to avoid.

Jake was bent over the table while gesturing excitedly with his index card reading aid; a basic three-by-five card with a small hole punched out of its center. He always had this with him when there was reading to be done, either keeping it in his back pocket or folded in a book as a place marker. He used the thing like some sort of cheat code. The first time I saw him use it I was completely confused at what was going on; he laid the card over the page and started moving it slowly from left to right, lips silently moving as the card progressed. After a moment, I realized he was looking through the little hole like it was a window, so I asked him what it was all about.

To use his words, he’d explained that, “Text has always been a problem for me. Letters alone on a page don’t bother me, and I can read my alphabet just fine, but when they get all jammed together into words, my mind starts to do funny things to them. It all falls into so much noise, and the meaning becomes lost.”

He said that he noticed at a young age that using his finger to point out one letter at a time helped but not so much that it eliminated the problem entirely. He could still see those other letters, and if he got distracted (in other words, he wasn’t able to keep one hundred percent of his attention locked on that single letter) all of the surrounding letters would collapse together, and he’d have to start over at the beginning of the word. Sometime later in his life, he figured out that he could cut a hole in a small piece of paper and move it over a page, such that he could limit his view to a single letter at a time, which had alleviated much of his troubles. After that, all he had to do was learn which letters went with which words.

Apparently, that’s not as easy as it sounds. According to Jake, the average person is a visual reader; we see a word on a page, and we don’t actually notice the individual characters. Our brains recognize the complete pattern of the word, and we automatically understand the meaning. Its instantaneous recognition and translation is automatic. In Jake’s case, that pattern recognition is completely broken, so he had to memorize the series of letters that goes along with each idea or concept. The really fucked up thing is that, the way he explains it, he has to concentrate on the sound of the letters and map that information to the sound of the word; again his visual understanding of a word is just broken. So what that all really means is that while we map word patterns to concepts, Jake is busy mapping letter sounds to word sounds to concepts manually by taking in a single letter at a time.

If it sounds exhausting, that’s because it is; you can probably appreciate why it takes him so damned long to read anything. It becomes even more shocking when you realize just how much reading he does. I don’t know where the man finds the time, personally.

So, all that is to say that Jake was basically pointing at the maps with his combination Rosetta Stone and decoder ring.

“Your trip is just the reverse of what we did when we first came to the Valley,” Jake explained. “You’ll eventually pick up the 80, here, but don’t try to take it into Salt Lake City; the whole area is a nightmare. Take the 189 at this point here, which will eventually run you into the 15… here. You’ll then have to head north to get to the 73, which will take you out to the tent city out at Cedar Fort. That’s the path you went, Otis, correct?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he agreed. “You’ll catch some knots here and there, but ain’t nothin’ you can’t get around with that Ford.”