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

“You… what?” Alan asked.

Lum smiled a toothy grin and looked at the others standing in a circle around a table supporting a topographical map. Focusing back on Alan, he enunciated, “You come along with us.” As he said it, he pointed once at Alan’s chest, then pantomimed walking with his fingers, and finally tapped himself on the breastbone.

“That’s that mountain talk,” Otis offered.

Lum nodded happily.

“What the hell?” Gibs asked. “You spoke English when I met you.”

Lum laughed and said a thing that stayed with Rebecca a long time. He said, “You adjust how you speak for your audience sometimes, don’t you?” His voice was smooth like well-worn, softened leather and Rebecca found she almost had to strain to hear the country underneath; almost, but not quite, having to strain her ears the same way she would have to squint her eyes to read small text by firelight. “You have different levels of comfort, I guess, and different voices to go along with ’em. When I left my mountain to join the Army, I picked up a whole new way of talkin’; kept me soundin’ official and kept my superiors happy.”

He stepped back from the table, then, and took in a deep breath, tilting his head back and smiling. “Been out of the mountains a long time now, just to find myself smacked plumb in the middle of ’em again. Mayn’t be my mountain, nawsir, but it is a mountain.” Rebecca and the others around her noted the change rolling over his voice, subtle at first but becoming more pronounced as he spoke. It kindled an easy warmth in her belly, some undefinable… thing … that reminded her of home and childhood and safety. She realized she was smiling along with him unconsciously.

“Mountains want Mountain Talk,” he concluded, pronouncing the final word as towk . He jerked a final nod to the rest of the people standing around the table before bending over the map again to continue the discussion.

Presently, Amanda lifted the binoculars to her eyes and swept them along the white expanse of the hill. She returned them to her lap; whispered, “Nothing. How about you?”

Lum only shook his head.

“Couldn’t we stalk them or something?” asked Alan.

“Might could do in differ’nt weather,” Lum whispered back. Without looking in the boy’s direction, he picked up a handful of snow and held it up. “Problem is this’ll crunch when you walk on it. Anythin’ out there’ll hear you comin’ long afore you see ’em.”

Alan signed, and Rebecca silently agreed. They’d been sitting out there for what felt like hours.

“Easy does it,” Lum soothed. “There’s all sorts of signs through here—droppings up that way. Looked like elk to me, and plenty of rub along them trees over yander. Somethin’ll come through.”

The “rub” to which he referred was something he’d pointed out eagerly to the rest of them on the previous day as they scouted; patches of lighter wood along tree trunks and low branches that had been stripped nearly clean of bark. Lum had explained that these were the markings a buck or bull elk made when he drug his antlers along the surface of the wood to knock off the velvet towards the end of summer. He had said that the rubs were not fresh, but the scat certainly had been, deciding the issue as far as he was concerned. They all rose before the sun the next morning to carve their little hideout under the pine.

Lum lifted an oddly curved pipe wrapped in camouflage fabric, something he’d picked up from town, and began to blow through it with pursed lips. It made a hollow, high-pitched squeal that hung in the air uncomfortably long, splitting the quiet peace of the mountainside. That keening whine plunged suddenly to a deeper register and began to stutter in short, grunting belches. Something about the call sounded insistent and lonely. Rebecca felt chills run up her arms and along the back of her neck. Lum finished the call and returned the bugle to his lap.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Rebecca muttered.

“What!” Amanda hissed.

“This,” Rebecca repeated, fanning a hand at the rifle she held: Otis’s old .30-06. “I… I don’t want to do it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” scoffed Amanda. “After all your complaining about being left behind? You’ve got a problem with this now?”

Becoming angry and more than a little hurt, Rebecca hissed, “I don’t see what your goddamned problem is. There’re three more of you that can take this shot.”

“Hey!” Lum growled. “You’ns wanna jaw any louder? There might be food within three miles ain’t heard you yet!”

Amanda sighed, held her hand out, and said, “Just give it here, okay?”

Two spots of color had risen up high on Rebecca’s cheeks. It made her even prettier than usual, if that was possible, stoking Amanda’s ire further. When the other woman didn’t move to offer the rifle, she reached over and yanked it across her lap, surprising a “Jesus, lady!” from Lum.

“You want it, Alan?” Amanda whispered to the boy on her right.

Eyes suddenly wide, Alan said, “Erm… sure…” He reached for the rifle hesitantly.

The pretty little high red points on Rebecca’s cheeks began to spread out over the rest of her face, crawling first up her forehead to disappear into her hairline. Not long after, that same flush crept down her neck, past her chest, and settled into her stomach, sending out waves of anger that pulsed all along her spine and quickened her heartbeat. Her relations with Amanda had been frigid at the best of times since their first real encounter; that first aborted attempt to get close to a woman who seemed hard and in control, a woman who appeared to Rebecca to embody that end state of development which she hoped one day to attain. A woman who didn’t have to justify her own usefulness to any group. In short, a woman you fucked with at your own peril.

Only that first attempt, that first little olive branch, had met with a snort of dismissal. Just a poorly suppressed laugh, a thoughtless joke, and Rebecca’s measure had been taken right there in the space of time it takes to declare that some exotic dessert “simply isn’t my thing.”

“Running low on eyeliner?”

The measure of her had been taken and found wanting. No method of appeal, no attempt made in any way to see if there was maybe something more just beneath the surface, that maybe she too had a history worth mentioning, no. It came down to the same old expectation: a jiggling set of tits, a round ass, and no need to trouble yourself further, thank you.

Rebecca’s mind was pulled back, despite its own best efforts to anchor into the present as desperately as when she’d clawed the toes of her boots into the mountainside to keep from rolling down its face, to a time not so long ago that yet felt like decades gone. Rebecca Wheeler, only twenty-six but feeling more like forty-six these days, thought of her always-drunk mother (“I’m tipsy, Love, just tipsy”) and her admonishment to not worry .

“Why worry? You’ve got my good genetics; you’ll be looking like that for a good long time if you take care of yourself. Your father didn’t leave you anything of use, the bastard, in neither the hereditary or monetary senses, but fuck him, right? Who needs him? You’ve got a look that would make a priest renounce God. So don’t worry, Love. You’ll be fine. Just find a sucker, and you’ll be just… fine.”

Rebecca jerked convulsively in her seat, shaking her head as though having just swallowed a glass of paint thinner mislabeled as a shot of high-end liquor. The other three looked in her direction inquisitively, their expressions betraying that they were oblivious to her mood.

She wondered what was worse: to be disregarded out of kindness, as her oft-inebriated mother had done so often during her childhood, or disregarded out of flat contempt as had just been done by Amanda? Looking at the flat, confused expressions on each of their unthinking faces, Rebecca decided that the distinction didn’t make so much of a difference to her, one way or the other. The only thing she knew for certain at that moment was that she was about done with taking it.