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

As I began to move items around in the truck bed, Lizzy got out of the cab. She walked by shooting me an angry look as she went, and approached Billy. She spoke to him, her voice sometimes rising, and he nodded to her the whole time.

I hung my head into the truck to look across the seat at Jake. “What was that?”

“She’s mad at you for going into town. She thinks you should stay here where it’s safe. I imagine she’s explaining to Billy that there will be hell to pay if he doesn’t keep both eyes on you.”

I looked back over to her and Billy, who was now squatted down in front of her and talking quietly. “Crap,” I said. “I’d better go deal with that.”

“This is really none of my business,” he said, “but she’s probably too angry to hear you right now. Might as well wait until you come back, so you have the proof of your results to back your position.”

“You’re right, it is none of your business,” I said. He nodded and looked off toward the city. “But you’re also right about her, as well. I’ll follow your advice on this one.”

He nodded again, without looking back at me.

Billy approached as I finished loading my backpack. He had his own backpack as well as a couple of belts full of different colored shotgun shells crisscrossed over his chest and under his survival jacket. His shotgun hung from a sling on his shoulder. A pistol was strapped to his belt on a holster.

“You look like less-thin Poncho Villa,” I told him, smiling.

“Watch it, Little Sis. You’re talking about the man I love.”

He heaved the heavy duffel bag up into the truck bed and then walked around to the driver’s side of the truck and got in. “You ready?”

I stood there for a moment, trying to process what I was seeing. “Never learned,” he had said. I stared at him, unmoving.

“Amanda?” he prompted.

I shook my head and climbed in beside him. Before I could say anything, Jake came to the driver’s side window and said, “Billy, keep your eyes open for a chess set, okay?”

“A… chess—what the hell for?” asked Billy.

“I told Elizabeth I’d teach her to play if we could find one. She’s read most of the books I found, it turns out.”

Billy drove away from our staging area due east toward a gentle rise of hills about a hundred yards away, over which the roofs of a housing tract were just visible. The ground was fairly gentle, and we could see a dirt road out in front of us that angled straight for the homes but Billy took his time, creeping along at an easy pace. I watched as he worked the stick and clutch effortlessly.

“So…” I said.

“So?”

“So, you never learned to drive a manual?”

He grimaced, and his left hand momentarily squeezed the top of the wheel where it had been resting loosely a moment before.

“Forgot about that,” he said.

“You want to explain why you were bullshitting me? You get one chance to do this right.”

He pulled a sigh all the way up from his stomach. “Let me ask you: what do you think of Jake?”

I was so surprised by his question that my eyebrows rose all the way up my forehead. “You’re playing Apocalypse Match Maker, now?”

“No, no. Don’t look at it like that. I’m being serious here. Just as one person to another, what’s your impression of Jake?”

I gave the question due thought because it was obvious to me now that this was bothering Billy. I had the impression that not much bothered him. “He scares me. Or, he scared me at first. Not so much now—I mean, I trust him alone with Lizzy, right? He does make me nervous, though. I can’t get a read on him. It’s like he doesn’t feel a particular way about anything at all.”

Billy nodded. “Exactly. Now I’ll tell you something about Jake. I haven’t really known him that long, and we’ll just say that he’s always been the private type, but he was different when I found him, all the same.”

“Different how?”

“Easier going. He was never what I would describe as chatty, but he spoke with me more than he does now. We weren’t trading jokes back and forth or cracking each other up. Actually, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the guy laugh. But he was communicative. Responsive.”

“Jake??” I asked. I couldn’t picture it.

“Yap,” he confirmed. “Listen, we all lost when the world fell apart, right? I know I lost people I cared about, you did too. I don’t know anything really about the kind of life Jake had before; who he knew, if there was anyone special or the like. I do know that whatever loss he suffered, it hit him hard. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet on you being the emotionally stronger of the two.”

“How can that be?” I asked. “It’s like he doesn’t have any emotion at all.”

“He does. I was with him when he found some of his people from before… what was left of them.”

“What happened?”

“Not my place to say,” he sighed. “What I think I can tell you is that Jake is trying very hard to be someone who doesn’t need people around him. The problem with that is no matter how hard a fish tries, it simply can’t be a bird, as the man says.”

“You think Jake needs people to be happy?”

“I think Jake needs people to function ,” Billy emphasized. “As far as I can tell, he doesn’t give much thought to his own welfare or safety. It’s like he has to have someone to live for or he just… drifts. Perfect example: after—well, just after, the best I could get him to agree to was to just come with me to Wyoming and see the place. I got the impression the only reason he agreed to come was to see that I arrived safe. I told him to stay with me but who knows what the hell he’s planning on doing when we get there? I’m fairly sure he plans on getting me to the front door and then just disappearing somewhere.”

“Okay, I get it,” I finally said. “You’re putting me and Lizzy out in front of him as a kind of anchor… or something. You could have told me.”

Billy glanced over at me with a “who the hell are you kidding?” look in his eyes. “You weren’t exactly in a state where I felt like that was an option when we met.”

This shut me up.

“Don’t get me wrong. I can only imagine what you and the Girly went through at the hands of those sons-a-bitches—I don’t want to know!” he exclaimed when I drew breath. “I didn’t know what to expect out of either of you. I know I didn’t expect you to be as functional as you both are so soon after you got out of there. I think you’re tougher than Jake and I put together.”

We drove on silently for a while, Billy weaving his way around the odd derelict car in the middle of the road, which had transitioned from dirt to pavement not long ago.

“Okay, so what now?” I asked. “Try to draw him out of his shell?”

“Nope. I think just let him keep hanging out with Lizzy. He’s talked more with her in the last eighteen hours than he has with me in days. I don’t know if there’s anything else you or I could do.”

I thought of how hard Jake had blushed when he fumbled at my belt and wondered.

We drove in silence for a while. The general idea was to cruise through residential areas in search of anything that looked like it could handle rough terrain and, if we turned up nothing useful, to move in closer to the 15 a little bit at a time and find more knots of traffic to try again. Billy was constantly rechecking our position against the Thomas Guide to ensure we maintained a good escape route, stopping in the middle of the street to do so. I had been through Cedar City in the past plenty of times but had stuck to the main drag for the most part; my local knowledge and usefulness as a guide increased as we came closer to the 15. Unfortunately, the 15 freeway was the major landmark Billy was doing his best to stay away from.