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

“What?”

He looked up at her a moment, apparently lost in thought. “Well, I was just thinking it’s kind of strange, you know? His reaction to Jeff?”

“What, the way he manhandled him; you think that’s strange? I was amazed he was so restrained,” she said.

“No, but that’s what I mean.”

She squinted her eyes, not quite following.

Brian shifted in his chair and said, “Look, it’s the behavior pattern, okay? You had those people you ran into in Utah, right? They knocked him out, tied Lizzy to a chair, and then when… uh… when whatsherface turned the knife on Lizzy, Jake said that was it, okay? He’d decided to kill her right there, see?”

“Okay…?”

“Or earlier, when… you know. James…?”

Amanda scoffed silently in her chair. “Go on.”

He sighed in discomfort and pressed on. “So you made it a point to use the knife on him, okay? I reviewed the notes from this recently when I transcribed it—you said specifically that you opened him up from… erm… ‘ from his balls to his throat .’” He coughed.

“So what?” she asked, sounding almost bored.

“And he saw the aftermath.”

“Yes, as I said.”

“And he had no problem with it at all?”

“Again… yes .”

Brian put his pencil down. “And those things that he did don’t seem inconsistent with what he said to you all? When he convinced Oscar not to kill Jeff? Put James aside—that was horrible—but wasn’t what Jeff did worse than that lady in Utah?”

“What the hell was her name again?” Amanda mused absently.

“I don’t recall; I have it in the notes back at my place. Her name doesn’t matter, though. Again: the two reactions don’t seem a little… off to you?”

Her attention drifted as she thought, looking out her front window into the Bowl, at the greenhouses and exposed patches of farmland in the distance. “I suppose but… people change over time, don’t they? They grow.”

Eyes widening, Brian looked down at the page on the table. “I guess. Sure is a one-eighty, though, right?”

“I don’t give it a lot of thought, honestly.”

“Huh…” He took another sip of tea, noting with a touch of surprise how dry his mouth had become.

“Okay, let’s keep going,” he pressed. “Gibs comes back and speaks to Jake—”

“Well he wanted too, but I had to go get him. Gibs’s leg was all messed up from the bullet, remember? So I ran and got Jake.”

“Right… right. Okay, this next thing confuses the hell out of me…”

“I know,” she nodded. “The best I could do was just describe what I saw.”

“It was… what? Sunlight from the window? Shining through his fingers? Or his hand?”

Amanda sighed and leaned back in her chair. Propping her chin in the palm of her hand, she shrugged and said, “It’s what I figured. Only it doesn’t seem right, you know? It was, like, a bright, white glare—just like I said: light shimmering on water. The sunlight was like this warm, reddish-yellow coming through the blinds. What I saw in his hand; it was like… reflecting off—”

He looked up at her when she said no more; was immediately shocked by the pallor in her face. Her dark brown eyes and generous mouth all described perfect little circles and the rich color of her face had thinned somehow; had gone sickly.

“Amanda… what is it?”

Her eyes, wide and unblinking, did not see him. They stared through him.

“Uh… nothing. Nothing…”

He sat back in the chair, becoming worried. She continued to stare, minuscule little muscles in her face twitching; eyes twitching as if she suffered a stroke—and, had anyone questioned her at that moment, a stroke may very well have been what she suspected.

She glanced out the window again, disconnected eyes following ghost trails through the valley as her mind tumbled in sickening, unstoppable circles. In a dead voice, she said, “Let’s call it for the day, okay Brian?”

“Uh… okay. Sure, that’s fine.”

“Thank you,” she whispered; eyes, heart, and mind cast outward into the past. She did not hear the door close behind him.

She found him in the cabin. Plunging down the side hallway, not bothering to check the common areas, past the bathroom, past Lizzy’s old bedroom of many bunk beds, to emerge in the library. In the library where she knew he’d be.

He sat on the couch by the fireplace, the couch where she’d sat, in fact, for the interrogation. He was torturing himself with a book again, dragging the index card along the page ponderously, eyebrows furrowed, lips moving silently; shoulders hunched and straining the fabric of his shirt.

She sat down in the wooden chair to his right, the one closest to the door, and waited. She concentrated on breathing deeply to slow her runaway heart.

Jake worked through the sentence slowly, painfully, translating letters to sounds to words to picture-concepts. No notebook for writing down important points or ideas; all important things committed carefully to memory. When the window in the card reached a period, he paused to consider what he’d read. Sure that he would remember, he bobbed his head gently, marked his place with the card, and lay the book aside. He looked at Amanda, saw the turbulence in her eyes like billows of smoky clouds turned to spirals by a thunderclap, and said, “Are you alright?”

She took a final breath and blew it out slowly—the jumping off point.

“Have you ever lied to me?”

“No.” Immediate and without waver.

“Will you lie to me ever?”

“No.” Just as fast as before.

“Have you kept things from me?”

He hesitated, unblinking eyes darting off to his left before snapping back to center. “We all keep things from each other, Amanda. It’s part of being human.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

He sighed; a motion visible only in the variance of his expanding chest—it pulled slightly deeper than before. The hair around his always-parted lips fluttered gently.

“What is it, Amanda?”

“Jake… did we let Jeff go? Or… maybe I should ask: what happened to him?”

He grunted and looked away.

“How did you know?”

The air bled from her chest, forced out under the collapsing weight of his question. His admission. She collected enough of her fragmenting mind together to say, “I saw a flash in your hand once…”

“Mmm,” he agreed, nodding. He rose from the couch and moved behind the desk, fished a small brass key from his front pocket and unlocked a drawer out of sight. She heard the soft, secret sound of wood sliding on wood. He returned and sat in the chair across from her; the chair he’d occupied for the interrogation, as this had now become. He leaned forward and opened his fist over the little circular end table at her right elbow, never taking his eyes from her; then settled back into his chair.

She looked down at the table and saw the silvery tab of curved metal and small chain links.

An identification bracelet.

She looked back at him again, his hooded, unblinking eyes. He waited.

“Why?”

“Is it really that surprising?” he asked.

“No… why… Why the speech? About life and choice and… and all the rest of it…?” Her voice was shaking. She noted in the disconnected, observational fashion of a lab scientist that she felt no anger in her heart… only hurt. Hurt and pity, though if that was pity for him or for herself or for all the people in the Bowl—she could not say.

“Because. Amanda… they have to be protected.”