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

“Why would anyone ask?” Alish coughed.

“Someone may,” Amanda said. “Soon, in fact. I just need your stories to be that we’re all pretty devout around here, okay? And that we used to meet in the cabin all the time to worship.”

“What are you cooking up, girlfriend?” Olivia asked suspiciously.

“I promise I’ll tell you soon. Also, Olivia, I need you to make some rounds today to visit the others; it’ll be less suspicious if you do it. Spread the word to them as well, okay? Everyone tells the same story. Tell them not to embellish a bunch of details; keep it all very vague so they can’t catch us out on a line of bullshit.”

“O… kay…” Olivia nodded. “You’ll explain later today?”

“Yes, I hope so. If this works. You’re coming by later to check up on Lizzy?”

“Yeah; I meant to ask. How’s her lip look this morning.”

“As good as Alish’s legs, apparently,” Amanda said. “I mean, the stitches make me queasy through the stomach every time I look at them, but I’m not seeing any of the stuff you told me to look out for.”

“That’s a tough kid you have,” Olivia said as she opened the door. “I had to scrape the hell out of that cut to clean it. She didn’t even let out a peep.”

Amanda said nothing to this; only nodded sharply through wincing eyes. Olivia stood a moment looking at her, working stubbornly to ignore the discomfort she felt, and then waved them all goodbye.

“Christians…” Greg muttered.

“Christians,” Amanda confirmed.

He sighed and looked at Alish, who only shrugged. “Are we gonna start holding mass on Sundays? I haven’t been to one since I was a little kid—before my mom finally gave up on trying to get my dad to go on any days other than Christmas or Easter.”

“Eh,” Amanda said, shaking her hand in a more-or-less gesture. “Kind of?”

Clay stood in the doorway of the office library, eyes flitting from place to place in search of Jake’s shadow. He’d already gone over the superficial aspects of the space; some twenty feet long by fifteen at its widest point, large windows on the north and east walls, executive desk, leather sofa, fireplace, the usual end tables, Greek revival bookcases ringing the walls. Dark, warm colors throughout. Expensive clock over the mantle, globe in the corner, and a small, golden model of a way wiser sitting on the corner of the desk. Antique books under glass.

Various framed pictures encircled the room; unrecognized faces staring through him. Nobody he recognized from the valley. No hint of Jake.

Clay breathed in deeply, smelling the odors of old books; dusty pages, leather, and deteriorating velum. He glanced at one of the small tables next to the sofa, noted the sextant—possibly ordered from the same bullshit mail order catalog as the way wiser—and picked it up. On closer inspection he saw that it was not functional; it would not articulate in any way that he could discover. It was for show, then, just like the rest of the room, as far as Clay could tell. He glanced down at the table that had served as the sextant’s pedestal and saw a pristine, rectangular patch of polished wood surrounded by a field of dust. He drew a line through it, inspected the pad of his finger, and dropped the display piece back on the table. It rattled on the surface and fell over on its side, where he left it.

He approached the desk, suspecting as he did that his search must be fruitless, as his search of the rest of the cabin had been fruitless, and sat in the chair. There was an old-fashioned Rolodex composed of ebony and brass with a spinning bundle of pointless names. He picked this up and looked under it, seeing that the surface of the desk was clean and uniform; no dust anywhere along the surface.

“Now we’re getting somewhere…” Clay whispered. He placed the palms of his hands flat upon the surface, thought quietly for a moment, and then pulled out the center drawer. He found a little wooden organizer within; pens, pencils, letter opener, paperclips, and pushpins all dutifully arranged in their own designated slots. These items had probably come with the organizer—Clay wondered if the owner had ever used it or if it had simply been extracted from its protective layer of cellophane and inserted into the drawer.

“Where the fuck are you? Who the fuck are you?”

He began going through the side drawers, finding a wealth of files and reports, many of which were arranged within manila envelopes. Some loose mail dated anywhere up to five years ago. He read the addressee on one of these.

“William R. Ybarra…”

He dropped the letters back into the drawer, shut it, and turned to the right side of the desk. He pulled out the top drawer and was rewarded with the sight of an old spiral notebook that had once been green in color, though the cover was now mottled with soft, white fissures of the paper under-layer peeking through like bolts of lightning frozen in time. The entire thing was cracked and abused as if the owner had rolled it up and driven over it with a car. When he opened it and thumbed through a few pages, he found mostly rudimentary drawings; rectangles, curves, and sharp angles that called to mind cubist paintings before he realized he was looking at diagrams… possibly even blueprints in a few cases. The scribbles along some of the lines might, in fact, be Arabic numerals. It was difficult to say for sure.

He flipped past a few more pages, then stopped when he found row on row of uniform scratches like insect tracks running along the page, left to right and top to bottom, like a repeating encoded pattern. The markings were nonsensical but uniform, tickling recognition in Clay’s mind. Looking over each line of jagging nonsense, he had the sense that he should understand what he was looking at. The sensation he felt as he perused the pages was similar to having a name on the tip of his tongue he could not recall.

The pattern continued on a few more pages, maintaining the same general shape but also morphing in subtle ways. Each line appeared to be characterized by concentrations of scribbles separated by tiny patches of negative space, discernable only in that they were less busy than the scribbles they interrupted. These interruptions grew in size as Clay turned the pages until he realized they were physical breaks in the pattern.

“What the fu…?” Clay muttered. He flipped back to the beginning of the notebook until he found the first page of the bizarre series and then began to work his way forward, counting each page as he went. He visually traced the motions of each page’s markings as it fluttered by, like a slow-motion flip book; his aged eyes gave way by the fifteenth page, refusing all commands to focus without the dire threat of a pounding migraine. Clay counted out seventy-three pages before the markings abruptly stopped halfway down the final leaf, all of which were covered front and back in that same meticulous pattern of nonsense, changing only in uniformity and spacing. On the final pages, he found definite gaps between each marking… and the markings themselves looked somehow more familiar than ever. It wasn’t the individual lines that made them up, so much, as it was their shape.

“No,” he said in a flat voice.

He counted the individual marks on the first line, knowing before he reached the end what the number would be.

“Twenty-six,” he muttered softly. “Son of a… the fucking alphabet?”

He struggled with what he was seeing; what his eyes insisted lay before him. What the fuck was it supposed to be? A code? How would such a thing even work? And why repeat the goddamned thing for a hundred and forty-odd fucking pages?