Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2)

by Joshua Gayou

  The RV itself was of decent size. It wasn’t palatial like a lot of the luxury buses you’d see on the road or on TV promos; it looked like a solid, affordable family RV that had been loved and well taken care of. It was the variety of vehicle that had started life as a large utility truck only to be surrounded by a metal frame and plywood living enclosure. There was a full sized bed in the back as well as another large bed up over the cab that was accessed by a little ladder behind the front passenger’s seat. There was also a small dinette area that would obviously convert into a bed. It looked like it could house five people reasonably; six if we put Maria and Rose in the dinette bed together. It wasn’t the answer to everything but it was certainly a nice little start.

  I set the gas cans down in the cramped excuse for a head at the rear of the living area and closed them in behind the door. Pulling out my multi-tool, I advanced on the driver’s seat, only to find the keys sitting in a pile on the center console. I had mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I was happy that I wouldn’t have to fuck around with the ignition to get the engine started. On the other, I had been interested to see if I could hotwire the thing on my own and was bizarrely disappointed to miss an opportunity to try out my new skill.

  The engine started up after a few moments of the starter bitching; it finally caught and turned over after I pumped the gas pedal a bit. I let it run for a while and listened for any sounds that might indicate a problem, hearing none. I shrugged, threw it into drive, and rolled over to the camper, which Oscar had just finished connecting to the Ford’s trailer hitch. I noted Amanda stood close by, scanning the area while hugging her ever-present bullpup.

  “We gotta take it really slow on the way back,” Oscar was saying. “I think this’ll be okay but once we get onto dirt, one good dip in the road could pop this right off the hitch.”

  Amanda nodded up at me. “How’s that thing look?”

  “Seems to run okay once you get it going,” I said. “Battery seems iffy but it’s nothing we couldn’t jump if we had to.”

  “Good,” she said. “Do you want to lead the way back?”

  “Let me follow you,” I said. “None of those roads are marked very well once you get into the mountains. I’m not sure I can find the way without a little more practice.”

  17 – Home Improvement

  Amanda

  Things got moving fast, a lot faster than I’d imagined they could, that first week after Gibs and his people arrived. There was a constant flurry of activity and, if you took a moment to just stand back and watch everyone running from place to place, the valley looked a little like a kicked anthill. I didn’t notice it too much, for the most part, because I was usually out there running alongside of them. Every so often, though, I would stand back to watch it all from the porch of the cabin and just…see.

  I remember being nervous a lot back then. There were all these new faces to get used to, different personalities to deal with and so on. And throughout the whole time, there was the constant worry over not having enough of anything. Sometimes Jake would be on the porch next to me, planning his plans, making adjustments as needed.

  I asked him once, “What the hell are we doing? The first snows are probably a month away. What chance do we have of collecting enough food to pull nineteen people through a winter season?”

  He smiled out of the corner of his mouth while continuing to look out over the field and said, “We have exactly as much chance as we choose to create.” He rested his hand on my shoulder for the slightest moment and then stepped off the deck to meet Oscar, Gibs, Fred, and Wang, who were all just returning with the second phase of Oscar’s shelter project.

  When it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to set everyone up in their own private camper, Oscar immediately started working on Plan B with Jake. Watching the two of them discuss it was kind of fun; Oscar was enthusiastic from the start when he explained what he wanted to do while Jake went from reserved to animated (well, animated for Jake) during the discussion. For lack of a better word, it was “cute” to see the two of them feed each other’s excitement as they planned out how the whole thing would work.

  To me, housing people in shipping containers seemed crazy but Oscar was absolutely certain he could make it work and Jake apparently had more imagination than I did because he got all the way on board after asking a few questions regarding how they were going to do it.

  The boys returned to the valley driving the Dodge, blasting the horn in triumph as they came. Behind the Dodge lumbered a giant Mac truck, growling (and sometimes grinding) angrily as it plowed through the dirt on the way up to the cabin. I noticed as they came that the driver (who appeared to be Fred, though it was hard to tell from so far away) made it a point to keep within the compacted ruts of the existing track that had been carved into the valley’s center, having evolved after months of near constant excursions out into Jackson. As he came closer to the cabin, I could see why; he swung out wide to the north of the road and turned in a lazy arc back towards the cabin, such that the two, forty-foot containers he was hauling lined up perpendicular to the track when he came to a stop – as he entered into the softer soil, his progress slowed noticeably and the truck’s tires began to spin alarmingly in places, causing me to wonder if he would get stuck and never be able to move from that position again.

  Some more grinding came from the giant, idling truck followed by an outraged, mechanical fart accompanied by a cloud of black smoke rising up into the air. The engine itself finally died just before the driver’s side door opened and a shaky, grey Fred Moses climbed carefully down to the ground. Once both of his feet were set in the dirt, he took a deep breath and shook out his hands.

  Oscar was on him before he was fully collected. “You…are…a…BADASS, Fred! That was some touch and go shit but I never doubted you for a second, man!”

  Fred grinned and nodded back, resting his right hand on one of the steps leading up to the cab to steady himself. “I didn’t think I was going to make it. That grade coming up the hill is a queen bitch.”

  “Uh, damn, are you okay, dude?” asked Wang. “You look like you might want to sit down.”

  “Think I will, thanks,” said Fred, and started walking slowly towards the house.

  Jake called to his back as he walked away, “Fred, there’s a cooler up there with a few beers in it. I put a little well water in there with them to cool them down a bit. It’s not ice cold but it’s the best I could do, and at least a couple of those beers have your name on them.”

  Fred nodded without looking back and offered a thumbs-up as he began to mount the steps of the deck.

  Oscar whispered, “Fuck, man, I didn’t think he was gonna make it!”

  “Give the man some credit,” Gibs said. “Mac trucks aren’t designed for off-roading.”

  “I know, dude, that’s what I mean! You think we’ll be able to talk him into doing it again?”

  “That sounds like an Oscar problem to me,” Gibs said.

  “That’s very white of you,” Oscar laughed.

  “Semper I, motherfucker,” Gibs responded happily. He had loosened up around me quite a bit over the last week and appeared to view me as one of the guys. He still wouldn’t talk like that around the other women. I took it as a compliment.

  “This is a great start,” said Jake while looking over the big rig. He turned his gaze to Oscar and said, “What’s next?”

  “That’s easy,” he said. “We can reconfigure these pretty easily but, for now, I’ll bet we can bunk four people in each one, which more than takes care of the immediate situation. I saw a few more of these on the road outside and around Jackson, so we could haul even more up here and eventually have a situation where each person has their own private home, if they want it.”

  “So we just leave them up there on the trailer?” asked Jake.

  “No, probably don’t want to do that. It’ll make it too hard for me to work on them. Plus, I don’t think people want to have to climb a ladder or
a ramp every time they go to the bathroom. Too dangerous at night, right?”

  “Good call,” said Gibs.

  “So…how do we get them off,” asked Wang.

  The sudden, stunned silence of the group was all of the answer any of us needed.

  “You don’t actually have a plan to get these unloaded, do you?” Wang asked.

  “Um…well,” Oscar said, scratching his forearm absently, “I, uh, I hadn’t thought about that part, honestly…”

  Gibs burst into hysterical laughter, doubling over on himself and bracing his hands against his knees. Despite himself, Oscar began to laugh as well, although not as hard.

  “Hey, dick,” he said, looking down at Gibs, “I can’t think of everything. Let someone else problem solve for a bit, eh?”

  “Well, maybe the trailer tilts or something,” Wang said. “Do you see any controls or hydraulics or anything?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said as I walked along the length of the two containers, looking under them. “This just looks like a couple of trailers joined together. I don’t see anything obvious that would help unload them.”

  “I think they must have just used cranes,” Gibs said, who had recovered and was looking the whole thing over as well.

  “Do you think we could pull them off with the Ford?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” said Oscar. “Maybe if it was on rollers or something but not like that. Those things have to be a couple of tons each. That truck would just spin its tires and dig a hole in the ground.”

  “Ugh, goddamn it, I can’t believe we can’t think of a way to get this thing unloaded,” Gibs growled. “We’re the most advanced lifeforms in the known universe; you’d think we could unload a fucking truck. Could we build a shallow ramp? We’re not actually looking at finding some forklifts and bringing them back up here, are we? God knows we have enough propane…”

  “No, no, just take it easy a moment,” said Jake, who had been quietly assessing the truck, just rattling along in his own little world. He looked like he would say more but then fell silent again. He continued to walk along the two trailers while observing them closely, arms crossed over his chest and tapping his lips with an index finger.

  Finally, Jake looked at Oscar and asked, “What’s the largest dimension of beam lumber we have on hand right now?”

  Gibs scoffed and said, “Hey, I was just joking about building a ramp, Jake.”

  “I don’t want to build a ramp. It will take too long. Oscar?”

  “We got some four-by-six,” Oscar said hopefully.

  “That’s probably not big enough,” he said quietly while looking back again at one of the containers. He clapped his hands once, surprising all of us. “Okay, let’s hop in the truck and do some shopping, then.”

  “Shopping” turned out to be a trip to the local lumber yard (which excited Oscar, predictably). Out of all the places to have survived the apocalypse, it seemed that this had faired the best out of anything I’d yet seen. Apparently, a store specializing in all manner and dimension of board lumber is the last destination on anyone’s list of places to go looting. We weren’t there for very long at all; just the amount of time it took to load two eighteen foot long six-by-twelve beams into the back of the truck. As soon as they were positioned in the bed, Jake was already hustling us back out of the yard with Oscar resisting him every step of the way.

  “Man, let’s grab some more of this!” he kept saying. “Leaving all of this wood here is criminal. Do you have any idea what I could be doing with all this?”

  “Focus, Oscar,” Jake responded happily. “This will all be here later. We have a different problem to solve at the moment.”

  Oscar was finally nudged back into the truck, looking like a child who was being forced to leave Disneyland early. He kept glancing back at the store as we ushered him away as though someone was going to run up and snatch it any moment. I struggled not to laugh at him; the look on his face was a little adorable.

  The next stop was a hardware store that was already becoming a regular destination for our whole group. This place hadn’t gotten through the fall as well as the lumber yard; there were a lot of empty spaces on the shelves and some overturned displays belying obvious signs of desperation here. The evidence of struggle was as much in those things that were missing as what had been left behind; all lighting had been removed from the place long ago. One row of shelves in the power tools section was completely bare. Closer inspection revealed that it had once showcased gasoline generators of all shape and size.

  Luckily for us (according to Jake), everything we cared about was still available: several hundred pounds worth of cinder blocks and bricks along with several yards of heavy duty chain. The final items he grabbed, while we were all offloading the heavy masonry to the bed of the truck, were four chunky, fist-sized, steel padlocks. With those taken care of, Jake rushed back to help us transfer bricks to the truck, carrying three times the weight of anyone else and almost running from point to point. We spent about an hour loading that truck up, cramming every available vacant inch of the bed with a block of some shape or size. It got so that we began to anticipate being done on each individual trip but whenever one of us showed signs of slowing down, Jake would fan at us with his hands and say, “We’re not done yet. Keep going. This is going to take a lot and I don’t want to make a return trip because we stopped early.”

  So we kept loading. We loaded the truck until the bed sat dangerously low on the rear axle with the insides of the wheel wells only a couple of inches away from the tops of the tires. We sat back a moment, looking uncertainly at the newly lopsided vehicle.

  Gibs said, “I think we overdid it, man. This is apt to fuck the truck up permanently.”

  Jake nodded, hands on his hips, and said, “Yep. Don’t care. There’re plenty of other trucks out here. It just needs to get back to the valley.”

  Jake could be like that sometimes. I usually got sentimental over things like that. If someone had suggested to me that I run my jeep to destruction and then leave it behind on the road somewhere I would have pitched an almighty bitch. That jeep was my baby. Jake wasn’t like that at all. When he focused in on something, he went after it, and he would ride any machine into the ground or wear any tool down to nothing to achieve it. He would use anything until it died and then just leave it on the side of the road without a second thought.

  The return trip was…interesting. The truck bottomed out at the slightest bounce and it ended up taking much longer than we’d planned to get home because we had to drive so slow to get there. Jake drove but I could still tell even from the passenger seat that the truck was handling sluggishly as we began to climb the dirt grade up into the Bowl. The engine sounded…wrong, like it was about to give out, and I kept glancing over at the driver’s console looking for warning lights. I heard Gibs mutter, “He’s gonna blow the tranny…” from the back seat.

  Maybe I’m superstitious but maybe, just maybe, we made it back only because Gibs said that the transmission was going to fail. If he hadn’t actually said that, I’ll bet it would have gone out. Anyway, we made it.

  What we did with everything when we got back was so incredibly simple that Oscar, Wang, and I felt like a bunch of morons for not seeing it sooner.

  Jake started by placing a beam at each end of the rear shipping container, front and back. The width of a container was just under eight feet, so with an eighteen foot beam at each end, the whole arrangement would have looked like a capital “I” if you could somehow hover high up in the air and look down at the top of it all. With the beams in place, Jake took the lengths of chain (which he had cut into four segments with a hacksaw back at the store) and wrapped them around each beam on the outside of the container, threaded the ends of the chain through holes at the bottoms of each of the four corners of the container, and secured it all in place with the heavy padlocks. With all of that done, he started offloading bricks and cinder blocks from the truck, stacking them up under the four en
ds of each beam.

  He started with the cinder blocks first, stacking them up in a two-by-two column, until they came within a foot or so of contacting the beam. He then filled in the rest of the space with bricks, stacking them up until he could wedge them tightly under the wood. We stood by watching him without comment, trying to figure out how this was going to help anything.

  He stood back to look over his work, nodded, and then looked back at the rest of us.

  “Make three more of these at each end, please, and get them as close to the trailer as you can.”

  Without waiting for a response, he made off towards the garage, waving at some of the others who were moving about outside as he passed.

  “The fuck is he doing?” Gibs asked.

  “I’ve found it’s best to just go along when he gets like this,” I said, and started transferring blocks.

  Jake returned only a few minutes later carrying something that looked like a red fire extinguisher without the top nozzle. It had a handle coming out of the side and a square base at the bottom. Gibs said, “Okay, you have a bottle jack. You could have just told us all this at the outset instead of being all Secret Squirrel about it.”

  “What?” I asked. “I don’t get how this helps.”

  “He’s going to jack it off the trailer,” Wang said.

  I still didn’t understand how it was going to work but didn’t say anything. The rest of the guys seemed to get it right off and it made me feel a little stupid that I wasn’t seeing it. I just stayed quiet and played along.

  At three corners of the container, bricks were stacked up all the way to the bottom surface of the wooden beam, such that they were wedged in as tight as we could get them. At the final corner, we stacked blocks up only high enough so that the bottle jack could be wedged under the beam. With all of this in place, Jake rubbed his hands together and began to pump the handle.

  After a minute or so of this, he began to slow down more and more until he finally came to a stop. He looked the whole thing over with a curious expression and asked, “Has that thing moved at all?”