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

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, goddamnit, 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 fared 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.”