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

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 ends 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?”

“Negative,” said Gibs.

“Huh,” said Jake. He began to walk the perimeter of the container, looking it over at each point of contact.

“I see the problem,” Wang said, crouching next to the brick pillar with the jack. We all walked over to join him. “It’s actually working okay; it’s just that the soil’s soft enough that the blocks are compacting down into it.”

“Well… shit,” said Gibs. “Now what? Stack them higher? Do we have enough?”

“No, we don’t need to do that,” Wang said, shaking his head. He was still crouched down by the brick stack and gestured with both hands, palms down, towards the ground as he explained: “We just need to find a way to spread the load out over a wider area. You said we had some four-by-six boards, right Oscar?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Okay, then let’s cut those into five-foot lengths and put a few under each pile.”

“Under each pile?” asked Gibs. “As in, we have to unstack and restack each pile?”

“Afraid so.”

Gibs sighed, “Like a bunch of monkeys trying to fuck a bucket.”

“Stand back, you guys,” advised Jake. “I don’t want you close when I’m operating the jack.”

He turned a little silver knob on the side of the jack’s base, which caused the central piston to lower back down into the bottle, and removed the jack from the pile. We all began to take each stack down while Oscar trotted back to the garage to select and cut the additional wooden beams. After all of the block stacks were moved aside (I had been shocked to find that the bottom cinder blocks couldn’t actually be pulled out of their depressions in the soil without first wiggling them around hard), we all went around and did our best to smooth the dirt over and stamp it down level. Oscar returned around this time carrying three of the five-foot beams in an armload. Jake and Gibs ran back to the garage to retrieve the rest.

As suggested, we placed the beams side by side at each corner and began the painful process of stacking all of the cinder blocks and bricks back up to the bottoms of the beams that were chained to the container. We had a few bricks left over at each point this time due to the distance being shortened by the addition of the wood beams in the dirt.

With everything back in place, Jake replaced the bottle jack and began to pump the handle again. This time, a loud, echoing, metal groan issued from the trailer almost immediately, making us all jump a foot off the ground, and causing us to laugh in varying degrees as Jake continued to pump away at the handle. When the corner of the container was about three inches off the trailer, he stopped.

“Right, so now what?” I asked. “You don’t have three more of those jacks, do you?”

“No,” Jake said. “What we need to do is make another stack of bricks next to this jack going all the way up to the beam. Then I can lower the jack. This corner will stay raised up off the trailer because of the second stack. Then, we can move the first stack from this location over to another corner and jack that end up. Once we have the other end up, we’ll increase the height of the initial stack at that end. We’ll just do this at each corner, one at a time until each corner of the container is lifted three or four inches off the trailer. Once we do that, we can just drive the truck out from under it. Lowering it back down to the ground is just the reverse of that process.”