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

“I can’t argue with any of that,” I said. “So what’s next?”

“Oh, all kinds of shit,” he said as he walked towards the door. “I gotta pack insulation in all these walls, hang drywall, get it all taped off and sanded, figure out how I’m gonna do flooring… I’ll probably give all the kids a bunch of painting equipment and have them paint the outsides of these things just to make sure they’re fully protected from rust and whatnot.”

“Oscar,” I said. He stopped talking abruptly and looked back at me.

“This… this is really impressive. I had no idea you were this talented. I guess I was kind of pissed at Jake when he brought you all back here. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hide it very well. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I’m glad he did. Jake was right… again.”

He laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it, Amanda. You were feeling the same thing as the rest of us. And, yeah, from what I’ve seen, Jake seems to make a habit of being right a lot.”

“The dick…” I said.

He laughed hard that time, nodded, and agreed, “Yep. The Dick .”

If Jake didn’t want me to turn our people into full Marines, it was at least strongly implied that he was looking for Marine-like objects. I didn’t have the first clue how close I was going to be able to get to that goal, and never would until I had a good assessment of where everyone was at. I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for badass levels of competency, but I figured I could at least get them all moving in a similar direction without flagging each other. I didn’t really know what to expect at the time and decided to just take things easy and see what might happen.

Getting people trained on weaponry means sending a lot of rounds downrange, so the first thing I had to do was get together with Jake and inventory the tools I had to work with. This was well back in the days before everyone kept a weapon either on their person or locked up in their home, so everything was centrally located up on the second floor of the garage by all of the reloading equipment. It was this whole wooden deck construction that appeared to be custom made after the garage building itself was put up; wrapping around the back of the building in a giant U-shape. There were safes up there at the time but the firearms he and Amanda owned by that point were so numerous that only a portion of them were locked in the garage; the rest were kept under lock and key in the cabin. He and I had both hauled them all over and laid them out on the floor.

I’m not going to belabor this document with a laundry list of manufacturers and features. I will say that, besides Jake’s AK and Amanda’s bullpup, there were a fair number of rifles in both 5.56x45 and 7.62x39, not to mention a shotgun and some handguns. Between that and what my group brought to the party, there was enough hardware there to keep half of our people armed all of the time, which wasn’t such a bad start.

The real problem was the ammunition. There wasn’t nearly enough of it.

“How many rounds do you have here?” I asked. “Of each?”

“I haven’t done an exact count, but I’d estimate on the order of twenty thousand of the 5.56, another eight thousand or so of 7.62, five thousand of assorted shotgun rounds, and probably fifteen hundred of assorted handgun ammunition. Is… is that a problem?” he asked when I began to shake my head.

“That’s not enough. We’re going to shoot all that up before we even get started,” I said.

He sat quietly and blinked at me for a few moments before saying, “You must be joking, of course.”

“I’m absolutely not,” I said. “I’m fairly certain most of these people have never even fired a weapon before. Look at this,” I held up my hands to start ticking off names, “Davidson, Rebecca, Oscar, Wang… uh… Edgar, Jeff, Monica, Greg, Alan, and Alish. That’s ten people, not counting yourself and Amanda, the children, or the infirm.”

“Now, do you have any idea how many rounds I’ll typically go through on an average day at the range? I mean just taking it easy and keeping my skills current?”

“I don’t.”

“Maybe five hundred,” I said. “Times ten people. Five thousand rounds, or thereabouts, on day one. And that’ll just be enough to start getting them familiar with the various weapons. We’ve gotta do this for days. Fuck, we gotta do this for weeks to get that muscle memory built up. I need to get them shooting at distance, I need to get them drilling close in, I have to work with them moving in teams. Reloading drills, speed drills, run ’n’ guns. What you have here will be about enough to get them to a point where they stop blinking every time a rifle fires. This is going to take an assload of bullets, Jake.”

He sat back and boggled at this. “I… well, I never realized… we don’t have nearly enough, do we?”

“No, man, we don’t. We’ll need to find a lot more.”

“Shit,” Jake whispered, looking down at the rifles and handguns all laid out on a blanket along the wooden planks. “Well, what can we do with what we have?”

I sighed and looked at the pile as well. “I suppose I could have them shooting halfway decent groups at a hundred yards. I’m telling you, you’re looking at a shitzillion bullets to get them competent. This is what it takes: frequency. It makes all the difference between capable people and hobbyists.”

He nodded, drew in a deep breath, and let it out.

“Start them on ARs,” he said. “Use fifteen thousand rounds of 5.56 to get them going but don’t exceed that. Find a way to stretch that out as much as you can. I’ll work on discovering more ammunition. Save that brass; I’ll start learning how to reload ammo. Billy had a ton of that material socked away here. It should help us to limp along for a little while, at least.”

“Aye-aye,” I said, and began pulling out the relevant rifles.

I had some idea about what Jake and Gibs had discussed early on specifically because Jake had mentioned it to me beforehand to get my thoughts on the matter and plan out our approach. I did not realize, however, just how seriously Gibs would take his assignment.

By the time he really began making an effort to work with all of us, a general routine had already been established—this was after something like a week and a half or two weeks after his crew had been living with us on the property. Oscar was just finishing off the drywall in the first container home by this point and had built up such a rhythm that he always had the Page brothers (Alan and Greg) working alongside him. He was so impressed by how hard they were willing to work despite their young age and obviously thin frames that he flat out declared the second finished container would be their home without even consulting with Jake or anyone else. We all saw how hard they were driving themselves to get the shelters finished as fast as possible, though, so not a one of us complained over it. I think it also helped that the brothers both turned out to be a couple of jokers as well, once they loosened up around us and began to come out of their shells. Oscar himself was an epic knucklehead, so they fit right in with him.

Besides this activity, there was ongoing scavenging that had to be kept up every single day. The food situation was a constant anchor on everyone’s psyche and, after a week of seeing just how much food nineteen people could actually put away, getting more became this constant race we never felt we could actually win. The problem was that you could never just collect food and stash it away; you had to eat some of it while you were in the process of getting it. So if you found, say, thirty pounds of good, long-life food on a Monday, you’d have to eat some portion of that after you brought it home because people are basically just eating machines… you’ve got to keep fed every day. So you don’t actually get to keep thirty pounds of food. Between nineteen people, you probably only get to keep fifty percent of thirty pounds of food. If you’re not as fortunate on the following day and you find no food at all, you end up eating the remaining fifty percent of yesterday’s find, and you’re back to square one, see?