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

So, yeah, people are cool with Fred, for the most part, but nobody wants to live with his Baby Huey ass.

Same deal with Wang and Edgar, for obvious reasons, I should think. Wang has a sharp fucking tongue; a point I’ve discussed with him on more than one occasion. He’s been good about taking the criticism, and I’ve noted him making an effort to dial it back, but all it takes is a little stress to bring out the personality that I’ve begun to think of as Belligerent Wang. That guy can do some outright damage with his mouth, and he knows just how to hit those little-exposed nerves that you work so hard to keep covered. He just… lifts the flap off ’em and braises ’em with a torch.

So, a little stress and Wang starts throwing darts. As bad luck would have it, we were all feeling stress in those days because the food situation was a constant concern that just wasn’t getting any better and Old Man Winter (the inconsiderate prick) just kept getting closer.

Then there was Edgar. I’m starting to think he doesn’t realize how he comes off; the reality is that he’s an effortless douche canoe. He doesn’t even have to try. It’s like he’s a virtuoso of condescension and backhanded compliments. He’s just always convinced that he knows better than everyone around him, which is only made more insufferable by the fact that the guy is actually pretty smart and does have good ideas.

So, taking all that into consideration, we knew right off that bunking Wang up with Fred was just weapons-grade levels of stupid, so we stuck Edgar and Wang together instead. Yeah, maybe it was kind of a dick move, given that Wang wasn’t Edgar’s biggest fan either, but Jake and I figured that Fred would have murdered either one of them eventually, so it was what it had to be.

If you’re keeping score, this left me, Barbara, George, Davidson, Jeff, and Fred dividing up the available space in the camper and RV we’d found so far. Now, we added Otis, his son Ben, and Samantha into the mix. We had just been treading water in the sleeping situation up to this point, and now we were back to scrambling in order to find a life preserver. As a stopgap measure, we had them assigned to bunks in Lizzy’s room in those earliest days when they came to stay with us.

Even with the on again, off again help of Greg and Alan, Oscar found himself hard-pressed to meet demand, so I took time off from slinging a rifle to fill in as unskilled labor. The container homes had been a good idea and had worked out pretty well, but they had just taken too damned long to get into a livable state, and we had folks that needed a roof right now, so we put the scavenging crews back on the hunt for more camping trailers of any shape or size. When time was a factor, you simply could not argue with the ability to tow a ready-made and furnished home back to the valley. All you had to do was get lucky and find one; then it was just a day’s worth of effort before folks were moving in.

The morning after Otis’s group arrived, I was out on the site of Amanda’s future cabin, having been assigned to mixing duty at a wheelbarrow. And by mixing, what I really mean is hour after backbreaking hour of hauling water buckets, upending bags of sand and masonry cement, and mixing up said components into mortar. With a goddamned shovel. I don’t know if you realize just how heavy mortar is but in its mixed, liquid form, it’s worse. Mixing and slinging that shit for an hour will drain all of the life out of you, never mind doing it all damned day.

We needed the mortar because you can’t just build a wood structure right onto the dirt, apparently, because it’ll pick up moisture and rot. To counteract this, Oscar’s plan was to lay a foundation using cinder blocks, which would be all glued together by the mortar I was mixing up. Thankfully, the stuff we needed to make this happen had all been gathered up from local home improvement stores on earlier excursions; Oscar did the layout on Amanda’s cabin, realized what it was actually going to take to get the job done (no, you can’t just chop down trees and stack them like Lincoln Logs), and had to put the whole thing on hold while a team went out and stocked up on masonry materials.

It turned out people were happy to help with this project, mostly because they knew that Amanda’s cabin was going to end up being a prototype of sorts. Once we figured out the process to build these things, we’d have the main kinks worked out and know how to do the job better and faster, just as we’d seen with the container homes. With this understanding, a lot of folks wanted Amanda’s cabin to succeed so that we could learn what mistakes there were to be made (because we would damned-well make them). Basically, a lot of people wanted their own cabins down the line, and they knew that in order for that reality to happen, we had to learn how to build them in the first place.

So, Oscar and Amanda were lining up a block foundation while my tortured ass mixed up batch after batch of mortar. A few hours in and I gave up any hope of actually finishing on that day; resigned instead to just mix the shit either until my arms fell off or some strange evildoer came along and granted me the sweet release of death. At one point, I asked Oscar how much of the stuff he thought we’d actually need to get the foundation laid just so I could gauge how much there was left to do. The son of a bitch said, “Just keep mixing ’till I’m tired, homes,” and then issued his little Speedy Gonzales giggle while picking up a cinder block with each hand in an effortless pinch grip that made them look like they weighed no more than a couple of pounds. He carried them over to the line he was constructing and laid them into a shallow trench, leaving me to reminisce sadly on a time when my hands could still work that deftly; they had become so cramped and blistered by that point that I doubted my ability to wipe my own ass.

Oscar called a lunch break towards the middle of the day, right as the morning’s scavenging crew was returning from their excursion. These scavenging activities were broken into shifts between a morning and afternoon crew, which helped to ensure that Housekeeping kept moving forward as well as spread out the limited number of firearms. The Page brothers had gone out that morning with Fred and Monica; they would be followed that day by Wang, Rebecca, Davidson, and Alish.

There was a bit of a handoff meeting between the two shift teams that happened during this period; the morning crew would eat lunch with the noon crew and discuss what ground had been covered, what they found or who they may have run into, areas that could use some more careful searching, and so on. As they all settled into chairs at a long table outside the garage, Amanda was setting up our own little picnic spot next to her future home, pulling the lid off a cooler loaded with food and drink while Oscar and I made a low table and stools out of cinder blocks and a few sandbags. The fare was decent; crackers just shy of going stale and some canned meat that she’d cooked up early that morning before wrapping it up in tinfoil.

“I never thought I’d say this,” I said, slapping a slice of meat between two crackers and stuffing the wad into my mouth, “but I’d kill for a fresh salad.”

“You didn’t like salad?” Amanda asked.

“No, not before,” I said. “It was pretty much steak, potatoes, and cheese for me. Pasta too, I guess, but all that green stuff wasn’t food. It was the shit my food ate. I never thought I’d miss it.” I turned another cracker-meat sandwich over in my hands, regarding it dubiously, and said, “Damned if I wouldn’t do unspeakable things for a fresh wedge of cold iceberg lettuce smothered in ranch. God forgive me…”

“I miss tacos,” Oscar said through a mouthful, which surprised a snort out of me.