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

“Is there enough to cover the whole window?”

I thought for a minute and said, “Eh, probably not, but that’s okay. We can leave gaps between each band. A bullet might find its way through, but it’s unlikely.”

“And those bands will stop a bullet, huh?” Davidson asked.

“I think so,” I said. “Your basic rifle and pistol rounds, sure. It might dent or crack, I guess, but I don’t think they’d shatter. Fred was explaining about the kind of steel they’d have to use to make a leaf spring; how it would have to perform? I think it’ll do the job. Besides, I’m going to test it. Each leaf spring has a series of plates stacked on top of each other and the closer you get to the top of the stack, the smaller those plates get. The topmost plate is very small; damned near useless for armoring the truck. I’ll take that piece to the range and put some rounds into it before we devote too much time to this and see how it holds up.”

“Anything else?” Amanda asked.

“Yeah, I think I can make a kind of bullet stop to hang off the back of the trailer, too.”

Jake’s eyebrows rose. “Oh? Do you have enough leaf spring for that?”

“No, but that’s not what I want to use. I think I can make a barrier that will absorb a bullet’s energy and basically stop it; kind of a soft target. Only thing is that I need you guys to clear me running out to the home improvement store.”

“What do you need?” asked Jake.

“Ceramic tile, epoxy, and fiberglass fabric. Probably some metal sheeting and plywood as well.”

“What the hell are you going to do with that?” asked Wang.

“I think I can make something that functions like a Kevlar plate carrier,” I said. “I’ll start with a sheet of plywood, smear some epoxy over it, and then cover it in ceramic tile. Then some more epoxy, a couple of layers of fiberglass, a couple of layers of metal sheets, and then another sheet of plywood; basically make a big goddamn s’more. Clamp the hell out of it with a bunch of weight (we’ll basically stack a lot of heavy shit on it) and wait for it to dry. Once it does, you should have something that’ll either stop bullets or slow them way down, provided the bullets don’t hit a seam between the tiles.”

“And you want to make one big enough to span the back of the trailer?” asked Amanda, looking dubious.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’ll just stand it up against that ramp gate in the rear and secure it with strap ties.”

“How well would something like that work,” George asked. “Is it worth all that effort?”

“I believe it would stop at least a couple of 5.56 rounds to the same, exact location. More than that or higher caliber and we might have some problems. But I believe if there’s a chance it stops only a single bullet we should do it.”

“Agreed,” Jake said. “I don’t care if it holds you here past a week. Let’s risk the timeline to see that done. Divert both Fred and Oscar to help. Anyone else you need as well. Keep me up to date on progress, please.”

“Rah,” I said, almost by reflex, and double-timed it out of the cabin.

“Well, what do you think?”

I looked over to my right to see Fred, standing a few feet off from me and staring down range at the little hunk of metal that we’d balanced on a wooden stand. He idly wiped axle grease from his hands with an old rag before tucking it into his back pocket. That Darth Vader voice of his had floated out to me all muffled due to the ear protection I was wearing. He had a set as well, which looked almost comically small wrapped around that bucket head of his.

“One way to find out, I guess,” I said, and pulled the HK to my shoulder. I exhaled and squeezed, feeling it chug against my shoulder in time with the crack of the bullet, made almost apologetic by the earmuffs.

Off in the distance (I’d paced out about fifty yards), the little hunk of steel from the leaf spring pinged and tumbled into the air. It landed unceremoniously in the dirt a few feet away. I set my fire selector to safe and repositioned my earmuffs around my neck. From my peripheral vision, I saw Fred do the same.

“Well, let’s head over and see how it looks,” I said, praying that we didn’t just waste two and a half hours’ worth of time under that fucking bus.

As we approached, I noted that there wasn’t a hole anywhere in the wooden stand. Taking that as encouragement, I stooped to pick the plate up from the ground. There was a black smudge just left of center where the round impacted.

“That looks pretty good,” I muttered, rubbing my thumb over it.

“Did it deform at all?” Fred asked from behind me.

“Not by much. I can’t see it with my eyes, but if you rub your finger over it, I think you can just feel where it dimpled. I might be imagining it, actually.”

He took it from me and rubbed his thumb over the smudge. His eyes unfocused as he concentrated on detecting any imperfection in the surface, after which a slow, satisfied smile spread over his face. Looking down at me, he said, “I think we got something, here.”

“Can you drill that?” I asked.

“I’ll have to see what Jake has in the shop,” he said, turning the plate over in his hands. “If not, we have that torch. I can always cut a hole through. Be janky as hell, but it’ll work.”

We were collectively able to put such a focus on the Weaponized Ford project that my team was ready to go only four days after Jake originally announced the trip; that’s counting the modifications I ended up making to the ceramic armor we attached to the rear ramp of the trailer.

These modifications occurred (you might say they were “suggested”) when I was initially laying out all of the layers that would compose the armor sheet to plan how I was going to get the whole thing put together. I’d gotten my hands on several buckets of this two-part Scotch-Weld stuff that was supposed to have a ninety-minute work life, which sounds like plenty of time, but I was still concerned about how much area I had to cover. The folding gate off the rear was seven foot wide by five foot high. For you math whizzes, that meant I had to cover thirty-five square feet in two sheets of plywood, a bunch of ceramic tiles, a whole shit ton of fiberglass, and a few layers of sheet metal. The sheet metal itself wasn’t all that thick, honestly; it was thin enough to cut with tin snips. I just wanted it there to add a little heft and to try to spread the shock out just a little bit more along the ceramic underlayer.

I was just getting ready to crack the first epoxy bucket when Jake strolled up to see how I was getting along.

“How’s it going, Gibs?” he asked.

“We’re in good shape. Fred’s just about finished mounting the frame to the truck, and the spring plates will go on after that. I’m getting ready to put this whole mess together.” I gestured at the various piles of material in the dirt.

“Will the frame hold, do you think?”

“You saw it, huh?”

Jake smiled and said, “Yeah. You have to admit it’s a bit ugly.”

“Well, Fred mentioned that the right way to do it would have been welded square tubing, but we don’t have an arc welder, so he had to make due. Considering he just had the grinder, nuts, and bolts, I think it came out pretty well. You sure can’t flex it in any direction.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to tug on it; I only saw it from a distance as I was coming over.”