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

The conversation lulled after that, people fidgeting silently as they struggled to process the report.

“This poses a few problems for us,” Jake finally said. “Food won’t be the issue; our projections are showing we’ll be able to get through winter without any more forage from the city, which is good because we’re not really finding any more food out there, as already noted. So the first issue that comes to my mind ties directly into this… and I guess it could be either a pro or a con depending on how you look at it. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like these people might be interested in settling in for a while.”

“They did give that impression,” Lum nodded.

“Well, they’re not going to find any food out there. Not enough to sustain that many, at least. If they don’t find anything… well, maybe they just pack up and move on. We just hunker down and wait for them to be on their way.”

“Except we can’t count on that for sure,” Gibs said.

“No,” agreed Jake.

Wang added, “And, you can count on them cleaning Jackson out when they leave. Anything that might have been useful; they’ll just take it with them. Why wouldn’t they? So that’s a bummer. Anything we have up here right now? That’s all we’ll ever get after that.”

“That would be a shame,” Jake said, “but it wouldn’t kill us. The things left in town are convenience items at this point, more or less.”

“Suppose they don’t move along?” Edgar asked.

Heads turned to regard him; some with neutral expressions while others barely hid underlying resentment. Jake seemed not to notice any of this as he answered.

“That is the big problem we have to deal with, certainly. We don’t know what kind of provisions they’re traveling with, but it sounds like they’re very well armed. It would be reasonable to assume they’re traveling with a good stock of food. Lum, what kind of vehicles did they have?”

“Lots, like you’d expect. Lots of diesel, a few Mac trucks. Even saw gas types, but they’s all modified up.”

“How so?”

“Well… they had them, uh apparatus hitched up behind; looked like mah daddy’s old still. Smokin’ too, all of ’em.”

“What the hell could that be?” Amanda wondered.

“Mah guess’d be woodgas,” Lum said conversationally.

“Do what?” asked Amanda.

“Woodgas,” Lum repeated. “You’ns can burn wood in such a way that it makes gas that uh regular engine’ll run off. A few of the old boys back home used to run ’em; those that had plenty of wood but not a lot of money for gasoline.”

“Holy crap,” Wang said. “You knew about these? Do you know how to build them?”

“Well, sure.”

“Why the hell did you never mention this?” Wang fairly shouted. “That would have been really useful, man! That Dodge and Amanda’s old Jeep have just been sitting around doing nothing; you’re telling me we could have kept them running?”

“Whoa, whoa. Just ease off, Tripod,” Lum said, sounding mildly annoyed. “The ones we knew how to build didn’t look nuthin’ like this. You could run old, gutless engines with ’em. These was engines with shit compression, see, and none of that fancy computer mess all them new cars have. You couldn’t’ve run a decent V6 off’n these; they would’ve pinged like a bastard. You couldn’t’ve made twenty horses, I bet.”

“So what the hell are they good for,” Gibs asked.

“Old engines, like I said, with low compression and no emission control. Four-bangers an’ generators, too. I never bothered to mention ’em ’cause I couldn’t’ve made a thang that woulda powered our vee-hicles an’ we got the solar an’ all that propane, plumb over in the gee-rage. What the hell do we need with woodgas?”

“Except you said they were powering their vehicles with them?”

“Sure, that’s true, but what they was runnin’ was like nothin’ I ever saw. Looked like they got uh egghead to science the hell out of ’em. Got a feller smarter ’an me, leastwise.”

“Okay, okay, let’s put that aside for now…” Jake said.

“Hang on, a minute,” said Edgar. “That sounds like a technology that would be really good to have. You don’t think we could trade them, do you?”

After a moment’s silence, Otis ventured, “Trade them what?”

“I… well, whatever they might need, I guess?”

“That’s the biggest problem, as I see it,” Jake said. “Namely—let’s assume that what they need the most is food. Well, we have that, but we only have enough to support our group. They have hundreds. Even if we gave them everything, we had it wouldn’t be enough.”

“And then they would know that there are people living up in the mountains with a food supply,” Amanda muttered.

Jake raised an index finger and pointed it at Amanda. “Just so. Have any of you ever seen two people who never learned how to swim out in the middle of a pool in the process of drowning? Once the real panic sets in—that awful desperation—count on seeing one of those people grab the other and shoving him under the water just to keep afloat. It’s not even done out of malice; just simple, stupid, blind panic. And the way it always works out is that the little guy is the one that gets shoved under the surface.”

“That points to us hunkerin’ in up here, then,” Otis said. His eyes had widened; thoughts of his son Ben swirling through his mind. He thought back to Oregon, and their narrow escape from the battle that had erupted between what he supposed was the Army and the Red-Arms that had taken control west of the Willamette. Otis thought about their mad drive out of Portland, tires squealing as they barreled down the street, his right-hand thrust into the back seat patting all over his boy’s body looking for injury, running over everything blindly as he blinked the tears away; Samantha screaming and crying as he checked his boy for bullet wounds; as his mind continued to replay the image of Robert falling under a hail of gunfire.

He shuddered and took a long drink.

“Hunkering is an option,” Jake agreed. “The problem there is that we can’t rely on them never finding us. This cabin has been found before, once upon a time before any of you came to live with us. It was a small group of people that found their way in, and I guess it must have been a hundred-to-one shot, but there are hundreds now in Jackson, as you say. That must do something to improve the odds in their favor.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gibs said, “this shit’s starting to give me heartburn.”

“Is there any way to even calculate the odds of something like that? Of them finding us at random?” asked Wang. “I feel like there has to be.”

“Maybe,” Edgar said. “Maybe, but you’d have to make a lot of assumptions. Make bad assumptions and your model is garbage.”

George shook his head. “No, no, educated guesses are still just guesses; we can’t plan based on that. We must do better than that.”

“Observe them a while? See what kind of people they are?” Andrew ventured.

“Sure,” Gibs shrugged, “But then you’re back to waiting around, which means you’re back to waiting on them to come find you here in the Bowl. And, that’s assuming they don’t find you down in the city and just shoot your ass.”

“Or take you, prisoner,” Jake said. They all went dead quiet. “A prisoner can be made to talk, of course.”

“That’s… that’s another big assumption, Jake,” George said.

“It’s a big group of people, George. The numbers involved up the ante quite a bit if we get this wrong.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but the numbers involved don’t change the options we have, do they? Is a large body of people likely to be more aggressive than a small body? There are arguments in favor of answering in either direction. A large group might feel emboldened to attack a smaller group, of course… or, they might feel secure in their superior numbers and therefore be less prone to violence. Who can say what they’ll actually do, having no information at all? All of this is just a bunch of guessing.”