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

I imagine such an app would be called Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus .

We had completed our transfer to the bus a little after four. Wang and I got back to the group, updated everyone as quick as we could, and then thirteen of our people all piled into two sedans like a circus clown act. We got an initial five into each vehicle in the usual fashion, then took the smaller people (there was our Maria, Oscar’s nine-year-old daughter, and another girl with Wang’s group named Rose Dempsey, who was fourteen) and put them on laps. Even Rebecca, that incredibly attractive redhead that was way too young for this leatherneck, ended up in Davidson’s lap—he looked like Christmas had come early and she kindly pretended not to notice. It was kind of touching, really. She was twenty-six to his twenty-two, but it was obvious that she was something more like forty-six in hottie years, experience-wise. I felt like I was watching a waitress at a Hooters restaurant patiently dealing with an adolescent boy who was having a hard time keeping his eyes on the menu. Oscar and I escorted the two vehicles on foot, each of us armed with a rifle.

Things went quick when we got back to the bus. The first thing we did was get our two eldest members, Barbara Dennings and George Oliver, installed safely on board. I passed Oscar some screwdrivers and a multi-tool, asked him to go to work on the bus ignition and had the rest of our crew transfer all of the baggage, gear, and provisions from the two cars to the center aisle of the bus all the way to the rear. I took a tire iron from one of the cars, trotted around to the front of the bus where the pileup was and began to move as quick as I could from vehicle to vehicle breaking out windows. When that was done, I had Davidson get into the driver seat of the first vehicle out in front, and Fred Moses came over to help me push the car out of the way. We had to shove each car about two hundred feet to get them all onto a cross street, and out of the way, but with Fred’s help pushing, it was pretty easy work that went by fast. By the time we had the pileup cleared, everyone was set up on the bus and ready to go. Oscar had exposed the necessary ignition wires a long time ago and was just waiting for us to come back before sparking the bus to life.

I could see that he already had a couple of the wires twisted together and that the instrument panel was currently lit up, which was a good sign as far as the battery was concerned; however, the fuel gauge was all the way down to empty. He held two other stripped wires in each hand.

“This is really gonna suck if the tank is empty,” he warned and touched the two wires together.

The starter began to chitter immediately, and the engine itself growled to life soon after. Oscar separated the two wires he was holding immediately and kept them apart. We both looked over at the instrument panel, where we saw the fuel needle positioned at just over three-quarters of a tank.

“Oralé pues!” Oscar said and smiled up at me. “You got any electrical tape in your bag, man? I don’t want to leave these wires out; they’ll shock the shit out of anyone that touches them.”

“Wait one,” I said and went to the rear to find my duffel. I dug around until I found my Universal Repair Kit (a roll of 100 mph tape) and took it back to give to Oscar. He wrapped the ends of the exposed wires and let them hang against the popped center console panel, which he’d had to remove to pull the ignition switch. He also wrapped the end of the two wires he had twisted together.

He got up out of the seat and pointed at a big yellow push button floating out in space next to the dangling ignition switch. “That’s your e-brake there. Make sure you pop it before you try to drive.”

“Hey, do you think you can drive this thing?” I asked.

Oscar hesitated, looking down at the wheel.

“I mean, don’t take it personally, but you kind of have more experience driving all sorts of different vehicles than I do,” I said in hushed tones.

He leaned in close and also lowered his voice. “I was jacking Toyotas, man. I never got into hijacking, like, shipping trucks and whatnot; there was too much danger of someone getting hurt. I’m as likely to roll this bitch as you are.” He straightened up and gave me the satisfied smile of an asshole absolved of all responsibility. “Saddle up, cabron!”

“Hey, I know what that means, dick,” I said to his back. “You think I didn’t have any loudmouthed Mexican Marines in my outfit? They’re so much of a stereotype that the Corps just gave up and started issuing at least two to every squad.”

Oscar sat down in one of the bench seats towards the middle of the bus next to his daughter and smiled at me. “Okay, Mr. Bus Driver, move that bus!” he called out, earning some giggles from the others.

I turned back to look at the steering wheel, which waited passively as if to say, “We can sit here and waste fuel idling all day, buddy. I don’t give a shit.”

As previously mentioned, driving the thing was a challenge, to say the least. Managing a full-sized bus is one of those jobs they used to make you undergo training for, and that was just when we lived in a world where the roads weren’t pockmarked with broken down and stalled vehicles. The apocalypse had significantly upped the difficulty of Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus. Driving along the straight sections in the road wasn’t too bad; as long as you stayed away from the most traveled areas, you could get around, although you sometimes had to sideswipe a car here and there. In some cases, I had to put the bus in park and take one or two guys along with me to go push another car out of the way. After a couple of instances of this, Fred, Davidson, and Oscar just stayed up at the very front of the bus with me, ready to deploy when needed.

No, the worst part of driving that bastard was making a right angle turn. The first time I tried to do so through an intersection, I heard a shout erupt from behind me followed immediately by the distressing sound of grinding. I hit the brake and looked back over my shoulder to see the right side of the bus pressed up against a pole on the street corner (I think it was a light or a street sign of some sort—I couldn’t see the top of it through the window). I had to back up in order to get off of it, straightened out the wheel, and attempted the turn at a slower rate, stealing glances over my shoulder as I went. Again, the side of the bus came dangerously close to the pole, and I heard Kyle, an eighteen-year-old kid from Wang’s group, say, “Nope. You gotta swing out way wide, bro.”

“Oh, fuck me with a toaster, you think?” I growled through gritted teeth—I kept it under my breath, though. I didn’t know him very well yet and wanted to avoid scaring him. I needed people to be able to come and tell me bad news without fear of my chewing their ass. I’d give him some time to get to know me before I introduced him to the more winning aspects of my personality.

We made it around the corner on the third try, swinging out so far that the front of the bus nearly hit the light pole on the opposing end. I got the hang of it after a while; the fact that there was no one else on the road helped. If I had to make a right turn, I could swerve over to the left side of the road first to give myself the greatest possible radius, and vice versa for left turns as well. This was one of the more dangerous aspects of driving the Super Duper Fun Time Shit Bus. It was like working with really dangerous woodshop tools; as soon as you got comfortable with what you were doing, your attention might wander, and that was when the malevolent intelligence hiding inside the machine would reach out and dick punch you.

We weren’t on the road for very long before I was pulling over to stop again, this time for reasons that excited me. Down a side street, almost tucked out of the way, there was a tan humvee sitting next to the curb. A humvee meant two things: diesel fuel and gear. This had potential to pay huge dividends.