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

Clearly, you could boil the water, given you have a receptacle that will stand up to the heat necessary to boil water for the time needed—about twelve minutes. But then, you need the ability to make fire. You also can’t drink water that has just been boiled, unfortunately, because you’ll burn yourself terribly. You need to sit around and wait for it to be cool enough to consume. This means that if you find yourself having to treat water in this way, roughly half of your usable daylight travel time is eaten up in the process of gathering enough fuel to run a fire long enough to boil the water, not to mention finding water to boil, waiting for it to cool, and so on and so on. Additionally, you don’t know if you’re going to find any water to process on the following day.

Given all of that, you always need to know the total distance you’ll be traveling, you need to know what kind of terrain you’ll be running into so that you can estimate average distance traveled per day, and some means to carry all of that heavy water you’ll need to survive.

I knew none of this when I ran into Billy. The only thing that really saved me was that I’d traveled most of the distance to Primm in a car. The main roads inside and around cities were all completely unmanageable. In the places that weren’t blocked off or barricaded, the streets were clogged with those cars that had survived the Flare or those cars that had been repaired since the Flare occurred.

The sequence of events to which we had been subjected meant that all of the major cities had undergone a double pileup. First, there was the initial traffic jam created by everyone trying to escape the riots that broke out after the Flare hit. When things became bad enough, the military came in to establish some kind of order. They weren’t there to win friendship medals, so the first thing they did was bulldoze all the vehicles off the major arteries for the purposes of securing supply lines and aid distribution networks.

The second pileup came after the Plague began to burn through what was left of us. The military personnel were just as susceptible as the rest of us and, as they started dying off in larger numbers, the unwatched roads began to bind up again.

A lot of people in all of the crowded areas where trying to get away. It’s kind of funny… or maybe ironic is the word. As long as society is intact and everyone understands that there’s some sort of system in place to ensure we all play nice, we’ll all cram together in one place like we can’t get enough of each other. As soon as those support systems start to fall apart, we can’t get away from each other fast enough.

Once you get a ways outside cities or towns and into the big empty of the open highway, it becomes possible to drive if you can find a vehicle. I had found one just outside of Hesperia, only slightly used with the owner still in it. I pulled him out, set him aside, and then went through the car (it was a sedan) to see what it had in it. There wasn’t much gas in the tank; however I couldn’t be too choosy. Any cars behind me were all blocked-in bumper to bumper, and I didn’t have any way to get gas out of them and into this car. There were other cars in sight further up the road, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time shopping for transportation. This car had gas and, because a driver was still in it, it had keys. I was grateful for that.

Whoever he was, he was less of a survivalist than I was. There was a roadside emergency kit in the trunk that looked as though it had been cannibalized, anything useful having been pillaged with the exception of the jumper cables. I also found a flimsy plastic parka in a clear plastic pouch. I opened the parka and pulled it over the driver’s seat. The previous owner of the vehicle hadn’t started to go all runny yet, but he had still been out there long enough to get rather foul, especially in that hot California sun, and I wasn’t excited about settling into whatever he may have left behind in the seat (visible or otherwise). I threw my rifle in the front seat, my supplies in the back seat, and folded up the bike trailer and tossed it in the trunk. I settled in behind the wheel, turned the key, and the engine started up with no complaints (most cars would still do that in those early days if you could find them in an un-fried state). I pulled the column shifter down to “drive” and proceeded on down the road, rolling all the windows down as I went to try and air out the evidence of the previous owner.

I didn’t realize it at the time but finding that car probably saved my life. I made it all the way to Primm before the engine finally gagged and died from a lack of fuel. This would have been days’ worth of travel on foot, requiring water that I didn’t have with me. Not realizing this, I shrugged, set the brake, and went about the business of removing all of my things from the vehicle. Once all was re-situated, and I had my rifle slung over my shoulder, I gave the front tire a light kick ( see yah ’round, partner ) and continued on my way. The sun was low in the sky, and it would be evening soon so I wanted to see if I could find somewhere in Primm to settle for the night.

I had my eyes peeled for anything that might be useful as I walked into the little town (the larger cities had been swarmed thoroughly once things like “rules” and “manners” had fallen apart—though you could still get lucky—but I had hope for the smaller places with small populations). What I found would disabuse me of any hope. In Primm, I would find yet another example of the complete and total faith we had devoted to our society. There was nothing else for miles in all directions (with the ridiculous exception of a golf course) in this desert, and yet here in, Primm there was nothing to be found that was conducive to living out in the desert. There was an outlet mall packed full of clothing made in India, China, or Taiwan that would fall to tatters after only a few weeks of hard living. All of the restaurants… the Subways and Carl’s Juniors and Taco Bells—all of those were filled with rotting food, if any of that could have been called food at any point. The restaurants did have water but no real way to carry it as it was distributed in cups via a filtered Magic Lever.

I did get lucky at a gas station I found right next to a Starbuck’s (those places where just everywhere) and found non-perishable food in the form of pretzels and beef jerky. The water had been cleaned out by those who had come before me.

The good news was that since I was now on the Nevada side of the border, there were already hotels and casinos available that had been positioned on the utmost extremity of the legal limit to entice those lunatic gamblers who couldn’t restrain themselves from waiting the extra hour or so to just drive into Vegas itself. For me, this meant that lodging would be plentiful. I had not needed to use my sleeping bag under the stars by that point, and I wasn’t looking forward to doing so in the Nevada desert.

I opted for Whiskey Pete’s across the way from the gas station. Crossing the highway, I approached what I can only describe as a hideous attempt at a castle tower slapped onto a tall, hive-like hotel building (“See Bonnie and Clyde’s Getaway Car!” advised a sign out front). I had no idea what castles have to do with either Whiskey or gentlemen named Peter, but then, searching for any kind of logic in a gambling town isn’t exactly the done thing.

The hotel (which I had started thinking of as The Hive) was around the back of the casino itself. I wasn’t interested in navigating my way through the casino. Casinos usually smelled like a stale, wet ashtray even before the world ended. I was in no rush to see what the experience turns into when you mix in desert weather, dead people, and a lack of ventilation. I veered to the left through the parking lot and swung around the back.