Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

The inside space of the building felt more like a warehouse than a garage. The ceiling was set high overhead, and the space stretched back far enough that I couldn’t see the wall on the other side. I was straining my eyes to see better and contemplating going back to the Jeep for my flashlight when the sound of a switch being thrown came from behind me. The interior was illuminated by hanging lights spread throughout the area.

“What the hell?” I asked.

“Solar panels,” said Billy. “Lining the whole roof. They charge an array of batteries along the back wall, which will keep the LED lights going all day and night or run the power tools in the back for a few hours straight before drying out.”

“Does the main house have solar?” asked Jake.

“Unfortunately not,” Billy said. “It was on my list of things to do, but I never got around to it. It was important to get this building online first—all of the critical stuff is here.”

The first thing to grab my attention after the lights were turned on was a truck out in the middle of the floor. I couldn’t tell what kind of truck it was because it was under a tarp. The only thing I could see for sure was that it was big.

“This will be our fall back when all the gas stops working,” said Billy as he rested his hand on the hood. “It’s a diesel, four-wheel drive Ford Super Duty. It makes about one thousand foot-pounds of torque and will happily pull the ass out of a T-rex without even slowing down. I’ve also added a one-hundred-gallon reserve fuel tank up in the truck bed with a transfer pump wired into the truck’s electrical system and a full sized ball hitch on the back. There is a twenty-foot utility trailer back in the corner of the shop by the drums. We’ll be able to push out over a significant distance in this thing without having to refuel.”

I stood up on my toes to look over the bed of the truck to the rear corner of the garage. Next to the trailer Billy mentioned, there were six steel drums stacked in a rack on their sides with three on the bottom and three more on the top. Jake was walking back there to look at them.

“Fifty-five gallons a piece, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Billy said as he joined him. “I started stockpiling diesel as well as some other items not too long ago. Half of those are empty, which works out for us. I hadn’t counted on prioritizing gas, but we’ll need to start collecting gas as part of our regular activities so we can get the most use out of your vehicles while they’ll still run. The steel drums will help. They’re a nice clean environment which will help to maximize the life of the gas we salvage. If we get lucky, we may be able to find some long life additives in surrounding auto shops and the like. It’s possible we’ll be able to extend the useful life out of the gas vehicles by a year or more.”

“What will you do with the diesel?” I asked.

“We’ll find something else to keep it in. Diesel will keep for a decade whether you baby it or treat it like shit. It’s a big reason I got the Ford over there; a decade of useful life, assuming you can keep it fueled and in good repair. The problem is finding more. Diesel wasn’t terribly popular so it won’t be as abundant as gas—it will take longer to find it and stock up a meaningful supply. Being in Wyoming will help, though. A lot of people up this way preferred nice diesel trucks. Also, any shipping trucks we can find should be a minor bonanza. Giant fuel tanks in those semis.”

“You have your own little auto shop back here, don’t you?” Jake asked, looking at the tool boxes and racks.

“More like a combination garage/woodshop.”

Jake looked up a set of wooden stairs that ran to a smaller second level suspended over the rear of the main floor. “What’s up there?”

“Additional storage, a pool table and an old couch, my reloading bench and gun safes, that kind of thing.”

“I can’t believe all this,” I said. “It’s like you were planning on the world falling apart. I’m not complaining now since it all paid off in the end, but what inspires someone to dig in this hard?”

Billy nodded and smiled. “Come on, Little Sis. Let’s get all the stuff from Barnes stacked up in the garage. After that, I’ll see about getting some dinner going and explain while I’m cooking. Hopefully whoever was here left a little food in the pantry.”

After several trips between the Jeep and the garage, Billy shut off the lights and rolled the door back down. He locked both sides and accompanied us back to the truck. There were only a couple of plastic bins left in the bed aside from the spare tires, gas cans, and extra tools. He took a bin, handed the other to Jake, and advised us to leave the rest for the next morning. The bins we carried back to the house were deposited in the main entryway along with the others that had been left by the front door from earlier. With that, Billy slapped his hands together a few times and made for the kitchen.

Jake followed him into the back area, but I made a detour to the bedroom recently claimed by Elizabeth. She was going through the drawers of a highboy dresser along the far wall.

“Hey, what are you doing‽” I blurted. We were clearly operating from different assumptions; to me, we were guests in Billy’s home and to her, she was surveying her new domain.

She looked up at me with no hint of guilt or concern, showing that she actually hadn’t been snooping around. “I thought I could put some of my things in these drawers,” she said. “There’s nothing in them, see?”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s ask Billy about it. I suppose we’ll have to get you some more clothes too. You’re only going to get bigger.”

“I’m pretty big already,” she said proudly.

“Okay, Little Miss Big Girl. We’re getting dinner ready in the kitchen. You wanna come hang out?”

“Maybe later,” she said. “I want to see what else my room has.”

“Ugh, okay. Just…try not to get into anything that looks like you should stay away from it.”

I left her room and went back to the kitchen. I saw that the rear of the house opened up into another common area, more private than the front room. To the left was a good-sized kitchen (not enormous but plenty of room for four people to move around in it) with an island. The coloring followed what I had already seen through the rest of the house, with rich woods everywhere. To the right was a family room-style living area with couches and a now useless TV as the dominant focal point.

Jake and Billy were standing over by the kitchen island; the latter had a little propane grill set up on the island over which a pot of water was set. Next to the pot were a small box of pasta and a jar of red sauce.

“OH, holy crap, spaghetti‽ I don’t think I’d planned on seeing that again, ever.” I said as he ground salt into the water.

“Yeah, don’t get used to it, probably,” Billy said, stirring the pot with a large spoon. “Longer shelf life food is still good right now, but that won’t last. Think of it like the gasoline: best to just consume as much of it as we can right now before it all goes bad.” He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “So, I believe you wanted an explanation as to how a seemingly rational man goes bugnuts and starts preparing for the world to explode.”

“Something like that,” I chuckled.

“Well, Jake got a part of this explanation, but I don’t think even he realized the lengths I’d gone to—”

“I did not,” Jake chimed in while nodding.

“—but the simple answer is: it was all a hobby.”

“A… hobby?” I asked.

“Sure. One that creeps up on you.” Billy walked over to a pantry, retrieved a bottle of water, and had a drink. “Like I told Jake, I was always preaching self-reliance with my people back home, which was an attitude that bled over into my personal life. At first, it started with the normal stuff, right? I was out in California, so first I had earthquake kits in my house and vehicles. The kit in my house had food and water enough to last three days, or just long enough for emergency services to come in and bail me out if we got a really nasty shaker, right?”