Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  “Negative,” said Gibs.

  “Huh,” said Jake. He began to walk the perimeter of the container, looking it over at each point of contact.

  “I see the problem,” Wang said, crouching next to the brick pillar with the jack. We all walked over to join him. “It’s actually working okay; it’s just that the soil’s soft enough that the blocks are compacting down into it.”

  “Well…shit,” said Gibs. “Now what? Stack them higher? Do we have enough?”

  “No, we don’t need to do that,” Wang said, shaking his head. He was still crouched down by the brick stack and gestured with both hands, palms down, towards the ground as he explained: “We just need to find a way to spread the load out over a wider area. You said we had some four-by-six boards, right Oscar?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Okay, then let’s cut those into five foot lengths and put a few under each pile.”

  “Under each pile?” asked Gibs. “As in, we have to unstack and restack each pile?”

  “Afraid so.”

  Gibs sighed, “…Like a bunch of monkeys trying to fuck a bucket.”

  “Stand back, you guys,” advised Jake. “I don’t want you close when I’m operating the jack.”

  He turned a little silver knob on the side of the jack’s base, which caused the central piston to lower back down into the bottle, and removed the jack from the pile. We all began to take each stack down while Oscar trotted back to the garage to select and cut the additional wooden beams. After all of the block stacks were moved aside (I had been shocked to find that the bottom cinder blocks couldn’t actually be pulled out of their depressions in the soil without first wiggling them around hard), we all went around and did our best to smooth the dirt over and stamp it down level. Oscar returned around this time carrying three of the five foot beams in an arm load. Jake and Gibs ran back to the garage to retrieve the rest.

  As suggested, we placed the beams side by side at each corner and began the painful process of stacking all of the cinder blocks and bricks back up to the bottoms of the beams that were chained to the container. We had a few bricks left over at each point this time due to the distance being shortened by the addition of the wood beams in the dirt.

  With everything back in place, Jake replaced the bottle jack and began to pump the handle again. This time, a loud, echoing, metal groan issued from the trailer almost immediately, making us all jump a foot off the ground, and causing us to laugh in varying degrees as Jake continued to pump away at the handle. When the corner of the container was about three inches off the trailer, he stopped.

  “Right, so now what?” I asked. “You don’t have three more of those jacks, do you?”

  “No,” Jake said. “What we need to do is make another stack of bricks next to this jack going all the way up to the beam. Then I can lower the jack. This corner will stay raised up off the trailer because of the second stack. Then, we can move the first stack from this location over to another corner and jack that end up. Once we have the other end up, we’ll increase the height of the initial stack at that end. We’ll just do this at each corner, one at a time, until each corner of the container is lifted three or four inches off the trailer. Once we do that, we can just drive the truck out from under it. Lowering it back down to the ground is just the reverse of that process.”

  “But if we try to do a second stack of bricks, won’t that just bury into the dirt too?” I asked.

  “Aw, shit,” said Oscar. “Hang on; I’ll go cut a couple more beams.”

  “Monkeys and buckets, people,” grumbled Gibs. “Monkeys and goddamned buckets.”

  Within one week’s time, we had the outhouses fully constructed along with four shipping containers all lined up next to each other and well on their way to being converted into livable homes. Oscar worked on these like a lunatic, driving himself from sunup to sundown each day, barely ever stopping to eat or rest. He pulled in the rest of us to help along the way, often times just grabbing whoever happened to be close by, yet some of us became regular helpers when we weren’t out trying to get more food, that persistent, nagging worry that drove everyone (that still drives everyone today, honestly). Some of us kept coming back to help because we enjoyed learning how to do new things – some in our group had never even driven a nail before – and others pitched in out of simple curiosity; they wanted to see how a row of ugly, boxed containers would turn into anything that a sane person would want to live in.

  Each container was spaced about fifty feet apart to help ensure that they would all catch a decent amount of cross wind for ventilation. I wasn’t really sure how that mattered, since they were just windowless boxes, until Oscar explained that each unit would be getting a series of windows on each side for relief in the summer months.

  He burned up a good amount of diesel travelling to and from Jackson in that first week alone just getting everything he would need. I usually ended up going along just to fill in guard duty, though we rarely saw anyone out there, and he almost always had one of the larger men along on the trip as well to help him carry items. With all the stuff we brought back to the Bowl, we almost could have built a regular house.

  He started by having Fred cut windows out of each unit with the torch that had been left behind by Howard’s group a few months earlier. These weren’t any small windows either; each “home” got two large sash windows on each side, directly across from each other, which Oscar said would produce a good cross breeze in the warmer months. These windows were cut to a specific size to match - you guessed it - all of the frame windows Oscar had managed to lift from stores in the surrounding city. These were all the high quality double paned affairs, as well. It was fun to watch him go shopping for this stuff. You could see that he was taking extreme pleasure in grabbing the best and most expensive versions of every item he could find, since price was no longer a barrier. It didn’t help (or perhaps Oscar considered it a great help) that, with the exception of items like sandbags and certain tools like axes, sledgehammers, crowbars, and the like, most home improvement stores were generally untouched by rioting or destruction.

  So, as I said, each unit got the two sash windows, not to mention an assortment of smaller windows at various points. Fred also cut holes for doors, in all cases along the longer side walls rather than on the ends, and three holes in each roof to install skylights. None of these units were getting electricity of any kind so Oscar was doing everything he could think of to cool and light them naturally.

  The holes looked really ragged to start out, which caused some of us to share disturbed glances, but Oscar’s obvious faith and self-confidence sustained us through our doubts. He never showed a moment’s hesitation throughout the entire process of converting these units. No matter what part he was working on, he was always mentally further along. I came to realize just how gifted the guy is. It was like he would plan out whatever the current task was that he had to work on and then just stop thinking about it entirely; he would just tell his body to go do it, and it would. And while his body was busy working on that little project, his brain would be busy working out the planning for whatever phase came next. Jake, who is probably the smartest person I’ll ever meet, used to just stand back and watch Oscar in either amazement or admiration…it’s always hard to tell with Jake because his expressions are so damned subdued, but it was definitely one of those.

  When all of the various holes had been cut into the containers, Oscar shifted gears and began to frame the insides with steel studs, screwing each piece directly into the walls of the container with a battery-powered drill. Once the internal framing of the unit was completed, he started up the generator and went around the outer perimeter with an angle grinder (which happened not to be cordless), smoothing out the sharp ends of all the screws that had punched through the surface. Later, he made a second pass around each building and smeared some kind of dark goop over each puncture, which he told us would harden up and seal the hole off from any outside moisture. />
  He installed all of the windows, skylights, and doors after that. What followed soon after was a bit of inspiration that I was certain came from insanity, yet I was soon proven wrong. Oscar insisted that the scavenging teams go out and get four new fifty-five gallon drums, preferably plastic, or at least rain barrels if the drums couldn’t be found. While the teams were out doing that, he climbed on top of each unit and poured some water over the roof to see which way it would run off (the ground was nearly level and we hadn’t bothered to flatten it out perfectly before setting the containers down, so there was a bit of a tilt to each container; Oscar had insisted this was a good thing as it would keep water from pooling on the tops of them when it rained). He then built a rain gutter running around the entire outside perimeter of each unit and positioned the spouts at their respective runoff points. This stage in the process took long enough that many of the barrels he would need had already shown up by the time he was finishing.

  Each container home received a rain barrel (at or around fifty-five gallons) on a raised platform just underneath the spout of the rain gutter, with the gutter itself tied into the feed hose of the barrel through something Oscar referred to as a diverter. He ran the drain hose of the barrel through a hole in the wall into the inside of the home, which he connected to copper plumbing that ran down the wall frame and eventually terminated in a faucet.

  When he had finished one of these he stood back with his hands on his hips and smiled. He looked over at me and said, “So these places’ll have running water…ish.”

  I was impressed but there were parts of it that I still couldn’t figure out. “Where does the water go, though?”

  Oscar pointed below the faucet and said, “I’m going to build a sink right there with an open bottom and we can put like a wash basin or a bucket under it. You’ll still have to dump out the water when it fills up but it’s better than running down to the creek every time you need to wash something.”

  I shook my head, laughed, and said, “This is freaking brilliant! This would have never occurred to me in a million years.” Oscar actually blushed when I said that.

  I thought for a minute, then, and asked, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to run the sink back outside so we don’t have to dump a bucket of water all the time?”

  “I thought about that,” he said, “but decided not to for a couple of reasons. For one, we don’t want to just dump water back into the dirt. Even if it’s dirty, it’s still water we could use for, like, crops or whatever, right? I also thought about just running it outside into another barrel but I didn’t like how out of sight that idea was. I was afraid that if we could just make water come and go when we wanted, we might fall back into old habits and waste the stuff carelessly. If we’re forced to carry it out and do something with it each time the sink fills up, I think we’ll be a lot more careful with it.”

  “I can’t argue with any of that,” I said. “So what’s next?”

  “Oh, all kinds of shit,” he said as he walked towards the door. “I gotta pack insulation in all these walls, hang drywall, get it all taped off and sanded, figure out how I’m gonna do flooring…I’ll probably give all the kids a bunch of painting equipment and have them paint the outsides of these things just to make sure they’re fully protected from rust and whatnot.”

  “Oscar,” I said. He stopped talking abruptly and looked back at me.

  “This…this is really impressive. I had no idea you were this talented. I guess I was kind of pissed at Jake when he brought you all back here. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hide it very well. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I’m glad he did. Jake was right…again.”

  He laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it, Amanda. You were feeling the same thing as the rest of us. And, yeah, from what I’ve seen, Jake seems to make a habit of being right a lot.”

  “The dick…” I said.

  He laughed hard that time, nodded, and agreed, “Yep. The Dick.”

  18 – Range Master

  Gibs

  If Jake didn’t want me to turn our people into full Marines it was at least strongly implied that he was looking for Marine-like objects. I didn’t have the first clue how close I was going to be able to get to that goal, and never would until I had a good assessment of where everyone was at. I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for badass levels of competency but I figured I could at least get them all moving in a similar direction without flagging each other. I didn’t really know what to expect at the time and decided to just take things easy and see what might happen.

  Getting people trained on weaponry means sending a lot of rounds downrange, so the first thing I had to do was get together with Jake and inventory the tools I had to work with. This was well back in the days before everyone kept a weapon either on their person or locked up in their home, so everything was centrally located up on the second floor of the garage by all of the reloading equipment. It was this whole wooden deck construction that appeared to be custom made after the garage building itself was put up; wrapping around the back of the building in a giant U-shape. There were safes up there at the time but the firearms he and Amanda owned by that point were so numerous that only a portion of them were locked in the garage; the rest were kept under lock and key in the cabin. He and I had both hauled them all over and laid them out on the floor.

  I’m not going to belabor this document with a laundry list of manufacturers and features. I will say that, besides Jake’s AK and Amanda’s bullpup, there were a fair number of rifles in both 5.56x45 and 7.62x39, not to mention a shotgun and some handguns. Between that and what my group brought to the party, there was enough hardware there to keep half of our people armed all of the time, which wasn’t such a bad start.

  The real problem was the ammunition. There wasn’t nearly enough of it.

  “How many rounds do you have here?” I asked. “Of each?”

  “I haven’t done an exact count, but I’d estimate on the order of twenty thousand of the 5.56, another eight thousand or so of 7.62, five thousand of assorted shotgun rounds, and probably fifteen hundred of assorted handgun ammunition. Is…is that a problem?” he asked when I began to shake my head.

  “That’s not enough. We’re going to shoot all that up before we even get started,” I said.

  He sat quietly and blinked at me for a few moments before saying, “You must be joking, of course.”

  “I’m absolutely not,” I said. “I’m fairly certain most of these people have never even fired a weapon before. Look at this,” I held up my hands to start ticking off names, “Davidson, Rebecca, Oscar, Wang…uh…Edgar, Jeff, Monica, Greg, Alan, and Alish. That’s ten people, not counting yourself and Amanda, the children, or the infirm. Now, do you have any idea how many rounds I’ll typically go through on an average day at the range? I mean just taking it easy and keeping my skills current?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Maybe five hundred,” I said. “Times ten people. Five thousand rounds, or thereabouts, on day one. And that’ll just be enough to start getting them familiar with the various weapons. We’ve gotta do this for days. Fuck, we gotta do this for weeks to get that muscle memory built up. I need to get them shooting at distance, I need to get them drilling close in, I have to work with them moving in teams. Reloading drills, speed drills, run ‘n guns. What you have here will be about enough to get them to a point where they stop blinking every time a rifle fires. This is going to take an assload of bullets, Jake.”

  He sat back and boggled at this. “I…well, I never realized…we don’t have nearly enough, do we?”

  “No, man, we don’t. We’ll need to find a lot more.”

  “Shit,” Jake whispered, looking down at the rifles and handguns all laid out on a blanket along the wooden planks. “Well, what can we do with what we have?”

  I sighed and looked at the pile as well. “I suppose I could have them shooting halfway decent groups at a hundred yards. I’m telling you, you’re looking at a shitzillion bullets to get them
competent. This is what it takes: frequency. It makes all the difference between capable people and hobbyists.”

  He nodded, drew in a deep breath, and let it out. “Start them on ARs,” he said. “Use fifteen thousand rounds of 5.56 to get them going but don’t exceed that. Find a way to stretch that out as much as you can. I’ll work on discovering more ammunition. Save that brass; I’ll start learning how to reload ammo. Billy had a ton of that material socked away here. It should help us to limp along for a little while, at least.”

  “Aye-aye,” I said, and began pulling out the relevant rifles.

  Amanda

  I had some idea about what Jake and Gibs had discussed early on specifically because Jake had mentioned it to me beforehand to get my thoughts on the matter and plan out our approach. I did not realize, however, just how seriously Gibs would take his assignment.

  By the time he really began making an effort to work with all of us, a general routine had already been established – this was after something like a week and a half or two weeks after his crew had been living with us on the property. Oscar was just finishing off the drywall in the first container home by this point and had built up such a rhythm that he always had the Page brothers (Alan and Greg) working alongside him. He was so impressed by how hard they were willing to work despite their young age and obviously thin frames that he flat out declared the second finished container would be their home without even consulting with Jake or anyone else. We all saw how hard they were driving themselves to get the shelters finished as fast as possible, though, so not a one of us complained over it. I think it also helped that the brothers both turned out to be a couple of jokers as well, once they loosened up around us and began to come out of their shells. Oscar himself was an epic knucklehead, so they fit right in with him.

  Besides this activity, there was ongoing scavenging that had to be kept up every single day. The food situation was a constant anchor on everyone’s psyche and, after a week of seeing just how much food nineteen people could actually put away, getting more became this constant race we never felt we could actually win. The problem was that you could never just collect food and stash it away; you had to eat some of it while you were in the process of getting it. So if you found, say, thirty pounds of good, long-life food on a Monday, you’d have to eat some portion of that after you brought it home because people are basically just eating machines…you’ve got to keep fed every day. So you don’t actually get to keep thirty pounds of food. Between nineteen people, you probably only get to keep fifty percent of thirty pounds of food. If you’re not as fortunate on the following day and you find no food at all, you end up eating the remaining fifty percent of yesterday’s find, and you’re back to square one, see?