The Last Haul
Dawn on our last day at the farm was busier than it had ever been. Long before the sun broke the horizon, people were already at their posts, working in silence. The air hung thick with the low growl of diesel engines, the clash of metal on metal, and the restless shuffle of bodies — a strange tension humming through it all.
I finished my final check of the trailer's inventory, then headed for the ramp door with Mike to test the Gun Nest we'd completed the day before.
"Just about done. Why don't you take a look."
"Let's have a look."
Mike hit the hydraulic switch mounted inside the ramp door. With a rising whine, the massive steel door unfolded and settled smoothly into a horizontal platform. An Mk 48 light machine gun sat locked into a rigid mount on top of it. I climbed up and took hold of the gun myself. The mount didn't budge a millimeter, and the U-shaped ballistic shield wrapping the gunner's position had more than enough coverage for two men.
The shape of it was unusual. The entire armor plate sloped inward, and it rose high enough to protect a gunner's head. The wide, horizontal firing port and the mount looked like they could cover a good hundred and twenty degrees to the rear.
"Mike. The gun shield's sloped like that to throw off incoming rounds?"
"Caught that right away, didn't you. I borrowed a bit from tank armor design. Pack that cavity with something like sacks of raisins and you've got yourself a layer of secondary armor. And when the ramp door's up, it doubles as a shelf. Hahaha."
"That's incredible."
"You still wear the helmet, though. I put a hook for it right there on the side. And I rigged a safety tether so the gunner doesn't go over the edge while we're rolling."
Where he pointed, a heavy belt and carabiner had been installed — solid enough to clip into a gunner's waist or plate carrier.
"This is excellent. This should be more than enough."
"That's not all of it."
He let out a hearty laugh and kept going.
"I added a few more tricks."
Mike pulled another lever inside the shield. A metallic clank rang out, and the side plates of the Gun Nest unfolded like wings, forming new firing platforms on either flank.
"Whoa..."
"This Gun Nest covers a hundred and eighty degrees to the rear as a baseline, but once you deploy the wings, additional shooters can fire from both sides — fore and aft along the flanks. No telling what you'll run into on the road, so I figured I'd build it in."
"Yeah. I never even thought of that."
"Which is why you clip into that tether while the ramp door is coming down."
"Right, right. Haha."
I gave him a thumbs-up, genuinely impressed with the work. When we raised the ramp door again, the heavy machine gun hung against the inner wall of the trailer as if it had always been part of the furniture.
"It won't shift around while we're rolling?"
"Don't worry about it. I've got it locked down with that — it'll take more than a hard bump to shake it loose."
Mike pointed to a heavy-duty down strap running from the bottom of the ramp door to the Gun Nest. In an emergency, a single lever would pop the whole thing free.
We were finishing the last of the checks when Jake and Frank came toward us, loaded down with gear.
"Boss!"
"What's that?"
"Boss, let's get this on the truck."
In their hands was the white antenna that had been mounted on the farmhouse roof — a Starlink satellite internet terminal.
"On my truck? Why not put it on the motorhome?"
Jake grinned at the question.
"It's already got one. The old man had a transcontinental trip planned from the beginning. Haha."
Frank jumped in.
"Vehicle mount's already on hand, and your truck's inverter has juice to spare, so we'll have it up in no time. Means we'll have internet at headquarters from here on out."
Frank and Jake climbed straight onto the trailer roof and started installing the Starlink antenna with the easy confidence of men who had done it before. The whole job was finished in under an hour. We came back inside the trailer and I booted up my laptop. A moment later, the little icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen announced that we were online.
Jake pulled up YouTube first. The video played, but even with the quality turned down it kept buffering.
"Looks like video streaming is hit-or-miss."
Next we opened Reddit and the major news sites. Pages built of text and still images loaded with a slight delay, but there was no trouble at all reading the content.
"Still, this is more than good enough. We'll be able to pull all the text-based intel we need."
Jake tapped at the keyboard, looking satisfied, and kept going.
"Boss, take a look at this. Since the catastrophe, local survivor subreddits have been popping up all over Reddit."
"..."
"There's a lot of bad intel and weird posts mixed in, but they're still useful for checking regional news in real time."
Jake brought up the Bakersfield-area survivor forum and clicked the post with the highest view count.
Hope you all are hanging in there. Figured I'd share what I've seen on the ground since the quake. If anyone else has intel, drop it in the comments.
Earthquake damage: Our farm came through pretty much okay, thank God. But I'm hearing there's subsidence on stretches of Highway 58 heading toward Tehachapi. The coastal cities look completely flattened. Do NOT even think about going that way.
Refugees: No big columns yet, but I'm already hearing reports of small family groups walking up I-5 out of LA. So far they seem more desperate than dangerous — people who need help, not raiders.
Supplies: The Walmart and Costco in town were stripped to the walls as of yesterday. Rumors say a few truck stops and outlying stores still have stock, but I don't know if burning the fuel to get there is worth it. Not a single gas station in town has a drop of fuel left. We're all on whatever we stockpiled.
Weather: The Great Winter is getting worse. Gray-outs during the day are getting more frequent — you can barely see the sun. Nights are dropping close to zero even this far south. This isn't California weather anymore.
That's all I've got.
Watch yourselves around outsiders. Good luck.
I scrolled down beneath the post. Among the comments, one had drawn a particularly high number of upvotes.
"Take a look at this."
Jake pointed to a comment that read:
Food and medical supplies are so short they're on the verge of losing control, so they've stopped taking people in.
That's why you've got these columns of people with nowhere to go, just keeping on south or east. This is solid intel.
It was what I'd expected. I spoke evenly.
"We leave tomorrow. That hasn't changed."
Then I looked at Jake and gave the order.
"Jake. Once all our vehicles are clear of the farm tomorrow, use the heavy equipment to drag every wrecked vehicle we've captured across the access road and block it off. Then follow us in the helicopter."
"Copy, Boss."
Jake answered short and stepped out of the trailer to see to the rest of his preparations.
I was outside inspecting the vehicles when Dave's voice came over the radio.
"Go ahead."
I looked up at the trailer roof. Solar panels packed it from edge to edge, but if we spread the sacks out wide, there would be room enough.
"Go ahead. There's room. Do it."
A short while later, the truck Dave was leading pulled up beside my trailer with a Skid Loader in tow. They moved like a well-oiled machine. Cody lifted the heavy produce sacks in the Skid Loader's bucket; Dave and two young men climbed onto the roof, took each load, set it in place, and lashed it down. They finished by throwing a heavy tarp over the whole stack, and that was the job done.
Looking at the sacks covering the roof, I felt a pang over the solar panels disappearing under them. But with volcanic ash already gutting the panels' output, filling our stomachs came first.
The frantic day burned down, and we gathered around the table for our last supper in the farmhouse. Even with a generous spread in front of us, every face carried the same mix of reluctance to leave and unease about the road ahead. Eleanor's prayer — Dave's mother — was the same as always, until the last line.
Everyone at the table knew who that prayer was meant for. After the meal, we drifted toward the living-room television as if we had all agreed on it without a word. On the screen, the end of the world was still being broadcast live.
"This might be the last time we ever watch TV."
Liam, Frank's son, tossed the line out, and Frank answered in a voice that was trying too hard to stay bright.
"What are you talking about? We hit a big truck stop on the way, hook up the cable, watch as much as we want."
Gunner shut that down in a low voice.
"The second we roll a three-thousand-gallon tanker into a truck stop, we become a walking target."
A heavy silence settled over the living room again. That was when the anchor's voice on the television caught every eye in the room. Her face was pale with exhaustion and despair, but her voice held a forced calm.
The screen cut to aerial footage of Los Angeles. The skyline that had once glittered was a grotesque jumble of collapsed and listing towers, and the freeways cutting through the city lay severed in places, sprawled out like the carcass of a giant snake. The whole city was drowning in a haze of pale dust and black smoke.
Over the anchor's voice, shaky ground-level footage overlaid the image. Through the gaps between burning cars and the rubble of fallen buildings, men with guns smashed storefront glass and hauled out whatever they could carry.
Back in the studio, the anchor looked straight into the camera and opened her mouth as if she were delivering a final farewell.
On any other night we would have turned the television off around then and gone our separate ways. Nobody reached for the remote. Whether it was the anchor's last line or the knowledge that we might not see a television again for a long time, I couldn't say — but everyone sat staring at the screen even after it switched over to some old movie nobody was watching.
One by one they drifted back to their quarters, and I returned to the trailer. I tossed Wolf a treat, then opened the laptop.
Why didn't I think of putting Starlink on the truck from the start?
I connected to Reddit again through the terminal Jake had installed. The screen glowing faintly in the dark, I already knew, would be our only window to the outside world for a while.
I searched around and found a subreddit for truckers. r/TheLastHaul. The name — The Last Haul — left a bitter taste, but the board was packed with raw, unfiltered intel from people still alive on the road. I skimmed a few of the thread titles.
▲ Do NOT come to California. This place is hell.
I was paging through when my finger stopped. A title with a name I knew had caught my eye.
I stared at Big Bill's message on the screen for a long time, and the image of him climbing into his truck, holding up the hand I'd stitched closed, rose unbidden in my mind.
On the last day before we left the farm, through a window we had opened to the world for the first time, a ghost of the past was waving back.
It felt like a sign from fate that this road would not be a lonely one. But I knew just as well that in a world of the living, old ties could just as easily be sweet bait on a hook.