Free OUTNUMBERED (Book 5) by Robert Schobernd Page B

warned him when she saw the tree and started braking. She told him to jump right before the truck and trailer tipped over and rolled."
    "How bad is Bryon hurt?"
    "Not bad. He's skinned and bruised and his right forearm is busted. He's lucky Maria saw what was happening so fast and made him bail out."
    I held my arms up as numerous people asked questions. "Were you able to get to her and bring the body back?"
    "No. There's more; it gets worse. In all the tumbling the truck did, the fuel tank ruptured. The truck and trailer ended up side by side against each other. Then the fuel caught fire and burned everything. The trailer was loaded full of food; about half was the vegetables we canned this last summer and fall."
    The six survivors facing us were so sad and dejected, you'd have thought they caused the wreck.
    I turned to the crowd. "Let's all go inside the main room of the lodge where we can see and talk. Tomorrow morning, we'll go have a look and retrieve Maria. We'll see she gets a proper burial."
    I knew from experience what recovering a burnt corpse would entail. I'd have to be very discerning in picking who went along. After the funeral, heavy hearts were sure to slow the work progress for the rest of the week, but eventually we'd all have to deal with the loss and move on.
     
    Two weeks after I'd moved my family to our new home, the first barn was ninety-five percent finished, and framing for the second structure was started. The horse barn would finish first and the cow barn last. The building crews made excellent progress and exceeded my and John's expectations given the setback we'd suffered from losing Maria. John and Anthony felt completion of the second barn would be achieved considerably faster because it was a carbon copy of the first and the craftsmen knew each step without having to stop and consult John or the drawings.
    While the barns were being worked, the portable buildings arrived and were set in place. Shane had shown me how to connect the generator to the power panel in the office, and it was functioning with power for lights and our equipment. Like all the other buildings, a small wood stove had been installed to provide heat.
    As soon as the metal roof was on the second barn, we pulled people to start on the repair shop. John had drawings ready for it, and the crew finished construction in six days. The dry food and miscellaneous articles storage building was our final large endeavor prior to moving all of our people from Deliverance. It was almost complete in two weeks, so four people drove to the nearest Walmart store to disassemble commercial shelving units in the warehouse and bring them back to the storage building. Since the building wouldn't be heated, we divided the perishable foods among the families and let each take responsibility for their own food supply.
     
    We'd conducted weekly update meetings with the entire group in the resort's main building. The lobby area was too big to heat, and it would be torn down at our leisure to salvage the lumber.
    A wood burner was installed in the new warehouse to be used only during meetings, and the big room was designated the official meeting place. At the Wednesday morning meeting in the first week of December, there was a lot of discussion about the remaining work.
    Kira opened the meeting by saying, "Okay everyone, listen up. John says trimming out of the major buildings will finish this week. That means more people will be shifted to building pens and sheds for the smaller livestock: pigs, sheep, goats and chickens. Vince is leaving in the morning for Deliverance with the convoy. He'll get with Shane and a crew, then take an eighteen-wheeler to Chicago. They'll leave the following morning for the Walmart warehouse we've gone to before. Their goal is to pick up the rest of the survival food our last foray found there. We expect them back here within a week." She paused for comments amid groans about the survival food most joked about but would