299 Days: The Preparation (11 page)

In he went. He knew from Forks that a shotgun was the perfect home defense weapon, so that’s what he was going to get.

The second he walked in the store, he knew he’d done the right thing. There was nothing scary or “dirty” about a gun store. It was like any other store.

The sales people in the store were very helpful. They could spot a yuppie getting a first gun a mile away, and they wanted to help. Grant got an inexpensive pump 12 gauge, a Winchester 1300 Home Defender. It would do. He got one box of twenty-five shells and a trigger lock, too. He paid cash; no credit card for Lisa to find out about. He had just cashed an expense check from work reimbursing him for a few months’ of miles he had driven on WAB business. He had been planning to turn the cash over to Lisa, as usual. Not anymore.

Right then and there he decided he would start to put the cash from expense checks in an envelope in the car. This is how he would spend money without Lisa knowing.

Grant noticed that, unlike the grocery store, Capitol City had plenty of inventory in the back. It made sense that a gun store wouldn’t have just-in-time inventory. If the grocery stores are empty, then people will be flocking to gun stores.

Did I just have that thought? Grant wondered. What is wrong with me? That trip back to Forks had really changed him. Now he saw signs of American society’s dependence everywhere he looked.

The whole experience of walking into a gun store was over in about twenty minutes. He filled out the paperwork and got his shotgun.

“Isn’t there some kind of waiting period for getting a gun?” he asked the sales clerk.

“Nope,” the guy said. “Not in Washington. No waiting period on long guns, only handguns.”

After calling a phone number where the police checked out that Grant wasn’t a felon, the clerk rang up the sale and handed Grant a large rectangular box labeled “Winchester.” That was it. Grant was now a gun owner.

Grant thanked the clerk and picked up the rectangular box and put in his car. When he got out to his car and put the box in his trunk, Grant chuckled. That was easier than I thought, he said to himself. Then it hit him: he had changed. A half hour ago he was a helpless and frightened sheeple. Now he was a gun owner. He immediately felt more at ease. The world isn’t so scary when you can protect yourself.

As he left the gun store parking lot, Grant started to wonder how he would get the gun into the house. What if Lisa was home? He felt like he was smuggling contraband. He laughed again because many husbands were going to the porn store and then smuggling it into the house. He was just trying to have a gun to defend them. What a horrible husband he was.

On the short trip from Capitol City Guns to the Cedars, Grant practiced his line. He hated lying to Lisa but, as the Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie “A Few Good Men” said, “You can’t handle the truth!” That was it. She couldn’t handle the truth and he needed to do this.

Lisa was unloading some groceries— of course, it had been since yesterday that they went to the grocery store— when Grant came home. He walked in with the shotgun box.

“Hey,” Grant said, “look what my dad gave me. Mom said he wanted me to have it. Don’t worry, it came with a trigger lock.” Grant was afraid for her to see the shotgun. It was one thing to see a box, but another thing to see a scary gun.

Lisa glared. But she was thinking. She had secretly been wondering why Grant didn’t have a gun in the house. She had heard about a friend of a friend who had a prowler on the front porch and it took several minutes for the police to come. And the trigger lock would take care of the concern about the kids. She saw lots of things in the ER from unlocked guns and kids.

“Let me see the trigger lock,” she said. Grant opened the box and the trigger lock was on. She thought about it. This gun actually made sense. She was actually a little proud that her couch potato husband was finally taking responsibility for something around the house like their security. Maybe he wasn’t so worthless, after all.

“As long as the trigger lock is always on,” Lisa said. “I mean always except if there’s a robber. And the bullets are kept separately. And the gun and the bullets are kept up high where the kids can’t get them.”

Grant couldn’t believe how well this was going. “Of course,” he said. “That’s perfectly reasonable.” It was.

Grant was a gun owner, and his wife was OK with it. That felt pretty good.

A few days later, the nagging feelings about dependence came back. The power went out for a few hours and Grant’s mind went into a whirlwind thinking about all the things that needed electricity. He realized that when the power was off, the police were hamstrung. Defending his family was up to him. You can’t outsource your family’s security. You have to man up and get it done.

A few days later, Grant decided to try out the new shotgun. He swung by a sporting goods store to get a second box of shells; it would be less “embarrassing” going into a sporting goods store than a gun store. He would leave the first box of twenty-five shells at home for home defense. He had asked the clerk at the sporting goods store where to shoot. They told him about a gravel pit outside town where people shot. Grant headed there with his box of shells and his new shiny shotgun.

Grant knew how to shoot a shotgun from growing up in Forks, but he ran into something he hadn’t experienced before. The new shotgun was jamming. Oh great. It must be broken. He would go return it and get a new one.

A guy shooting at the gravel pit, who looked like a country boy, came up to him.

“That thing jammin’?”the guy asked.

“Yep,” Grant said. “I think it’s broken.”

“Let me see if I can fix it,” the guy said. He quickly took the gun apart for cleaning and asked if Grant had ever lubricated the bolt. No, he hadn’t.

“You know how to do that?” Grant asked, pointing the bolt in the guy’s hand.

The guy looked at Grant like he was an idiot. “Yeah. It’s not hard.” After a squirt of oil, the gun ran fine.

Grant realized that he was such a sissified and dependent suburbanite that he didn’t even know to perform simple maintenance on a shotgun. His immediate thought when something didn’t work was to get a new one. Like a sheeple consumer. The idea of fixing it never crossed his mind. That’s what highly trained specialists did. Lawyers didn’t fix things.

Oh, God, did he just think that? How stupid was that?

What if he had tried to use that shotgun when someone was trying to kill his family? What if it had jammed because he’d never test fired it?

A few days later, Steve called and said he would be in Olympia for some auto parts business. They got together and started talking about how suburbanites like Grant lived. Steve said something that stuck with Grant for the rest of his life.

“We’re living under a false economy,” Steve said.

Exactly. That’s what had been bugging Grant. This was all fake and couldn’t go on. Steve, the auto parts store manager in Forks, knew more about reality than Grant’s economics professors at the University of Washington. Those idiots told everyone that America could just have a service economy and not build anything, and that whenever there was a downturn the government could just print and spend more money. What could possibly go wrong?

Grant kept asking Steve about how he lived back in Forks. He was fascinated about how much Steve could do: build things, hunt, and fish, can food they grew in their garden, all of that. The nagging feeling about dependence was there again, but Grant knew that he couldn’t just start living like Steve did in Forks. It was really bugging him.

Chapter 14

Survivalist

Grant was feeling his oats. He was not afraid to look at guns. Hell, he’d just bought one and successfully smuggled it into the house. He was invincible.

It was much easier going into a gun store the second time as opposed to the first. Grant went back to Capitol City and looked at all of the cool guns. Wow. He had forgotten how much he loved them.

The expense-check envelope in the car was full, so he bought a .38 revolver; a gently used Smith & Wesson with a three-inch barrel so it wouldn’t kick as much as a snub nose. It is hard to go wrong with one of those; simple to operate, and ammo is relatively cheap and plentiful. He went out to the gravel pit. It shot beautifully. He loved it.

He had fallen back in love with guns. They felt so good in his hands. When he handled one, he didn’t feel like a dependent suburbanite. Grant remembered how safe he felt with a gun. The ogre couldn’t hurt him when he had one. He was safe.

He went back to Capitol City and got a Crimson Trace laser grip for the .38. It put a red dot exactly where the bullet would go. It made aiming almost effortless. It was so easy that Lisa, or any new shooter who didn’t practice using guns, could do it in a stressful situation. And a revolver was very simple to operate; no cocking, no safeties, no magazine or slide that could jam.

At the gun store, Grant saw that guys buying handguns could avoid waiting five days to pick up a handgun if they had a concealed weapons permit. As whacked out as Washington State was, at least they had good gun laws. A permit was only $35, so he got one. He now had a concealable revolver and a permit to carry it.

But he didn’t carry it; that would be weird. He kept the permit secret from Lisa. She would think he was a gun-crazed nut. He put a trigger lock on the .38 and hid it where Lisa would never find it. He hid the box of .38 ammo; the one box of fifty shells. That should be enough.

As he was taking baby steps toward being prepared, the nagging thoughts about dependency were getting more intense and frequent. Grant kept thinking he should learn about things. He needed to learn — actually, relearn — how to survive. Not just how to build a fire in the woods. He needed to learn the survival mindset. He had to get in the habit of figuring out a solution on his own instead of depending on someone to supply him food or fix something.

Grant went to the bookstore to find books on “survival.” He was looking at the books secretly; he didn’t want anyone to know what he was looking at. It felt like the first trip to the gun store. It was like he was looking for a book like “Bestiality Illustrated.”

Grant meandered over to the “Outdoors” section of the bookstore and waited until no one was looking. Then he pulled a book, the
Special Forces Survival Manual,
off the shelf and looked at it, shielding it so no one could see the title.

That book had things in there about building a fire and making traps to get small game. That wasn’t the kind of survival knowledge he needed. Oh, sure, it was good stuff to know and he planned on learning that at some point. But right now, at this early stage of his journey into prepping, he needed to find a book that would tell him how to be an independent man. There were none.

Grant left the bookstore empty handed and disappointed that there wasn’t some book he could read that would teach him everything he needed to know. This survival thing might be more difficult than he thought.

When he got home and saw that Lisa wasn’t there, Grant got on his computer. He did a Google search for “survival.” He erased his browsing history so Lisa wouldn’t find out his secret, shameful interest in something so sick and wrong. He started to laugh at himself; it’s not porn, it’s learning how to save your family and live through bad situations. Since when is that a shameful thing?

Grant had an iPod and liked podcasts. So he searched the iTunes Store for “survival,” and many bizarre podcasts came up. Some of them were the crazy tinfoil hat kind of “survivalists”: the government is going to round you up and put you in camps, the Jews are taking over the world, etc. That image of a survivalist was exactly what Grant was afraid of. “Survivalist” seemed to mean “white supremacist” and “conspiracy theorist.”

Great, Grant sarcastically said to himself. He was going insane.

He was worried about society breaking down and only a bunch of weirdoes shared his concern. If the only people who were survivalists were weirdoes, then he wasn’t a survivalist.

Grant clicked on one last search result: “The Survival Podcast.”

The stats showed that exactly 173 people were subscribing to this podcast. It probably sucked.

He listened for a few minutes. Whoa. The guy doing the podcast wasn’t crazy. He was really smart. He was practical. He talked about how to store food, how to learn skills, how to grow a garden, alternate sources of electricity and water. Jack Spirko was his name. He did this podcast while he was driving in his car. Grant was hooked.

Besides the non-nuttiness of the guy and the practical information, the other thing that Grant liked about the Survival Podcast was that Spirko seemed to be just like him. He had grown up in the country and lived a lot like they did in Forks. Spirko got a big job and turned into a suburban guy, but felt like the whole thing was a fake. Just like Grant. Spirko returned to his country boy roots and was telling everyone else who would listen— all 173 of them— about how they, too, could get more independent and survive whatever might be coming. Spirko made it clear that he wasn’t a racist or an anti-Semite. He was a libertarian.

Grant hit the button on iTunes to become a subscriber to the Survival Podcast. He could feel that something bad was coming to America. It was the strongest nagging feeling he’d had up to that point. The economy seemed to be a giant fraud. The analysts on CNBC kept saying that things were fine but Grant didn’t believe them. Jack Spirko was telling people to get out of the stock market. That was preposterous; the Dow was at 14,000. Spirko was adamant.

Then it happened. All kinds of banks were failing. There was full-on panic in the U.S. It looked like the financial system would melt down.

Grant kicked his survival preparations— “preps” as Spirko called them— into high gear. He felt bad for reacting so strongly and perhaps panicking, but he felt the need to get food and guns ASAP. When Grant thought about the preps he needed to do, the nagging feeling would stop nagging and start encouraging him.

Chapter 15