299 Days: The Visitors (8 page)

Out in the rural areas, there were no social services, roads departments, tax collection, or anything like that. The most that many cities and towns in rural areas could manage was a semi-professional police force, and maybe a small fire department. Libraries? Parks? Forget about it. The thought of a functioning library or park seemed absurd, given all the other needs of the people in a town.

The parks reminded Jeanie of the paras, the paramilitary groups operating on all sides, who were rumored to be killing people in parks. All the parks of her childhood were probably now full of bodies, she thought.

Although she no longer attended the briefings, she still heard murmurings among staff, and those who were huddled in the conference rooms at Camp Murray were really worried about the paras. Not only because they signified lawlessness and because people were getting killed, but more importantly, because many paras were said to be targeting Loyalists, who were the people in that room. Going after the paras was self-defense for the Loyalists.

The paras also introduced a lot of uncertainty. People wondered if they could trust the person they were giving sensitive information to. They worried he or she may tell the paras. And, if so, which paras? It slowed down operations. A person’s loyalty had to be checked and double checked before they could be trusted to act. It also meant that some of the government’s best plans were thwarted by para informers, and not just informers who were working directly for paras. Regular people with no political agenda were afraid of paras. They would give paras information out of fear even if they didn’t support that particular para group’s politics.

To try to control them, especially the ones threatening the Loyalists, the government used its insurrection powers to round up suspected Patriots and paras. The government didn’t have enough troops and professional police to do this, so the task fell on the pathetic, but numerous, Freedom Corps.

Most of the suspects who the FCorps rounded up were sent to hundreds of hastily created medium-security “temporary detention facilities” for a few weeks and then released. Quick releases were required because it cost too much to feed them. Suspects didn’t actually eat too well in the temporary detention facilities, but even a meager diet was costly.

The main penalty was taking away suspects’ FCards. Arresting them was done more to intimidate others than to actually incarcerate the suspects. That’s about all the government could do.

All of the insurrection powers exercised by the government were “temporary.” Order had to be restored, Jeanie kept telling herself. She realized she had a personal stake in supporting all the emergency powers. If strong measures weren’t taken, the Patriots (or terrorists, or paras, or whatever they were) would kill every government official. Like her.

Oh God, Jeanie thought. Where does this all end? There were so many people killing each other already. People can’t just forget all the killings and get back to normal. This could never be “temporary.” It will continue until one side wins, and that side wipes out the other side.

She was starting to wonder if she’d picked the right side.

Chapter 145

Tom’s “New Normal”

(June 4)

The rooster woke Tom Foster. He was getting used to it. In fact, the rooster crowing at dawn, which was about 4:30 a.m. this time of year, was feeling normal. He never thought it would. Now it was part of his day.

What a change he’d been through. Just a month ago, he was an executive for the state’s largest business association, the Washington Association of Business. He lived in a nice home in Olympia and ate at restaurants all the time; business lunches and dinners were part of his job. He never really did anything outdoors. He kept in decent shape, but was definitely a city boy.

Not anymore. Now he was getting up at the crack of dawn out at the Prosser Farm. He worked with his hands outside all day. He ate what he hunted or milked. He was growing food in his garden, too. His hands were starting to callus. At first, he was sore from all the new physical activity, but his body was quickly becoming accustomed to the labor. He was getting in great shape, and he was tan. He felt pretty good.

The one Prosser Farm activity that resembled their old undercover activities was that they had continued to record the Rebel Radio Podcast episodes. Brian, Ben, and Tom would get together once a week and talk into the microphone attached to the laptop that Tom brought out when they fled Olympia to hide out on the farm. They talked about how everything happening had been totally predictable. They called that segment of the show “Who Saw That Comin’?” They would talk about how they had been warning against the extreme expansion of government for years before the Collapse. They would recall the examples of corruption they discussed on the show before the Collapse. They didn’t treat their past predictions which had come true in a snarky “I told you so” way. Instead, they approached their accurate predictions by saying, “Well, we were right. Now hear what else we think is coming.”

They couldn’t post their new episodes on the internet, of course, so they burned them onto CDs and Dennis smuggled them into Olympia for distribution to the Patriots. They wondered if anyone was even listening.

Things were going just fine at the Prosser Farm, especially when Tom realized what they had out there compared to Olympia. Tom and the other WAB people and their families would have been rounded up by those Freedom Corps idiots under the “Declaration of Insurrection” or whatever the government was calling the power it gave itself. Tom wondered how many of his WAB staff and friends had been picked up. He wondered if they were still alive or languishing in a jail somewhere.

Even if all the WAB people weren’t wanted by the government, crime was another reason to get out of Olympia. Dennis told them about the crime after returning from his trips into Olympia distributing the Rebel Radio CDs. It was totally out of control. Almost all citizens in Olympia were disarmed. They were mostly government employees—well, former employees now that the government officially ran out of money—and a surprising number of them didn’t have guns to start with. Most of those who did have them dutifully turned them in when they were ordered to. And, for some unexplainable reason, crime started going through the roof.

There was food in Olympia. The government semis regularly rolled into the city and the TV news would show dozens of trucks waiting to be unloaded. Feeding the state capitol was a priority for the government. They wanted to take care of “their people.” The government people had plenty of money on their FCards. After all, they were the ones deciding who got how much on their cards.

The people in Olympia thought they were the lucky ones. They had plenty of food and other supplies. Most had “jobs,” like working for the FC. They weren’t their old jobs where they got paid with money, but they got their FCards filled with credits and they had things to buy with them. They were happy. Some of them got “fringe benefits” from their jobs. That was the term that emerged for bribes. An FC member might get five gallons of fuel for “accidentally” not finding a person he or she was supposed to pick up. Fringe benefits were a significant source of spending money. They always were in every corrupt society. Now America had become one, too.

In contrast to the corruption and crime of Olympia, Tom’s family and the other WAB staff’s families were safe at the Prosser Farm. They had plenty to eat. In fact, they had surpluses. But, there were lifestyle adjustments that the WAB city people had to make, like getting up at the crack of dawn and wearing clothes they thought looked a little out of date. However, the clothes were functional and, besides, they weren’t going out for a night on the town. It didn’t take long for the farm clothes to feel normal.

The WAB kids were getting along very well. They thought the farm was some kind of vacation camp. They were learning all kinds of new things, like how to milk a cow. They got to run around and play without supervision. They liked playing on their own much better than having rigid schedules for soccer and ballet practices. They were playing like kids used to play before everything got suburbanized and over-scheduled.

Things weren’t perfect out there, though. Brian’s wife, Karen, did not love the farm; she was merely tolerating it. She was a good sport about it and tried not to let it show, but it was just so foreign to her. She worried about her home back in Olympia. Did those people who were trying to arrest her husband know where their Olympia house was, and were they trying to destroy it? But most of all, Karen worried about the kids. Sure, they were reasonably safe out there, but they weren’t in school and their academic progress would suffer. It was summer now, and they couldn’t be in school then anyway, but what about the fall? She didn’t want them to be behind when school started back up in a few months.

Karen believed school would start up in the fall after this “temporary” little crisis. She firmly believed things would be back to normal. She was having a hard time even believing any of this was really happening. Sometimes she wondered if everyone wasn’t overreacting. She had never been very interested in politics. Maybe her husband and the WAB people were just hiding out for no reason. It just didn’t seem logical that government people would hate them so much that they would hurt them. That just didn’t make any sense. Why would people do that? She’d never seen it or even heard of violence like that. This must be a big overreaction.

Another thing that wasn’t perfect was the lack of normal services, like medical care. Tom realized that a simple accident out there could be fatal. There was no ambulance to call. Even if it was only a simple cut, there were no antibiotics available. They were working all the time with tools and sharp things and they didn’t really know how to use them. That’s what scared Tom the most.

Tom missed beer. He loved microbrews and, before the Collapse, had a beer or two every night. There was no beer out there. There was some God-awful Budweiser available, but he couldn’t drink that. He really, really missed beer. He realized that he was actually missing the “normal” times when he could drink a beer at his house without people trying to kill him. That’s truly what he missed, but he focused on the beer. If he only had his beer, everything would be OK again.

The farms around the Prosser property were all along Delphi Road. It connected to Highway 101, the main highway into Olympia, which was about ten miles away. There were probably a hundred farms or houses along Delphi. The families got together at the old Delphi schoolhouse and decided to post guards at the exit from Highway 101 onto Delphi Road. That way, they could protect all of them with just one guard station. It was a pretty beefy guard station. They averaged about ten men and women on a shift. There were quite a few ARs and some AKs and lots of ammo, too. Those ole’ boys (and girls) had plenty of firepower.

The Delphi area residents formed a “bubba guard,” which was a neighborhood guard station. Since gas was so hard to come by, Delphi guards couldn’t just drive to the roadblock for an eight-hour shift and then drive back, so they decided on seven-day shifts with guards staying at the station, which eliminated the need for daily commutes to the guard station.

Each day for a guard was an eight-hour primary shift spent actively scanning for threats, which became mentally exhausting. So, the next eight hours was a secondary shift. The guards were still there and remained armed, but they were relaxing a little. They were in reserve if an attack started. They also helped with food preparation and other tasks. The third eight-hour shift was for sleeping. They had several donated RVs that served as the sleep quarters at the guard station. They had “hot bunks” which were beds that someone was sleeping in at any given time. The beds stayed warm from constant use.

Some of the area residents volunteered to feed the guards. (Other residents kept all the food to themselves, which caused them to be outcasts.) An unforeseen benefit from having people from the neighboring area spending seven days together is that people who had never spoken got to know each other. Community was starting from the ground up.

The Delphi Road bubba guard worked pretty well. There were three drunken hillbillies from one family who were quickly kicked off guard duty. Other than that, the guards got along very well. It felt like a small farming town out there, like it had been 100 years ago.

Tom grew to like guard duty. He didn’t at first; he had never been a “gun guy,” so he didn’t want to look stupid around all these country people who knew guns. He brought his Sig 9mm pistol and was loaned an AK-47 for when he was on primary duty. Some farm kid in his twenties named Justin showed him how to use the AK.

Tom had the operation of the AK down in about thirty seconds. Those things were designed to hand to anyone, even illiterate tribesmen in any part of the world, and have them know how to use them very quickly. He was much less nervous about looking like a “city boy” now that he was smoothly operating an AK-47. He slung it over his shoulder like a pro. Actually, he was just doing what he’d seen in the movies, which worked just fine.

Tom asked to shoot the AK once, to see if it kicked. It wasn’t bad at all. He actually hit the target—a milk jug out at about fifteen yards. Not too shabby, he thought. He realized that he didn’t have to be some military guy. The Delphi bubba guards were all just civilians with guns guarding a roadblock. Tom could do that.

He was also initially nervous about spending a week with people who were essentially strangers. It was like going to a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone, but the party lasts for a week.

It turns out this wasn’t a problem. Everyone greeted him warmly when they found out he was a guest at the Prosser farm. The Prosser family had been on that land for over 100 years and had built up a lot of goodwill there. Some people asked what he did back in Olympia. Tom would just change the subject. He never gave out his last name. He was just “Tom.”