299 Days: The Visitors (11 page)

Now that all the conservatives had been exposed for the criminals they were, the government could do all the things people like Carol had always wanted them to do. They had nationalized everything. Good. It was about time.

At the University, the government was utilizing public resources for the public good. Since most of the students had left to go home, either because of the budget cuts before the Crisis or the crime, the dorms and off-campus housing were largely empty. So, the authorities wisely used the dorms to house Freedom Corps volunteers.

The Freedom Corps volunteers lived communally and were trained at the University. Carol’s specialty, Latin literature of the Bolivarian era, was not in high demand, so she taught Spanish to the Freedom Corps. She was so happy to have a job again. She also counseled them on the other social services available to them now that they had volunteered to help the public. She loved it. It was so nice to see people selflessly serving their fellow humans.

The University sought out disadvantaged groups, primarily Latinos who had come up from Mexico when the troubles started down there, and housed them in the nearby off-campus privately owned apartments. The University exercised some emergency powers and took over these privately-owned apartments and assigned them to disadvantaged persons. About time, Carol thought. She never understood how someone could “own” a piece of property when other people needed to use it for free. That seemed so selfish.

Carol was doing her part for the Recovery—that was the term the authorities used while trying to get back to normal after the Crisis. She asked to have a family placed in her home. She spoke fluent Spanish, although she spoke an academic dialect. After a long paperwork hassle, Carol finally got her new house guests. They were Maria, a mother in her early twenties, and her two sons, Enrique and Fabiano.

They were scared when they arrived at Carol’s little house. They’d been through horrible things making their way out of Mexico and up to L.A. They fled L.A. for Seattle after the riots. Carol was glad to have them and they were glad to be safe in Seattle. The government gave Maria an FCard. Maria and the boys were excellent houseguests. They felt like a family.

Things were going pretty well in Seattle, Carol thought. The progressives were finally in charge. We are finally doing what should have been done all along, she thought. In the past, Carol had spent a lot of time in Venezuela. As a Simon Bolivar-era expert, she frequently guest lectured down there. Venezuela was run right, and now she was seeing the same thing up here in America. Finally. The government owned most things, supplied the people with what they needed, essentially outlawed private property, and had a strong civilian security force to crack down on the conservatives trying to take all of this away from the people.

Carol’s job of teaching Spanish to the Freedom Corps volunteers puzzled her. She knew there were plenty of native speakers in the Freedom Corps, so she suspected she wasn’t there just to teach Spanish.

Sure enough, during her orientation for the new job, she was told that some of the teabaggers had infiltrated the Freedom Corps. Federal officials believed the redneck spies inside the FC would go out and commit atrocities in FC uniforms to turn the people against their leaders. Therefore, the Freedom Corps trainees needed to be evaluated and watched for political loyalty. Carol was proud to be selected as one of the people who would ensure that the FC remained loyal. The whole Recovery—and the fundamental transformation of the old system they’d been promised—was riding on the population seeing how well they were treated by the new system. That way, they wouldn’t want the old capitalist system back. Carol was on the lookout for “Patriot” spies. She blocked out of her mind the fact that her own brother was a “Patriot” POI. The fact that he was on the POI list merely meant that mistakes could be made, and she was going to work hard to make sure that no mistakes were made regarding the people she was overseeing. Grant became the reason why she worked so hard to be accurate with the information she passed on.

As she took her last sip of the delicious latte, she thought about the future. She’d spent so much time over the last few weeks only worrying about the present – food for today, electricity being on today, and not having someone break in today – that it felt kind of good to think about the future.

She was just fine with the future. Sure, things were still rocky out there, but the right people were finally running things. She had some wonderful houseguests, and she was doing something important for the people with her work with the FC.

Despite all of this, Carol was still scared. The crime scared her some, but it had already been increasing for years, and she had just learned to accept it. She was scared that the right-wingers would win. Sure, the progressives, like her, had a safe enclave in Seattle and its surrounding areas, but outside of Seattle, the teabaggers seemed to be running things.

With her first caffeine rush in over a month, she was thinking more clearly. Maybe this won’t be temporary, she thought for the first time. All along, she had been told that these emergency measures would be lifted soon and things would get back to normal. But, now that things were stabilized and the right people were finally in charge, she actually didn’t want to go back to the way things were before the Collapse.
She liked the way things were in Seattle currently, they suited her just fine.

Chapter 148

“Ain’t Too Many Things These Ole’ Boys Can’t Do”

(June 5)

Strawberry shortcake never tasted so good. Steve Briggs hadn’t had anything this sweet in…what? Weeks; not since the Collapse started.

It wasn’t traditional strawberry shortcake, but Steve didn’t care. Instead of fresh berries, which hadn’t quite ripened yet, it was made with strawberry jam from the previous summer. The shortbread was biscuit mix with extra sugar added. The whipped cream was amazing. Steve hadn’t tasted anything like it since he was a kid and went to his grandma’s house. It was real cream, like from a cow and everything, whipped with a hand blender.

Steve ate it slowly, wanting to savor it. He wanted more. He wanted the whole tray of it, but there were other guards to feed and he couldn’t hog it up, which would be extremely uncool.

Steve was eating dinner at the school in Forks like he always did. It was where the guards and other volunteers ate when they were working. He ran the day shift of the guards. They were bubba guards securing the entrance to and from town on the only road to the outside world, Highway 101. It was about 100 miles from Forks to the nearest decent sized town to the south, Aberdeen. It was about fifty miles to Port Angeles to the east. They were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of forest land on the extreme northwest tip of Washington State.

Very few vehicles came down the highway from either end, usually about one a day. They were people passing through to get to bug out locations or to find relatives. The travelers were always relieved when the Forks bubba guards didn’t kill them or steal their things. Some bubba guards at other places were rumored to do that. All it took was one or two stories of that and everyone thought it was a daily occurrence.

Because there was so little traffic at the gate, the main duty of the Forks guards was as a police force inside the town. Almost everyone in Forks was armed. Attempting to break into just about any house was a very foolish thing. The guards patrolled the residential parts of the small town on foot, but mostly concentrated in the downtown part, which was where the businesses and anything of value were located.

Guards were purely volunteers, of course. There was no set period of time guys would commit to doing it. They might show up one day and not the next. Some guys did it full time. It depended on their supplies at home. If they had enough, they could do things like guard duty. If they had pressing matters at home, such as working on a garden or fishing, then their time to do anything else was limited.

Forks, which was one of the most isolated towns in the whole country, was entirely cut off from government food supplies. The Feds didn’t even attempt to come there. Why waste precious diesel to drive food a few hundred miles round trip just to get some food to about 3,500 hillbillies? They were probably all militia whackos, anyway.

Forks was cut off from the traditional means of communication. There was essentially no internet. Long distance phones were spotty and cell coverage was, too. Texting still worked pretty well because it took up so little bandwidth, but it was very hard to stay in real contact with the outside world with such limitations.

Luckily, there was a ham radio operator in town, Don Watson, so Forks and thousands of other little towns were not cut off from the outside world. The government wanted to shut down hams, but it couldn’t. Too many official recovery operations were dependent on ham radios, so they had to let people talk to each other, even if they were saying things the government didn’t like. The government monitored the ham frequencies for anything overt, but ham operators weren’t stupid enough to directly say things that could get them a visit from the FC.

Don had ham contacts all over, but particularly in the Seattle suburbs. They told him that they actually were doing OK around Seattle. The grocery stores were reasonably well stocked. There wasn’t much meat or produce, and there were almost no luxury items, like chocolate, but there was enough to eat, like mashed potato mix. “Truck stop food,” as everyone was calling it. He also got reports from hams across the country on evenings when the atmosphere was just right and could skip a radio wave a few thousand miles.

The hams described the gangs. The white-collar gangs sold gas and other things. There was also a problem with the violent gangs, though it wasn’t yet total chaos and anarchy. Don couldn’t get the hams to say anything critical of the government on the air, although disdain for the government was implied in almost everything people said on the radio.

The hams verified what the Forks people thought: rural areas were being abandoned. The government was concentrating on the big cities. There were rumors from the hams of entire military units standing down all over the country. Half of the troops just weren’t showing up for duty any more. Most of the other half, who initially stayed in the barracks, eventually went AWOL.

The hams would speak about this sensitive topic in semi-code. References like, “the teams are staying in the locker room instead of taking the field.” Don knew some of the hams well enough from years of talking to them to know what they meant, and that they didn’t exaggerate things. Don was getting the same reports from every ham, so he was certain they were true.

Steve’s interest in the outside world was waning. Who gave a shit who the President was? The Southern and Western states were pretty much out of the union? OK. That had zero impact on life in remote Forks, Washington. Steve only cared about two things: food and security.

Most people, including Steve, were doing OK with food. “A country boy can survive,” as the song said. Despite being cut off from the rest of the country, Forks was actually pretty lucky, Steve thought.

There was plenty of fish and game, especially deer. There had actually been an overpopulation in the years leading up to the Collapse, but that was just because the government started charging outrageous license fees for hunting licenses. Steve knew fish and game would become harder to find as everyone started going after it. The goal was to get as much as he could now and store it, which was the same goal that many people had. They froze it and smoked some. It seemed like most houses had a little smoke rising from a shed as they built smokers. Some people went in together on smoke houses and had a kid attend them and keep a small fire going. The first batches weren’t great because people had forgotten how to smoke meats, but after a couple of batches, they had it down. There was nothing more delicious than freshly smoked salmon.

There were a few things that they were running out of in Forks. One was toilet paper, so they started using alternatives. Steve remembered his grandma telling him that, back in the old days, they used a page out of the Sears catalog. These days, however, the Sears catalog was on the internet. And any catalog that came to a house was glossy and wouldn’t work. Steve knew this because he had tried.

One thing he didn’t have any experience with was an alternative for feminine hygiene products. Those, too, were in very short supply. Steve wished he had stocked up on those before the store in town ran out, but he was so focused on food and other supplies and…guys just don’t want to buy those things. Looking back, he should have manned up and gotten many of the things that the female members of his family needed. Luckily, they started coming up with alternatives, thanks to tips from their grandmothers about how they did it back in the old days.

Another thing they were running out of was shaving supplies. Some guys had electric shavers, but most men just quit shaving. Steve had always hated shaving. He remembered his grandpa and the beard he always had. It made sense now. He and his grandfather were pretty much living in similar conditions.

They were running out of canning supplies, too. Steve should have seen that coming, since he anticipated the Collapse. He tried to prepare all he could, but he could only do so much. He did a very good job, but didn’t get everything his family needed. Oh well. They were still doing OK.

Gardening was providing a surprising amount of food. Quite a few people in Forks gardened before the Collapse out of necessity as the economy was getting worse. Most people had plenty of space to grow things and there were still enough old people around who remembered how to do it.