299 Days: The Visitors (12 page)

But people were still only getting just barely enough to eat.
Everyone was losing weight. Even out in a rigorous lumberjack town like Forks, people had been getting fatter and fatter before the Collapse. They still ate like country people, but weren’t physically exercising before the Collapse like country people used to. And bad foods, starches and sugar were cheaper. So the hard times before the Collapse meant even worse diets and more weight gain.

That was changing. People were now physically working hard. Instead of sitting in an office or store, they were out patrolling, gardening, hunting, or building things. They were eating better, which surprised Steve at first. He had assumed that being largely cut off from store-bought food would mean people wouldn’t eat as well. It turned out they were cut off from junk food and were switching to homegrown food.

What about the winter? Steve kept thinking about the inevitable changing of seasons. He knew that all kinds of bad things were coming for Forks. He knew that disease was on the way. As people were weak from malnutrition and stressed out, their bodies would be more susceptible to disease. People would huddle together indoors when it got cold. Easily treatable illnesses would go untreated since there was no medicine. Steve prayed that the utilities stayed on. If the water system failed, third world diseases like cholera were a real concern.

Food was Steve’s biggest worry for winter. His family needed to have enough food stored up to make it through the long months ahead. Most people were doing a pretty good job of hunting, fishing, and gardening, but it was early June. People were eating what they were gathering and growing. There wasn’t much of a surplus now. Maybe in the fall there would a surplus, but probably not a huge amount. Not many people realized how they needed to gather and store food now because nothing would grow in the winter.

Some people in town were not even trying to hunt, fish, or garden. A sizable number of them were still sitting around waiting for people to take care of them. Generations of an entitlement society where everything was handed out created expectations that were very hard to break. The people of Forks were very generous to each other. The lazy people kept getting things from others. Why would the lazy think he or she needed to do anything? Food just showed up all the time. Why worry?

Steve realized that the charity would stop when the food was getting low, which would likely be in the fall. The older folks and disabled would still be taken care of, but the shitbags, as Steve called them, would not. They would be stunned. And hungry. And pissed. It would get nasty. Steve urged the people in town to stop giving food to able-bodied people now. Some listened to him, others did not, especially those with a family member who was a shitbag.

Rifts were already forming along family lines. This was the security concern that Steve had.

Two days earlier, some shitbag teenagers got drunk and decided to steal again. This had happened earlier and resulted in one of them getting shot. It was the same group of kids. Steve didn’t understand why they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around.

The problem was that the kids were the children of some of the guards. The guards whose kids were out stealing didn’t want to do much about it. They had a “kids will be kids” approach to some serious crime. The other guards, who were not related to the shitbags, didn’t see it that way. They thought the crime needed to be put down, hard. Not killing the kids, but definitely putting them in the makeshift jail for as long as it took. Probably until things got back to normal, if that ever happened.

It came to a head during a shift change of the guards. Members of the two factions started arguing loudly. There was pushing and shoving followed by a fistfight. Guns came out. Steve realized he needed to take control of the situation. He fired his pistol into the air, just like in the movies. It worked; everyone stopped in their tracks. After they all calmed down, Steve announced that the kids would be picked up and the town would decide what to do with them. Any guard who didn’t agree could go home and not come back. Steve realized that he was risking a civil war in the town, but something had to be done. Some of the relatives of the shitbags left. That was about ten percent of the guards. Fine.

Steve was also worried about external threats. What if a big gang came down Highway 101? Would the town’s few dozen guards on duty at any given time be able to repel them? Some of these roving gangs were beyond comprehension. They had a hundred or more vicious killers. The hams told stories about them. Steve attributed the stories to the rumor mill or grand exaggeration. But still. A hundred bikers, or Mexicans, or Russians, or ex-military, or whoever was a serious threat.

Remoteness was Forks’ best asset. Steve knew that it took more fuel to get there than it was worth. Why would a gang drive a few hundred miles to take down a town of 3,500 when they could pick off a town or even neighborhood of that size by driving two miles from wherever they were? Besides, why would a gang want to fight gun-toting hillbilly lumberjacks when they would have such an easier time with suburban office workers who didn’t own any guns? It was an easy choice. Steve hoped the gangs kept making that easy choice.

One down side of Forks’ remoteness was that the government decided to try out a new program on the town and a few isolated towns like it.

The government turned off the electricity. One day, the power went off, which was not uncommon, but then it didn’t come back on. Don got on his ham radio and verified that power was on in Seattle and even in Port Angeles, which was the closest town.

After twenty-four hours, things started getting serious. It wouldn’t be long before all that frozen food would start to go bad. The water plant in town needed electricity. Steve wasn’t panicking, but he was very concerned. He couldn’t sleep.

Day two of no electricity was even worse. People in town were getting nervous. The last thing Steve and the town’s leaders needed was for people to panic.

Later in the afternoon of the second day, a few guys came to see the town leaders at the school. They had a crazy idea. There was an old steam generator in town. It was wood fired and had been used until the mid-1980s to provide back-up power to the town. The guys were determined to fix it up and get it running. They had all the firewood they needed.

Steve remembered that line again from the Hank Williams, Jr. song, “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Referring to rural people, it went, “ain’t too many things these ole’ boys can’t do.” That was certainly true in Forks. After about ten hours, they tested it, and sure enough, they had that old steam generator running. The only problem was that, due to some switches not working, the steam plant could not send electricity into the town’s grid. This required people to bring whatever it was they needed electricity for, like a freezer full of meat, to the old steam plant. Someone rigged up some car batteries to be recharged at the steam plant and then taken over to the one gas station in town to get the pump working that got remaining gas out of the underground tank.

People started getting neighbors to help them load some freezers onto trucks and drive them to the generator. They plugged them in at the power plant and then brought in food they needed to refreeze. They rotated out the now-refrozen food and the next person did the same.

This went on for eight days until, one day, the power simply returned. And it stayed on.

Chapter 149

Battle for the Fence-Sitters

(June 5)

Grant and Lisa had a marvelous moped ride to the Grange that evening. They felt like they were back in college, except for Grant’s AR-15 slung over his shoulder.

As the Grange came into sight, they both knew that the fun times of the day were over. Tonight was serious business. It was the final vote on whether to have a trial for the tweakers.

Grant noticed that the Grange was packed. There were far more people at tonight’s meeting than the many ones leading up to it. It seemed that, since the raid on the tweaker house, the usual people were at the Grange meetings making their arguments about the trial. Now just about everyone seemed to be at the Grange for the final vote.

Grant wanted to win this vote; he wanted to get going with the trial. But, he was proud that the community was coming together to vote on this. He knew that, no matter the outcome of the vote, the community would feel like a fully discussed and fair decision had been made. The previous accusations of Grant and the Team “ram rodding” things had dissipated. People could see the decision making process was fair, even if it took too much time and discussion from Grant’s standpoint.

The Team had just arrived at the Grange. They were in full kit and getting out of Mark’s truck. It looked like they’d been out all day on patrol or training. They waved when they saw Grant and Lisa. It had been weird for them to have spent a whole day without Grant.

As Grant parked, he saw Dan and Rich with a crowd around them. As Grant got closer, he could hear that they were telling the crowd about the gate guard schedules. Dan had a clipboard and was calling out names and shifts. He was an absolute natural for this.

Rich saw Grant and came over to him. He had a smile on his face.

“Well,” he said to Grant, “This is it. The final vote. Supposedly.”

Before Grant could say anything, the enemy arrived: Snelling and his little followers. They traveled together, undoubtedly rehearsing their arguments on the way over. They were mostly the “cabin people,” the upper income people who owned cabins at Pierce Point, as opposed to the “full-timers” who were the year-round, middle-class rural residents.

The “cabin people” were more likely to cling to the idea that the Collapse was temporary and would end soon; the “full-timers” were more likely to acknowledge that things would likely never be “normal” again. There were plenty of individual exceptions to this, but the basic dividing line was that people who’d had it better in the past, the “cabin people,” were more likely to wish that the past would come back. The “full-timers,” who by and large had been economically struggling in the years leading to the Collapse, were more likely to understand that things weren’t coming back. Some of them were even OK with that because the bad times leading up to the Collapse had been brutal on them. And, by and large, the “full-timers” were rural people who had usually been more independent than the dependent suburbanites.

Grant realized that this dividing line at Pierce Point between the dependent and formerly prosperous suburbanites and the independent, but economically hurt, rural people was just like the divide in America. Great, Grant thought. Pierce Point was a microcosm of a bitterly divided America. This was a big political problem, but Grant felt like he was there to attempt to solve it, at least on a tiny scale. “One millionth,” he muttered to himself and became calmer. By that, he meant that there were several hundred people at Pierce Point, and several hundred million in America, so the political mess facing Pierce Point was only about one millionth of the mess facing America. That made him feel better that he wasn’t supposed to fix everything, just a tiny little piece of it. It made it a little less overwhelming to think about. It was still a big task, but he thought of all the other big tasks he’d accomplished recently. He mentally shrugged. He knew it would work out because he had tons of help doing whatever it was he was supposed to be doing at Pierce Point.

Snelling and his followers would not acknowledge Rich, Dan, or especially Grant. They stopped doing that a few weeks ago, after Grant demolished Snelling in a verbal exchange at the Grange. Snelling didn’t show up for a few days after that. When he returned, Grant got nervous. Grant knew at that point that Snelling was in this to win, and that Snelling was going to be a big problem.

Just as Grant suspected, when Snelling returned he was the most cheerful and polite person at the Grange. He was downright charming. He lost the superior air of being an architect from Seattle; now he was acting like a regular guy. His little followers were doing the same. They now talked apple pie recipes with the Grange ladies instead of complaining about “macho” men with guns.

Snelling and his people fanned out and started glad-handing everyone, except Rich, Dan, Grant, and the Team. Snelling was focusing a lot of his attention on the Morrells; Mary Anne in particular. Grant was afraid of this. Mary Anne was such a decent person that she would want to find a way to not execute neighbors and let things get back to normal. She was a tough bird, but her heart was in the right place – and that place was being humane to people and getting things back to “normal.” John Morrell was suspicious of Snelling’s sudden interest in apple pie, but wanted to support his wife.

Grant was doing his own share of politicking. He was spending as much time as possible with the “fence-sitters.” These were the people at Pierce Point who still hadn’t decided whether to have a trial of the tweakers, who by now had been in the makeshift jail for three weeks, or whether to turn them over to the authorities. The fence-sitters were not weak and indecisive people. They were like Mary Anne: decent people who didn’t want to overreact or kill people who were innocent. Mostly, though, the fence-sitters were going through varying stages of normalcy bias. It was just too mind blowing to think about imprisoning and then killing your neighbors, all without the involvement of the police or courts. It was an extreme thought, and one that forced a person to confront the reality that there were no more police or courts. Decades of assuming the police and courts would take care of things – and that anything else was uncivilized vigilantism – took a long time to shake. More than three weeks, in many, if not most, cases.