299 Days: The Collapse (17 page)

But, not all were making the adjustment. Pow watched one guy in the neighborhood, a recently retired guy, washing his ’69 Mustang over and over again. Pow went over to talk to him and all the guy could talk about was all the things he’d done in that Mustang. He was almost in a trance. He wasn’t thinking about getting food or gas or the crime all around them. He just mumbled about that car and kept washing it. Pow walked away and the man didn’t even notice. Pow knew that he wasn’t going to make it through this. He didn’t want to. He wanted to be riding in that Mustang. He wanted “normal” back, and would die trying.

Chapter 63

POI

(May 6)

The ride to the “secure location” should have been pretty short, but it took three hours. Jeanie knew where they were going; it wasn’t a mystery. They would go the fifteen miles or so north on I-5 to the Washington National Guard Headquarters at the giant Army and Air Force base called Joint Base Lewis McChord, or JBLM as everyone called it.

Sure enough. That’s where they were going. Traffic was extremely heavy. I-5 was the main interstate up and down Washington State. The Seattle metropolitan area stretched from Olympia in the south up I-5 about a hundred miles to Marysville in the north. The whole metro area straddled I-5.

Many other people were going places, too, and I-5 was how to get there. The roads were tightly designed to accommodate normal loads. If just five percent more cars than normal were on the road, traffic would jam up, especially when cars were stalled out. Jeanie saw that many were; she presumed they were out of gas. When that happened, people would honk and get furious. Eventually, they would push the car over to the shoulder. People were standing around their disabled cars on the side of the road. Jeanie knew that bad things were probably going to happen to those people.

I-5 was a parking lot. There was no movement most of the time. Emergency vehicles were using the left lane. After a while, non-emergency vehicles starting driving in that lane, too, following the emergency vehicles just to get by the traffic jams. That was a misdemeanor; but no one was writing tickets.

The car Jeanie was in would drive in the left lane and on the shoulder when it wasn’t blocked. Her car had cop lights in the grill, and the trooper driving was using them.

Menlow just looked out the window. Since they were stopped most of the time, he could look into the windows of cars stopped next to his and see their faces. He saw families screaming at each other. He saw terrified faces. He saw kids crying. And, Menlow realized, the people in these cars were just the 1% who realized they needed to get out of the cities before it really got bad. What about the 99% still sitting in their homes awaiting instructions from the authorities?

As Menlow looked at all the people stuck in traffic trying to flee, he thought about all the problems that needed to be solved. Gas would need to be distributed. Food, too. The people on the side of road with disabled vehicles would need places to stay. People would need medical care. He smiled inside.

This meant government would need to do those things. Need. Need. People would depend on government for their very lives, and he was going to be running the government. Once he got elected, of course, but with the Governor not running for re-election and the state craving a Republican to fix things, he’d be in for sure. He would be the greatest governor in state history. He allowed himself to actually smile. He felt warm inside.

Finally, they took the exit for JBLM. Traffic was backed up around Ft. Lewis. There were soldiers with rifles checking IDs. They were turning people away. It took forever to get past the gate, but Jeanie’s car got right through. The guards radioed in when the trooper used a code word. They were on a list of expected guests.

They went to a nondescript building. It had very big radio antennas on it. There were soldiers and police everywhere. Jeanie wasn’t used to being around people with guns, especially rifles. Everyone looked so serious. And scared. And tired.

“You can work from here until your quarters are ready,” said a female soldier as she showed Jeanie, Menlow, and Tony a small conference room.

Work? Doing what? Auditing state agencies? It was pretty apparent they wouldn’t be doing their old jobs. They were here because Menlow was “five heartbeats” away from being the governor. No one really thought the first five wouldn’t be able to be the governor; it was probably just some dusty Cold War-era continuity of government plan that said the Auditor needed to be at the National Guard headquarters if something happened. And it had happened.

They just sat there. Jeanie looked at her watch. It was 3:22 p.m. They weren’t talking; they were just waiting to be told what to do. After a while, the female soldier said, “Come with me, please,” and motioned for them to follow her. They went down a few hallways into a bigger conference room which had many of the same people who were usually at the state agency leadership briefings. There was Jason from the Governor’s Office who had briefed them that morning.

“Hi,” Jason said as Jeanie, Tony, and Menlow walked in. As they were taking their seats, Jason continued with what he had been saying to the rest of the people in the room.

“Here’s what’s going on,” he said. “The Governor declared a military emergency a few hours ago. This means that our continuity of government plan goes into effect. That’s why you’re here, Mr. Auditor. You won’t be doing your normal job until this is over, which hopefully will be soon. We will ask you and your staff to work with the Governor’s Office to help with the relief efforts.”

Menlow nodded. He loved this.

“The National Guard has been activated, of course,” Jason said. “They are reporting in for duty as soon as they can get to their duty stations. Only a few people are able to come in, though. The police are on full alert. Oh, by the way, the capitol campus has been evacuated and protestors have pretty much trashed the place. Technically, the new seat of government is right here,” Jason said as he waved his hands around the conference room.

“We are working closely with federal authorities to start rounding up the people responsible for this,” Jason said. “There are some suspected terrorists we’ve, or rather the federal authorities, have been watching in our state. They’re getting them. There are also some radical political groups to watch. We are assisting them with the round ups.”

“What radical political groups?” Menlow asked.

“Some left-wing terrorist groups. Sympathizers with the Red Brigades,” Jason said. “Oh, and some Tea Party and Oath Keeper militia types. Lots of those. Actually, most of them are teabaggers.”

Jason continued, “We have started something called ‘POIs.’ That stands for ‘Persons of Interest.’ They are people who are not suspected of a crime per se, but are people we want to talk to. Right-wing political types, mostly. In fact, Ms. Thompson, we’d like you to work on getting the POI list out to the media.”

“Sure,” Jeanie said. This was so exciting.

Jason handed her a scrap of paper. “Here is a password to our system. You’ll see the POI list there and can get started formulating a message.”

Jeanie nodded. Wow. This was amazing.

“I need to take the Auditor and his Chief of Staff to go meet with the others in the line of succession,” Jason said. He took them with him. There was Jeanie in the big conference room with a bunch of other civilians and some military people. OK, time to get to work.

Jeanie logged on and opened the POI file. It was very interesting to see who was on that list. She didn’t recognize any names, of course, until one jumped out at her on the screen.

“Matson, Grant.” Near his name was “Foster, Tom,” “Trenton, Benjamin,” and “Jenkins, Brian.” The next column said “Wash. Assn. of Business” and “‘Rebel Radio.” What the hell were WAB people doing on a “Persons of Interest” list?

She suddenly felt like she might be on the POI. She searched for her name. Nothing. She wasn’t on there. She started panicking. The government was going to try to arrest her friends. There must be some mistake.

She wondered about her boyfriend, Jim. He was really conservative and had mentioned to friends that he thought the people would start a revolution soon. She hadn’t thought about him much today. There had been too much excitement. He was off on Guard duty and was probably fine. He was surrounded by many well armed men. He would be busy doing his computer job for the Guard. She missed him. It would be so great to be home and with him if all of this wasn’t happening. But it was and she had a job to do. She tried to do it. But she couldn’t think. Her boyfriend was away from her, possibly in danger, and she was being asked to help the government round up her friends.

A female plainclothes cop came over to her. “Are you Thompson, the one working on getting the POI list out?” She asked Jeanie.

“Yes,” Jeanie said.

“I’m Sergeant Winslow, WSP,” which meant Washington State Patrol. She looked at Jeanie’s screen and saw the POI list was there. “Pretty interesting list of characters, huh?”

“Yeah,” Jeanie said. “So how did you create this?”

“There were some troubling groups out there,” Winslow said. “As things got bad with the economy and the political situation became more heated, these groups got more vocal. We used some informants for the secretive ones. For the vocal ones, we used Facebook and similar social media.”

“Facebook?” Jeanie said.

“Oh, yeah,” Winslow said. “When we found one person of interest, we’d look and see who his or her friends were on Facebook or other social media. We’d check the ‘mutual friends’ thing and, poof, we had a really good start to the list. And all their contact information was there. That’s how most of these people got on the list. Facebook. It’s a wonderful tool for us.” She was smiling.

Oh crap. Jeanie started to wonder if she was a Facebook friend with any of the WAB people? No. She remembered that Menlow had asked her to unfriend them after he decided to run for governor. Whew.

“OK,” Jeanie said, trying to focus on doing her job so she didn’t look suspicious. “How do you want to get these names out to the media? Is the internet still working for the outside world?” she asked. They talked about how to the get the list out. The whole time Jeanie wondered if she was betraying Grant and the WAB guys, and who knows how many others of her conservative friends? But what was she going to do? Walk away? She was stuck on a military base surrounded by chaos. She had to stay. She had to do what was being asked. She told herself that she would do whatever she could to alert Grant without getting caught, herself.

Chapter 64

“Why are you hurting us?”

(May 7)

The morning after the first neighborhood meeting, Nancy Ringman was going around to each house trying to convince them that they needed to go along with her plan of looking to the police to secure the neighborhood. Nancy, of course, would coordinate all of it. She found many of the people receptive to her no-guns message. But they were questioning whether it really made sense not having an armed guard at the entrance to the Cedars subdivision.

By now, things were starting to get out of hand in Olympia. People were slowly starting to react to everything going on around them. Shelves in the grocery stores were getting bare. People were arguing in the parking lots and in lines. Some had even seen some fights. The lines at gas stations were becoming long and unruly. A rumor was spreading about someone in the neighborhood being shot during an argument at the gas station.

Nancy had one more cul-de-sac of households to talk to before the meeting later that night. It was Grant Matson’s. She was getting tired. She hadn’t slept a full night’s sleep in two days; the excitement of these events kept her awake. She kept having the feeling that finally the good people like her would be in charge. Finally.

Nancy had run out of her anti-depressant, Prozac, when all of this started. “Anti-depressant” was a misleading term, she thought. The Prozac didn’t make her feel less depressed; it helped her get along with people. It curbed what her doctor had politely termed her “aggressive impulses.” Without it, she was mean. Really mean. She didn’t have time to go get a prescription filled right now. There was a crisis and the neighborhood was depending on her for leadership.

Most of the people in the neighborhood were weaklings, Nancy thought. She needed a little extra meanness to lead people. It’s called leadership, she told herself. She’d been mean her whole life and got a lot accomplished that way. People were wimps and needed someone to tell them what to do, she had found.

Nancy’s phone vibrated. It was a text from Brenda, a former co-worker at the State Auditor’s Office. It’s first few letters were “POI!!!” It said that the Governor had created a list called “Persons of Interest” and had a link. The text went on: “Grant Matson is on it!!! He’s POI!” She looked at the link, which loaded very slowly on her phone. She looked at the background on what the POI list was. Fabulous!

Grant Matson was officially a terrorist and a wanted man. Nancy was standing outside his house now. Finally, her government was doing something about people like Grant Matson. Finally, the cavalry had shown up. She was part of the solution to all of this chaos. She would help the effort by going to his house and finding out where he was hiding. She felt a surge of adrenaline. It felt so fabulous. She loved a good fight. Especially against a teabagger like Grant Matson and his obnoxiously pretty doctor wife.

Nancy felt so alive. She confidently walked right up to the Matson’s door and knocked on it. It took a while for someone to answer. She saw Grant’s wife looking through the blinds before she opened it.

“Yes,” Lisa said. “Can I help you?” She vaguely recognized Nancy as someone from the neighborhood.

“Oh, yeah, you can help me,” Nancy said in a very excited voice. Then Nancy yelled, “Where is that terrorist piece of shit husband of yours?”

Lisa was scared. What was this “terrorist” thing? And why was this woman yelling at her? Lisa could tell that Nancy was agitated like some of the people that came into the ER.