299 Days: The Community (31 page)

Jeff told Dennis that the people staying with them had left the city because of the violence. He told Dennis not to mention to a single person that they were out there. There had been a misunderstanding with the authorities that would get straightened out when all this cleared up.

Dennis was a hick, but wasn’t stupid. He knew that Jeff worked for WAB and that WAB was hated by the state government. He was glad to help the effort. He, too, hated all the superior-minded city people who kept taking and taking from the people out in the rural areas. Dennis just wanted to be left alone, but the environmentalists kept telling him how to live. They wouldn’t let him raise cattle out there. At 500 yards, it was too close to a stream. That stream had been fine for the 140 years the Prossers had been on this land. Dennis wasn’t political, but he was glad to be helping in some small way to get even with the people who were destroying his country. If that meant harboring some fugitives when the cops were stretched too thin to do anything about it, that was fine. It was more excitement than he’d had in his whole life.

Tom, Ben, and Brian were huddled together and talking before breakfast. Jeff introduced Dennis to Tom, who was scoping out Dennis’ truck.

Tom asked, “Hey, Dennis, does your truck run on diesel or regular gas?”

“Diesel,” Dennis said. “Why?”

“Good,” Tom said, “Jeff has plenty of diesel in that underground tank. So you can make trips to town, right?” Obviously, the POIs couldn’t show their face in town, but Dennis could. He had no ties to WAB. Even Jeff, the mailroom guy, had WAB ties. Only Dennis could go into town.

“Yeah,” Dennis said. He didn’t like to go to town and knew that it was dangerous right now, but he could go. For a good enough reason.

Ben said, “Dennis, we need you to get something pretty important.”

“Yeah? What?” he asked, trying to hide his excitement.

“Can you go to an office supply store and get some blank CDs?” Ben asked. “You know, the kind you can record music on. As many as you can.”

That was weird. Making music CDs? “Why do you want to do that?” Dennis asked.

Ben told Dennis what they were doing with the CDs. Wow. This was exciting, Dennis thought. He couldn’t wait to go to town.

Brian gave Dennis a bunch of cash. Brian didn’t want his wife to see how much he was handing Dennis; she’d get mad. Karen was not loving this farm living. She was used to suburban living. She was grateful to be away from the protestors, but she felt so odd out at the farm. Giving Dennis the last of their cash to buy blank CDs would have been too hard for Brian to explain. So he didn’t. He just did it.

“I’ll go right now,” Dennis said. He needed to go to his house and get his pistol. He wanted to be ready for what was sure to be the biggest adventure of his life.

Chapter 105

Fine in Forks

(May 10)

By now, it was obvious to everyone in Forks that things were going to be bad for quite a while. This wasn’t a temporary little thing. It was the biggest thing that had happened to the country since World War II; maybe bigger.

Politics was not much of a topic in Forks. Right, left, Patriot, Loyalist—none of that really mattered. People were pissed at how the government had let all this happen, but they’d been pissed for years leading up to the Collapse. They started getting angry a few decades before when the environmentalists started to shut down logging—the life blood of Forks, Washington—because of the “endangered” spotted owl. There were plenty of spotted owls; the locals saw them flying around all the time. The endangered species listing was just an excuse to turn most of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington into a park for city people to play in when they drove their Subarus out from Seattle to go bird watching. For spotted owls, of course.

People in Forks had been watching the size of government grow, too. There were more and more controls on the land, and taxes kept going up. More and more people worked for government; directly, or as contractors. Longtime hometown businesses went out of business. More and more people went on welfare and weren’t even trying to find work. Many people were making questionable disability claims and going on the state-funded workers’ compensation system. Rural and isolated Forks was not immune from the slide into government dependence that was going on in the rest of America. But, it wasn’t as bad there. People still knew how to live poor and take care of themselves. Most of them, at least.

Steve, the manager of the now-closed auto parts store in town, was amazed that all economic activity had stopped; just stopped. No one was buying and selling anything. Well, they were, but not like before the May Day Collapse. People still traded deer meat for gasoline and that kind of thing, but, they’d increasingly been doing that in the hard economic times leading up to the Collapse. Now it was the only way to do it. No supplies from the outside world, and no cash. Barter was it.

The news wasn’t worth watching, anymore. Steve wasn’t sure he could trust it. During the first few days of the Collapse, the news had story after story about terrorist attacks, power outages, riots, looting, and states threatening to “opt out” of the union. At first, most of the terrorist attacks were blamed on the left-wing Red Brigade and some splinter groups of public employee unions. The union thugs—a handful of radicals out of the millions of unionized public employees—were furious that their jobs and pensions had been cut off. No one was very sympathetic to them given that Americans’ 401(k)s were now basically worthless after the stock market crashed. After a few days of stories about the Red Brigade and union thugs, the news quit mentioning them. Either the left-wing attacks stopped, the news wanted to quit scaring people, or the news decided to start blaming attacks on “right-wing” and “militia” groups. Which they did. That became the theme on the news. The “Right” was going on a rampage. Some believed it, though many didn’t.

Don Watson, the ham radio operator in town, kept them abreast of the latest rumors from the outside world. People were saying that some military units were mutinying. They were killing their officers. It didn’t sound like many were doing this. Most were either working hard at the relief efforts or sitting out the political stuff, waiting to see which side would be stronger. Some military units were defecting and joining gangs, which was what had happened a few years earlier in Mexico. Whole military units in Mexico would just start working for a drug cartel. Steve didn’t know if American units doing this was true, or just a bunch of crazy rumors. There were so many rumors and most didn’t turn out to be true. After a while, most people quit trying to stay up on the rumors, and tried to keep their heads down and just survive what was happening. Rumors were an unnecessary distraction, and usually only served to scare people with an endless list of “what-ifs.”

The power was on most of the time, but would go off for a few hours at a time. One of Steve’s friends at the electric company said that when the hackers periodically attacked, the government would shut down the power in the rural areas first, where there were fewer people to inconvenience and scare. Seattle had power almost all of the time.

Steve saw on the news that the government had started something called “Freedom Corps.” Whatever, he thought. Wear your silly hats. No one in Forks would be caught dead in one of those. They didn’t need the Freedom Corps in Forks. The people there were taking care of things on their own. Pretty damned well, as a matter of fact. The last thing they needed was a new government agency. That’s what got them in this mess in the first place.

There was one bright spot in Forks: the police. The city police and the sheriff’s deputies were local guys. Everyone knew them. There were a couple yahoos on the force, but most were solid. They weren’t abandoning their jobs because they couldn’t. They lived in Forks. There was nowhere else to go. Defending home and family meant defending Forks.

The police quickly set up a volunteer “posse” force. They had lots of men willing to join up. In fact, they had to turn some away. There weren’t any neighborhood guards because the posse served that function. Besides, Forks was one giant neighborhood. Might as well have a city-wide guard force instead of a measly neighborhood one. Everyone knew each other, so it was possible to trust people. People in Olympia would have a hard time trusting someone who came from another part of the city to guard their neighborhood. That wasn’t the situation in Forks.

Steve was a posse captain. He had about fifteen guys working for him. They patrolled on foot because gas was too precious to waste driving around. They carried pistols, and sometimes shotguns or rifles. They didn’t have a colored cloth tied around their arms like many of the communities were starting to. They didn’t need any identification; everyone knew who the posse was.

Steve used the auto parts store as a headquarters. He had the swing shift of guards. Just like the swing shifts from the days back when they logged in Forks: 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm. This was a pretty active time for guarding since lots of crime started after dark, which was about 9:00 pm in mid-May.

There wasn’t a lot of crime, though. Some stealing. Mostly kids; the welfare kids, to be honest. There were other people stealing, but the “shitbags” as they called the welfare kids and their families, were usually the culprits. They usually stole firewood stacked at someone’s house or siphoned gas from parked cars. The town used the school for a makeshift jail. Stealing got someone about thirty days in jail, along with shame from the community. Everyone knew who was in jail and would make sure to stay clear of them once they got out.

The criminals usually weren’t violent. One burglar—an adult shitbag and notorious alcoholic—broke into a single mom’s house. She shot him with a shotgun. That same night, a kid stealing firewood pointed a gun at a posse member. It didn’t end well for the kid. The shootings jolted Forks. The welfare people were getting more and more pissed at the posse, and the good people of Forks didn’t care. They backed the posse. But, things weren’t heading for a deep split in town because most people were related. It wasn’t uncommon for a welfare recipient to be the cousin or nephew of a posse member. That kept a lid on the divisiveness. It didn’t eliminate it, but it limited it.

People in Forks were helping each other in ways they never had. Steve made sure to go check on Patty Matson, Grant’s mom. She was doing fine. He hadn’t been over to see her since Grant’s dad died and Grant had come to visit. It was things like this that made life a little bit more meaningful in Forks. People were helping each other. It had been too long since people acted so decently toward each other.

The three churches in Forks seemed to be working as usual. They were mainstream churches without any real theological differences; they got along fine. Attendance before the Collapse had been light. Mostly old people went to church in Forks. The Pacific Northwest was known for having some of the lowest church attendance in the country. After May Day, however, people of all ages started to come to church. The world seemed to be turned upside down and many looked to a higher power for comfort. A fair number of people started wondering if all that was happening was the end times described in Revelation. Was Jesus coming back very soon? Was this the Tribulation? The three churches were packed. A couple people started holding home church services.

The churches were doing much more than just sermons. They used the big kitchens each one had to start providing meals for people. Church members would bring extra food, especially game meat and fish, and share it with fellow members, and anyone else in need. Churches became strong and cohesive groups of people. They were like all the other groups forming after the Collapse: gangs, just not the kind of gangs that hurt people. Churches were doing what they had always done—before the government moved in several decades ago and took over social services. Now, instead of taxes being collected and sent thousands of miles to Washington, D.C., passing through dozens of agencies, and finally returning to Forks, the charity stayed in Forks. As a result, much more of it got to the people who needed it.

One area that became disturbing very quickly was people getting cut off from their medications. Old people and others on life-sustaining medications were dying. It was sad, but everyone expected it. The other unsettling thing was all the people on mental illness medications. There were some people who started going crazy once their meds ran out.

One of them was Donnie Phillips, a guy Steve went to high school with. No one knew that Donnie was on anti-depressants. After about a week without his meds, he tried to kill his kids. A neighbor, Bob Francis, came over and had to shoot Donnie, as he was attacking his children, who had locked themselves in the bathroom. That was especially hard on Steve; he knew both of them from high school, and one had to shoot the other.

There were many people who were helping family as they went off their medications. They would remove all the guns and knives in the house and stay with them all they could. It was sad. Families who had mental illness in the family, and had been able to mask it with medication, were now ashamed when their secrets were coming out. Most people understood and tried to help.

Steve sat back at his desk in the auto parts store during a quiet moment. He thought about all that was going on and how the town was reacting. So far, so good. Better than he would have thought. But this was only the beginning of the Collapse. Would things hold together for months? What about winter?

Chapter 106

The Gray Man

(May 10)

Ed Oleo, a handsome man in his late fifties with a full head of grey hair, looked out his big living room window at the Pacific Ocean. He lived in West Seattle, a nice part of the city, but not one of the trendy parts. He was surrounded by good solid homes, many with nice views of the water. Ed owned a real estate company, so he always looked at neighborhoods like he was selling a house. When he looked at his neighborhood he thought: water view, established neighborhood. That described West Seattle.