299 Days: The Stronghold (22 page)

Chapter 130

Pop! Pop!

(May 13)

Granny waved to the Freedom Corps men before they got in their car. “Sirs,” she yelled, “There is something you need to know about the house up there. Now that you mention it, there have been some strange men there lately.” She motioned for the men to come to her. She didn’t want to say this out loud. She started to whisper.

“Jackpot,” one of the FCorps men mouthed to the other.

The FC men realized that this little old lady was not a threat. She was doing the right thing by alerting the authorities about a terrorist living in her area. She was probably scared of the terrorists. The teabagger terrorists were scum, probably threatening nice little ladies like this.

The FC men came jogging up to her to hear her whisper. She pointed toward Jeff and Molly’s house and said, “There’s a dog in that barn there. Be careful of him.” She pointed to the Prosser farmhouse and said, “See that? Can you see that window up there?”

The FC men were squinting to look at the house.

“Get right up here,” she said pointing to a dirt pile on the side of the road, “and you can see what I’m talking about.”

The FC ran up onto the dirt pile where she was and squinted at the house.

Granny stepped back. The FC men were now in front of her on the dirt pile and were looking away from her, facing the house.

Pop! Pop!

She didn’t even remember pulling out her little revolver and calmly shooting each one in back of the neck. She did remember thinking that it was only a .22 so she kept shooting until they were on the ground. Their helmets had fallen off, so she had clear shots at their heads down there on the ground. One of them was screaming. She shot him in the face until he stopped screaming. The other one was having seizures. She shot him in the head a few times until he stopped.

Click, click, click. She used all eight .22 rounds from her Smith and Wesson Model 63. It had been her late husband’s favorite target pistol.

Then she heard Jeff and Molly’s dog barking. That snapped her back into reality. She realized that she needed to do something with the bodies.

She ran to the Prius to get her shotgun. She could not believe how calm she was. She had been thinking about those kids. They needed their parents and these men were trying to take them away. Shooting them was just like shooting a hog or calf for butchering. She went up to the bodies and pulled their guns out of their holsters.

She got on her radio and said simply, “Send some men down here. Don’t let the kids know what happened.” In a few minutes, which would have been much too long if she had been in trouble, Ben and Brian came in Jeff’s truck.

They couldn’t believe what they saw. By now there was a lot of blood on the ground. Crimson purple blood. It was the weirdest color they had ever seen. It was almost black in the sunlight. A very unnatural color. It didn’t look like the blood they saw on TV.

“Let’s get them into the car,” Granny said, sounding almost too calm. Ben and Brian didn’t want to touch the two dead bodies. Granny sighed and said, “C’mon. They won’t bite.” She got the keys out of the pocket of the driver and drove the Prius up to the bodies. It was quiet because it was on electrical power for that slow speed. Ben and Brian still didn’t want to touch the bodies.

“For goodness sake, put them in there,” she said pointing to the Prius.

“Wait,” said Brian. “We’ll need to get rid of the bodies and the car. Let’s think about this first.”

They thought for a few seconds. Brian looked in the car. It had a radio. “They probably checked in on their radio when they got here so someone knows this was the last place they were,” he said.

More silence.

“We have to move them and the car to someplace else and make it look like this happened there,” Ben said.

“It can’t be too far from here or it won’t be believable,” Granny said.

Brian snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. The school. Let’s take them there after dark,” he said.

“Video cameras,” Ben said.

“Oh, yeah,” Brian said.

Granny said, “Well, how about going a few miles away, maybe on the way from here to the freeway. That would lead them to believe it happened after they came here, found nothing, forgot to radio in that they found nothing here, and they got shot going back.” It sounded like a pretty good plan.

“OK,” Ben said. “We’ll keep them here, over by the trees so no one will see. We’ll make sure no animals get them. We’ll need to have a guard on them.”

“We’ll need all of us on guard now,” Brian said. “The FC might be coming back to see what happened to these two who didn’t radio in.”

That was terrifying. They knew that they couldn’t fight off an organized force of more than a couple of police. The people checking out the disappearance would not be pencil-pusher FCs.

“Keep the car running and see if they get a call on the radio from their headquarters,” Granny said. Another good idea.

It was quiet for a while, and then Ben said, “OK. If nothing happens, we wait until dark, throw them in a tarp in the back of the truck, drive the Prius to a road near the freeway, get them out, put them in the car, and maybe shoot them again to get a good blood splatter in the car.” Ben had seen that on TV.

“It won’t fool a serious crime investigation team…” Brian said. He’d watched those same shows on TV.

Ben smirked. “They’re not doing real investigations anymore. Too busy.” That was true. For once, the lack of any real law enforcement was a good thing.

“No one talks about this,” Ben said. “To anyone. At all.” Brian and Granny nodded. Ben thought some more and said, “OK, maybe Jeff. He’ll need to know that there might be visitors coming. And Tom, he’ll be a guard. And Dennis. But that’s it.” Brian and Granny nodded again.

A few minutes later, Jeff came to see why Brian and Ben had jumped in his truck. Granny showed him the bodies and filled him in on what had happened and what the plan was. Jeff was upset that someone had done something to attract the attention of the authorities to their quiet little farm.

In the past few weeks of the Collapse, the value of human life had gone down for most people. People were dying all the time. People were running out of medications, people were killing looters, and the authorities were killing people. Not massive killings; not a Mad Max total breakdown of society. Just lots and lots of stories indicating that killing was slowly becoming something that more and more people had encountered.

That night, they carried out the plan. They needed someone to re-shoot the bodies in the car. No one volunteered. Finally, Granny said she’d do it.

“Make an old lady do this?” she mumbled.

Ben and Brian felt guilty about not being man enough to do it, but they could not bring themselves to do it. They just couldn’t. They threw up when they heard the pop of Granny’s rounds. It was the worst night of their lives.

The authorities never came back to the Prosser Farm. The authorities were completely disorganized and riddled with corruption. Government couldn’t do anything well in the perfect conditions of peacetime. It was even worse when everything was broken.

The FC men who came out were completely untrained. They were wildlife biologists from the Department of Natural Resources. They had two days of training and were sent out with pistols, which they barely knew how to use, and a radio. They didn’t check in at regular intervals. Even if they had, there was one dispatcher for over 100 FC. The FC who went out to investigate the report of Tom Foster’s cell phone being used—Derek’s call to his girlfriend—weren’t taking it too seriously. They received the report several days after the phone was used.

The FC knew the terrorists, as they called the Patriots, would distribute their cell phones to runners who would go to strange locations to use the phone once. This would create a false report that the terrorist was in the strange location. So the FC didn’t actually think Tom Foster was at that farmhouse. They were just doing their job—and were glad to be one of the few with a job—when they went to the address they had been given. While a handful of Patriot fighters got the attention of very well trained law enforcement—at least the ones who hadn’t gone AWOL yet—the vast majority of the government’s crackdowns were done by laughable amateurs like the FC.

The WAB families were coming to realize this. Their enemy was largely a paper tiger. This emboldened the Patriots. The FC at Prosser Farm were a perfect example. At first it’s terrifying that the authorities came to investigate a report of a fugitive in the area. Then an old lady shoots two of the investigators with a .22. Then no one comes to investigate. After that, it’s hard to be terrified of the government.

Chapter 131

The Hamburglar

(May 13)

After the meeting about the graffiti, Jeanie spent the rest of the day doing her job: spinning the government line to the media. She did TV interviews on how the FCard system was working. She worked with the public affairs officers from a National Guard unit to do a story on how civilians and the FC were volunteering in droves to help the Guard with food and fuel distribution efforts. There were smiles all around. Jeanie was surrounded by this happy stuff all day. She was starting to believe that everything would be OK.

In the late afternoon, she got a text from a strange number. It said, “Jim here. Call this number ASAP.” Jeanie was scared as she dialed.

Jim answered in a whisper. “Can’t talk much,” he said. “Not supposed to be on a phone. I borrowed this phone from one of my men.”

“Are you OK?” Jeanie asked.

Jim paused. He didn’t want to make her worry, but the answer was “no.”

“I guess so,” Jim said. “Here’s the deal. My CO,” which meant commanding officer, “came to me and said that CID found that I had some Facebook friends who are POI.” “CID” was the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, the Guard’s internal affairs police.

Facebook friends. Jeanie froze. It felt like all the blood drained out of her. They knew about Jim’s friendship with the WAB guys. Oh crap. She and Jim were in danger now.

“What did your CO say?” Jeanie asked. She was hoping desperately for good news from Jim.

“He said that I’m getting transferred to a ‘less sensitive’ unit,” Jim said. “I’m going out to some farm in Eastern Washington to guard it. I’m done in the Guard. My career is over. I’ll serve out my time in this new unit. They call it the ‘penal battalion.’ It’s more like being in jail. The MPs watch the unit like hawks. We get all the shit work. I mean the total shit work. I’m not supposed to be calling anyone. I gotta go. Love you. Don’t worry.”

Jeanie started crying. “Wait.” She didn’t want him to hang up. “Are you going to be OK?”

Jim regretted telling her what had happened. She’d just worry now.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s not like I’m in an actual jail or anything. Besides, we have plenty to eat and the gangs are miles away.” He was serious: he’d be fine. Because the Guard was so screwed up they couldn’t actually pull off anything nasty towards him. He needed Jeanie to know that.

“Here’s the thing,” Jim said in a whisper. He was talking quickly to get all of the information out before he had to hang up. “Nothing is going right. I mean the Guard is totally dysfunctional right now. We’re not even issued ammunition. We show the public our weapons but they don’t know that they’re unloaded. This is all a show. We don’t have radios most of the time and no one is told what frequencies to use. The political people don’t trust us; they think we’ll link up with defecting units. Half the time there’s no fuel for our vehicles. Cooked food comes sometimes. Other times we use up the MREs.”

Jim paused and then kept going to get all the info out to Jeanie. “At first, most of the men were reporting for duty. A week ago, it was down to half. Now it’s even less. People are just melting away. The next morning they’re not around. We can’t do a thing. No one can make a decision. Everything is political. We were supposed to go into Seattle last week. We were told to go, then to not go. Then to go, then not. Over and over. It was ridiculous. They were trying to figure if sending more of us would ‘escalate’ the situation in Seattle. Then some wanted a ‘show of force’ and then the de-escalators would win and we’d stand down. A total joke.”

Jim caught his breath and kept whispering. “So don’t worry. I’m probably better off at the potato farm. We’ll just sit around there and make sure the Hamburglar doesn’t steal the Fry Guys,” he said in a reference to the old McDonald’s cartoon characters advertising Happy Meals. Back when there were Happy Meals.

That made Jeanie laugh. The Hamburglar. That was her Jim, making jokes in a tough situation. He would be OK.

“So you’re not working on computers anymore,” she asked, knowing the answer. She was whispering, too.

“Uh, no,” Jim said. “They don’t want a ‘POI-lover’ like me near the networks. That’s the really frustrating part,” he said getting a little choked up. “I know that system like the back of my hand. I can stop some of the hacking that’s going on and get the system back up when it goes down. They need me. But I was a Facebook friend with someone who pisses them off. So they put me on Hamburglar duty.”

Jeanie laughed again. That was what Jim needed to hear. She was laughing. She wouldn’t worry. He could go now.

“Gotta run, dear,” Jim said in a hurried whisper. “Love you. I’ll be fine. Tell the TV stations that the Fry Guys are safe from the Hamburglar.” He hung up.

Jeanie laughed some more.

And then cried. And cried and cried.

She was worried about Jim. And herself. She knew that she held an ultra-high security clearance. It wouldn’t be long before she got sent on Hamburglar duty. Her career was over.

But, it could even be worse. They could kick her out of Camp Murray and make her live out there with the regular people. She would have to stand in line with an FCard—if they even gave her an FCard. She might go to jail. They might…

Just then Jason walked into Jeanie’s office. “Jeanie, can I talk to you?” he asked. He closed the door to her office. Here it came.