by Glen Tate
299 Days: The Community
( 299 Days - 3 )
Glen Tate
299 Days: The Community, the third book in the 299 Days series, reunites Grant Matson with his family after his wife, children, and in-laws accept that the only way to survive the Collapse is to flee the comfort of their suburban lives and join him at his isolated cabin in the woods. With riots becoming more violent, power outages more widespread, and the military crumbling, Grant and others throughout Washington State realize they must organize if they want to endure.
From the secure confines of the relocated state capitol building, to a rural self-sustaining farm, to the developing community of Pierce Point, 299 Days: The Community explores the mental, emotional, and physical changes everyone must make to adapt to a collapsed society.
The years of preparing and training position Grant to lead Pierce Point as he begins to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics and unpredictable situations to help build a new community that can withstand the threats closing in on them.
Will people join forces or stand alone? Can communities successfully organize themselves in times of chaos? Will what is left of government help those who cannot help themselves? And if so, at what cost?
From Chapter One to Chapter 299, this ten-book series follows Grant Matson and others as they navigate through a partial collapse of society. Set in Washington State, this series depicts the conflicting worlds of preppers, those who don't understand them, and those who fear and resent them.
For more about this series, free chapters, and to be notified about future releases, please visit www.299days.com.
299 Days
THE COMMUNITY
by
Glen Tate
— To the real "Morrells" and "Colsons," who are the best neighbors a guy could have.
Books from the 299 Days series published as of November 2012:
Book One – 299 Days: The Preparation
Book Two – 299 Days: The Collapse
Book Three – 299 Days: The Community
Book Four – 299 Days: The Stronghold
About the Author:
Glen Tate has a front row seat to the corruption in government and writes the 299 Days series from his first-hand observations of why a collapse is coming and predictions on how it will unfold. Much like the main character in the series, Grant Matson, the author grew up in a rural and remote part of Washington State. He is now a forty-something resident of Olympia, Washington, and is a very active prepper. “Glen” keeps his real identity a secret so he won’t lose his job because, in his line of work, being a prepper and questioning the motives of the government is not appreciated.
- Book 3 -
Chapter 70
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
(May 7)
Off in the distance, Grant heard the unmistakable sound of car wheels on a gravel road. There was a low rumble with the crackle of the tires on the crushed gravel. Then he heard a radio crackle. It was one of those little Motorola ones Grant used in the Cedars. Paul had it on his belt for his turn doing the watch.
It was John. “We have visitors. Lots of them. Come quick.” They jumped up and headed toward the guard shack. Chip had an AR and Paul had a shotgun. Mark had his revolver and Tammy was unarmed. All Grant had was his pistol, which was always on him. His AR was in the cabin.
He was scared to death. “Visitors…lots of them,” sounded like a motorcycle gang. It was only about 100 yards to the guard shack. Grant had never run so fast; the adrenaline was pumping.
They ran out onto the road, exposing themselves. Grant and Chip quickly found some cover. Paul, who was winded because he was so heavy, just stood in the middle of the road panting. Mark and Tammy stood by him, helping their son.
John had his 30-30 with a scope aimed down the road. The sound of the cars on the gravel road got louder. They were moving slowly. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? Were they slowly advancing, like professionals?
Then he saw it. The most beautiful sight ever: Pow’s white Hummer. And, oh goodness, Drew and Eileen’s car. Then, Lisa’s Tahoe! Wait. It must be a car that looked like hers. It couldn’t be hers. But, it had to be because that was Drew and Eileen’s car!
It was hers! He recognized the license plate. No way!
Grant was elated. He ran up to John yelling, “Don’t shoot. They’re friendlies!” John lowered his rifle and Grant ran down the gravel road toward Pow’s Hummer, and holstered his pistol, which was hard to do when he was running. Pow flashed his headlights. It was them!
Grant ran up to Pow’s Hummer, looked in to make sure it was him, and kept going right past the other vehicles to Lisa’s Tahoe.
He saw her in there. The kids, too! Grant tried to open her door. It was locked. Of course. They had driven through a war zone to get there. She unlocked the door. He ripped the door open and screamed, “Thank God you’re here! Thank God!”
Grant started hugging Lisa. He looked her straight in the eye and said, “There’s the hug I meant to give you the other night.”
She started bawling. The kids were screaming, “Daddy!” They were getting out of the Tahoe and jumping around with Grant and Lisa. Pow got out and watched. He felt a tear roll down his cheek. The other guys on the Team were taking it all in; Grant reunited with this family and all the great cabins and the beautiful scenery. Pow had told them this place was great. He wasn’t kidding.
The next hour or so was a blur to Grant. Drew and Eileen were crying, too. Grant was just running around showing all the cool stuff off at the cabin that would allow them to make it. Make it as a family. Things like the guard shack, and telling them about fishing, Mary Anne’s canning, the nightly BBQs, the neighbors, and introducing the Team to the neighbors. It reminded Grant of his bachelor party, which had all of his friends from the various phases of his life. Grant was the one guy all the guests had in common. They didn’t all know each other, but they all knew Grant. He was the common thread, and all his friends were in one place. It felt great.
Then something strange happened. Something Grant never saw coming. He was pissed at Lisa. She was pissed at him. Once the initial elation wore off, they were mad at each other. It made no sense, except that both of them had been so mad at each other for days. Intensely mad. The maddest they’d ever been in their whole lives.
Grant was mad at Lisa for not coming out to the cabin earlier, for not being thrilled about getting the cabin, and for not understanding, let alone approving, of his prepping for what had happened. He had been right the whole time and she had been fighting him the whole time.
Lisa was mad at Grant for abandoning the family and leaving them in danger. Just taking off for politics. For being part of the WAB troublemakers instead of living a normal life. For not being a normal lawyer living in a normal subdivision and enjoying normal things, like golf. No, Grant had to be a terrorist and live out in the woods somewhere. He had been so worthless around the house for so many years and now he was Mr. “Let’s Go Live Out in a Cabin”?
So, after about the first hour, things got tense between Grant and Lisa. They both kept telling themselves that they were together and safe and that’s all that mattered, but they both couldn’t help wanting to say to each other, “this worked out despite all the stupid shit you did.”
It was like an old wound. Like scar tissue. There had been wounds from the past. They were healing, but the scar tissue was there and the injury was still tender. Grant and Lisa felt themselves falling into their old debating routines with each other; Grant being pissed that Lisa didn’t support his prepping and Lisa being pissed that Grant had caused so much trouble for the family.
The hug. This is just like the hug. Don’t make the same mistake aga
in, Grant told himself. “In marriage, it’s better to be happy than to be right,” Grant remembered his Grandpa telling him. The scars needed to heal for good. No more of that. Grant and Lisa didn’t have the time or the luxury of bickering about who was right. They had to pull through as a family right now. Bickering and being “right” could get them killed. At a minimum, it would make them miserable out in the boonies with nothing to do but argue. No. That was done.
“Honey, I’m sorry for all that’s happened,” Grant said when no one was around. “We need to get along out here, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.” He held his arms out for a hug.
Lisa was reluctant. She knew that hugging him meant the argument was over. She wanted to tell him what an asshole he was. She wanted to tell him how much harder life would be out here without all her stuff, but she was tired. She was sick of all the fighting. She’d had the most stressful day of her life today, and wanted to have a husband again. Maybe not the “normal” suburban husband she had before all this. But her husband. He wasn’t so bad, after all. He had prepared a safe place for them with all they needed. Maybe not all they wanted, but all they needed. He was kinda cute, too. He was the love of her life, even though she still had no idea why.
She hugged him. It was warm. It was soft. It felt like home. Not a house kind of home. But the comfort of being with the ones you love. She still wouldn’t say she was sorry; he would figure out she was because she was hugging him. That’s all he would get. After all he put her through, an out loud “sorry” was not going to happen. He’d put up with it. He always had.
Grant felt like things were complete. His family was supposed to be here. They would be able to be a family again. They could walk the beach and have campfires and do all the things he thought they would be doing when he first got the cabin, before Lisa decided that she would hate the place. It had been a horrible couple of years of Lisa hating the cabin, the economy tanking, and the country collapsing when no one would listen to him. Chalk it up to a horrible couple of years. Maybe the worst they’d ever have.
Things were different now. They would be a family. Everything else was a detail. That hug lasted a long time.
Pow came up and said, “Cut the lovey dovey, guys. We have a bunch of work to do.” That jarred Grant into reality. He let her go. She kissed him. That was the “sorry” she couldn’t say out loud. Grant knew it and Lisa knew that he knew it.
OK, work time. Grant realized that the Team needed to unload their stuff and settle in. He found Mark and asked him for the key to the yellow cabin. Grant gathered the Team. He walked them the few yards to the yellow cabin and said, very dramatically, “Gentlemen, here are your new quarters.” He unlocked the door and they went into a very nice cabin. The guys were blown away. There were three beds and a nice couch; enough for each one of them. A nice kitchen, a great view, an amazing place.
“Wow, it’s even better on the inside than it was on the outside when you showed it to me,” Pow said.
“Whaddya think, guys?” Grant asked the Team, knowing the answer.
“Unreal, man,” said Wes.
“Fabulous,” said Bobby.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Scotty.
Pow just nodded.
Mark, Paul, Chip, and John offered to help unload the guys’ stuff.
“What the hell? Did you bring an armory with you?” Mark asked when he saw all their gear.
The guys just nodded.
“Well, good,” Eileen said. She had changed during that trip. She could feel her farm girl roots coming back to her. She knew how much safer they were at Pierce Point than back in the city. This didn’t seem weird anymore. It felt like a blessing.
Chapter 71
A Partial Break Down with Patches of Normalcy
(May 7)
How could so much be going wrong at once? Jeanie Thompson asked herself.
The power was going out for a few hours at a time every few days. Camp Murray, where the seat of Washington State government had been temporarily located after the state capitol, Olympia, had all the rioting and protests, still had a constant source of power. But, the rest of the state didn’t.
The FBI told Jeanie and the other people at Camp Murray that it was Chinese hackers attacking the software that ran the electrical grid; the program that routed power. If extra electricity was sent to the wrong place by the hacker, it would overload the system and could cause a cascading failure. It would fry the system, which would take days to repair if parts could be flown in, and weeks with all the highway traffic jams. To thwart the surges, the Feds had to shut down the power for a while until the software was secure again. So, technically, the Feds were the ones turning off the power. Wait till that news gets out, Jeanie, the public relations expert, thought. People will be pissed. At the Feds.
The Feds, to their credit, had detected that the hackers had been repeatedly sending the extra power into California and various military bases in the West. The hackers had been doing the same to the East Coast and DC. Those seemed to be the two regions with the outages.
No reliable electrical source meant that the internet wasn’t working. Oh, how reliant America had become on the internet. Government, and most businesses, couldn’t function without it.
Everyone was sent home. Jeanie, the communications director for the State Auditor, didn’t even want to think about the economic damage this was doing. No one was working, and nothing was getting done. Maybe this was one reason why the stores were running out of everything. Their inventory was restocked via the internet.
The Feds were doing all they could to get gasoline out to the cities. They had commandeered all the gas trucks. They had a plan in place for this and, for once, the plan worked pretty well. Now the Feds controlled all the fuel in the country. They put the refineries on full production and started running truckloads of fuel. They drove them with police and military escorts.
At first, people moved over to accommodate the emergency vehicles. They weren’t anymore, though. People were getting meaner and tougher. The roads were packed. The police and military escorts were needed because that fuel was worth its weight in gold. When a fuel truck would get bogged down in traffic, angry, violent motorists who ran out of gas would demand gas from the trucks. The police were shooting people who couldn’t be subdued.
However—and this part really amazed Jeanie—there were some supplies getting through. Trucks were taking the back streets, and some residents were helping them get through. Trips by semi were taking days instead of hours, but things were getting through. The fact that the food, gas, medicine, and other necessities were worth ten times what they were a few days ago helped. The market was an amazing thing. Everything was for sale, at the right price.
This meant gangs were sprouting up. Not street gangs, although they were running wild without any police. White-collar gangs were taking advantage of the fact that the tanker of gasoline stalled in traffic in their neighborhood was now worth a million dollars. It was like stealing stalled armored cars full of cash with the keys in the ignition. In the cities, Russian and Asian gangs were the muscle behind the white collar gangs and were turning into the black market suppliers of everything. In the rural areas, which were much better off, local cops and related “good ol’ boys” were taking things like semis of food and gas for “safekeeping.” Gangs took many forms after the Collapse. The idea that a “gang” was the Crips or Bloods was so…pre-Collapse.
Back in Washington State, the government was in a full chaotic panic. The police had been out fighting protests, and looting, along with waves of crime for days. They were exhausted. Many cops were just leaving their posts and going home. Most would see if their families were OK, get some sleep, and then try to go back out. But each day, fewer and fewer were reporting back for duty. With all the budget cuts of the past year, there weren’t as many cops to start with. Many had decided that the lifelong employment and retirement they had been promised was another politician
’s lie and they had already been looking for something else.
The National Guard was in the same boat. Many guardsmen had been called up a few weeks prior for the “training,” which was actually just preparation for the civil unrest that the Pentagon knew was coming. The Feds had done something a few years back that had never happened before: they stationed combat troops in the United States whose mission was to fight in the states. The military, of course, had about a million troops in the U.S., but they were assigned to commands whose mission was to fight overseas like Central Command, which covered the central part of the world, including the Middle East. A few years back, they created North Command to fight in North America. That action went largely unnoticed. NorthCom, as it became known, swung into action when the Collapse started. It strongly defended Washington, D.C. and coordinated federal combat to help state National Guard units.
But, fewer and fewer National Guardsmen were reporting for duty. Many were cops or others who were working their other jobs to the point of exhaustion. Others didn’t want to leave their families during the crisis. Some tried to report for duty but got caught in the traffic jams.
Jeanie could see that the state government really had no idea what it was doing. She was talking to media all day long, giving the state spin. Things will be OK, we’ll all pull through, people are helping their neighbors, terrorists are taking advantage of the disruptions, don’t be a hoarder, and listen to the government for further information.
Even though Jeanie was in chaos central at the state’s command post, she could see legitimate signs that not everyone was in a crisis. Oddly, most people were staying home from work, watching TV news, helping their neighbors, and eating the several days of food they normally had on hand in their pantries and refrigerators. It was not a complete breakdown of society. Things were bad, worse than anyone had ever seen in modern America, but not the end of the world. It was a partial breakdown with patches of normalcy.
