299 Days: The Community 2d-3

by Glen Tate

  Now, the Prossers and their guests had fresh milk and lots of it. They even churned the cream to make butter with an electric churn Molly’s mom left them years ago that Molly dug out of the attic.

  Kids were invaluable little laborers out on the farm. In addition to milking the cows, they were in charge of gathering the eggs from the hens. They had planned on selling the extra eggs, but now, with all the guests, they used the extra eggs for breakfasts. They had beef cows, too; about thirty. Beef cows were one investment that outperformed the stock market enormously. They had more beef than they knew what to do with. Even with the guests eating lots of it, they still had enough to sell.

  The Prossers sold the extra beef to neighbors. Now, with cash not having any real value, Jeff figured they could trade the beef for gasoline, chainsaw oil, fence posts; whatever they might need out there, which wasn’t much. That was the beauty of the farm: it didn’t produce a lot in economic terms, but didn’t take a lot to keep it running. They were largely self-sufficient. Not completely; they still needed electricity and running water and would need to go to town for things like tractor parts.

  They had electric heat in the house, but Jeff was too cheap to run it. Besides, electricity prices had quadrupled in the past few years. A ton of “greenhouse” gas regulations had kicked in and utilities were not allowed to use the great and nearly free electricity source in the Pacific Northwest: hydroelectric dams. The utilities shut down the nearly free electricity of the dams and had to buy power on the open market, competing with California utilities for a limited amount of electricity and bidding up the price. With the cut in hours at WAB, that electric bill became a big deal.

  Jeff had a woodstove in the farmhouse. His dad got it in the 1970s and it was very efficient. They had tons of firewood on the property. Down by the creek, alder grew like weeds. Alder wasn’t the best firewood, but it would do. They had lots of cedar and spruce farther out toward the hill, but it was a long haul back to the house.

  Jeff was glad he had the tractor. It made hauling logs or cut wood across a sometimes soggy field much easier than trying to use a truck or, worse yet, carrying it all on foot. He had a winter’s worth of wood already cut, but with the free labor out there he might as well get even more cut. His guests needed to work for the room and board, he thought with a chuckle.

  Another chore was guard duty. They were nearly at the end of a long road of farmhouses. There was a gate at the entrance to the road to keep cattle from escaping. It worked well to keep people out, too. Up on the high ground where they were, the Prossers could see a car coming down the road for quite some distance. But still, they needed a guard out there. Jeff had made a deal with the neighbors: they have an armed person watching the gate during the day and his house would take care of the night. He did this because he didn’t want his POI guests to be seen during the day even by the neighbors, though he had grown up with and trusted them. Who knew what guests the neighbors would have during the Collapse and where their guests’ allegiances might lie.

  Jeff had a little Motorola radio set so a guard could communicate with the house. After a few times out on nighttime guard duty showing people the lay of the land, he let the WAB guys take it over. Jeff needed to sleep. He figured he was doing plenty for the WAB families by harboring fugitives and letting them live out there for free. They could pull nighttime guard duty in exchange. They didn’t seem to mind the trade. In fact, they were extremely grateful.

  The WAB guys hadn’t spent much, if any, time with guns. That was OK. Jeff went over the operation of a shotgun, which would be good at the gate-to-car distances involved for a guard at the gate. A rifled slug from a 12 gauge could punch through most car doors. Jeff had a standard Remington 870 Wingmaster. It was a great duck gun, or a looter gun.

  Jeff showed them how to shoot his lever-action 30-30 carbine. They did fairly well, but weren’t exactly marksmen. Jeff had a limited amount of 30-30 ammo, about 250 rounds, so he got the WAB guys familiar with the lever-action 30-30 by shooting his lever-action .22, a Marlin 94. He had been shooting that gun since he was a kid. He knew exactly where each round would go. Jeff had thousands of rounds of .22 ammo, which he bought one box at a time over the past few years. They used the .22 frequently out there on rabbits, squirrels, and crows. Besides, Jeff loved shooting that lever-action .22.

  The guys took their pistols with them when they were on guard duty. Karen didn’t like seeing the guns and asked that they not be visible to the children. The kids didn’t seem to care about the guns, though. They had been afraid of them at first, but quickly realized that guns were part of what happened on the farm. They were tools. After a while, Tom and Ben quit trying to accommodate Karen and she didn’t say anything. Brian, however, kept his pistol hidden as his wife wished. That was OK. At least he was carrying it, which was what mattered.

  Jeff had two pistols. The first was a snub-nosed .38 revolver that he used when he needed to carry a concealed gun. He didn’t have a holster; he just put it in his pocket. He couldn’t remember if his concealed weapons permit had expired or not. Oh well. They weren’t exactly required anymore. Besides, he only needed a permit if he was in town and he didn’t plan on being in town.

  Jeff’s second pistol was his pride and joy: a Ruger Blackhawk in .357. It was a “cowboy” gun. He had a Western holster for it and loved it. He loved all things cowboy and wasn’t afraid to wear his cowboy pistol and carry his cowboy lever action rifle. It was his damned farm and that’s how it was. No one cared. Jeff had lots of .38 ammo. It also worked in the .357. He wished he had a lever-action carbine in .357/.38, too, but he never got around to getting one before the Collapse. That was OK; his 30-30 worked just fine. He had almost 200 rounds for his 30-30. It was enough for hunting, or an attack or two on the farm.

  Rounding out the “arsenal” was his 30-06. It was scoped and could take down elk, which came by quite a bit, at 200 or more yards. That had been the longest shot he’d taken with it. Jeff didn’t shoot it much; he didn’t need to. But, it was sighted in perfectly. He only had about 100 rounds. This would be the gun he used from the house out to the road, if necessary. He hoped it wouldn’t be.

  Just then, someone knocked on the door. He grabbed his shotgun and went to the door. It was Dennis, Jeff’s cousin who lived down the road. Jeff’s family owned all the land on the road and subdivided it a few years ago when that was still possible before environmental regulations prevented it. Dennis’ mom, who was Jeff’s aunt, got one of the lots. When she died, Dennis got it.

  Dennis was a nice guy, kind of quiet and shy. He was a non-descript bachelor in his thirties. A hard-working guy who was perfectly comfortable on the farm, but not so much in town. Dennis had come over to Jeff’s house to see if he could help show the new people some of the things they’d need to know. He was also coming over because he was lonely and wanted to be around some new people.

  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 b
reakfast. 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 “shitba
gs” 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.