299 Days: The Stronghold

by Glen Tate

  The next screen said, in black, “There is no gov’t.” The first person said, “I think this helps us. ‘There is no gov’t’ drives people toward safety and security, and that’s us. People want government now since it’s the only thing getting food onto the shelves. So saying there is no government adds to the crisis atmosphere and makes government even more needed and desired.”

  Jeanie disagreed about the “There is no gov’t” graffiti. She said, “I think it’s fairly effective. It challenges our authority. That’s how insurgencies win. The black paint is a symbol of anarchists, which most people don’t like, so that part of the message is ineffective. But you put that message in yellow, the so-called Patriot color, and people will say, ‘Yeah, there is no government. They’ve screwed everything up. We’ve got nothing to lose by turning on the government.’ That hurts us.” Jeanie realized she was able to peer into the mind of the Undecideds and even the Patriots a little too well. Because, she hated to admit it, that’s where her natural sympathies laid.

  The next screen had in green paint, “They’re not listening to you.” Everyone agreed that message hurt the government, but people thought the green color conveyed an environmentalist message, which was confusing. “You put ‘They’re not listening to you’ in Patriot yellow and you’ve got a powerful message,” someone said. Most nodded.

  “This is the last one,” Jason said. It was the most powerful one in his opinion. It said “I miss America” in yellow.

  “Wow!” Jeanie said. “That one stings. It captures everything we don’t want people thinking. The past was good: no shortages, no serious crime, no financial collapse, no states ‘opting out.’ No bad stuff.”

  Jeanie continued, “This ‘I miss America’ message captures everyone’s hopes and dreams about the greatness of America and how it has been destroyed. That captures the sentiment of,” Jeanie almost said “most,” but settled on “many people out there. Not to mention the play on words about ‘Miss America’ the beauty contest. That,” said Jeanie, “is a powerful message.” Jeanie looked around the room. Most of the people were not pleased that she was so enthusiastic about what a great message “I miss America” was. So she needed to focus back on her job: a counter message.

  Jeanie said, “The only counter message is ‘America always sucked.’ No one wants that to be their argument.”

  Chapter 129

  Granny on Guard

  (May 13)

  Guard duty was one of the things that was very different for the families on Prosser Road. They never had a need for a guard at the gate to Prosser Road before, but now they did, even though they didn’t have a lot of people out there. A few of them were Jeff Prosser’s older aunts and uncles so they weren’t much help on guard duty. Besides Jeff and the WAB guests—Tom, Ben, and Brian—the only other two guard candidates were Dennis, who was in his mid-thirties, and “Granny” as they called her. She was Jeff’s great aunt; in her sixties, but in good shape. She spent her whole life on the farm and could handle a few hours of sitting by the gate with a shotgun, especially if it wasn’t raining.

  Besides, no one came to the gate on Prosser Road. They were way out in the sticks, several turns off the main road. People had to know where they were going to get there. Granny often took a guard shift in the morning. She liked it. She was outside where it was quiet. One of the guys would take the afternoon guard duty and then two more would split night guard duty. The WAB guests knew enough about guns to at least get a warning shot off to alert the others. Each home was like a fortress. It wasn’t exactly a “tactical” defense plan but, given that no one ever came out there, it was good enough. Probably.

  As Granny was out watching some deer grazing across the road around 10 in the morning, she thought she heard the sound of a car. She did. A Prius, in fact. Coming down the road and slowing down at the Prosser Road gate. It had government license plates.

  She picked up her shotgun, but held it to her side so the occupants of the car couldn’t see she had it. She hoped the car would drive past. Instead, it slowed down and stopped about fifty yards from the gate. Granny and the car just stared at each other for a while. She wanted to wave them in and chat with the visitors, which was her impulse. But, not in these times. Who knew who was in that government-looking Prius and what they wanted. Granny knew what they wanted. She was scared. Really scared.

  Finally, the doors of the Prius opened up and two men came out. They were wearing pistol belts with guns and had their hands to their sides. They had hard hats. Granny recognized those hard hats from TV. They were the Freedom Corps.

  The FC men were fat. They looked like they hadn’t been out of their cubicles in months. They seemed out of place with those helmets and pistol belts. They looked angry and uncomfortable.

  The FC men started walking toward her. She had a little walkie talkie, but it was on the bench a few feet away. She didn’t want to look suspicious by talking on the radio. That was a tough decision: alert Jeff on the radio or just try to talk her way out of this? Her instinct was to not look suspicious. They were probably just lost.

  When the men were about twenty yards away, one of them yelled—they were close enough that they didn’t need to yell—“Are you armed?” That frightened Granny. She nodded and turned so they could see her shotgun up against her side.

  The FC drew their pistols and screamed at her, “Drop it! Drop it old lady or you’re dead! Drop it now, bitch!” The FC men had received a few hours of training about how most people out in the rural areas were teabaggers and probably a threat. Intimidate them, they had learned in training.

  Granny was terrified. She dropped the shotgun. She put her hands up. These men were scaring her.

  One of the men, the passenger, pointed his gun right at her and slowly walked forward. When he got to the gate, he grabbed the shotgun on the ground and took it. He walked back to the Prius and threw it in trunk.

  “What’s your name?” the driver asked while the other one was taking the shotgun.

  “Beatrice Prosser,” Granny said.

  “Who lives on this road?” The other one screamed with his gun still pointed at her head.

  Granny named off all the families.

  “Do you know a Tom Foster from Olympia?” one of them screamed. There was really no need for the screaming, she thought.

  “Who?” Granny asked. “Foster? I don’t know any Fosters and I know everyone around here. Are you sure you have the right address?” She was pulling this off pretty well, she thought. She was the most scared she’d been in her life.

  The suggestion that they were lost only made the driver mad. “Shut up,” he said. “We’re not lost. We’re looking for someone. He’s a terrorist. Tom Foster of the Washington Association of Business. Do you know him or have you seen him?”

  “No,” Granny said meekly. She started to cry. It was genuine. She was terrified.

  It was silent for a while. The FC were deciding what to do. They would search the houses on that road. They had received a report that a few days ago that Tom Foster’s cell phone had been used in the farmhouse on the hill there. It turns out it was Derek Foster trying to call his girlfriend on his dad’s cell phone.

  “Who lives there?” the FC passenger said, pointing to the house.

  “Jeff and Molly Prosser,” Granny said. “Why? Have they done something illegal? They’re good people, they…”

  “Shut up old lady,” said the driver. “Shut up, OK? We have to think, here.”

  “OK,” Granny said. She had never been treated this way, let alone had a gun pointed at her. She was so scared. She started to shake.

  The FC talked to each other and then the driver said, in a civil tone this time, “Open the gate.”

  Granny went to the padlock and put in the correct combination. She wished she had radioed Jeff. Oh, God, would she be the reason they all got killed? She felt like she’d made a horrible mistake.

  The lock opened and she opened the gate, and she stood there while the
FC men were heading back to their car. She thought of the WAB kids. They were so sweet and innocent. They needed their parents.

  That’s when Granny made a decision.

  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 t
o 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.”