Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Visitors

Things were going pretty well in Seattle, Carol thought. The progressives were finally in charge. We are finally doing what should have been done all along, she thought. In the past, Carol had spent a lot of time in Venezuela. As a Simon Bolivar-era expert, she frequently guest lectured down there. Venezuela was run right, and now she was seeing the same thing up here in America. Finally. The government owned most things, supplied the people with what they needed, essentially outlawed private property, and had a strong civilian security force to crack down on the conservatives trying to take all of this away from the people.

Carol’s job of teaching Spanish to the Freedom Corps volunteers puzzled her. She knew there were plenty of native speakers in the Freedom Corps, so she suspected she wasn’t there just to teach Spanish.

Sure enough, during her orientation for the new job, she was told that some of the teabaggers had infiltrated the Freedom Corps. Federal officials believed the redneck spies inside the FC would go out and commit atrocities in FC uniforms to turn the people against their leaders. Therefore, the Freedom Corps trainees needed to be evaluated and watched for political loyalty. Carol was proud to be selected as one of the people who would ensure that the FC remained loyal. The whole Recovery—and the fundamental transformation of the old system they’d been promised—was riding on the population seeing how well they were treated by the new system. That way, they wouldn’t want the old capitalist system back. Carol was on the lookout for “Patriot” spies. She blocked out of her mind the fact that her own brother was a “Patriot” POI. The fact that he was on the POI list merely meant that mistakes could be made, and she was going to work hard to make sure that no mistakes were made regarding the people she was overseeing. Grant became the reason why she worked so hard to be accurate with the information she passed on.

As she took her last sip of the delicious latte, she thought about the future. She’d spent so much time over the last few weeks only worrying about the present – food for today, electricity being on today, and not having someone break in today – that it felt kind of good to think about the future.

She was just fine with the future. Sure, things were still rocky out there, but the right people were finally running things. She had some wonderful houseguests, and she was doing something important for the people with her work with the FC.

Despite all of this, Carol was still scared. The crime scared her some, but it had already been increasing for years, and she had just learned to accept it. She was scared that the right-wingers would win. Sure, the progressives, like her, had a safe enclave in Seattle and its surrounding areas, but outside of Seattle, the teabaggers seemed to be running things.

With her first caffeine rush in over a month, she was thinking more clearly. Maybe this won’t be temporary, she thought for the first time. All along, she had been told that these emergency measures would be lifted soon and things would get back to normal. But, now that things were stabilized and the right people were finally in charge, she actually didn’t want to go back to the way things were before the Collapse. She liked the way things were in Seattle currently, they suited her just fine.

Strawberry shortcake never tasted so good. Steve Briggs hadn’t had anything this sweet in…what? Weeks; not since the Collapse started.

It wasn’t traditional strawberry shortcake, but Steve didn’t care. Instead of fresh berries, which hadn’t quite ripened yet, it was made with strawberry jam from the previous summer. The shortbread was biscuit mix with extra sugar added. The whipped cream was amazing. Steve hadn’t tasted anything like it since he was a kid and went to his grandma’s house. It was real cream, like from a cow and everything, whipped with a hand blender.

Steve ate it slowly, wanting to savor it. He wanted more. He wanted the whole tray of it, but there were other guards to feed and he couldn’t hog it up, which would be extremely uncool.

Steve was eating dinner at the school in Forks like he always did. It was where the guards and other volunteers ate when they were working. He ran the day shift of the guards. They were bubba guards securing the entrance to and from town on the only road to the outside world, Highway 101. It was about 100 miles from Forks to the nearest decent sized town to the south, Aberdeen. It was about fifty miles to Port Angeles to the east. They were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of forest land on the extreme northwest tip of Washington State.

Very few vehicles came down the highway from either end, usually about one a day. They were people passing through to get to bug out locations or to find relatives. The travelers were always relieved when the Forks bubba guards didn’t kill them or steal their things. Some bubba guards at other places were rumored to do that. All it took was one or two stories of that and everyone thought it was a daily occurrence.

Because there was so little traffic at the gate, the main duty of the Forks guards was as a police force inside the town. Almost everyone in Forks was armed. Attempting to break into just about any house was a very foolish thing. The guards patrolled the residential parts of the small town on foot, but mostly concentrated in the downtown part, which was where the businesses and anything of value were located.

Guards were purely volunteers, of course. There was no set period of time guys would commit to doing it. They might show up one day and not the next. Some guys did it full time. It depended on their supplies at home. If they had enough, they could do things like guard duty. If they had pressing matters at home, such as working on a garden or fishing, then their time to do anything else was limited.

Forks, which was one of the most isolated towns in the whole country, was entirely cut off from government food supplies. The Feds didn’t even attempt to come there. Why waste precious diesel to drive food a few hundred miles round trip just to get some food to about 3,500 hillbillies? They were probably all militia whackos, anyway.

Forks was cut off from the traditional means of communication. There was essentially no internet. Long distance phones were spotty and cell coverage was, too. Texting still worked pretty well because it took up so little bandwidth, but it was very hard to stay in real contact with the outside world with such limitations.

Luckily, there was a ham radio operator in town, Don Watson, so Forks and thousands of other little towns were not cut off from the outside world. The government wanted to shut down hams, but it couldn’t. Too many official recovery operations were dependent on ham radios, so they had to let people talk to each other, even if they were saying things the government didn’t like. The government monitored the ham frequencies for anything overt, but ham operators weren’t stupid enough to directly say things that could get them a visit from the FC.

Don had ham contacts all over, but particularly in the Seattle suburbs. They told him that they actually were doing OK around Seattle. The grocery stores were reasonably well stocked. There wasn’t much meat or produce, and there were almost no luxury items, like chocolate, but there was enough to eat, like mashed potato mix. “Truck stop food,” as everyone was calling it. He also got reports from hams across the country on evenings when the atmosphere was just right and could skip a radio wave a few thousand miles.

The hams described the gangs. The white-collar gangs sold gas and other things. There was also a problem with the violent gangs, though it wasn’t yet total chaos and anarchy. Don couldn’t get the hams to say anything critical of the government on the air, although disdain for the government was implied in almost everything people said on the radio.