Glen Tate: 299 Days: The Restoration

She slowly lifted the gun. It wasn’t as heavy as she’d thought it would be. In the movies, guns always seemed heavy.

Now that she was holding it, she started pointing it at various parts of the empty football field, still very afraid it would go off.

“And, what?” she asked herself, “Hurt someone?” Like the things under the dirt? She wanted to laugh at her thought, but it seemed too dark.

She was moving the gun around, but still wasn’t comfortable with it. She wanted to put it back in the box. She felt dirty holding it.

She put it back in the box and then wondered if it was loaded. She remembered from a movie that you could see the bullets in the little wheel thing on this kind of gun, the cowboy kind, not the fully automatic assault pistols with the high-capacity clips, like the Glock. This was the kind of gun the police used when she was growing up. A revolver, she seemed to remember them being called.

She slowly and carefully looked at the holes in the wheel thing and didn’t see any bullets in them. She remembered from the movies that pushing a button somewhere made the wheel thing flop out so bullets could be put in it. There was only one button on the gun. She was afraid pushing the button would make it go off. She pointed it at the ground with the gun in her right hand and slowly pushed the button with her left hand.

Nothing. The gun didn’t go off, but the wheel thing didn’t flop out either. Finally, she pushed harder on the button and the wheel thing started to flop out.

She looked in the wheel thing and saw there were no bullets in it. She set the gun down, with the wheel thing open, and looked at the bullets in the pistol box. There was a box of bullets. She opened the box and carefully pulled a bullet out. She was careful because those things could just go off. They were miniature bombs, after all.

She tried putting the bullet in the wheel thing but the big end of the bullet wouldn’t fit, so she turned it around and put the small end in the hole; the big end kept the bullet from falling through. That must be how to load it, she thought. She put in five more bullets. She only needed one, but realized that when the wheel turned, it might not have a bullet. She didn’t want to put this up to her head, decide to do it, and then just hear a click.

Now the gun was loaded. She stared at it in the box, starting to psych herself up again. She began to imagine what it would look like if she put the gun in her hand and put it up to her head.

She couldn’t. She couldn’t touch that thing. It was a loaded gun and was very dangerous. Touching it a little had been one thing, but this was different. This was final.

She started to think about the dental instruments and stared at the gun.

She decided to touch it again, recalling the root canal and how it was better to just do it than keep worrying about it.

She put the gun in her hand and put it up to her head.

“Boom!”

She swung around toward the sound of the explosion and dropped the gun.

“Boom!” There was a second explosion followed by the sound of a truck ramming something. It was coming from the direction of the back entrance to the campus.

It took a moment for her mind to switch from being a second away from killing herself to realizing that soldiers were coming to Clover Park.

It was Linda! Linda had sent soldiers to come and rescue her! All this would be over — right before she killed herself! She was the luckiest person on the planet. She was elated and on top of the world.

But why were they blowing up the gate and ramming it? If they were the legitimate authorities, wouldn’t they have a key or something? Suddenly, Nancy’s thrill of being rescued was turning to the terror of being captured. The dental instruments flashed through her mind.

She started to run, but soon fell down because her legs were so wobbly. She was terrified and still drunk. She got up, ran some more, and fell again. In the minute or two it took to run, fall, get up and slowly hobble her way back to the main building, the soldiers at the gate had made it onto the campus. She saw several regular pickup trucks, not military vehicles, racing on the beautifully landscaped campus grounds and tearing up the lawn and flowerbeds.

The legitimate authorities wouldn’t have pickup trucks, she realized. She fell again when the thought of being captured by the teabaggers swept over her. As she was getting up, a man raced up to her with a gun and pointed at her.

“You’re under arrest!” he yelled.

It was weird. As they rolled down Highway 101 on the outskirts of Olympia, Grant realized that there was no one shooting at them. They approached each overpass carefully –very carefully. It took them all afternoon to go the few miles from Delphi Road to the Olympia city limits. They knew that the Limas would be concentrated in the city and would have more sophisticated defenses closer to town.

They did. Kind of. There were log obstacle booby traps on each of the overpasses after the Delphi exit, but no one there to pull the rope. Not a single person.

In fact, it was getting dark and they hadn’t seen one enemy fighter all day. They’d seen scared civilians running away. Women and children. It was raining, so the women and children looked miserable and pathetic scurrying away.

Dark, Grant thought. It was getting dark. They needed to have a plan for the darkness. He looked at the next exit, knowing the area well because it was the exit he used to take when he came home from the cabin. It had the perfect hiding place.

“You guys ever taken the Olympia brewery tour?” Grant asked the Team and Donnie, seemingly out of the blue. The tour was famous because they let the visitors sample all kinds of beer. The Olympia brewery was a huge beer-making plant right off the exit. It had been shut down a few years earlier because new environmental regulations made it economically impossible to brew anymore. Before that, the brewery had operated for over a hundred years making the formerly famous Olympia Beer. Hundreds of jobs were lost when it closed. The brewery was now boarded up, just like most other businesses.

The guys, who were concentrating on spotting people trying to kill them, wondered why Grant was distracting them. They didn’t answer. Each of them expected someone else to respond, but no one did.

“The reason I ask,” Grant finally said, “is that the brewery would be a great place to bed down tonight. Lots of windows, up high with a commanding view. All those gates protecting the place. It’s a nice defensible place. And it’s abandoned, so no one would think anyone was there.”

Still more silence. It was getting dark and harder to see threats.

“Scotty,” Grant said, “call in to Ted and see if he thinks the brewery would be a good place to be tonight.” Scotty obliged.

Ted, who had lived in the Olympia area for several years, was familiar with the brewery and, given its proximity to their current location as well as the capitol campus, he thought it would be a good place to be, at least for the night.

“Okay,” Grant said, referring to the Team and Donnie, “we will clear out one of the buildings for ourselves and set up shop.”

Grant had Scotty radio to Ted that the main convoy should park on the side of the highway as the Team exited and checked out the brewery.

The Team went off the exit very slowly. They were nervous. They were now at the Olympia city limits. If the reports were right, and they seemed to be so far, then the Limas would be concentrated in the city. They could easily set up ambushes at places like the exits coming into the city.

Then again, as Grant thought about how slowly they needed to proceed, he realized it was steadily getting darker. They didn’t have much time. They couldn’t have the convoy sitting on the side of Highway 101 all night. The Team needed to find a suitable place for the 17th Irregulars to park and set up a defense. Maybe even sleep a little. Eating would be nice, too.