Glen Tate - 299 Days - The 17th Irregulars

The volunteers were very eager to help, and maybe get a cut of what was going on. They later became the “Blue Ribbon Boys” due to the blue cloth strip they wore on their left arms to signify who they were.

As things were getting worse and worse with the economy, the state and Feds wanted to control everything. All that federal and state money came with strings attached. Winters constantly had to deal with all the officials in Olympia and DC; at least at first. But pretty soon, he noticed, Olympia, and especially DC, couldn’t keep track of it all. There weren’t enough bureaucrats to keep tabs on all the money flowing into even little Frederickson. Winters quickly realized he could essentially do what he wanted. He would just send in “everything’s fine here” reports to Olympia and DC. They were reports that probably went unread.

When the “Crisis” hit on May Day, things got even better for Winters. There were plenty of government resources coming in during the “emergency.” And the little townspeople needed Winters even more.

But, the best part about the Crisis was that this made Winters truly untouchable. No one from Olympia or DC would possibly have the time or resources to crack down on corruption like his. Even if they caught him, he’d just call a few of the many favors government officials owed him and he’d get a slap on the wrist. He decided to quit trying to hide what he was doing and figured that being out in the open about it reinforced that he was the boss. He was so powerful that he didn’t even need to hide it.

Winters decided he would directly profit from the Mexicans instead of just indirectly. He had the police (what was left of the police) arrest the leader of the Mexican gang in town. He told the leader that the gangs had a new business partner: Commissioner Winters. They would get protection from the police in exchange for various cuts of different enterprises. The gang leader, Señor Hernandez, wondered what took Winters so long to make this deal. He was happy to have the government as his new business partner. It made everything so much easier.

The benefits to Señor Hernandez of his formal relationship with the police became clear when a rival Mexican gang tried to come in. The police dutifully arrested them, and the townspeople were so happy that Commissioner Winters was taking bold action to combat crime. Winters viewed it more as getting rid of a business competitor, but if the little townspeople wanted to think he was protecting them from crime, all the better. However, rival gangs kept coming. The Mexican refugees from the collapse down in Mexico continued to flood northward. Winters was getting dragged into gang wars and even family feuds that had started back in Mexico.

He proposed a deal with all the gangs. Protection for all of them; same price for all of them. They couldn’t agree with each other and rejected his offer. They even started to kill his cops, which was the last straw.

Winters and Señor Hernandez’s gang went after the other gangs. It got bloody. That’s when Winters had to move from his house into the security of the courthouse. It didn’t take long until a barbed wire fence went up all around it, which was where the term “outside the wire” came from. Winters was essentially under siege in his own courthouse. Heavily armed convoys of cops, Blue Ribbon Boys, and Señor Hernandez’s men could move outside the wire, but that was about it.

After much in-fighting, the Mexican gangs finally came to an agreement: They would split up the Frederickson action. Gasoline, food, guns, drugs, and girls.

Girls. Winters really liked the young Mexican girls. He liked that he could do whatever he wanted to them. He got to be the boss. He got paid in “product” as often as he could. His wife had known this side of him for decades. She didn’t care anymore. She stayed in a separate room somewhere in the basement of the courthouse. Winters never really liked her, anyway.

Soon after the Crisis started, there was a Mexican sector in town run totally by the gangs. Cops were not allowed in, except to collect money. Not “money” as in cash, but gas, food, ammo, gold and silver, medicine, FCards, and whatever else was valuable.

Winters was glad there was a truce—a very profitable one—for now, but he knew that the Mexicans’ deal with each other could break down at any moment, which was what kept him awake at night. He never fully believed that he could keep control over the whole town like he had been doing so far. He knew this racket was too good to be true.

Another thing keeping him awake at night was the reports that his own Blue Ribbon Boys were going into business for themselves. He didn’t like that. He let some of it happen; that’s how he paid those guys, but he was starting to wonder if they wouldn’t try to get rid of him and keep all the money for themselves.

Winters maintained the barbed wire around the courthouse even during the gang truce. By then, there were too many militia whacko “Patriots” out there. Winters assumed the Patriots were a gang, too. He was waiting for them to come to him and ask for a piece of the action.

Winters, after he heard about the armament at Pierce Point, assumed Pierce Point might be the first Patriot gang he needed to make a deal with. Before the Crisis, he didn’t spend much time thinking about Pierce Point. They had always kind of been on their own, but now they were coming into town and using their FCards. That was money in Winters’ pocket, and he got to tell Olympia how many more people he was helping with the “Recovery.” He needed Pierce Point to be good little customers. He needed them to play ball.

And then, one night, someone faxed Winters a disturbing picture from Pierce Point.

Fax machines, long forgotten as a communication device, were much more popular during the Collapse. The internet would go off and on. The phone lines still worked, most of the time. But old 1990s era phone-line faxes didn’t require the internet. People were actually using them again.

Several weeks ago, Winters was given a fax that showed a picture of someone hung out at Pierce Point. He ignored it at first; he had a gang truce to broker. But now, in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep, he started thinking about it. He found the fax on his desk. He got scared.

Winters was concerned with the picture of the hanging because that meant Pierce Point was running things themselves, and Winters didn’t like that. Worse yet, it was in a newspaper called the “ Pierce Point Patriot .” Oh, great. Some redneck “Patriots” out there had their own little newspaper, Winters thought when he re-read the fax. This little newspaper of theirs showed a level of boldness—calling themselves a “Patriot” was daring the police (if any were around) to arrest them as a terrorists—that made Winters nervous.

Then Winters remembered that right after he got the fax a few weeks ago, Winters got a call from Olympia. They got the fax, too. They wanted to know what was going on out in Winter’s county. They sounded pissed and said they thought some POI who did some right-wing podcast might be out there. Winters didn’t need that.

Olympia had leverage over Winters and he didn’t want to screw up his rackets. Olympia sent semis of food to him. They controlled the FCards. Winters needed that food. It was his biggest profit center, more than the Mexican gas or bootleg medical supplies. He needed that food so he could get a cut of it. Oh, and the townspeople needed the food, too. Winters didn’t need them hungry and starting to notice how much food had been stockpiled in the courthouse.

Stapled on the back of the newspaper article was a new fax from a few days ago that Winters must have missed. It was Olympia telling him that they would be sending some FCorps investigators out to look into Pierce Point.