Glen Tate - 299 Days - The 17th Irregulars

Bobby went up to Wes and pointed to his front pants pocket. “Sorry, dude,” Bobby said and took out Wes’s Zero Tolerance folding knife. “I’ll take good care of this,” he said, “for three short days, brother.” That knife meant everything. Members of the Team always had their matching knives with them. Always.

Wes realized that all eyes were on him. Would he be a whiner or a man? “The sooner this starts, the sooner I get out,” Wes said to Rich. “Who’s taking me back there?”

Kellie started crying. She needed Wes right now. She needed him and now he was going to jail. This wasn’t fair.

Rich made arrangements for someone to take Wes to the jail. As Wes walked by Rich, he pulled him aside and whispered, “Don’t worry. You’ll get the star treatment in jail. Comfy room. Good food. I just had to do this to show…”

“I know, I know,” Wes whispered back, “the Team gets no breaks. I understand. One request: conjugal visits?” he said looking over at Kellie.

“We’ll see,” Rich said. “I just don’t want you to get caught. It’ll take away the ‘no special treatment’ thing I’m trying to do here.”

Wes nodded and recognized that Rich was doing what he could. Wes decided to think of it as three days of rest, which he could use. They had been patrolling and training hard for weeks.

A truck came for Ethan. A few minutes later, one came for Wes. Kellie was crying while Sheila took her away in their car.

Things got quiet for the first time in a while. Finally Rich said, “OK, let’s get back to work. Let’s run through this raid one more time. In slow motion first, then full speed. Empty mags and empty chambers. Safeties on. Let’s go, gentlemen.”

Grant stood there and thought about the different things that motivate people. He was trying to motivate people to risk their lives and do some very nasty things with the promise of high-minded things, like freedom and liberty. That motivated a few people. But other people, like Ethan, were motivated to do life-changing things, such as leaving the safety of Pierce Point, by things like being scorned by a woman. Never underestimate wildcards like jealousies over women, Grant thought. Never think that this is some perfect chess game of political philosophies and predictable behaviors. Human beings are a crap shoot. Expect the unexpected.

Wes did his three days in jail, no problem. He actually enjoyed the rest. The part he didn’t like was no Kellie. Rich couldn’t figure out a way to allow conjugal visits without getting caught. When Wes got out, he and Kellie spent about a day doing nothing but having the wildest and most passionate sex of their lives. Kellie was very glad to have him back and was so proud that he went to jail for her. She showed her appreciation in the bedroom. Wes went back to work with the Team. He had missed them and they had missed him.

Everything was back in a rhythm. There was actually a “same ole’, same ole’” routine developing. Everyone had their specific jobs now and they were doing them, like the old days, except they were different than their pre-Collapse jobs.

Grant was spending most of his time at the Grange doing organizational things and a little bit of judging. He had a mental health commitment trial about once a week. He also informally resolved various civil disputes, most of which involved property line disagreements. One case involved who owned a generator. He tried not to spend time having a full trial for these civil disputes. He talked to each side and tried to get them to settle, which worked in every case. This was more than a way to save his time, and the jury’s time; it was to come to a resolution of the dispute that both sides sort of agreed to instead of one side winning outright and the other side losing. Those things tend to simmer and lead to hard feelings for years. They didn’t need that out at Pierce Point.

He and Drew were continuing to work on a very detailed roster of Patriots and Loyalists. Luckily, with Snelling and his people gone, there weren’t too many “L”s left on the roster, but there were many “U”s: Undecideds.

About three quarters of Pierce Point remained Undecided. Maybe they were soft Patriots or Loyalists, but they weren’t wearing their politics on their sleeves, which was pretty typical when two sides are competing for the support of the population and there is violence on both sides.

However, more and more people were openly identifying themselves as Patriots. But politics was a secondary—way secondary—thing for most people. They were focusing on gardens, FCard food, gas, medical issues, and all the other things it was going to take them to survive. Many people worked sixteen hours a day making sure they would survive. They were tired and didn’t really care about philosophical discussions regarding the Constitution.

Fair enough, Grant thought. As long as they weren’t Loyalists trying to get everyone killed, Grant was fine with Undecideds quietly doing their thing. In fact, Grant’s vision for after the Collapse was to have the people who didn’t care about politics go back to their lives of doing their own things. Grant’s hope for a free society was that politics wouldn’t matter because the government’s powers would be constitutionally limited so it wouldn’t make a difference who was in office. The ideal was that government wouldn’t do much bad because it couldn’t do much at all.

The hardest thing for Grant was hiding the Ted project from Lisa. Every time he was with her, he felt like such a liar. The longer he didn’t tell her, the bigger the breach of trust would be. He struggled with this. He wanted a happy marriage, but he couldn’t tell her. He was slowly realizing that his marriage would probably be over because of this stupid Collapse and the war that was coming. Grant could feel that he was thinking of himself more and more as a solider instead of a husband. He hated it. But he couldn’t come up with a solution. “Play the hand you’re dealt,” he would always say to himself.

Lisa, on the other hand, was doing well. She was easing into the idea of being a doctor who got paid in cans of tuna. She was so glad she was out at Pierce Point instead of Olympia. She didn’t know how to tell Grant that. He might get a big head and say “I told you so,” which would ruin the whole good glow of the moment. So she never told him. He probably knew, she told herself.

Manda and Cole were doing great. Manda had emerged as quite a leader of the kids. They loved her. The group of kids she oversaw was growing.

Cole was doing amazingly well. All the busyness of suburban life—all those people talking all the time—had really worn him out. There was none of that in Pierce Point. His talking was getting better and better. It was amazing to see.

Drew and Eileen were getting used to their new lives. Drew was a huge help at the Grange. He was keeping everything running fairly by giving people credit for the donations they were making.

Eileen, who had grown up on a hard-scrabble farm in rural Eastern Washington, was right at home in the rather primitive conditions of post-Collapse America. She had gotten over her initial normalcy bias and was embracing life as it now was. She got to see her grandkids more than ever and loved it.

The Colsons, Morrells, Chip, Gideon, and the Team were doing fine. Everyone was easing into a “new normal” of their lives out there. Grant looked back at just the past almost three months and couldn’t believe how far they’d come.

The rest of the people out at Pierce Point seemed to be adjusting to the new normal. It was amazing how quickly people had forgotten about many parts of their pre-Collapse lives of just a few months ago. Post-Collapse life was now how life was.