Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Community

Jeff had a little Motorola radio set so a guard could communicate with the house. After a few times out on nighttime guard duty showing people the lay of the land, he let the WAB guys take it over. Jeff needed to sleep. He figured he was doing plenty for the WAB families by harboring fugitives and letting them live out there for free. They could pull nighttime guard duty in exchange. They didn’t seem to mind the trade. In fact, they were extremely grateful.

The WAB guys hadn’t spent much, if any, time with guns. That was OK. Jeff went over the operation of a shotgun, which would be good at the gate-to-car distances involved for a guard at the gate. A rifled slug from a 12 gauge could punch through most car doors. Jeff had a standard Remington 870 Wingmaster. It was a great duck gun, or a looter gun.

Jeff showed them how to shoot his lever-action 30-30 carbine. They did fairly well, but weren’t exactly marksmen. Jeff had a limited amount of 30-30 ammo, about 250 rounds, so he got the WAB guys familiar with the lever-action 30-30 by shooting his lever-action .22, a Marlin 94. He had been shooting that gun since he was a kid. He knew exactly where each round would go. Jeff had thousands of rounds of .22 ammo, which he bought one box at a time over the past few years. They used the .22 frequently out there on rabbits, squirrels, and crows. Besides, Jeff loved shooting that lever-action .22.

The guys took their pistols with them when they were on guard duty. Karen didn’t like seeing the guns and asked that they not be visible to the children. The kids didn’t seem to care about the guns, though. They had been afraid of them at first, but quickly realized that guns were part of what happened on the farm. They were tools. After a while, Tom and Ben quit trying to accommodate Karen and she didn’t say anything. Brian, however, kept his pistol hidden as his wife wished. That was OK. At least he was carrying it, which was what mattered.

Jeff had two pistols. The first was a snub-nosed .38 revolver that he used when he needed to carry a concealed gun. He didn’t have a holster; he just put it in his pocket. He couldn’t remember if his concealed weapons permit had expired or not. Oh well. They weren’t exactly required anymore. Besides, he only needed a permit if he was in town and he didn’t plan on being in town.

Jeff’s second pistol was his pride and joy: a Ruger Blackhawk in .357. It was a “cowboy” gun. He had a Western holster for it and loved it. He loved all things cowboy and wasn’t afraid to wear his cowboy pistol and carry his cowboy lever action rifle. It was his damned farm and that’s how it was. No one cared. Jeff had lots of .38 ammo. It also worked in the .357. He wished he had a lever-action carbine in .357/.38, too, but he never got around to getting one before the Collapse. That was OK; his 30-30 worked just fine. He had almost 200 rounds for his 30-30. It was enough for hunting, or an attack or two on the farm.

Rounding out the “arsenal” was his 30-06. It was scoped and could take down elk, which came by quite a bit, at 200 or more yards. That had been the longest shot he’d taken with it. Jeff didn’t shoot it much; he didn’t need to. But, it was sighted in perfectly. He only had about 100 rounds. This would be the gun he used from the house out to the road, if necessary. He hoped it wouldn’t be.

Just then, someone knocked on the door. He grabbed his shotgun and went to the door. It was Dennis, Jeff’s cousin who lived down the road. Jeff’s family owned all the land on the road and subdivided it a few years ago when that was still possible before environmental regulations prevented it. Dennis’ mom, who was Jeff’s aunt, got one of the lots. When she died, Dennis got it.

Dennis was a nice guy, kind of quiet and shy. He was a non-descript bachelor in his thirties. A hard-working guy who was perfectly comfortable on the farm, but not so much in town. Dennis had come over to Jeff’s house to see if he could help show the new people some of the things they’d need to know. He was also coming over because he was lonely and wanted to be around some new people.

Jeff told Dennis that the people staying with them had left the city because of the violence. He told Dennis not to mention to a single person that they were out there. There had been a misunderstanding with the authorities that would get straightened out when all this cleared up.

Dennis was a hick, but wasn’t stupid. He knew that Jeff worked for WAB and that WAB was hated by the state government. He was glad to help the effort. He, too, hated all the superior-minded city people who kept taking and taking from the people out in the rural areas. Dennis just wanted to be left alone, but the environmentalists kept telling him how to live. They wouldn’t let him raise cattle out there. At 500 yards, it was too close to a stream. That stream had been fine for the 140 years the Prossers had been on this land. Dennis wasn’t political, but he was glad to be helping in some small way to get even with the people who were destroying his country. If that meant harboring some fugitives when the cops were stretched too thin to do anything about it, that was fine. It was more excitement than he’d had in his whole life.

Tom, Ben, and Brian were huddled together and talking before breakfast. Jeff introduced Dennis to Tom, who was scoping out Dennis’ truck.

Tom asked, “Hey, Dennis, does your truck run on diesel or regular gas?”

“Diesel,” Dennis said. “Why?”

“Good,” Tom said, “Jeff has plenty of diesel in that underground tank. So you can make trips to town, right?” Obviously, the POIs couldn’t show their face in town, but Dennis could. He had no ties to WAB. Even Jeff, the mailroom guy, had WAB ties. Only Dennis could go into town.

“Yeah,” Dennis said. He didn’t like to go to town and knew that it was dangerous right now, but he could go. For a good enough reason.

Ben said, “Dennis, we need you to get something pretty important.”

“Yeah? What?” he asked, trying to hide his excitement.

“Can you go to an office supply store and get some blank CDs?” Ben asked. “You know, the kind you can record music on. As many as you can.”

That was weird. Making music CDs? “Why do you want to do that?” Dennis asked.

Ben told Dennis what they were doing with the CDs. Wow. This was exciting, Dennis thought. He couldn’t wait to go to town.

Brian gave Dennis a bunch of cash. Brian didn’t want his wife to see how much he was handing Dennis; she’d get mad. Karen was not loving this farm living. She was used to suburban living. She was grateful to be away from the protestors, but she felt so odd out at the farm. Giving Dennis the last of their cash to buy blank CDs would have been too hard for Brian to explain. So he didn’t. He just did it.

“I’ll go right now,” Dennis said. He needed to go to his house and get his pistol. He wanted to be ready for what was sure to be the biggest adventure of his life.

By now, it was obvious to everyone in Forks that things were going to be bad for quite a while. This wasn’t a temporary little thing. It was the biggest thing that had happened to the country since World War II; maybe bigger.

Politics was not much of a topic in Forks. Right, left, Patriot, Loyalist—none of that really mattered. People were pissed at how the government had let all this happen, but they’d been pissed for years leading up to the Collapse. They started getting angry a few decades before when the environmentalists started to shut down logging—the life blood of Forks, Washington—because of the “endangered” spotted owl. There were plenty of spotted owls; the locals saw them flying around all the time. The endangered species listing was just an excuse to turn most of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington into a park for city people to play in when they drove their Subarus out from Seattle to go bird watching. For spotted owls, of course.