299 Days: The 17th Irregulars

Chapter 207 Life in the Loyal Areas

Life was going really well in Seattle for Professor Carol Matson. Well, going as well as could be expected given all the terrorists and teabaggers trying to prevent the government from helping people. Carol still had her job — thank God — at the University of Washington teaching Freedom Corps volunteers Spanish, which was her specialty.

Kind of. She was a world-renowned scholar of the literature of the Simon Bolivar era. But, in these times, there wasn’t a use for that now, so she taught beginning Spanish.

Actually, she was tasked with keeping an eye on the FCorps volunteers. “Patriot” spies had infiltrated the FCorps and Carol was helping the legitimate authorities figure out who they were. In fact, teaching beginning Spanish was only a small part of what she did. Getting to know the FCorps volunteers, and finding out all she could about them, was her real job.

Her FCard had a good balance put on it each month. She could get her beloved lattes at the University book store. With coffee beans being so scarce, only faculty like her and important officials could get lattes there. She was very glad to get special treatment like that. She felt a little guilty about this, being a progressive and all, but she had to admit she’d do just about anything for that daily latte.

Carol continued to worry about her Patriot right-wing whacko brother, Grant, who was on the POI list. She was worried the authorities would hold her brother’s insanity against her. So far they hadn’t.

This should all be over soon, Carol thought as she sipped her daily latte at 9:15 a.m. Time for that latte and the caffeine rush that would get her through the day. The news said that the military and police were rounding up many teabaggers and stopping dozens of attacks on a daily basis. She saw teabaggers confessing on TV every night. They admitted doing horrible things, but were sorry now. One time, she thought she noticed the same teabagger confessing twice, only with a different name. There was a rumor that the confessions were fake, but that was just right-wing propaganda.

The initial shock of Crisis was over for Carol. The first few weeks were horrifying. The empty shelves, the crime, the terrorist attacks, but things were now in a “new normal” phase.

Carol felt like she was part of something new and very big. The right people were running things now and the legitimate authorities had nationalized almost everything. Progressives like her were in charge. They were getting so much done with all these new emergency powers to overthrow the capitalist power structure. She hated to admit it, but she was a little glad about the Crisis. It was a way to get some things done that couldn’t be done with the knuckle dragger macho men in control of everything.

It had been such an adventurous spring and early summer, and things would be heading toward autumn in a few months. This would all be over soon. Probably by the winter break. Or, as the teabaggers called it, “Christmas.”

Carol finished her latte and went to work. She was so lucky to be in Seattle.

Jeanie Thompson also felt lucky to be where she was: Camp Murray, the Washington State command center at Ft. Lewis. It was extremely secure. A thousand troops guarded her and the people she worked with, who consisted of the Governor, the command staff of the Washington National Guard, the state police, several federal agents, and miscellaneous state officials. Her boss was one of those state officials. Jeanie felt extremely secure there. She could hear the faint sound of gunfire “outside the wire” in the surrounding area. There was more and more gunfire at night, and now there was even some during the day, though it sounded far away.

While she was glad to be “inside the wire” of Camp Murray, the downside was that her career was basically over. Jeanie was a public relations genius. She had been so close to being the communications director for the next governor. Back then, she had been in all the important top secret briefings and had been spinning stories to the media. She was in heaven.

Then Jeanie was abruptly yanked off those cool duties. Her friend from the past, Grant Matson, was a POI and the police found out. Damned Facebook. They took her out of the top secret briefings and relegated her to doing stupid “happy smiley” tours for VIPs, who were very important people, like city council members from medium sized suburban towns or water district commissioners from who knows where. Or the employee of the year for the Department of General Administration. Wow. Real celebrities.

“I’m not out there,” Jeanie would say to herself as she looked out past the barbed wire to the chaos and God-knows-what going on outside the wire. Even though she was no longer getting the top secret briefings, she knew that things weren’t going well. The Recovery was stalling. They had dodged a bullet early on. After a few weeks of total disarray, the government finally got food rolling into the stores and contained the riots. The relative calm of most people being fed had been going on for several weeks now. It was much better than the “crisis of the hour” mode they had been in at the beginning.

Despite this, Jeanie could tell that things were not going well. There were some all-night sessions in the briefing room with lots of yelling. She still got to eat in the DFAC, the dining facility, with all the others and people in the DFAC looked pissed all the time. They were tired—so tired their brains weren’t working, like they were on drugs—and they were worried. Deathly afraid. Terrified of how out of control the situation was. She even saw some of them crying as they ate. No one came over and comforted them. They just cried alone. People tried to ignore that it was happening.

Lately, people were withdrawing into themselves, no longer chatting or hanging out. It was almost like people were afraid to be seen with other people or were afraid they were being plotted against. Every few days, the police would arrest someone at Camp Murray for espionage. Apparently, the Patriots—she caught herself; the “teabaggers”—had spies right there in Camp Murray. Right there, where the Governor was! Jeanie heard that entire military units were getting arrested. They were not following orders to engage in combat. She couldn’t figure out if the units were actively supporting the teabaggers or just sitting out the fight. They had hastily built a military prison at nearby Ft. Lewis. It was a giant outdoor tent city with massive rows of barbed wire and, she had heard, even landmines. But, she also heard, sometimes whole units would just be let out under some kind of deal. It was all very weird and chaotic.

Jeanie didn’t want to go to one of those prisons, so she was very careful to follow all the rules. She constantly worried about the fact that one of her friends — ex friends — was a POI.

It was lunch, but Jeanie wasn’t hungry. She was too worried and distracted to eat. She just sat there in the DFAC watching people. They would just silently eat some food and then shuffle off like zombies back to work. Jeanie noticed that people were eating less. The stress was doing that. She also noticed that occasionally, a person would not show up for a few days in the DFAC, and then she would later find out that they were in the base hospital suffering from some stress-related condition. Sometimes they came back, and sometimes they didn’t. She was starting to wonder if the “hospital” really meant prison.

The longer she was at Camp Murray, the more she was beginning to believe that everything was a lie, and she had been one of the chief salespersons of the lies. At first, she believed everything she was telling the TV news, radio, newspapers, and internet sites. Then she started to question it a little. She’d only talk about the good news, because at that point, there was still some good news to tell. Slowly, though, the good news became more and more scarce.

A few weeks into the Crisis, she would have to make up the good news a little, then a little more until she was full-on lying about everything. “The Governor asked me to tell you how much she appreciates your work at the (fill in the blank of some stupid little government agency). Things are going well. Excellent, actually. The Recovery is taking off. We’ll have things back to normal in a few months. The Crisis has been an unprecedented event for the United States, but we’ve always bounced back from adversity before. We’re Americans.” Blah, blah, blah. She could recite that crap in her sleep. Sometimes she actually did.

Jeanie knew things were going badly when they had a meeting with all the staff to go over the evacuation plan. The National Guard colonel who gave the briefing said an evacuation plan was just a formality. They didn’t really expect to evacuate. But just in case.

Jeanine quickly noticed that there were definite tiers of people who would get out first, like the Governor and her immediate staff, of course. They would go by convoy to Ft. Lewis and then by helicopter to Seattle. No one told her that; she pieced it all together.

Next out would be the other officials, police, and federal agents. They would take a massive motorcade up Interstate 5 to Seattle. Then, after them, the last to go would be the expendable people, like her. No one told her that; she just knew it. They would get to ride up to Seattle in school buses and were assured they’d have an armed escort, but that was probably a lie like everything else.

Jeanie looked at her organic fajita wrap and fruit cup. One thing was going well: the food remained top notch. They had the best of everything at Camp Murray. She looked out the window in the DFAC toward the surrounding area outside the wire. “I’m so glad I’m not out there,” she said out loud to herself. It was no longer weird for the exhausted and depressed people in that DFAC to mumble to themselves.

Jason, the sharp young staffer from the Governor’s Office, was also glad he wasn’t outside the wire. He knew much more about how bad things were. In fact, he knew more than anyone else at Camp Murray. Sometimes his assistant would hand him a note containing a coded phrase that told him he needed to get on the ultra-secure phone or internet connection at Camp Murray. From the secure phone and internet, he would get information and report back to Washington D.C. on what was really happening in Washington State. The federal government, for whom Jason secretly worked, didn’t trust state officials anymore. The Feds only trusted their own people like Jason to give them the straight facts.

Jason didn’t know where to start on his list of worries. He figured starting with the ways millions of people could die would work, as he sat in the DFAC eating lunch alone two tables over from Jeanie. The federal government had lost control of dozens of their nuclear weapons. Whole submarines were missing, but they couldn’t launch without a code from the President — at least that was the theory, but in all the chaos of the Collapse, who really knew?. The Russians and Chinese were not reassured. They said they would launch against the U.S. if a “stray” missile came toward them. They were serious. With some of the nukes in the hands of the teabaggers, and others for sale on the black market, who knew what could happen?

No one was answering at a few of the land-based missile silos left in the U.S. arsenal. One of the Legitimate units tried to investigate a silo in North Dakota and got cut to pieces by the personnel defending it. The silo was either a teabagger unit or they decided to freelance although they couldn’t launch without the codes. They did, however, have a nuclear device, and it was rumored that they could be detonated manually, without the codes. Maybe it was for sale. No one knew.

Aircrews had “lost” some of their nuclear bombs and air-launched nuclear missiles. They didn’t have the codes to launch them, but they physically had the weapons and, once again, there was the rumor that they could be manually detonated if someone knew what they were doing. And some of the people who had defected to the teabaggers knew how to detonate them. That was the rumor, anyway.

The scariest nuclear rumor Jason knew of involved the teabagger national military commander, Gen. Warrilow. Jason only got bits and pieces of this from his briefings, but what little he knew was alarming. Gen. Warrilow had informed Washington, D.C. that he had several operable nuclear devices and asked if they needed a test detonation to confirm this. He asked them to pick the location. Of course, they wouldn’t, so he picked a spot off the East Coast where the winds would take the radiation out to sea toward Europe. The Patriots sent the latitude and longitude in the Atlantic to the Feds and an hour later, a satellite picked up a bright ball of fire and steam.

This changed things. At first, the Feds were convinced that Warrilow would use the nukes on a northern city or somewhere in California, which was the heart of the area still loyal to the federal government. They were getting ready to surrender.

Then a Loyalist spy in Warrilow’s camp distributed a communication that Warrilow was not prepared to use a nuke on American soil. The feds tested this by daring Warrilow to detonate one in the U.S. He declined, so they knew that he wouldn’t use the nukes—at least not yet. It was a stalemate. A nuclear stalemate on American soil. Great. But at least it was a stalemate.

Even if a domestic nuclear war were off the table, Jason still worried about other things. Food production was not what it needed to be. They were distributing stored food now and basically living off warehoused quantities of food. They couldn’t get the fuel and fertilizer to the agricultural areas fast enough to grow the next crop. And even if they did, they couldn’t process it fast enough into flour, corn meal, etc. And even if they could process it, they couldn’t distribute it quickly enough. Even if they could distribute it, much of it would be stolen by corrupt officials. The list of “even if” problems went on and on.

Thank God, Jason thought, that some people were growing their own food. Another relief from the supply problem was that the federal government quit delivering food to the Southern and mountain west states that “opted out” of the United States. As everyone seemed to know by now, the Feds also quit trying to get much, if any, food to the disloyal parts of the loyal states, like the rural parts of Washington State. Besides, Jason thought, the rednecks in the South and other disloyal areas were good at hunting, fishing, and gardening, right? They better be. It wouldn’t take care of all their food needs, but would lessen the blow of not having federal semis rolling in. The last thing the Feds needed was massive starvation, even in the teabagger areas.

Things were better in the loyal areas, but not perfect. The people in the cities were in for a very lean winter. They were doing well now, but that would be over soon, just in time for winter.

The Feds had no plan. Well, no plan for fixing things. They had a plan for themselves: they would hunker down and defend themselves. Officials, and the people they did business with, would get enough food and would build up defenses to keep the regular people out. The regular people were on their own. Jason chuckled at the teabaggers: They didn’t want the government and now they got their wishes. They would be on their own this winter. We’ll see what’s left of the country after that, he thought. That was the federal “plan.” They would feed themselves during the winter and see what’s left of the country in the spring. This wasn’t going well long-term.

Jason was working on the Washington State portion of this plan. They would evacuate the key personnel to Seattle from Camp Murray, which was on the very southern end of the Seattle metro area and dangerously close to some teabagger rural areas. They would keep Camp Murray and the surrounding Ft. Lewis in the hands of the Legitimates. They had a massive military facility at Ft. Lewis that was the only place they could house various equipment and personnel; they couldn’t move those assets. They also had a massive prison at Ft. Lewis and couldn’t just let all those teabaggers and criminals go. Besides, the Legitimate military brass insisted on having a big base to defend. They didn’t want everyone else to evacuate to Seattle — and leave them alone to fight off the Patriots. The military would try to literally hold down the fort. They insisted on having a giant “last stand” military base and that was Ft. Lewis.

As a second priority, the Legitimates would try to build up the defenses for Olympia, the state capitol and a key stronghold. But, try as they might, they all knew they probably couldn’t keep Interstate 5 open all the way from Seattle down to Olympia, which would be the first city they would abandon when the teabaggers started the attack everyone was waiting for.