299 Days: The Community

Chapter 100 Jobs (May 10)

Grant woke up with the sunlight coming into the bedroom of the cabin. He always slept so well out there. It reminded him of the time he had to have a general anesthesia. He woke up so refreshed from the deep sleep of the anesthesia that it was hard to describe. That’s how it was out at Pierce Point.

His thoughts quickly turned to all the things he had to do and all the things he was responsible for. It was like a job. Hell, it was a job. His new job. He was starting to see this.

That was a good way to look at it, he thought. It would help make things seem “normal” because it was normal for Grant to have a job. Treating survival out at the cabin as a job would also make him focus his energies on it, like he did with a job. Treating his new duties as a job would also be a good example for the others, especially Lisa who needed the normalcy of a job. She might even put “Pierce Point Clinic” on her resume when this was all done, he thought. That’s how to think about it: things were pretty decent out there, this will be over, and we need to work now and to make it through this so we have some stories to tell the grandkids. That’s how survivors think.

There were signs of a routine developing out at the cabin. There was the morning “breakfast meeting” with the Over Road crew as he was calling his family, the Team, the Morrells, and the Colsons. There was supervising others, such as making sure Manda was getting chores done with Cole. There was making sure that others had what they needed to do their jobs, like figuring out how to get medical supplies to Lisa. There was motivating people and making them want to work. It was what he’d done his whole life in his other jobs. Now he was doing it for the most important job of his life and his family’s lives.

And thousands of people’s lives. People you will never meet.

Really? Grant thought. How is what I’m doing out here going to affect thousands of people? That had him puzzled. But, oh well, the outside thought had been right every time. Still Grant couldn’t wrap his mind around that. He could only focus on doing his new job the best he possibly could.

People started stirring at Grant’s cabin. Eileen came down the stairs.

“Good morning, Grant,” she said. “How did the meeting go last night?”

“Pretty well,” he said. “I think. This community is really forming up nicely. Lisa was very popular. Doctors tend to be, especially when there are no doctors or hospitals around.” Grant wanted to see how Eileen had been spending her time.

“So,” he asked her, “what have you been up to?”

Eileen described how she was working with Mary Anne on food and gardening. They were working on planning out, to the extent possible, how the various families would eat. For example, if the Colsons got a deer, who would butcher it, how it would be stored, how to preserve it, how to distribute it, and even recipes and ingredients for things like deer jerky.

Eileen was also working with Mary Anne on gardening. They were planning what and when to plant, finding seeds, and scouting out garden patches.

“Growing food is different than the kind of gardening I’m used to,” Eileen said, referring to ornamental gardens, “but the basics are the same.”

Eileen looked a little concerned and asked, “Can I go into town and get some things? We have the money.”

Grant was worried that people would start, just a few days into this, to miss all the things of town. Eileen’s question reminded him of this.

“I’ll ask the security people what the situation is like in town,” Grant said. “We also have to be careful with the gas. It’s a precious commodity now. It takes a couple gallons to go into Frederickson and back, but I hear what you’re saying. We need a way to periodically go into town. I’ll get an answer for you by tonight.” Grant realized that Eileen had not seen what the others who went into town had seen. Like pulling out an AK-47 or having punks follow you until you flashed a gun. Besides, not seeing the actual conditions in town, Eileen had the most normalcy bias of anyone on Over Road. She was rational, just clinging more to “normal” than the others.

“Thanks,” Eileen said. “I know it’s hard to do things now but I needed to ask.” Maybe that was it, Grant thought. Eileen was curious and just needed someone to tell her that it wasn’t possible to go into town.

Manda and Cole came down, sleepy eyed and yawning. They were getting plenty of good sleep out there, which suggested that they were doing OK. If they were terrified, they wouldn’t be sleeping.

“Can we have some pancakes with syrup, Dad?” Cole asked. Grant hadn’t seen him at all the day before. He missed the little guy, who wasn’t so little anymore at thirteen. His voice was changing.

“You bet, pal,” Grant said. “Let’s cook them up right now.” When Grant was cooking pancakes with Cole, he wasn’t a killer of looters, a POI, a SWAT team member, or a guerilla political organizer. He was a dad. It felt great.

Lisa came out of their bedroom. She looked well rested and a little disoriented. She was going to work this morning at a new job. “Morning,” she said. She seemed deep in thought.

Grant would try to find out later that day what was on her mind. She wasn’t a morning person, so, after over twenty years of marriage, he’d learned that deep conversations first thing off the bat were not wise.

Chip came over with his trademark, “Morning, sunshine” greeting to Grant. Everyone loved him.

Mary Anne followed. She explained that John was on guard duty last night and was sleeping. Grant thought that they needed a better guard arrangement. With the Team, Chip, and Grant about to do full time patrolling, it fell on Mary Anne, John, Paul, and Mark to guard, and that was on top of the gardening, fixing, driving the Team around, hunting and fishing each was doing. Drew was volunteering for guard duty, but he wasn’t a gunfighter. He could fire a first shot to alert all the armed people in the houses, but that was about it. Grant needed to get someone out there whose job would be night time guard duty.

You will have that person soon.

Who? Grant wondered who could possibly fill the role of a dedicated night guard. But he trusted the outside thought.

The screen door made its distinctive sound of being opened. It was Paul and Missy. Grant hadn’t seen much of Missy in the past few days. She mainly kept to the Colson house. She was only five and Paul kept a close eye on her.

“Hey, Paul,” Grant said, “Manda and Cole can hang out with Missy. Manda’s main job out here is watching Cole and she could easily watch Missy, too. I think Missy and Cole would get along great.”

Paul thought about it. “Missy, would you like to play with Manda and Cole?” he asked.

Missy was glad to get to play with the big kids. She was shy and said, “OK. What will we play?”

Manda lit up. “How about we play cooking? Then we can go to the beach and try to go find the duck family that lives down there. And there’s a secret waterfall down on the beach. Wanna go see it?”

Missy smiled. So did Cole. At age five, Missy had roughly the language skill Cole did at age thirteen. Cole always loved the younger kids. He felt at ease around them because they didn’t talk as much as big kids and grownups. He could communicate with them easily, which was such a relief for him.

“OK,” Manda said, “you can help me clean up after breakfast and then we’ll go down to the beach. Sound good, Missy and Cole?”

Both of them nodded.

Paul was happy. “Thanks. Great. I appreciate it. I don’t know what I’m doing today so it’s good to know that Missy is taken care of.”

Grant realized that he had been largely neglecting Paul. He wasn’t on the Team and was, well, way too heavy to do much. Paul had been taking lots of guard duty, but there was only so much night time guard duty a person could do and then try to do things during the day. Besides, Paul had metal fabrication skills that the community could probably use. Grant was determined to put every person to his or her best use.

“Hey, Paul,” Grant said, “come with us to the Grange today. I bet there is something that a metal fabricator could do for us.”

Paul smiled. He had been waiting to hear that for days. “You bet,” he said. “Drew and I worked yesterday on an inventory of the tools and equipment I have. We can bring that list to the Grange.”

Grant felt good. He always did when he could find a way to make a “loser” fit in. Paul was a great guy, a great father. He wasn’t a “loser” in reality, just in his mind. Paul was feeling left out because he was different (overweight) and that made him think of himself as a “loser.” Grant had been there. He knew exactly what it felt like. Like when “loser” Grant was asked onto Squadron 3. Grant’s experience as a “loser” allowed him to see hidden skills in “losers” like Paul so they could be fully integrated into the group. That was how he got the most out of everyone. Being a Forks loser was great training for his future role. As breakfast got rolling, the main topic became Lisa’s new job as the Pierce Point doctor. Drew was very proud of his daughter, so he started off the conversation by asking, “So, Lisa, are you going to be the doctor out here?”

“Yep, looks like it,” she said. She seemed to be neutral on the idea, not enthused but not regretting doing it. “I’m it,” she said. “I just wish I had a real ER out here. I’m not sure how effective we can be without all the stuff I had back at my ER.”

Grant wanted to change the subject a little, toward the positive. “We?” he asked. “Who else will be working with you?”

“Oh, two nurses and an EMT,” Lisa said. “I met them last night at the meeting. The nurses are Cindy and Rory, and the EMT is Tim. Cindy is—well, was I guess—a renal nurse at the Frederickson hospital. Rory was a general nurse there, too. Tim was a fire department EMT in California, but moved up here two months ago when his department folded down there. They ran out of money and laid him off. His sister-in-law lived here so Tim and his wife moved here. He was looking for a job when all this started.”

Well, for a community of a few hundred homes they had a decent medical team. Supplies would be the hard part.

Chip was thinking the same things and asked Lisa, “Do you have any medical supplies out here?”

“Nope. That’s the bad thing,” she said with a frown. This was a very big concern to her. “We have some first aid supplies, but they won’t last long.”

Grant would later privately tell her about the fish antibiotics he secretly got a few years earlier and stored out at the cabin. He wanted to save those for his family, the Team, and the Over Road people. Besides, all of his antibiotics would only last a week or two if all the people in Pierce Point were using them. Might as well give the people close to him the benefits of his planning, although that seemed a little selfish. Grant thought that if he were a perfect Christian, he would give all the antibiotics away. But, he was not a perfect Christian. Far from it.

Lisa, still frowning, continued. “But, we don’t have any extra prescription medications. Most people are running out of theirs and, I suspect, a few already have. We have no anesthesia. We have a little rubbing alcohol to sterilize instruments and wounds, but not much. I don’t have instruments, anyway. We don’t even have a place to do all this, although Rich the sheriff guy said we would probably use the Grange building for the clinic.” Lisa made a “yuck” face. “It’s not exactly the germ-free facility I’m used to.”

Lisa realized she needed everyone to have confidence in their medical care out there. She needed to encourage them. So she added, “But, hey, people have gotten by with much less for several thousand years. We’ll do OK. People just shouldn’t expect all the modern medical wizardry that we have—or had.”

Grant kicked into his role of encourager-in-chief. “Hey, we’re way better off than those people in Frederickson,” he said. “They have a hospital, but it has probably run out of supplies and the doctors and nurses have been working for a week non-stop. If they’re even able to come to work. I bet people have looted their medical supplies, especially the pain killers. So, while we may not have the usual supplies out here, I bet no place has the usual supplies, either.”

Grant thought about all the medical supplies they’d need. They would probably have to buy them on the black market. He was all for taking them by force from the government, but that really meant stealing them from people who needed them. Then again, any black market supplies would have been stolen by someone—probably the government—and wouldn’t be going to regular people, anyway. Is stealing stolen merchandise of the real owners who can’t be located really “stealing”? What if you needed it to save lives? What if others needed it to save lives? Grant would need to think about this more.

Ethics aside, Grant had a political purpose for getting the medical supplies. Having them to offer to a community was much like having a doctor: we, the Patriots, can take care of you. The government can’t. Drew, the former accountant and business executive, asked, “How will a clinic work? There’s no health insurance anymore. How will you and the nurses and EMT get paid?”

“A case of tuna,” Lisa said with a smile and a glance at Grant. “Barter. We won’t turn away anyone, of course, but we’ll ask people to give us what they can. We’ll take money, too, if we can buy anything with that.”

Grant realized medical care would be a thing to give to those in the community who contribute, like the meals for the guards. Contribute labor or supplies to the community and you will get free medical care. Those who don’t contribute must pay for the medical care. No one will be turned away, but the non-contributors will need to pay for it. Another incentive to being a full contributing community member.

This idea of free medical care for those who contributed to the Pierce Point community wasn’t universal health care like the fiasco the former government forced on America. That system covered everyone—well, kind of if you count dropping dead waiting months for life saving treatments that were needed immediately as “coverage.” But it taxed everyone for it. And taxes were taken with the force of law, which was really the force of violence. Don’t pay your taxes and see what happens. It involved search warrants, arrests, and jail.

The Pierce Point system was different. If you donated labor or supplies, you were making a contract of sorts with the community to get free care. It was a fringe benefit for what you were doing for the community. If you chose not to make that agreement with the community, you were on your own. You would be treated, but it would cost you.

Grant loved the political significance of the clinic. The community, led by him and Rich and various committees of people helping, were getting people medical care when none else existed. The community, working the Patriot way of voluntary exchanges instead of government coercion, was getting something done and making people’s lives better. Participate in the Patriot way, and things are better for you. The former government couldn’t come close to providing medical care for Pierce Point residents. But the Patriots could.

Grant thought they needed to get some black market medical supplies. He was thinking of things of value they had to use to buy medical supplies. He thought of Chip and his basement goodies, or they could “liberate” some medical supplies. Grant was warming up to the idea of taking medical supplies by force from the government. The government had stolen from Grant and other taxpayers for decades. Payback time. But he would try to buy them first and take them as a last resort.

Grant wanted to emphasize the point about Lisa and the medical team getting paid. He needed to encourage a semi-reluctant Lisa. “Seriously, this case-of-tuna thing will really help,” Grant said. “Between the Team getting fed at the Grange and Lisa getting food and other supplies for being a doctor, I think we can really stretch our stored food out here. And, when you add in Mark’s and John’s hunting and fishing,” Grant said that to remind those two that they needed to start bringing some food to the table instead of just hanging out with the Team at the Grange all day, “we should do OK. I am encouraged, for the first time in quite a while.”

Everyone was nodding. Maybe this wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe it was just a dark chapter, a low point. Maybe they’d make it.

Grant waited for the outside thought to tell him he was right. Then he realized that the outside thought was only there to encourage him when he needed it. He didn’t need encouragement right now. He could see with his own eyes that things were working out. For now.