299 Days: The Community

Chapter 71 A Partial Break Down with Patches of Normalcy (May 7)

How could so much be going wrong at once? Jeanie Thompson asked herself.

The power was going out for a few hours at a time every few days. Camp Murray, where the seat of Washington State government had been temporarily located after the state capitol, Olympia, had all the rioting and protests, still had a constant source of power. But, the rest of the state didn’t.

The FBI told Jeanie and the other people at Camp Murray that it was Chinese hackers attacking the software that ran the electrical grid; the program that routed power. If extra electricity was sent to the wrong place by the hacker, it would overload the system and could cause a cascading failure. It would fry the system, which would take days to repair if parts could be flown in, and weeks with all the highway traffic jams. To thwart the surges, the Feds had to shut down the power for a while until the software was secure again. So, technically, the Feds were the ones turning off the power. Wait till that news gets out, Jeanie, the public relations expert, thought. People will be pissed. At the Feds.

The Feds, to their credit, had detected that the hackers had been repeatedly sending the extra power into California and various military bases in the West. The hackers had been doing the same to the East Coast and DC. Those seemed to be the two regions with the outages.

No reliable electrical source meant that the internet wasn’t working. Oh, how reliant America had become on the internet. Government, and most businesses, couldn’t function without it.

Everyone was sent home. Jeanie, the communications director for the State Auditor, didn’t even want to think about the economic damage this was doing. No one was working, and nothing was getting done. Maybe this was one reason why the stores were running out of everything. Their inventory was restocked via the internet.

The Feds were doing all they could to get gasoline out to the cities. They had commandeered all the gas trucks. They had a plan in place for this and, for once, the plan worked pretty well. Now the Feds controlled all the fuel in the country. They put the refineries on full production and started running truckloads of fuel. They drove them with police and military escorts.

At first, people moved over to accommodate the emergency vehicles. They weren’t anymore, though. People were getting meaner and tougher. The roads were packed. The police and military escorts were needed because that fuel was worth its weight in gold. When a fuel truck would get bogged down in traffic, angry, violent motorists who ran out of gas would demand gas from the trucks. The police were shooting people who couldn’t be subdued.

However—and this part really amazed Jeanie—there were some supplies getting through. Trucks were taking the back streets, and some residents were helping them get through. Trips by semi were taking days instead of hours, but things were getting through. The fact that the food, gas, medicine, and other necessities were worth ten times what they were a few days ago helped. The market was an amazing thing. Everything was for sale, at the right price.

This meant gangs were sprouting up. Not street gangs, although they were running wild without any police. White-collar gangs were taking advantage of the fact that the tanker of gasoline stalled in traffic in their neighborhood was now worth a million dollars. It was like stealing stalled armored cars full of cash with the keys in the ignition. In the cities, Russian and Asian gangs were the muscle behind the white collar gangs and were turning into the black market suppliers of everything. In the rural areas, which were much better off, local cops and related “good ol’ boys” were taking things like semis of food and gas for “safekeeping.” Gangs took many forms after the Collapse. The idea that a “gang” was the Crips or Bloods was so…pre-Collapse.

Back in Washington State, the government was in a full chaotic panic. The police had been out fighting protests, and looting, along with waves of crime for days. They were exhausted. Many cops were just leaving their posts and going home. Most would see if their families were OK, get some sleep, and then try to go back out. But each day, fewer and fewer were reporting back for duty. With all the budget cuts of the past year, there weren’t as many cops to start with. Many had decided that the lifelong employment and retirement they had been promised was another politician’s lie and they had already been looking for something else.

The National Guard was in the same boat. Many guardsmen had been called up a few weeks prior for the “training,” which was actually just preparation for the civil unrest that the Pentagon knew was coming. The Feds had done something a few years back that had never happened before: they stationed combat troops in the United States whose mission was to fight in the states. The military, of course, had about a million troops in the U.S., but they were assigned to commands whose mission was to fight overseas like Central Command, which covered the central part of the world, including the Middle East. A few years back, they created North Command to fight in North America. That action went largely unnoticed. NorthCom, as it became known, swung into action when the Collapse started. It strongly defended Washington, D.C. and coordinated federal combat to help state National Guard units.

But, fewer and fewer National Guardsmen were reporting for duty. Many were cops or others who were working their other jobs to the point of exhaustion. Others didn’t want to leave their families during the crisis. Some tried to report for duty but got caught in the traffic jams.

Jeanie could see that the state government really had no idea what it was doing. She was talking to media all day long, giving the state spin. Things will be OK, we’ll all pull through, people are helping their neighbors, terrorists are taking advantage of the disruptions, don’t be a hoarder, and listen to the government for further information.

Even though Jeanie was in chaos central at the state’s command post, she could see legitimate signs that not everyone was in a crisis. Oddly, most people were staying home from work, watching TV news, helping their neighbors, and eating the several days of food they normally had on hand in their pantries and refrigerators. It was not a complete breakdown of society. Things were bad, worse than anyone had ever seen in modern America, but not the end of the world. It was a partial breakdown with patches of normalcy.