299 Days: The Preparation

Chapter 12 You are the man. Do something.

By the time Grant pulled into his neighborhood in Olympia, everything had changed. He was noticing things he had never noticed before.

When he was on the outskirts of Forks, Grant noticed all the signs of independent living he’d seen earlier like the wood piles and fishing boats. They got fewer and fewer the closer he got to Olympia. The denser the population became, the fewer signs of independent living he saw. On the outskirts of Olympia, there were no more signs of independent living; quite the opposite.

On the highway as he came back from Forks, Grant started to notice all the semi-trucks. They were everywhere. They were full of everything people needed to live. Trucks full of food, gasoline, medicines, and parts to run all the machines and gadgets everyone relied on. What if the trucks stopped rolling?

When he was back in Olympia, Grant stopped at the grocery to get his favorite lunch: stir fry at the deli in the store. He and Lisa rarely cooked anymore; they ate take out pretty much exclusively. As soon as Grant walked into the store, he noticed things he hadn’t noticed before. He noticed that there was a stunning variety of products, but not too much of any given product. For example, in the chilled drinks aisle near the deli, there must have been fifty kinds of cold drinks— but only six or so of each one. Where was the inventory they would use to restock?

For the first time in his life, Grant walked around the parking lot to the back of the store. He was on a quest to answer this nagging feeling about being dependent.

Grant walked around the outside of the whole store. There was no giant warehouse with the inventory. There was only a loading dock with semi-trucks constantly coming in and out.

Semi-trucks. That’s how they did it. It was “just-in-time inventory.” It meant that stores kept just a little bit of product on hand and ordered more when that little bit was sold. This saved the store money by not having to pay interest on inventory while it was sitting before being sold, and it saved on the cost of shelf space. Just-in-time inventory explained why the store would be out of milk and bread within two hours of the announcement that some snow was coming. When that happened, Grant had seen otherwise nice people become angry when there wasn’t any of a particular kind of food that they liked. The idea of going through two days without that one kind of Belgium goat cheese was too much for some people to bear.

What was wrong with me? Grant wondered. Was he really walking around a grocery store thinking about how much food they had? What a weirdo. He went back and got his stir fry. He ate it and headed home. The nagging feeling wasn’t going away.

When he got home, Grant saw that Lisa and the kids were out somewhere. He started looking at things in the house. The food pantry. It had maybe a week’s worth of food? The particular cold cereal Manda always ate: two days’ worth. The pancake mix Cole loved: maybe enough for three days. This explained why they were going to the grocery store about every other day. The Matson household had a just- in-time inventory system, too.

Grant looked at his computer. They couldn’t do much without it. Businesses would be done for in a crisis; no internet, no business. America would grind to a halt in about twenty minutes without the internet. How would all those stores order more inventory without the internet?

Electricity was even more critical. Without electricity there would be no internet, plus no refrigerators, lights, or anything. Grant scanned around the living room. Everything ran on electricity. Everything.

He went out to his car to get his phone. In the garage, he noticed that he had no tools. In Forks, everyone had tools. Not just hand tools, but chain saws, shovels, everything. He noticed the furnace in the garage. It ran on natural gas. That seemed like a pretty stable thing to supply, but it took electricity to turn the fan that delivered the heat. Grant remembered the two-day power outage a couple of winters ago and how cold it got in the house.

Well, we have a fireplace, right? He thought. Except that he had never actually had a fire in it. Lisa said it would make a mess and she didn’t want to use it. The fireplace was a decoration. Besides, they didn’t have any firewood. That would look “junky” at their immaculate house.

The Matson house relied on water coming out of the tap. The water had never gone out. But there was a giant water treatment plant serving about 100,000 people in Olympia. What if a key part broke and it took a semi-truck or FedEx to get a replacement to the plant?

What about security? There was no crime in their comfy neighborhood. In fact, Grant could only recall once ever hearing a siren and that was a fire truck going to a barbeque that got a little out of hand. That was it. He had wanted to keep his old .22 at their house, but Lisa said no. She didn’t want a gun in the house. Grant offered to get a trigger lock, which was reasonable given the kids. Still no. “Guns are dangerous,” she said. So Grant’s .22— the one that he had slept with that night he waited to be stabbed by his dad— stayed in Forks. Calling 911 would have to be their only way to stop crime.

At this point, that nagging feeling about dependence was screaming to him. A criminal, or a group of them, could drive right into the Cedars, get out of their car, walk into any house or knock the door in, and do whatever they liked. That last thought was horrific. He knew what criminals did when they found defenseless pretty women.

You are the man. Do something.

There it was again. The outside thought. Talking to him clearly, without speaking. Just a thought from somewhere in his mind. Grant was listening this time to the outside thought. He knew what he needed to. Grant was going to do something.