299 Days: The Restoration

Chapter 291 Used

Nancy Ringman was wobbly from all the wine, but felt like her legs were encased in concrete. She could barely move them. Each step was a struggle, requiring all her strength and then a long rest. There was nothing physically restraining her; it was all mental. She held the box with the pistol in her hands. She knew that once she got out to the football field, she had to do it — and she really didn’t want to do it. She wondered if it would hurt to shoot herself. She kept wondering if she shot herself in the head, would the brain shut down instantly and prevent it from registering pain. Or, would she feel pain before she died?

Each step was taking longer and longer. During her brief rests, she looked at where she was, the Clover Park Temporary Detention Facility. Remembering the people who used to be there, many of them just a few hours ago. Now they were gone. Everyone was gone. The staff had melted away as the explosions and gunfire got closer and the prisoners… they were… gone.

“Under my feet,” Nancy said softly as she stepped onto the first of the fresh dirt at the football field. “Under my feet,” she repeated. She smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile; it was an ironic and tragic smile. She realized that, throughout her life, she desperately wanted to have people under her — in her job, in her marriage, in everything — and now she had succeeded.

“Success,” she whispered to herself as she took another step on the fresh dirt. “I’ve been so successful,” she said sarcastically. “Look at me! I’m a success,” she said out loud in the empty football field.

She started to feel something under her feet and quickly jumped back onto the grass and away from the dirt. There wasn’t anything physically moving under the dirt; there was a very faint sense of… something… under the dirt. She felt like lots and lots of things were under that dirt. Not bodies, although she knew they were down there, but… lives. Under that dirt were lives. Fathers who would never see their wives and children. Brothers and sisters who would never see their siblings. Weddings that never would happen, lives that never would go on. It had all stopped and those incomplete lives were under the dirt.

And she had done it. She could have stopped it. She could have let them go. She let out that same ironic and tragic laugh as a moment before. “I could have just done a bad job,” she said to no one, except the faint things under her. “I could have failed — for once,” she said, without a laugh this time. “But no,” she said, “I’m Nancy Ringman. I never fail. I get the job done. ‘You can count on me, Linda’,” she said, repeating her answer to her boss, Linda, when she was told to “make room” for the new arrivals at Clover Park by getting rid of the prisoners. “You can count on me,” she mumbled again.

She wondered what Linda was doing right now. Linda was probably in some safe place in Seattle, cheerfully reporting to her superiors that Clover Park was now ready for refugees loyal to the legitimate authorities. Linda had succeeded.

Used. That word kept ringing in Nancy’s mind. She had been used. Linda got all the credit; Nancy had all the things underfoot to haunt her for the rest of her life.

In a rush of emotion, Nancy started to realize how all her “success” was just her being used by her superiors. She made all the sacrifices, she got people mad at her, and she made enemies, just to ‘get the job done’. Their job, the superiors’ job. She was at the end of her life with no friends, no real marriage to speak of, and no kids. Until a few days ago, she only had that thrill when she could tell people what to do or could get favors done because of her connections. That wasn’t a life. That was a power trip masquerading as a life.

Empty. That word replaced “used” as the one running through her mind. An empty life, completely wasted by enjoying being the bitch. “You’re the one who enjoyed it,” she said to herself. “No one made you be this way.” She started to relive the thrill of calling the Governor’s chief of staff on her cell phone and getting a cousin a job, or placing a call and then someone she couldn’t stand magically lost his job at a state agency.

But it didn’t seem fun now; it didn’t seem like a thrill. She felt horrified at the things she’d done. She now realized how… awful she’d been.

“Time to do something about this,” she said aloud again. She looked at the pistol box she was holding. Her hands and arms started to go wobbly. She had to set down the box. She spent the next minute or so staring at the pistol box and imagining that she was picking it up and getting the gun out. After several mental rehearsals, she thought she was finally ready to actually do it.

She slowly bent down to pick up the box and hold it in her hands, just like she’d mentally rehearsed. She felt it. She paused. Then she suddenly picked it up.

“Might as well get this over with,” she said. She recalled a root canal that she had postponed a few years ago and how relieved she had been when she finally got it done. Putting things off can often be worse than actually doing them.

She remembered the pain of the root canal and recalled the dental instruments and how frightening they looked when she saw them at the onset of the procedure. Then she started to wonder if the teabaggers had dental instruments. They would use them to torture her. They probably had things far worse than dental instruments. They would use them, too, because they were haters.

There was only one thing to do. It was in that box.

She opened the box and there it was: a gun. She stared at it. She’d never held a gun before. They were so dangerous. Guns were what rednecks and criminals used. People like her, good people, never touched them.

She closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at the gun. It was too terrifying. Not what she would do with the gun — that part she was fine with — but guns were so evil. It was like looking at a poisonous snake; ugly and evil and painful if you touched it.

She remembered how, just a few moments ago, she had mentally rehearsed picking up the pistol box and then finally doing it for real. She could psych herself into touching the gun. Probably.

She imagined touching the gun with her index finger. She wanted to touch it and see if anything happened. She wondered if it would just go off if she touched it.

She stared at it more and pointed her index finger at it, slowly bringing it down to the handle part of the gun. She got about an inch away from it and jabbed her finger down onto the handle.

Nothing. It didn’t go off. It was just a piece of hard plastic. She thought she’d try touching the metal part now. She psyched herself up again and slowly brought her pointed index finger down and touched the top of the gun.

Nothing. Now that she knew that it wouldn’t go off just by touching it, she slowly touched other parts of the gun, except the trigger. She was very careful not to touch that.

She then decided to take it in her hand, doing so very slowly and carefully. It felt strange in her hand, like nothing she’d ever felt before. “Makes sense,” she said to herself, because she had never had a gun in her hand. Of course it felt like nothing she’d ever held before.

She slowly lifted the gun. It wasn’t as heavy as she’d thought it would be. In the movies, guns always seemed heavy.

Now that she was holding it, she started pointing it at various parts of the empty football field, still very afraid it would go off.

“And, what?” she asked herself, “Hurt someone?” Like the things under the dirt? She wanted to laugh at her thought, but it seemed too dark.

She was moving the gun around, but still wasn’t comfortable with it. She wanted to put it back in the box. She felt dirty holding it.

She put it back in the box and then wondered if it was loaded. She remembered from a movie that you could see the bullets in the little wheel thing on this kind of gun, the cowboy kind, not the fully automatic assault pistols with the high-capacity clips, like the Glock. This was the kind of gun the police used when she was growing up. A revolver, she seemed to remember them being called.

She slowly and carefully looked at the holes in the wheel thing and didn’t see any bullets in them. She remembered from the movies that pushing a button somewhere made the wheel thing flop out so bullets could be put in it. There was only one button on the gun. She was afraid pushing the button would make it go off. She pointed it at the ground with the gun in her right hand and slowly pushed the button with her left hand.

Nothing. The gun didn’t go off, but the wheel thing didn’t flop out either. Finally, she pushed harder on the button and the wheel thing started to flop out.

She looked in the wheel thing and saw there were no bullets in it. She set the gun down, with the wheel thing open, and looked at the bullets in the pistol box. There was a box of bullets. She opened the box and carefully pulled a bullet out. She was careful because those things could just go off. They were miniature bombs, after all.

She tried putting the bullet in the wheel thing but the big end of the bullet wouldn’t fit, so she turned it around and put the small end in the hole; the big end kept the bullet from falling through. That must be how to load it, she thought. She put in five more bullets. She only needed one, but realized that when the wheel turned, it might not have a bullet. She didn’t want to put this up to her head, decide to do it, and then just hear a click.

Now the gun was loaded. She stared at it in the box, starting to psych herself up again. She began to imagine what it would look like if she put the gun in her hand and put it up to her head.

She couldn’t. She couldn’t touch that thing. It was a loaded gun and was very dangerous. Touching it a little had been one thing, but this was different. This was final.

She started to think about the dental instruments and stared at the gun.

She decided to touch it again, recalling the root canal and how it was better to just do it than keep worrying about it.

She put the gun in her hand and put it up to her head.

“Boom!”

She swung around toward the sound of the explosion and dropped the gun.

“Boom!” There was a second explosion followed by the sound of a truck ramming something. It was coming from the direction of the back entrance to the campus.

It took a moment for her mind to switch from being a second away from killing herself to realizing that soldiers were coming to Clover Park.

It was Linda! Linda had sent soldiers to come and rescue her! All this would be over — right before she killed herself! She was the luckiest person on the planet. She was elated and on top of the world.

But why were they blowing up the gate and ramming it? If they were the legitimate authorities, wouldn’t they have a key or something? Suddenly, Nancy’s thrill of being rescued was turning to the terror of being captured. The dental instruments flashed through her mind.

She started to run, but soon fell down because her legs were so wobbly. She was terrified and still drunk. She got up, ran some more, and fell again. In the minute or two it took to run, fall, get up and slowly hobble her way back to the main building, the soldiers at the gate had made it onto the campus. She saw several regular pickup trucks, not military vehicles, racing on the beautifully landscaped campus grounds and tearing up the lawn and flowerbeds.

The legitimate authorities wouldn’t have pickup trucks, she realized. She fell again when the thought of being captured by the teabaggers swept over her. As she was getting up, a man raced up to her with a gun and pointed at her.

“You’re under arrest!” he yelled.