299 Days: The Restoration

Chapter 307 “Let’s Go Fix This State”

Patriot EPU agent Mike Turner heard what he’d been waiting for… for years.

“Carrot cake.”

That’s what the radio operator at the Think Farm said.

Mike felt a surge of adrenaline when he heard those two magical words.

“Cream cheese frosting,” Mike responded into the radio, which was the encoded reply showing that he received the code phrase and would carry out the mission.

This was it. Mike’s years of watching the government slowly imploding. The corruption. The outright theft. Putting innocent people in jail. Letting guilty ones go. Maintaining a secret membership in Oath Keepers and worrying about getting caught, then defecting from the State Patrol’s Executive Protection Unit, or EPU, a few months ago and becoming a guerilla behind enemy lines. All of it. It all came down to “carrot cake” which was the code phrase for the order to bring the Interim Governor and his staff in to Olympia. It meant the Patriots had taken the city and were holding it. That they would start governing and fixing things. Everything Mike had risked his life for during the past several years was finally here.

It was 11:32 p.m. Time to get going while it was still dark. Mike alerted his fellow former EPU members that it was time to go. They woke the families, who had been expecting this.

They’d heard the faint gunfire and explosions in Olympia for the past two days. In fact, they were getting nervous that the Patriots hadn’t taken the city yet. They were relieved to get word that they had to get into cars and drive into a city where lots of people wanted to kill them. That was a relief compared to the thought that Olympia had not been taken, which would mean they would be hiding out on the Prosser Farm forever. Or worse.

The Interim Governor, Ben Trenton, and his chief of staff, Tom Foster, would go into Olympia with Ben’s director of legislative affairs, Brian Jenkins. Also joining them would be Carly Johnson. She would be the assistant director of legislative affairs. She risked her life to get the EPU out to the Prosser Farm so all of this could happen.

Wives, and especially children, would stay behind at the Prosser Farm. They would be protected there. To everyone’s knowledge, no one other than the immediate neighbors knew who was staying out there. That had been a miracle, but hiding on a farm where all the neighbors were relatives made that possible. The presence of the EPU agents and their sophisticated equipment, to the extent anyone even saw them, was explained with the story that Tom Foster had a rich relative who had paid for a private personal security detail. Rich people were hiring lots of former military and law enforcement people, and sometimes current ones, to protect them. That seemingly outlandish story made perfect sense in the insane world of post-Collapse America.

After everyone was awake, there were quick goodbyes. The wives, Karen Jenkins in particular, were scared. They knew their husbands were in amazingly good hands, but still it was hard to say, “Okay, go off into a war zone and become the enemy’s biggest target for assassination. See you in a while. I won’t worry.”

The kids were taking it pretty well. They were mostly older, around middle school age and a few in high school. They had been told for quite a while that their dads would be leaving to go back to Olympia and do some important things—things that would allow the kids to go back to their normal lives. To live in their own homes, to go to school, to not have people with guns around. Well, that last one wouldn’t change. These kids, given who their parents were, would have EPU agents around them for the rest of their lives. But, overall, the kids’ lives would be back to normal when their dads could go back to Olympia and fix all the bad things that had happened.

Packing took no time at all because they had all their bags pre-loaded. Ben changed out of sweatpants and into jeans. Brad, the chief of the EPU unit, didn’t want to waste any time with apparel changes.

“Governor, no one will see you arriving,” Brad said. “We have suits your size coming from the Think Farm. You’ll have a tailor there at the capitol to finish them off. You’ll look fine.” Brad was used to vain dignitaries that he had to guard. Ben wasn’t vain—he was amazingly humble, in fact—but he was a politician.

Ben smiled. “I’m not getting into jeans for fashion,” he said. “My sweats won’t hold a holster belt.” Ben showed Brad the Sig he was carrying and Brad smiled. A holster belt was an acceptable reason to make an apparel change, especially given what they would be doing in the next few hours.

The families gathered in the living room and just stood there silently. They didn’t know what else they were supposed to do. They’d never had to watch their fathers and husbands leave with a personal security detail to a battlefield before. Not many people had.

The plan was for Brad and Jerry Schafer, the EPU agent who was a former Marine, to accompany the “principals,” as protectees were called. Jerry would drive. They would travel light, with just two EPU agents, but it was just for a while and then they’d pick up an escort detail.

Two EPU agents, Mike Turner, the coms guy, and Chrissy Mendez would stay. They needed coms back at the farm and Chrissy, besides being a spectacular gun fighter, was very good at calming kids… and wives.

“Okay, let’s go,” Brad said. He looked at the families. “You’ll be in extremely good hands with Mike and Chrissy.” There was a tradition in the EPU that the protectees could call their agents by their first names instead of “Trooper Turner” or “Trooper Mendez.”

“Bye,” the kids and wives said one by one. Everyone got a final hug.

“Let’s go,” said Brad. He had radioed in to the first checkpoint that they’d be there in a few minutes and he didn’t want to be late. Being late in a personal security detail was a big deal.

The protectees and agents got into one of the two EPU vehicles, a black armored Chevy Suburban. Very nice. Brad had stolen it during the chaos of the Collapse. Mike had stolen the com van, too. With all the budget cuts right at the end, Brad and Mike, and most of the other state employees who weren’t politically connected, hadn’t been paid in a few months, and what salaries they got were totally eaten up by the runaway inflation. So they decided to settle up with the state by taking a couple of vehicles. Fair trade, they thought.

Jerry started up the Suburban. A full tank of gas. Of course. Tires inflated to the correct pressure. A map of the route for the driver and navigator. Radios set to the correct frequencies, a notebook with backup frequencies, and plenty of charged spare radio batteries. Plenty of firearms and ammunition, and a bulletproof vest for each protectee. Of course.

They took off down the long driveway and looked at the Prosser Farm. For the last time?

Of course not, Ben reassured himself. The Prosser Farm would hopefully be a museum in a few years. Showing where the Governor had to hide out during the Collapse. Hopefully. If everything worked out. It had so far, Ben reassured himself.

Ben had never ridden in the Suburban before. It was a smooth ride. There was a strong vibe about being in the “war wagon,” as they called that Suburban. It made them feel like they really were special, worthy of a personal security detail. It was really cool, Ben had to admit. He still couldn’t fully believe he was the Interim Governor… but riding in the war wagon made it very believable.

Brad was working the radio. He looked at his watch, “ETA four minutes.” Ben recognized the voice on the radio answering him as one of the Delphi guards.

The plan was that they would go from the farm to the Delphi guards. A Patriot escort would be waiting there who would take the Suburban into the capitol. The actual capitol campus was still a little hairy with some remaining holdouts barricaded in individual rooms. The Patriots were having to go room to room—and closet to closet, and heating duct to heating duct—to clear the buildings on the capitol campus and the buildings within sniping range of the campus, but the Patriots had a place for the new Governor and his staff to stay temporarily.

The Suburban pulled up to the Delphi guards, whose eyes popped wide at the sight of the war wagon. They had already been impressed with the Patriot escort that had arrived a few minutes before. An armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun and three pickup trucks with serious-looking, very well-armed soldiers. They had kit and beards. Maybe they were contractors, but there was something about them that made the guards believe they were in a military unit of some kind, maybe Special Forces or something.

When the Suburban stopped, Brian asked, “Are we supposed to get out?”

“No,” Brad said. “Please don’t get out until we tell you to. Ever.” He seemed very stern and serious.

Brian nodded. Of course. He’d never had a personal security detail before. He didn’t know how it worked.

Brian noticed that one of the pick-ups was maneuvering to the left of the Suburban and another was on the right. The third one was behind the Suburban and the Hummer was in front. They started to move.

The trucks stayed alongside the Suburban until they got to the on ramp to Highway 101, which was only wide enough for one vehicle to safely travel. There, they peeled off and went to the rear. The Suburban accelerated with the Hummer in front setting the pace. When they got onto the highway, the left and right pick-ups zoomed past them and resumed their positions on both sides of the Suburban. Brian felt very safe.

There were no other vehicles on the road. The lights were off in most homes and businesses. The power was on, and some homes and businesses had their lights on, but most were dark. They were probably hiding out and trying not to draw attention from the bands of Limas and Patriots roaming the streets. Not to mention the gangs. They could be out in full force, Brian thought. What he didn’t know was that now the gangs were hiding. Last he knew, when he was still in Olympia, was that they were tough guys out strutting around and terrorizing unarmed citizens. There had been nothing for them to hide from. But now they were being hunted down and killed one by one by Patriots. They weren’t so tough anymore and weren’t showing themselves.

“Okay, Governor,” Tom said, getting into his new role as Chief of Staff, “What’s your first message when we get to your new offices?”

“I thank everyone for making this possible,” Ben said. “The EPU, the troops, the civilians. I let everyone know that I’m only the Interim Governor, that fair elections are our first priority once order is restored.”

“Excellent,” Tom said. They had worked together for so long it was easy for them to go over things like this.

“Brad, correct me if I’m wrong,” Ben said, “but we still don’t have Seattle and the surrounding metropolitan areas, right?”

“Correct, Governor,” Brad said, without taking his eyes off the road. “We have Olympia, all of rural Washington, and all of Eastern Washington. Seattle is a little patch of enemy territory. Once you get settled, one of your first meetings will be with your Commandant of the State Guard to get a briefing on the military situation. You are the commander in chief of the State Guard.”

Ben let that sink in. “Who, by the way, is my Commandant?” Ben asked.

Brad told him the name of someone Ben had never heard of.

“Oh, okay,” Ben said. “I guess he’s doing a good job since we’re going to Olympia.” It seemed odd to him that someone as important as his Commandant would be a stranger, but then Ben realized he wasn’t really in charge of the state. He had been picked to be the interim Governor but couldn’t leave the Prosser Farm. He trusted that the Patriots, probably the Think Farm, would be picking good people. Ben, while he was a leader, was not a control freak. That being said, he was still a little surprised that he didn’t know his Commandant. But they were putting the state back together on the fly, so he expected lots of seat-of-the-pants governing in the beginning.

The trip in to the capitol area went remarkably fast because they were speeding. The pick-ups on the sides were doing a great job keeping the Suburban perfectly shielded from attack although, with the highway empty, it wasn’t hard to keep pace like that. There were no cars to get in the way.

“Boom! Boom! Crack! Crack!” A line of red tracers went up from their right and over into some buildings ahead of them.

“Blue!” Brad yelled into the radio. They sped up. Everyone in the Suburban was scared, except Brad and Jerry.

“Yellow two,” a voice said on the radio. Brad relaxed.

“That was nothing,” Brad reported to the protectees. “Just some fighting, not aimed at us.”

In a minute or two, they were off the highway and onto the exit. They took the exit fast and raced through the red light at the intersection, knowing that being off the highway was a dangerous time because they would be moving more slowly and exposed to numerous buildings that made excellent cover for an ambush.

The street took them past the brewery which was blocked off.

“There’s your military headquarters,” Brad said to Ben, pointing to the brewery. There were vehicles and soldiers everywhere around it.

“We’re going there?” Ben asked. “To have me, you know, talk to the troops?” Ben was still trying to feel comfortable in his new role as commander in chief.

“No, Governor,” Brad said. “We want to keep your arrival under wraps for a while. We have this all planned out. We’ll get you in front of the troops, soon and often.” Brad’s protectees were usually elected officials. He learned early on that politicians like them loved to talk to crowds, even when it was dangerous. It made his job of protecting them harder, but it was part of the deal.

They went on the side streets around the brewery and down towards the capitol. The lead driver gave the passwords at the military checkpoints and they went right through. It was extremely well planned and orchestrated.

The rain had stopped but everything was still wet. There were burned out pick-ups and a few military vehicles. There were boarded up buildings, covered in graffiti, surrounded by trash and debris. They hadn’t been in Olympia for months. They had no idea how bad it had become.

“We’re cleaning up this garbage, right?” Ben asked. “Can we get some Loyalist prisoners to do that?”

“Look at you, Governor,” Tom said with a smile. “You’re governing.”

It hit all of them. They really were governing now, after all the bitching they’d done about the former government. Now it was up to them to get things done, to fix things. They finally got what they wanted: a chance to do things their way, the constitutional way. But now, any failures were on them. They couldn’t blame the “powers that be” any longer. That was them now.

They had inherited problems almost too vast to imagine. It was a civil war, although they never used that term because it didn’t fit very well. A “civil war,” everyone thought, harkening back to history, was a large army of blue and gray troops fighting big battles. This wasn’t that. It was a breakdown with one side trying to hold onto power and another side trying to clean things up. There weren’t large battles. Instead, it only took a slight nudge to topple a broken and battered government that could barely stand up. To call it a “civil war” was an exaggeration.

They also inherited a complete breakdown of the economy. Economy? What economy? Gangs stealing everything in sight wasn’t an “economy.” Handing out FCards, usually based on political loyalty, wasn’t an “economy.” Commandeering truckloads of food wasn’t an “economy.” The closest thing to an “economy” was people doing little tiny odd jobs to get paid in food or gasoline or ammunition.

But that would be the basis for restoring the economy. People, at least some of them, would still work. They would still trade things. That was how the American economy recovered after the devastating Revolutionary War. It would be the basis now for a complete rebuild. No more government-controlled economy. No more crushing taxes and regulation. The briefing binders in the Suburban were full of ways to make sure the government didn’t resume its old ways of taxing and controlling. And destroying.

“Winter kill-off,” Brian said looking at all the garbage, burned-out vehicles, and boarded up buildings. “You know, like a field at the end of winter. Everything, including the weeds, is killed off, which makes it possible to plant seeds that will grow in the spring and summer. It still takes constant work, making sure the weeds don’t come back, but you start with a clean slate.”

As they passed through more destruction of their formerly nice city, Brian said, “This is our clean slate.”

Everyone sat and thought about that. The destruction, especially the destroyed vehicles and burned out buildings, got worse the closer they got to the capitol.

“This area looks familiar,” Carly said as they went down Capitol Boulevard toward the old WAB building.

“It should,” Brad said as they turned in front of the brick WAB building. The headlights from the Suburban and convoy showed that the WAB building had burn marks on the outside of its beautiful brick walls. The windows were smashed out. More garbage. It was caked up against the walls of the building like a snowdrift.

The parking lot was full of vehicles, some military and many pick-ups. There were dozens of soldiers and more of those contractor-looking guys, like the ones in the pick-ups accompanying them. The lights were on in the building.

“Here’s your temporary headquarters, Governor,” Brad said. “We still have some cleanup to do at the capitol, but we should have it ready for you in a few hours, maybe a day.”

Ben, Tom, Brian, and Carly had forgotten just how destroyed the WAB building had been. It was scarred and ugly, and was a symbol to them of how destroyed the State of Washington itself had become. A formerly beautiful and functioning thing, like that historic building, was now a trashed shell of what it had been.

The WAB building had been intentionally selected as the temporary headquarters. The political people back at the Think Farm wanted to put the new Governor and his staff in the proper frame of mind when they returned to Olympia. They wanted the new leadership to realize how all the formerly good things had been destroyed. And nothing symbolized that more for the former WAB people than the trashing of their beautiful building. Besides, the WAB building was only a few blocks from the capitol and the security people said it would work as temporary headquarters.

As the Suburban stopped, the occupants now knew better than to get out without being given the okay, though it was weird to just sit in a car after it stopped.

Brad was checking things out and working on the radio. Finally he said, “Some people will be opening your doors. Let them. And then quickly follow them into the building. Let them be your shields. That’s their jobs. They’re all volunteers.” He wanted to, but didn’t, say, “They’re your bullet catchers.”

All the passenger doors opened at the same time. There were military people and those same contractor-looking guys. Everyone got out of the Suburban and walked quickly into the building. Sure enough, the soldiers and others formed a shield around them as they went in.

The place was cleaned up and orderly, not like the last time Tom had been there. And it had a functioning office. There was even a receptionist who they didn’t recognize at the reception desk. There were other obvious Think Farm staff members. Ben recognized some of them as the political people he used to hang out with socially. They were the “known conservatives” who had to go underground when the Collapse started.

When they walked in to the lobby, the receptionist said excitedly, “Welcome back, Governor.” Ben looked around to see who she was talking to. Oh. It was him. He acted like he knew that she meant him, although it was pretty obvious he didn’t.

Brad led them into Tom’s old office. It had new office furniture—well, new to them, but obviously old furniture from somewhere else. It looked like an office someone could actually sit in and get some work done like things were normal again.

Ben, Tom, Brian, and Carly were blown away. They had been cooped up alone at the Prosser Farm for months and had no idea all the preparations that had been going on for them. Carly had told them that the Think Farm was buzzing day and night with planning for the eventual victory and then governing, but that was just vague generalities. Now they could see tangible proof that the Think Farm had planned everything and they were ready to govern.

Tom started to sit at the desk in his old office. It felt natural.

“Uh, Tom,” Brad said, “I believe this is Gov. Trenton’s office.”

Everyone laughed. Tom was embarrassed. That would be one of the other changes he would need to get used to. Tom’s former employee, Ben, was now his boss.

Tom extended his hand to Ben as if to say, “Here. Sit at your desk.” So Ben did just that. He sat in the comfortable office chair and observed all the people in the room who were looking at him with joy on their face. He was their Governor. Him. He remembered the drunken conversation he’d had with Grant Matson while watching the Seahawks in the 2005 Super Bowl about the insanity of thinking Ben could ever be the governor.

Ben couldn’t smile, though when he thought about Grant. He wondered if Grant was still alive since he was a “prepper” and had that awesome cabin and all those guns. But, he was also on the POI list. Ben wondered if Grant had been picked up, maybe never making it to his cabin.

That was the bittersweet nature of all this, Ben thought. There was the sweetness of something wonderful, like being the governor and having a chance to fix the state. But it was at the cost of bitter things, like whatever happened to Grant and all the others.

Everyone in the room—staff from the Think Farm, Brad and Jerry the EPU agents, Tom, Brian, and Carly—was looking at Ben with a huge smile. Ben, sitting in that desk had been what they’d worked for, and risked their lives for, for months. Years, actually, counting the risks they were taking before the Collapse by being “known conservatives” or Oath Keepers.

Someone started clapping and soon, everyone joined in. Ben couldn’t take it. They were clapping for him, but he didn’t deserve it. They did, all those people who sacrificed for him to be able to sit in that chair. Ben stood up and started clapping. He started to tear up.

Ben couldn’t stand it any longer. He was not worthy of applause. He walked from behind the desk and went up to Brad and Jerry and hugged them. Tom, Brian, and Carly joined in. Pretty soon, the Think Farm staff was in a big huddle, too. Everyone was crying.

After a while, Ben realized he needed to project the image of a calm decision maker, not a crying man. So he said, “Okay it’s time to get to work.” The huddle broke up and Ben thanked everyone before going to his desk.

“Let’s go fix this state.”