299 Days: The Restoration

Chapter 323 Reports and Letters

From all the reports he was reading, a pattern was emerging. There were two kinds of Limas: involuntary and voluntary. The involuntary ones, which were the vast majority of them, were people “just doing their job.” They were government employees or government contractors and their business was doing what government wanted. And before the Collapse, government was the majority of the business in the state, so the majority of people did business in some way with the government.

The involuntary Limas weren’t angels. They profited—handsomely, in most cases—from the government. Leading up to the Collapse, they got things that were taken from other people. Whether it was tax money or property seized, or whether it was a competing business that was regulated out of existence, these people got things that were taken from other people. It was that simple.

The theft accelerated during the Collapse. The involuntary Limas were the ones with big fat FCards and gas. They had the power to potentially put their neighbors in jail with one “report” to the authorities. Some of them abused this power, but many did not. Most abused this power a little but usually, they would say, only to take care of their families.

“I didn’t have a choice” they would say. That might be true, or at least partially true, in most cases.

The involuntary Limas would be pardoned. There were several reasons for this. First, and most disturbing, was because it would be impossible to execute them all. Not that killing them all was what anyone wanted—except some hardcore “retributionist” Patriots as they became known. But, with the limited resources the New Washington government had, there weren’t enough firing squads or jails for all the involuntary Limas. Most of the pre-Collapse economy was tied to government. Most people had done business in some way with government. Grant remembered that for a while, he too, was a government employee at the State Auditor’s Office. He technically “profited” from government, too. Should people like him be killed? There were just too many involuntary Limas to do anything about.

Second, mass killings and revenge was exactly what Grant was there to prevent. In fact, Grant spent most of his time fighting the retributionists. Not physically, although he and the Team were expecting a retributionist para group to try to take him out, but politically. There were retributionist legislators and even a few judges. Politics was helping Grant, though. While most average citizens hated the Limas and wouldn’t mind if they all died, they were so tired of war and hunger and dying that they wanted it to stop. They wanted the economy to get back on its feet and for life to quit being so damned hard. Therefore, there was little political support for the retributionists. Especially if the ReconComm was being fair and punishing the truly bad people, which was Grant’s job.

The third reason for not killing all the Limas was that the economy needed these people. The majority of educated people were Limas, if not active ones, then Lima sympathizers in the past. This was because, once again, most of the economy was government. The well-educated Limas were the white-collar people who ran things. The managers. They were managing and running things that didn’t need to be run like a giant government. However, they were the ones who would be necessary to make things run smoothly in the new economy where a former government manager wouldn’t have a new government job, but he or she might be a great manager for a manufacturing plant that wanted to open.

Voluntary Limas, however, were a different story. These were the people who weren’t just “doing their job.” They sought out the power and money and abused it. And they loved it. They were the Commissioner Winters of the world, the Nancy Ringmans. They did horrible things and ordered the involuntary Limas to do them, too.

The FCorps kept coming up in the reports Grant was reading. People who just joined it to get some extra FCard credits, like Ron Spencer who volunteered to do accounting for the FCorps, were not the problem. It was the people who joined the FCorps and actively went out and hurt people. All the sex offenders and other criminals who joined up because they were now immune from the law. Grant read reports about the “bumfucks” the FCorps did. Grant ordered hundreds of those people to be prosecuted, which meant they would probably be hung. It was literally a box to check on a form and then initial. It was easy to order the probable death of these people. Technically, Grant did not order their deaths. By checking the box, he was recommending against the governor granting a pardon. They would then be given a jury trial and almost certainly convicted. It was impossible to be in the FCorps for months and not leave behind proof of it. Most of them bragged about all the things they’d done. They loved bragging about how they weren’t subject to the laws. And they loved telling people how important they were, which meant gloating about all their crimes. That hubris ended up being the death of them, literally.

Grant would pray that he was doing the right thing. He essentially had the power of life and death in his hands which was an enormous responsibility. He prayed that he exercised it wisely. He would stop doing what he was doing and just close his eyes and listen for the outside thought to guide him. The outside thought never told him he was making a mistake. The only thing he heard from it, and he heard it often, was forgiveness. It was hard to forgive, especially after hours of reading those reports. But then he would hear it again. Forgiveness.

Grant wondered if Lisa was forgiving him. He was so busy with life and death matters that, he hated to admit, he didn’t think about her that often. Why do it, though? He’d just get more depressed. Then he’d feel sorry for himself. It did no good for Grant to constantly think about how doing what he was supposed to do during the Collapse, war, and Restoration, as they were calling it, had cost him his marriage. No good whatsoever.

“Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” he kept telling himself. That put his sacrifice in context and helped him get through it.

But still, he wondered. He would tell himself that she was missing him, which was probably true, but would she be able to admit that? Would the fact that Grant and the 17th Irregulars were now almost legends in New Washington sway her? Would she realize that if thousands of people thought what he did was awesome, that maybe she should think so, too?

Would Manda and Cole sway her? The kids certainly missed their dad. Manda would understand why Grant was doing what he was doing. On some level, Cole understood, too; he knew that his dad was putting the bad people in jail. Funny, an autistic kid had a better understanding of the situation than a grown-up doctor.

Grant tried to call the kids, though the phones were a complete mess. The Limas took them down on their way out. The internet was spotty and Grant didn’t want to use it even when it worked because, for all he knew, he would be giving away his position to someone in Seattle who could get a Lima hit team out to his location.

No, Grant would just sit there and wonder about his family from afar. Whether they loved him or hated him, or a combination of both. All he could do was write letters and give them to people who were going in the direction of Pierce Point. Since he was well known, and, although he hated to admit, because he had the power of life and death as the chair of the ReconComm, he could get letters through that others couldn’t.

Grant wrote letters to his family describing all the good things that he was doing. He constantly downplayed the danger and aimed the letters primarily at the kids. He would tell Lisa that he loved her and missed her. He wondered if that just made her angrier.

“Oh, if you love me so much,” he could hear her saying, “then why did you leave? And why haven’t you come home?”

Every time he wrote a letter back home, he felt terrible. Those letters reminded him how he had left, how letters were necessary because he wasn’t there to say the things he was writing.

He never got a letter back from them. Never, though he kept waiting for one.

He would start to feel alone, like he was totally alone, the only person in the world. Then the Team would be there and would remind him that he wasn’t alone. He had the best friends in the world around him. He had dozens of people a day tell him how much good he was doing with the ReconComm. He would meet a few people each day for whom he had obtained pardons and they thanked him for literally saving their lives. It was powerful.

And empty. He didn’t want strangers telling him how awesome he was. He wanted to be a dad again. He really wanted to be a husband again. He wanted the appreciation coming from his family.

Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. It all kept coming back to that. Grant was making a sacrifice. It was the price he was paying to do the things he needed to do.

As the Team was taking a break at a rest stop on the way to Yakima and standing around Mark’s truck, a soldier came up to Pow.

“This is a letter for Lt. Matson,” the soldier said.

“It’s Commissioner Matson, but I’ll get it to him,” Pow said. “Thanks.” He looked and saw the letter was from Lisa. It was likely the most important piece of mail Grant would ever receive.