299 Days: The Stronghold

Chapter 125 I Miss America (May 13)

Ron Spencer was standing in line. Again. It seemed like that’s all he did all day long. At least they had gas today. But, it was “gang gas” sold by the Russians; the Russian mafia, of course. Young Russian men with AK-47s were the “security contractors” for the gas station. They were polite, but tough as nails.

They spoke English with customers, but spoke Russian among themselves. It was weird to see Russian men with AKs walking around in America. It looked like some weird scene out of Red Dawn, but it was real. All the fears of the Cold War about a totally implausible Russian invasion had come a little bit true.

As he was standing in line, Ron thought that the Russian mafia guards were not oppressing the people like the Soviets depicted in Red Dawn, but were just making a living. A semi-honest living. It was capitalism pure and simple, if “capitalism” meant government controls of everything and then the inevitable black market. That was as close to capitalism as anyone could get in Collapse America. At least, in the cities where the government still had control.

Ron hoped the “gang gas” was not bad. Some of it had been stalling out vehicles because it had fillers in it, including water, it was rumored. But, as a non-government employee, he couldn’t get the FCards that worked at the “government gas” stations where people could get unadulterated gas. Ron had to use his regular FCards which, theoretically, could only buy food. However, regular FCards were traded like cash. The card was not tied to one person; someone could have ten of them if that’s what they bought or traded for. Or stole.

Ron got a few FCards of varying amounts by trading for some silver. He bought silver steadily before the Collapse and had about 150 ounces in one-ounce pieces. He was a Mormon and was supposed to have a year’s worth of supplies for his family according to his church. But he and his wife hadn’t wanted to fill up the garage with bulky cans of food. Besides, that seemed “weird.”

So, they decided to buy and store something much more compact: silver. They got “junk” coins, which were pre-1964 U.S. coins that were ninety percent silver. They would buy pre-1964 silver dollars, fifty-cent pieces, and dimes. Then they got one-ounce silver pieces.

The Spencers started buying silver when it was $12 an ounce and kept getting it all the way up to $43 an ounce. Now it was $600 an ounce, kind of. It wasn’t as if people walked up with $600 of cash and bought an ounce of silver, but the price on the day before the May Day Dump was $545 an ounce.

No one really used cash (paper money) to buy silver or much of anything anymore. First of all, the government made owning silver and gold a crime, although not too many people paid attention to that law. Second of all, cash didn’t buy anyone much and wasn’t accepted usually for food or gas. Some people would accept cash, but in such high amounts—thousands of dollars for a bag of groceries—that people stopped using it for the most part. Besides, with the banks closed, almost no one had cash on hand.

People still used dollars to set prices. For example, groceries had a dollar price but that just meant that a certain number of dollars was taken off an FCard when a purchase was made. Dollars were now just a measuring unit for prices, not a currency used to buy and sell things.

Silver, and especially gold, were king, followed by FCards. People were frequently bartering for their necessities: gas, ammo, guns, medicine. Sex was traded quite a bit, too, but not in Ron’s world. He’d heard about it, though, including rumors that good people he knew were doing it. Alcohol was a hot commodity. Drugs were less so, at least as far as Ron, the Mormon, knew. Many people were growing and smoking pot for themselves, and for trading.

Ron traded a one-ounce silver piece with a corrupt FC person for $550 on three FCards. He would use those FCards to get ten gallons of gang gas that was $55 a gallon. Ron had two five-gallon gas cans with him. Not bad. He could drive for a month on that.

He didn’t have a job to go to and school had been cancelled for the rest of the year—and probably years to come—so he didn’t need to drive for that. He found that he had to drive on various errands, like to get gas that day. Since he had silver, which was something he hid from everyone initially, he was asked by his neighbors to take people to the black-market clinic or move someone’s family’s stuff to a new house or pick up someone’s family members who were moving in with them. His church was very close-knit, so he did a lot of favors for them. He also did favors for his neighbors who weren’t in his church. He did favors for atheists he knew; he didn’t care. People were people. Helping people was helping people. He figured that God had guided him and his wife to get silver before the Collapse and he would use that silver to help people. The silver wasn’t his; it was a tool he’d been given to do good things.

Ron decided that driving people around was his new job. There wasn’t any accounting work, so he had to do something. He made a living—sort of—by helping people. They gave him whatever they could to compensate him for his time and gas. Any little thing he or his family needed. His wife really missed a particular skin lotion, for example. He mentioned it to a couple of people he’d helped and a bottle of it appeared on his porch one morning.

The power and water were still on in Olympia. The bills quit coming. Maybe that was because the postal system had stopped. Ron hadn’t seen a mail carrier in…weeks.

What most people didn’t know was that the government had made a silent bargain with the population: we’ll take all your money and restrict your freedom, but we’ll get you some food and free utilities. It was kind of like the silent bargain in the old Soviet Union; bread and utilities will always be free, but we get to run your lives.

The government was essentially keeping its end of the bargain on utilities. There were frequent power outages, but it was getting better. The internet was spotty at first, but that was also improving. However, access to websites the government didn’t like was restricted. It was possible to get to them, but not unless someone knew a lot about computers. And there was a risk of getting caught, which meant an FCard might become inactive. Maybe. There was so much crime that the government couldn’t really go after people who were looking at the wrong websites, but most people feared a loss of their FCards if they acted up. Many believed the government knew everything they did and could retaliate against them, like the old IRS system. Most people paid their taxes even though the government could not possibly prosecute even a tiny fraction of them. People, or sheeple as Ron called them, had been trained for generations to follow the law no matter what. That made sense when the laws were reasonable and the chances of getting caught were real. Neither of those two things were true now.

Crime was a constant problem. It seemed that a sizable chunk of the population was not following any laws and were not at all afraid of prosecution. There was no functioning police force. Prosecutors and judges? Not anymore.

Ron carried a revolver, a nice Ruger SP 101 .357 Magnum, with him all the time. Even in his house, which was where he’d need it most. He had a holster for it and carried it concealed, which was against the law, but whatever. He’d be out of his mind not to carry a gun when he was carrying an ounce of silver, or two gas cans. The Russians were good about making sure their gas station was safe; they needed to have people coming to their places to buy things, but once a customer left the gas station, they were on their own.

Ron pulled into the Cedars subdivision where he lived and sighed. The FC dorks were “guarding” the entrance. He had quit going to the worthless neighborhood meetings because the weenies were running the show and because Nancy Ringman, the leader of the weenies, had flipped out and accused Ron and his family of being “Mormon hoarders.” Why even go?

But, Ron heard that Nancy showed up last night at the meeting and seemed to appear sane. She said she had an allergic reaction to some medication that had previously caused her to “not be herself.” She said she had some new medication and was fine. She was a pretty high-ranking government person so she probably got special access to medications, Ron thought.

Nancy told everyone at the meeting she would be moving soon to “somewhere near Seattle” to run a new TDF, which was a “temporary detention facility.” It was probably one of those political prisons they were setting up. Not a maximum security thing for criminals. These were “Club Feds” for POIs and others who were causing non-life threatening problems for the government. Not much was known about the TDFs. Given what he’d heard about them and who was being sent there, it wasn’t exactly a torture chamber. They were kind of like locked dormitories. It seemed that TDFs were where they sent tax protestors, Patriot bloggers, and other troublemakers who were violating the myriad of new laws. The authorities wanted to make examples of them and scare the population into doing what they were told. The authorities needed the TDFs, which were springing up everywhere because there weren’t enough regular prison cells. Filling the TDFs to the brim demonstrated where the government’s priorities were. They had let most of the real criminals go a few weeks earlier to save money, but were now trying to round up political enemies and seemed to find the resources to house them in TDFs.

That reminded Ron about his former neighbor, Grant. Where were Grant and his family? Were they together? Grant had been on the POI list and owned some assault rifles. Ron figured Grant was probably in Texas now, where he’d be safe. Grant’s wife had been heartbroken that he’d left, so who knows where she and the kids went. It was sad that a nice family like that had been broken up by this whole Collapse.

The weenies were all against a “militaristic” guard when it was Ron and Grant organizing it, but when the Freedom Corps came to the neighborhood, the weenies were suddenly all for an armed guard, under the control of the FC. It seemed the weenies were opposed to a “militaristic” group, except when it was controlled by their government buddies.

The FC had those stupid hard hats. They looked ridiculous. At first, some FC guy came to Nancy’s little meetings, but he wasn’t coming any more. He must have “deputized” some of the neighborhood residents because now a few of them had the dork helmets. Three neighborhood people volunteered to be FC dicks. They were Carlos Cuevas, Rex Maldonado, and Scott Baker. They thought they were pretty cool.

One of the FC dicks would oversee a few armed guards from the neighborhood. They did an OK job of keeping people out. Well, at least there hadn’t been any incursions by gangs like the night Grant shot those guys. The weenies cited this as “proof” the FC system was working. “We only had violence when the cowboys were taking the law into their own hands,” they’d say.

Ron wasn’t convinced that the FC guards should get credit for keeping people out. Ron thought what actually happened was that word went out that some bad asses in the Cedars shot up a bunch of people, so stay the hell away. Little did he know that the gangs weren’t coming to the Cedars because the Olympia Police Department, what was left of it, made a deal with the gangs to stay away. The government let the gangs sell their wares, like the Russians’ gasoline, in exchange for not looting neighborhoods. Not all gangs had deals with the government, so there was still a threat of looting.

Almost everyone in the Cedars was a government employee, or a former government employee since the government really didn’t have any money anymore. This was the state capitol and an upscale neighborhood. It was full of former assistant directors of state agencies, like Nancy Ringman who was the former head of the campaign finance commission. All they knew was government. Government solved problems. Private people created problems. Ron, as one of the few private-sector people, was not well received by them. Especially since Mormons like him were “fundamentalist” Christians.

He wondered if he was just being a jerk about the whole government-worker versus private-sector thing. When FCards came out, his views were confirmed.

It turned out that, for some reason, all the government people had higher amounts put on their FCards. They would actually brag about how high their FCard amount was. It was a status symbol. Ron and the few private-sector people in the neighborhood got a third less and had just as many dependents. So, even though there was no longer a state budget, the public employees were still giving themselves more than the private sector. Just like the good old days before the Collapse when they did the same thing via public sector unions electing bought-and-paid-for legislators who appropriated more and more money for their union pals, who returned the favor the next election cycle. They did it with tax dollars in the past, but were doing it with FCard credits now. Because they could.

None of this sat well with Ron. He had been on the fence before the Collapse when Grant would talk about all the corruption and “soft tyranny.” Ron knew that Grant was right, but it just seemed so radical to say those things. “Tyranny?” In America? Oh, come on. Wasn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?

No. Grant had been right. Ron felt stupid to be trapped there in the Cedars trading in silver for a few gallons of gas and having to wave at the FC idiots lining the entrance of his neighborhood so he could go home. Ron had his family, some silver, and some guns so he was better off than most, but still. He felt like he got left behind in some crappy place. He wanted to make things better.

Ron was out driving one of the ladies from church so she could move into her son’s house a few miles away out in the country. He came to an intersection and there was some graffiti. It said, “I miss America.”

That hit him like a ton of bricks. Ron missed America. He missed having a job, having plenty to eat, not worrying about his family, and never having to deal with all the corruption and lawlessness. He missed America, too.

A few miles away, closer to the country where the church lady was moving, was some more graffiti, also in that Patriot yellow color. It said, “Resist.”

Right then and there, Ron decided that he would resist. He would figure out a silent and secret way to throw a monkey wrench in the government’s machine. He was not openly a Patriot like Grant, but he would fight these bastards. Fight them. He just needed to come up with a way to do it.

Then he got an idea. The perfect idea.