299 Days: The Stronghold

Chapter 127 Samizdat (May 13)

That damned rooster woke up Tom Foster again. He wasn’t a morning person and that rooster crowed at dawn, which was about 5:00 a.m. this time of the year in Washington State.

The rooster was one of the big adjustments Tom and all the other Washington Association of Business senior staff and their families were making to adjust to life out at the Prosser Farm.

Not that they were complaining. They would have been dead back in Olympia, which was just a few miles away. They were wanted by the government as “Persons of Interest.” Worse yet, the gangs of government union thugs, or whatever they were, would tear them limb from limb if they knew who they were. Tom could still remember the sickening scene of the WAB offices on fire after the big budget-cut protest, which happened right before they decided to get out of Dodge and go to the Prossers’ farm. Tom was glad to be at the farm. But that rooster. Did it have to do that so early?

Other than little things like the rooster, the Prosser’s city guests were doing quite well out at the farm. They didn’t have real jobs, except the chores they did out there, but they didn’t have taxes, either. It was actually relaxing.

In their pre-Collapse jobs, the WAB guys were the targets of hateful political attacks. They were sued by the government for things they clearly didn’t do. They were audited by just about every government agency that could audit them, and in pre-Collapse America, there were a lot of them. Their wives and kids were told they were not welcome among polite Olympia society because WAB people were such right-wing monsters, so hiding out on a farm actually seemed like a vacation.

The WAB wives were not feeling like this was a vacation, however. They were making the best of it and were glad to be safe, but for the first times in their lives, their suburban wife skills weren’t needed. No one needed the kids picked up from soccer, no one needed buttons sewn on their Girl Scout uniforms. There was no juggling of career and kids. The farm wife skills of Molly Prosser were more important out there, but the WAB wives didn’t know how to do a lot of those things. At least at first. They learned quickly and had a good attitude about it, even though they wanted their old lives back. They felt guilty that they didn’t love it out on the farm because they knew they were literally dead back in town. But, still. The younger kids loved it out here, which was really important to the parents and made any little hardships out there well worth it. The kids got to play with animals and even seemed to enjoy their chores. It was like playing “farmhouse” for them. Maybe the novelty of the chores would wear off, but so far it hadn’t.

The older kids, sixteen year-old Derek Foster in particular, didn’t like the farm life too much. He missed his girlfriend back in town. He asked his mom if he could call her. No way, she said. That could get them all killed, although Joyce Foster didn’t say it that way to avoid scaring Derek. Teenage puppy love would have to be yielded to preventing their slaughter. That made sense to the grownups. To Derek, though, not so much. Seeing his girlfriend was all he thought about.

They had plenty to eat out there; lots of beef from their own cows. The smaller kids wouldn’t understand the part about killing the cows for food, so, when they butchered one, the grownups told the kids that one cow must have run away. The older kids knew, though.

Molly Prosser had always canned and dried fruits and vegetables, even before the Collapse. That was just what people did out there, and it also saved them a ton of money. The Prossers were in the full swing of feeding themselves before the Collapse.

They had a small out building they called the “fruit shed” where they stored all their canned and dried foods. It was a standalone insulated shed in the shade of a big tree that kept cool in the summer and, with just one light bulb on all the time, kept the food above freezing in the winter. It was full of food before the Collapse. And now, with all the extra hands available, they were canning and drying more food than ever. They were eating last year’s food. At first, the city guests didn’t like home canned and dried food, but they quickly got over it. Now they actually liked it. “This tastes amazing,” the city guests would say over and over to the Prossers. “It’s so much more flavorful.” That was especially true of the real eggs they had out there. They tasted so much better than the store-bought ones the WAB families used to eat.

The city guests were losing a little weight, too. They exercised a lot more out on the farm and the food they ate was much better for them. They slept better out there, too. They started to wonder why they had been rushing around and living on drive-thru and take-out in the past. To get to soccer practice on time, was the answer. But why did they have to do so many soccer practices? Why did they work so hard before the Collapse just to earn more money, that would only be taxed away? Any money they saved was taken away by the inflation in the run up to the Collapse. After the Collapse, all their savings were gone because the banks were closed. They had worked so hard and sacrificed so much for…worthless bank accounts? They were just doing what everyone around them was doing pre-Collapse. They never thought about whether it made any sense. The Collapse was the restart they needed.

One of the big reasons the Prossers and their guests were doing so well on the farm was that they weren’t entirely on their own. They lived on a road that had a half dozen other farms. The Prossers and their relatives had known the other families for decades and, in some cases, generations. They traded among themselves.

It wasn’t really trading; it was more like sharing. Everyone just took care of each other. It was just how it was, and how it had always been out there. Taking care of each other had been increasing leading up to the Collapse as the economy was tanking, and then it just accelerated after the Collapse.

At first, the WAB guests wondered how they could survive without near daily runs to the grocery store, Costco, and the mall like they had been doing pre-Collapse. They could not conceive of a world where they didn’t drive around all day buying things.

They quickly saw that the Prossers and their neighbors didn’t need to go into town for food or other things. At first, they would go in for things like toiletries and gas. But it was getting more and more dangerous in town. There weren’t roving hordes of motorcycle gangs, but gangs ran everything. Some were mean and some were polite, like the Russians at the gas stations, but they were gangs, nonetheless.

The Prosser neighbors had another good reason to not really want to go to town. They knew that the Prossers had some guest families out there from Olympia that the police might be looking for. The guests didn’t look like criminals, so they assumed it must be political. The neighbors figured it out pretty quickly. They knew that Jeff Prosser worked for WAB.

The neighbors all hated the government for various reasons. The government had destroyed the economy, taken their savings, and before the Collapse, taken away their ability to live out on their farms because of the insane environmental regulations. They wanted this nightmare to be over. They wanted to start over. They wanted a new government—one that was limited, constitutional, fair, and left them alone. They would die before they let anything happen to the Prossers or their WAB guests. They were glad to do their little part by protecting the WAB guests.

The WAB guys had a laptop and some cheap microphones. For the past few weeks, they were recording Rebel Radio and burning it to the CDs. They couldn’t put the recordings up on the internet because they’d get caught, so they went to a “sneaker net”: delivering CDs by walking them someplace instead of using the internet to deliver the content.

Since they couldn’t broadcast Rebel Radio, they decided to go “samizdat,” which was the Russian word for “self-publishing” that the Russian dissidents used during the Soviet tyranny. Dissidents would get a typewriter from the black market and type essays on freedom, one copy at a time. They couldn’t make copies because copy machines were highly restricted. They would type the same essay over and over again and secretly distribute it. Readers would read it and pass it on to the next trusted person.

The WAB guys started calling these episodes of Rebel Radio the “samizdat episodes.” They would record an episode and do their usual ripping on the government. They had segments like “Who Saw That Coming?” This was a humorous, but cutting, description of all the pre-Collapse indicators leading up to something like the government running out of money and how they had been trying to tell people it was coming. They avoided an “I told you so” tone, and made devastating political observations.

Another segment on Rebel Radio was called “After the Reset.” It was about how getting rid of the criminals running things and returning to a limited government and constitutional republic would make life far better for everyone. They provided details on what post-Collapse life would be like. Practical details; not pie-in-the-sky ideology. They discussed how the Patriot approach would lead to business thriving, government treating people fairly, and a future for young people. They constantly talked about how young people had been robbed of a future.

The main purpose of the Rebel Radio samizdat episodes was to encourage the resistance. To rally fighters and gray men, even though the WAB guys didn’t really know if anyone was listening or if there were any fighters or gray men out there. The samizdat episodes described why things had gone so horribly wrong and, even more importantly, how they could be fixed. These broadcasts gave the Resistance hope. Hope was everything during these times.

If there was no way to fix things, why would people risk their lives to fix them? Why not just take the measly scraps they’re given on their FCard and be like all the other sheeple? People out there needed to have an answer for that question. They got one every episode.

They didn’t have the production capabilities of the pre-Collapse Rebel Radio episodes; they had to add the intro music by playing the music CD in the background while talking, but the poor production quality actually made the samizdat episodes better. It gave them a true “rebel” feel, like they were being recorded in some hideout with government agents looking for them. Which was true.

After recording several episodes and filling up a CD, they would make a handful of copies on their laptop and label them with a Sharpie pen. At first, Ben suggested that they use gloves so their fingerprints weren’t on them. Tom said it didn’t matter because the government knew who they were. It was just where they were that the government didn’t know.

Distribution of the CDs depended on the one non-Patriot in the group. She was Adrienne, Joyce Foster’s younger sister, who lived in Olympia. Adrienne was the wild child in the family. She wasn’t really into politics, but loved adrenaline. She was a gorgeous woman in her mid-thirties with black hair and green eyes. She could drink the boys under the table. She was single and liked it that way.

Dennis would get the CDs to Adrienne in Olympia where she made a handful of copies on her computer. She got them out to people Joyce identified. Those people did the same, and the number of copies started to slowly grow. People in the Olympia area, then the Seattle area, then beyond, started to risk getting arrested to hear Rebel Radio on CD.

Adrienne’s cover was selling pot. No one went to jail for that. It wasn’t the hard drugs that the gangs sold, so there wasn’t any danger of pissing them off. Adrienne’s cover for sneaking around and meeting people on street corners was that she was selling pot. That was much more socially acceptable than distributing Rebel Radio CDs, and much less likely to get her in trouble with the law.

The hard part was getting blank CDs. At some point, the stores in Olympia would wise up and stop selling them or, worse yet, arrest the people buying blank CDs in bulk, so Adrienne decided to get some blank CDs on her own. And maybe have some fun in the process.

Cam, a guy down the street, who was half cute, worked for the state as a high-ranking computer guy. Actually, Cam used to work for the state, but since they weren’t paying him anymore, he didn’t go to work. Adrienne told him one day that she was making music CDs and selling them to make enough to supplement her FCard, but she couldn’t find any blank CDs. He said he had cases of them at work and he still had the keys. She winked, gave him her sexiest look—which was very sexy—and asked him, “What does a girl have to do get herself some of those CDs?”

Cam was happy to oblige. This whole Crisis had been stressful and bleak. Now a beautiful woman wanted to sleep with him. That was the best news he’d had in years. And all she wanted was some stupid CDs sitting at work. Cam couldn’t believe how lucky he was.

Every week or so when she needed CDs, Adrienne went over to Cam’s place and snuck in a quickie. She actually enjoyed it. She even went over a couple times when she didn’t need CDs. The fact that she was doing it for the Resistance made it even more exciting. Cam was married, so Adrienne knew he wouldn’t rat her out because he didn’t exactly want any attention paid to the fact that he was having an affair and stealing state property. Besides, Dennis said he would take care of Cam if Cam decided to do something stupid.

The WAB guys had a way of knowing if the samizdat episodes were successful. In each episode, they would suggest a new graffiti message, which was the genesis of “I miss America.” Dennis would come back from town and tell them how many times he saw the graffiti they suggested in a given episode. Adrienne would hear from her network of the slogans appearing in nearby cities and tell Dennis, who would pass it on to the WAB guys. They would then do a “shout out” to that city so the people there knew that their messages were being received in the Rebel Radio “bunker” as they called their location.

This pumped up the Resistance. They knew the Rebel Radio guys could see the graffiti out there. Men and women risking arrest to spray paint Patriot graffiti got some recognition for their efforts.

But, as it turns out, the Resistance weren’t the only ones listening to the samizdat episodes of Rebel Radio.