299 Days: The Visitors

Chapter 153 The Garbage and the Fox (June 6)

Grant stared at the sky until he finally got up off the ground and back onto the moped. He wiped the barf from his mouth onto his sleeve. He rode toward the gate, trying to prepare for being calm when he got there.

When he got to the gate, Heidi saw him and asked how the trial went. She’d heard the verdict over the radio. Then she realized that he was the judge. “Hey, you’re the judge or whatever,” she said wondering why he was down at the gate so soon after the verdict.

“Or whatever,” Grant said humbly and then told Heidi about the outcome of the trial.

“We’re going to hang people?” she asked. Those words stung Grant like he had done something wrong by suggesting, and then accepting, the death sentences. Maybe hanging was too harsh. Had he done something horribly wrong?

Heidi paused and said, “I mean, they have it coming and everything, it’s just that I don’t think anyone’s been hung in this state in a hundred years. Why not just shoot ‘em?” she asked. Here was a sweet, peaceful nineteen year-old young woman asking, “Why not just shoot ‘em?” It seemed so odd. Life had quickly become mean and hard out there. It wasn’t whether to kill some people, but rather how.

“Hanging will send a message to the community,” Grant said. “It will remind people not to do this.” He pointed back toward the Grange and said, “Hanging conveys authority: a community orders the hanging of a person. Any ole’ guy with a gun can shoot someone. That’s not a community-wide punishment, it’s just shooting someone.”

Heidi thought about it. Hanging did have an official law-and-order feel to it; an old fashioned sense of justice. It was quick and relatively painless, too. “Yeah, I can see hanging making sense here,” she said.

Grant was relieved. He stopped worrying that he’d overreacted and ordered two people killed for no reason, but he still was worrying whether he had been fair.

Always wonder if you’re being fair. You will be fair, but always wonder. It’s hard to be fair. You are a human being, so you have to work at it. Don’t let the hate blind you.

Grant got the feeling that the outside thought was talking about more than just Frankie and Josie. It seemed like it was talking about Grant making a lot more of these decisions. Punishing people he hated, but being fair while doing so. Loyalists? No way, Grant thought. How would he be in a position to judge Loyalists? That was impossible.

Dan, who had missed the trial because he was patrolling the creek, came up to Grant. Heidi told Dan about the verdicts and he just nodded. None of this surprised him.

Grant wanted to take his mind of the hangings. So he talked to Dan about getting a second set of dogs for the next raid. Dan was happy to oblige. He had a couple of detection dogs who could sniff out bombs and drugs back at his place. “Detection dogs are not ideal for attack duties, but they’ll do fine for what you need. Just seeing those dogs will get the bad guys to beg you to arrest them,” he said with a grin. Dan was glad that people were seeing how valuable his dogs were. He wasn’t just some pet lover. He was the owner of some very useful tools.

Dan would train someone new, a kid named Kyle who Dan said was doing a great job guarding the gate, to run the second set of dogs for the Team. Kyle would go out with the Team and let the dogs loose, if necessary. He wouldn’t bust down doors, but he didn’t need to. The dogs would go get the bad guys. Grant and Dan went over the logistics of getting Kyle started with the second dog team.

This discussion took Grant’s mind off what had just happened, which he desperately needed. He wanted to focus on things that made the community safe, not on hanging people. Well, hanging people indirectly kept the community safe, but…Grant’s mind went back into the loop he was trying to quit thinking about. He forced himself to focus on Kyle and the second dog team.

After a while of working on that issue, Grant realized he should get back to the Grange. They had a hanging to plan, and he was the judge so he should preside over it or whatever it is that one does at a hanging.

“Gotta go to a hangin’,” Grant said to Dan and Heidi, trying to sound like it was no big deal. They both nodded; they were trying to make it seem like no big deal, too. But it was, and everyone knew so.

Grant went back to the Grange, and Lisa was glad to see him. “We wondered where you went,” she said.

“I had to think,” he said.

She nodded. “I’m proud of you, honey. I know this is hard. You are exactly what this place needs. Most people would have just shot those people, especially that Frankie guy. They might have tortured him. We don’t need that.” She paused and pointed toward all the people at the Grange.

“We need normal,” Lisa said. “The new normal, maybe. But we need a normal thing like a court and police and fair trials. We need it. We’re not animals. We need it.”

She was right. The people of Pierce Point needed justice and a fair system to do it. A system that was actually better than the old one. Then it hit Grant.

They had just created something better than the old system. Their new system produced a fair trial and a just result. Before the Collapse, this issue would have ended up with 911 not showing up and child protective services not doing anything about a nine year-old girl living in a meth house and enduring unthinkable abuse.

Grant thought about child protective services not doing a thing in the past about Crystal despite all the chances it probably had to help her. Then his mind wandered to just a little while ago when he had stopped his moped to throw up and noticed something he’d never seen before. He had driven down the road to the gate a million times at full speed in a truck, but never noticed anything on the side of the road; the scenery just whizzed by.

The moped ride to the gate was the first time he’d stopped and looked at the side of the road. He saw garbage in the ditch. Ugly, hideous garbage. Lots of it, everywhere. It was disgusting. But, among the mess, he also saw something wonderful: a fox and her cubs. The beauty of nature, right there among all the garbage. Beauty could live among the ugliness.

By slowing down and looking for the first time, Grant saw the bad and the good; the garbage and the foxes.

Crystal was the same way. Before the Collapse, when life was whizzing by and there was no reason to focus on the side of the road, things didn’t look so bad. The government was handling it. They were in charge of protecting children so individuals didn’t have to bother. There was no reason to really think about Crystal, and people were glad they didn’t have to. The Richardson house was just something everyone drove past and never really thought about.

But now that something had radically changed—the end of a functioning government—people had a reason to think about Crystal. They saw the garbage along the road for the first time. It had been there the whole time, and there was no one around to take care of it, so now they had to clean it up themselves.

But, just like the bad of the garbage, there was also the good, the beauty of the foxes. There was a lot of previously unseen good out at Pierce Point, too, like people rallying together and helping each other.

Now that Pierce Point was functioning without a government, the people had to take care of the bad and could then appreciate all the good. They had to pick up the garbage but could marvel at the foxes. And after the garbage was gone, the beautiful foxes would still be there.

Lisa was right that the trial provided some “normal” that everyone needed. It was a ray of hope. As bad as things were, they had come together and, after some debate, made things better. On their own, without government. Maybe they could do that with other things. Maybe they could rebuild. Things didn’t seem so terrible.

Suddenly, Grant and Lisa saw an unfamiliar car come speeding toward the Grange. Chip and his guards raised their rifles and got ready to shoot. Chip was preparing to shoot the driver when the car slammed on the brakes. Someone got out and yelled for help. Lisa and the medical team rushed over.

A woman about thirty years old was unconscious in the passenger seat. Her arm was bandaged, but there wasn’t much blood. Chip’s guards carried her into the clinic where Lisa and Tim started working on her. They learned that the woman, a mother to three small children, had cut her arm two weeks ago and she hadn’t treated it. At the time, it didn’t seem like a major medical issue, but it got worse over the weeks and now she appeared to be dying of a completely treatable infection. A healthy woman was dying of something that was no big deal before the Collapse.

Lisa and Tim did everything they could for the next hour, as Grant and everyone else looked on but couldn’t do anything. A car with some kids pulled up; they wanted to see their mommy. Grant was trying not to lose control of his emotions when he saw the adults reluctantly letting the kids into the clinic to perhaps see their mom for the last time. After a half hour or so, an agonizing half hour, everyone heard the kids crying. They were wailing and screaming. When he heard the anguished cries of, “Mommy, come back, “ the emotional wall of bricks hit him again and he excused himself to behind the Grange where he threw up. That was twice in one day.

As the tragedy of a totally preventable death and the creation of three new orphans was sinking in, a man about fifty years old came to the clinic. His wife said he was on some heart medication and had been taking half of his pills to stretch them out and he had finally run out. He died about a half hour after arriving at the clinic. The group witnessed two preventable deaths within forty-five minutes of each other.

Someone asked Grant when the hanging would be.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “There’s been enough death today.”