299 Days: The Visitors

Chapter 156 Community Affairs (June 7)

As Frankie swung lifeless on the noose, Ken Dolphson snapped a picture for the newspaper. Right at that moment, Grant knew that the picture would become something big. Iconic and symbolic of a small community taking matters into its own hands and operating without any outside government. It would be hope to Patriots and a threat to Loyalists. Grant didn’t know how, but he knew that the picture of a man hanging at Pierce Point would become famous.

The impact of the hangings made for a very solemn day at Pierce Point. Some cried. No one talked much. They were deep in thought. Most people were relieved that the thieving tweaker child molesters were dead. No one felt sorry for Frankie. Some questioned whether Josie needed to die, and then wondered whether it was “sexist” to think that a woman should not be hanged. Somehow, seeing a woman swinging on a rope seemed odd. For most people, that image was more jarring and unsettling than that of a man.

When people started talking again, many were quietly describing why they thought justice had been done. They talked about why the trial was fair and how good it was that Pierce Point had its own courts. And the constables. People were thanking the Team for their heroism in getting these people.

Then something amazing happened. The rhetoric between the “cabin people” and the “full timers” seemed to go down a notch. The two camps were still divided, but people weren’t arguing with each other. The gung-ho full-timers weren’t talking so tough now that two human beings had just died. The ivory tower cabin people weren’t talking about abstract things like legitimate laws; most of them realized that Frankie and Josie deserved to die, as jarring as watching them actually die was.

One group that seemed deeply affected by the hangings were the ten-percenter scumbags who were planning on committing crimes if they could get away with it. Some of them had already committed petty crimes and now realized what would happen to them if they got caught. They didn’t like this hanging or jail or court thing one bit. They hated Grant. He was a threat to them and what they wanted to do. They now had confirmed enemies: Grant, Rich, and the Team.

The ten-percenter scumbags weren’t all poor people. A sizable portion were middle class and even some cabin people. They were anyone who thought it was OK to get something for nothing. They were looking out for number one; themselves. That line of thinking wasn’t limited to poor people.

The ten-percenter scumbags were joined by another group that hated the hangings: the handful of Loyalists out at Pierce Point. The Loyalists weren’t motivated to commit crimes, necessarily; they just wanted “their guys” back in charge. They knew that Grant’s success with the court, and now the hangings, meant Grant, Rich, and the Team—the teabaggers—were in charge out there. The Patriots weren’t running the place like dictators, which would have made the Loyalists’ job of ousting them much easier. No, the Patriots had been smart in the way they did it. They had garnered the support of the people. They were fair. They followed the Constitution. All of these things were gimmicks, according to the Loyalists. To the Loyalists, “fairness” and the “Constitution” were just words that people said to get whatever they wanted, so they assumed the Patriots must be using those terms as a gimmick. The Loyalists were projecting: accusing their opponents of thinking the way they actually did.

Snelling, who remained quiet during the hangings, was visibly horrified—for political, not humanitarian, reasons. He understood the power of hanging people. He understood that most of the residents would be rallying around Grant and the Patriots now. Snelling had to be a politician to get all those government architecture contracts like he did before the Collapse. He understood politics and realized how effective the Patriots were being out there. If they were hanging people and the crowd was cheering, what was to stop the Patriots from starting to hang Loyalists? Like him.

Snelling was the leader of the Loyalists. He was not afraid of Grant and had challenged him in previous meetings. He had a small band of cabin people following him, including Dick Abbott, the retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy.

Abbott fancied himself as a law enforcement expert even though he’d been retired for ten years. He had been a mediocre patrolman when he was on the force, but now he was close to 300 pounds. He had been scamming the California public employee disability system for a fake knee injury for years. The “disability” checks stopped coming when California ran out of money.

Before the Collapse, Abbott had made his living on shady stock deals. He wasn’t a true criminal; he just had no problem letting “suckers” give him their money. Abbott figured if people were stupid and trusted him, it was their problem.

Grant had been worrying about Abbott. Being a retired cop meant that he would be the natural challenger to Rich. When Grant saw Abbott and Snelling huddling together at one of the first Grange meetings, he knew that he’d have to deal with Abbott sooner or later.

Abbott wanted to be the sheriff out there. He wanted people to beg him to arrest or not arrest people. He wanted to be in “command” of the guards and constables. He wanted to be a big man out there. He wanted a cut of the FCards.

Over the past few Grange meetings, Grant watched Abbott and Snelling talking with their little group. Snelling was the brains and Abbott was the brawn. Well, to the extent a sixty-something stock market scammer weighing 300 pounds who always complained about his knee was “brawn.”

Grant watched after the hanging as some more people went over and started talking with Snelling and Abbott. These were probably ten-percenter scumbags who were alarmed by the hangings. They were gravitating toward the people who were opposing the Patriots.

The ten-percenters didn’t care about politics. They wanted the Loyalists to win so they wouldn’t have Grant and the constables to worry about. The ten-percenters knew that the real police would probably never be back. They knew that the Loyalists would be weak and would let them run wild. Perfect.

Grant knew that the more the Loyalists directly opposed him, the better. His political hand was strong right now. Might as well have the Loyalists show their stripes for everyone to see. That meant prodding Snelling and Abbott into popping off at Grant, which shouldn’t be hard.

Grant approached their little group. They looked nervous.

“Howdy, gentlemen,” he said with a sarcastic tip of his baseball cap to Snelling and Abbott. “Whatcha up to?”

“Just talking about how many crimes you’ve committed here today,” Snelling said, “with your little kangaroo court. Murder. Two counts, actually. Hanging people is against the law.”

People who were still lingering suddenly stopped talking and tried to listen in.

Grant smiled and said, “Why don’t you come to the meeting tonight and tell everyone your feelings?” He stared Snelling right in the face for a few seconds, and Snelling was the first to flinch. His eyes darted down at the ground. Grant turned around and walked away.

He realized he needed to do a better job of keeping track of the Loyalists. He had been so busy lately and, frankly, he didn’t want to “keep files” on opponents. He was trying to apply the Constitution out there, and tracking people’s political beliefs seemed so wrong. But, these people were now a direct threat to everything that was going right out there. These Loyalists would destroy Pierce Point in ten seconds if they could.

Despite how important it was to keep track of the Loyalists, Grant still hesitated to spy on people and categorize them by their political beliefs. Would he then have informers and secret police? He really didn’t want to go down that road. Was he using “security concerns” to justify a political disagreement—and especially a personal hatred—of Snelling and his group? Kind of like the old government did with him?

Pierce Point needed to be a model of the Patriot way, and that didn’t include secret police. But Pierce Point couldn’t be a model for anything if the Loyalists took it over. Grant would need to think about this some more. This living under the Constitution thing was harder than it looked. Utopians had never tried to govern anything. Platitudes break down when they make contact with reality.

Well, Grant concluded, he would at least keep a close eye on the Loyalists until he decided on whether to keep formal files on them. There was nothing wrong with just keeping an eye on them.

He spent the rest of the morning talking to people who came up to him. They wanted to talk about the trial, and most thanked him for it. He used these opportunities to explain to people why he was so insistent on applying the Constitution out there. Why it was important for Pierce Point to be a mini-republic where they lived like they had wanted to before the Collapse, but the government wouldn’t let them. That was a political statement. People, even the Undecideds, understood that.

Pierce Point would start over and do things the right way. That wasn’t some pie-in-the-sky utopian political theory. It was real. There were some real problems facing the people of Pierce Point and simply applying the Constitution and being decent human beings produced good results. The Constitution was just plain practical and solved problems. And people could see the good results—a fair trial, fair jail sentences, and fair hangings.

Grant was starting to slip the word “Patriot” into his discussions with people, like when they thanked him for handling the trial the way he did, he would shrug and say, “That’s the Patriot way.”

After talking to people all morning, he ate lunch. The Team had already gone to Dan’s house with Kyle to get the dog training going. Grant stayed behind and did his administrative and political things, which he was doing more and more frequently.

Grant realized he needed to talk to the Team about him transitioning from being an active member to being the judge and administrator. That didn’t mean he would never strap on his kit and go out with them, but his main job would be at the Grange. Besides, the core Team was getting diluted. Chip, a semi-member of the Team, had left to run the daytime Grange guards. Ryan, who was not an original member, had joined and Kyle was working with the Team. Tim, the EMT, was hanging out with them. After everyone realized they almost didn’t have enough guys to handle a bunch of essentially unarmed tweakers, Grant knew the Team would be growing. It had to. The old Team wouldn’t be the same. It would be bigger and better, but not the same. They’d still be the Team, just different.

Drew came up. It had been a few days since he and Grant had a chance to talk. He brought Grant up to speed on all the organizing he had done on the records showing who was contributing to the community. It was amazing. Some people were donating food to the Grange kitchen for the volunteers. They usually gave surplus food they couldn’t eat right then or it would spoil, but it was a donation, nonetheless. A few people were donating gas and equipment. Then there were all the miscellaneous things people wouldn’t realize were important until they thought about it. Like Ken’s copying machine and paper for the newspaper.

Plenty of people were donating their labor, too. Most of them were rural middle class people who had always worked. They were active country people who didn’t like to sit around. Besides, no one really had a “job” anymore. Most people had an itch to get out and do something.

They wanted to help their neighbors, and they wanted their neighbors to help them. That meant work, like helping a neighbor move a relative’s belongings to a new house within Pierce Point, cutting firewood, clearing a patch of ground for a garden, or fixing small equipment, like chainsaws.

They also needed something to take their minds off all the destruction and despair. They couldn’t count on their old crutch of TV or the internet anymore.

TV was the worst. It was full of “news” that everyone knew was fake; lots of puff pieces about how great things were. Inspiring stories of how neighbors were helping neighbors, with the help of the Freedom Corps, of course. The stories on TV made it seem like neighbors could never just help each other without the organizing wisdom of the government. Watching TV would depress a normal person, who could look outside and see how the official channels were full of lies. Most non-news channels were taken off the air. Had they been on the air, they would have been reruns of reality shows or other things showing the prosperity of the past. With gangs running gas stations, the government wasn’t keen on people watching a show from two years ago about million-dollar cars. It would be too much of a contrast between the present and the past.

The authorities started running reruns of popular sitcoms from the past few decades. Old standbys. The shows that brought people together into one common America and reminded people of better times. Grant remembered that during 9/11, viewership of old I Love Lucy episodes went through the roof.

The authorities also wanted to numb peoples’ minds. They constantly played reruns of all the trashy daytime shows where people went on and accused their boyfriends of sleeping with their sisters and that kind of thing. Celebrity shows were also all over TV. They showed celebrities doing…whatever it was that celebrities did. Some of the shows featured celebrities helping people, with the help of the government, of course. The shows would depict this movie star or that one talking to truckers about how the authorities were getting the freight moved to the cities where people needed it. But, mostly it was mindless gossip about the stars.

The dependent and unproductive—the Oblivious, as Grant called them—would just sit in their houses for hours and watch this. Then they would wonder who would be feeding them. Their way of coping was to pretend everything was like it used to be. Then again, they were so dependent on government that they wouldn’t have had the skills to cope even if they’d wanted to. The government had been taking care of them their whole lives. They didn’t know how to feed themselves or protect themselves. So they just sat around and waited for the authorities to take care of them, even though there were no longer any authorities. It made no sense, but things were so out of whack from normal that some people couldn’t process the change. They wanted “normal” back. So they pretended—contrary to everything they saw around them—that things were normal again.

This was classic “normalcy bias.” It was an epidemic in the cities. The more dependent people were, the easier it was to fall into normalcy bias because they had no way of handling the new situation. The government counted on normalcy bias. They managed normalcy bias by trying to create the illusion of normalcy and then directing people to act like they had in normal times, which was to do what the government said. Hence, the reruns and fake news on TV.

The internet was much the same. The government had acquired “emergency” powers to control it. It was hard, of course, to totally prevent Patriot websites and communications. A person might be blocked on nine out of ten attempts to find Patriot web information, but would get through on the tenth try. There weren’t really any police left, so no one cared if the authorities knew that a computer they were using was accessing a “terrorist” website. This was less true in the cities where there were more police or, more accurately, FC. They would get lists of people accessing restricted websites and go “visit” them. The FC would try to intimidate people and, on occasion, take them in. This was to cause fear among the population. The government really didn’t have the facilities to jail everyone, so they let most of them go, after taking away their FCards.

Thinking of the cities and all the government controls reminded Grant once again of how good they had it at Pierce Point. The productive people at Pierce Point were working hard to take care of themselves and their neighbors. Drew and his assistants were merely keeping track of who was helping, but they were not trying to direct it. They weren’t the government. People at Pierce Point could tell the difference. They liked the approach out there. Individuals at the Grange, like Drew, were there to help, but not control things, which was such a welcome change from what had been happening for the past few years.

People were rediscovering their own self-sufficiency. It felt good to take care of themselves and others. They had a sense of pride after spending all day canning or drying food and then having something to show for it. Many people hadn’t had that sense of pride in quite some time. They had gone to jobs in cubicles and come home and watched TV. Life was more…real now. More like it was supposed to be.

Grant pulled Drew aside so people couldn’t hear the conversation. “Are you getting a sense of who is on board out here and who the slackers are?” Grant asked.

“Yep,” Drew said. “I see the same names on the donation records. The same people seem to be coming up to me to ask if anyone needs to borrow their truck or if anyone needs help with a project. Most of the people are like that.”

“What about the lazy people?” Grant asked. He knew the answer.

“Well,” Drew said, “their names don’t show up in my records, so we could figure out who they are by a process of elimination.”

That was exactly what Grant had thought. In an instant, he decided to start “keeping files” on people. Not files, really, just a map. He had to. Soon, resources would be scarce and it would be unfair to start giving things away to people who weren’t contributing. That could split the community apart, and they needed the community solidly together in order to survive. Survive, Grant said again to himself. Keeping files on people is about surviving. Don’t let it turn into anything else.

“Yeah,” Grant said to Drew. “Could you get the master lot map and come up with small maps showing the helpful and unhelpful so I can have them?” Grant would add the Patriot, Loyalist, Undecided, and Oblivious labels himself after he had evidence in each case. Helpful people weren’t necessarily Patriots and unhelpful people weren’t necessarily Loyalists. The map would label both community contributions and political leanings. Grant would use the list of contributors, regardless of their politics, for the decisions on allocating resources. That would show he was being fair. This would bring many of the Undecideds, who were the majority of the population, over to the Patriot side. If a Loyalist was contributing, then great. He or she would be rewarded and the Undecideds would see that.

Creating this map would be a lot of work. Oh well. Grant needed to have a command of these important details. He couldn’t delegate this one. This was really important. He had to know, with specificity, who the good and bad guys were. This was his job now. He still would judge cases and might kick down doors on raids now and again, but his main job was political and administrative, as Pierce Point solidified from a group of people to a mini-republic. It wouldn’t just happen with luck. It would take hard work to get things formed right so Pierce Point could be a model.

Exactly. This is your job.

Grant arranged for Drew to get a set of the lot maps copied by Ken. He wouldn’t tell anyone about his political map. He didn’t want to alarm anyone about what he was doing. Grant wouldn’t even tell Rich.

He realized that he needed to get to know the people out there better. He needed to be able to personally call on the Patriots for things, and have a good sense if others were Loyalists or just Undecideds or Oblivious. He wouldn’t label someone as a Loyalist unless he had a good reason for it. He didn’t want to accuse someone of that without proof.

Grant realized he hadn’t had any time in the past to just get to know people out there. He had been so busy doing “gun things.” Now it was time to do “people things,” like talking to people, refining the lot map, judging cases, and coordinating all the self-help out there. He was the perfect person to be doing this.

Now you’re catching on.

Despite knowing this, Grant still felt like he should be grabbing his AR and kit and patrolling or something. He fought that urge, and instead talked to people at the Grange and did miscellaneous coordinating.

Pow came into the Grange and said, “Hey, man, we’re going out to Dan’s place to get briefed on the new dogs with Kyle. You comin’?”

“Nah, ‘fraid not,” Grant said. “I need to do a bunch of stuff here. I’d love to, man. You know that.” He wanted to ride in the back of a truck with his guys. He felt so comfortable with an AR and standing with these guys.

“Totally understand,” Pow said. “Kinda figured.” Pow smiled. He wasn’t offended at all. “Besides, it’s probably best not to have the judge going out on all the raids to catch bad guys.”

Grant nodded. “Hey,” Grant said, “the Team is in great hands with you in the lead. Seriously. I’m proud of you guys. You don’t know how many people talk to me and say they appreciate what you guys are doing.” It felt weird to talk about the Team by saying “you guys” instead of “us.”

“Of course,” Pow said with his big smile. “We’re good.” He straightened up his back, did a press check of his AR, and said, “Gotta run, man. Take care here.”

“Adios,” Grant said. “Stay safe, brother.”

As Pow was leaving, Grant yelled, “Oh, and this never gets old.” Pow laughed. He knew Grant wanted to come out with them, but things were changing out there at Pierce Point. The first few weeks were done. Now it was time to settle in for the long haul.