299 Days: The Visitors

Chapter 157 Pop-Tarts and Spray Paint (June 28)

“Who wants Pop-Tarts?” Ron asked his kids.

“Me! Me!” they said. Ron hadn’t seen them this happy in quite some time. He held the box of Pop-Tarts like it was gold. The box looked so fresh, so new. Like something he hadn’t seen in weeks, because he hadn’t.

Ron had a huge grin on his face as he opened the box and handed a foil Pop-Tart package to each of his kids.

“Where did you get these, Daddy?” Ron’s oldest daughter asked.

“The store,” Ron said. “I heard they would have them today so I walked over there and got a box. That was the limit. One box. But, hey, I’m glad they had them,” he said with a big smile.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said sweetly. Her bleak world was temporarily suspended. Things weren’t so bad. The store had Pop-Tarts.

Ron’s wife, Sherri, came in and saw the Pop-Tarts. Her eyes lit up. “This means that things must be getting better,” she said. She was a realist and had been doing really well throughout this whole ordeal. She could look at the situation objectively and decide how to proceed. She was not trapped in the good ole’ days of “normal.”

That being said, Sherri still craved for “normal” to come back. She continued looking for any little sign that things were getting better—like Pop-Tarts. This must mean the food factories were getting supplies and were producing, and were also able to get the products out to the stores. This was a good sign.

Sherri really didn’t care if Ron committed a felony to get the Pop-Tarts. Who cares if he got them at the store or from some gang? Pop-Tarts from a gang? Did she really just think that? Boy, life had changed in America.

“Yeah, it was cool,” Ron said, always trying to highlight the good news for his wife. “They had them at the grocery store. Ken Kallerman told me about it.” Ken lived in Ron’s neighborhood, the Cedars. Ken was a high-ranking fish biologist for the state fish and wildlife department before the Collapse. Now he was working on keeping drinking water systems functioning. This gave Ken inside information. And he was Mormon, like Ron, so they shared whatever they could.

“Did you use the FCard?” Sherri asked Ron.

“Yep. But they weren’t cheap,” Ron said a little concerned that Sherri would get mad. “Umm…$45.”

“You paid $45 for a box of Pop-Tarts!” Sherri whispered, out of the hearing of the kids. “Are you insane?”

Ron became defensive that his big score of Pop-Tarts was now a bad thing. He decided to reason with her.

“Honey,” he said, “How much is a gallon of gas?”

“They have some?” she answered. “I heard no one had any.”

“Precisely,” he said. “It’s not about what something costs in terms of dollars; it’s about whether there is any of it available.”

She nodded. That made sense.

“Besides, what good is $45 on our FCard account if there’s nothing to buy with it?” That made even more sense.

“They’re just FCard credits, not real dollars,” he continued. “I know, I know. It’s hard to quit thinking of the cost of items in terms of pre-Collapse dollars. But things are totally different now.”

She knew he was right. “Yeah, I guess,” she said slowly. “But…”

“But we all do it,” he said. “I do it every day. It’s getting easier to quit pricing things in pre-Collapse dollars, but it’s still the starting point we all use.”

She appreciated that he was being reasonable. It was hard to conceive of a box of Pop-Tarts costing $45, no matter what was going on. She decided to salvage the joy of him going out and getting Pop-Tarts for his family.

“What flavor?” she asked.

“Strawberry,” he said.

“That works,” she said.

“Twelve Pop-Tarts in a box,” he said. “Three kids. I think we can snag a Pop-Tart a piece for us. Wanna have a Pop-Tart with me, beautiful?”

How could she resist that? “Of course,” she said with a wink. That meant something good was coming later.

Ron opened the last Pop-Tart package and gave her one.

Sherri was almost afraid to eat it. It was so perfect. She just looked at it for a while, and then she put it in her mouth. The Pop-Tart tasted so sweet; amazingly sweet. Then Sherri realized they hadn’t really had sugar for about two weeks. She could almost immediately feel the sugar rush hit her bloodstream.

In that moment, things seemed so normal again while they were eating their Pop-Tarts. Things can’t be that bad.

Ron wanted to drink some milk. He never really drank milk, but Pop-Tarts and milk went hand in hand. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any milk. Refrigerated things, like dairy and meat, were very hard to come by because they had to remain refrigerated during transport and, with the potential for weeks of delays to get a semi load of products across the country, hauling these products was an extremely low priority for the government. And the power was still going off intermittently. It was too hard to warehouse things that needed constant refrigeration. The government had switched to supplying only easily storable foods, like Pop-Tarts.

“Could I get you a glass of water?” Ron asked Sherri, before she could mention how good the Pop-Tart would taste with a glass of milk.

“Sure,” she said.

“Me too, Daddy,” Ron’s youngest said, as she came back into the kitchen.

They stood in the kitchen talking about the general stuff that a family talks about while they enjoyed Pop-Tarts together.

Ron would try to get another box tomorrow. If he got one, he would hide it and give it to the kids for Christmas, which, by then, could be the best present ever. He would walk to the store in the morning, as gas was too valuable to waste on Pop-Tart runs.

He drove around much more than most people because he could still get gas by selling the silver he squirrelled away before the Collapse. He traded silver coins for FCards and then used the FCards to get gas at the gang stations. As an accountant, Ron didn’t really have a job anymore so he had time to help people who needed transportation, especially people from his church.

Believe it or not, he actually made a living this way. His overhead was low—no taxes anymore. Technically, there were taxes due on things, but the last thing in the world the government had time or resources to do was collect taxes. It was funding itself by stealing everyone’s savings and bank accounts and by controlling all the food and fuel supplies—and taking a cut, of course. Ron didn’t have any real bills. The government quit sending power, water, and natural gas bills because it realized that cutting off these utilities would cause a massive revolt. All the other things the Spencer household used to spend money on—saving for college, clothes, restaurants, vacations—was no longer being purchased. It was amazing how much money they no longer spent. Amazing.

What about Ron’s mortgage? The banks weren’t even trying to foreclose. No one paid their mortgages anymore. Not a single person. The banks were closed; it was impossible to go to the bank in person or online and pay your mortgage even if you wanted to. Every home would be up for sale and no one had any money to buy them.

Surprisingly, the banks didn’t care about people not paying their mortgages. The government had taken over all the banks, purchased all the loans, and decided to not even try to collect on them. Not because the government was nice, but because the government had bigger problems. It was hard enough for them to feed people. The government wasn’t about to start evicting people. The Southern and Western states had functionally seceded and the federal government couldn’t trust most military units. They were constantly putting down riots. Would kicking everyone out of their homes really be a good idea?

The same applied to credit cards, car payments, and student loans. The government would not even try to collect on those debts—besides, the dollar was worthless now anyway, and the loans were payable in dollars, so why even try?

Paying your bills was such a pre-Collapse idea. It was the old way of thinking about money and debt. The new reality was that the government stole everyone’s bank accounts and gave people some credits on their FCards to buy food. Paying back your credit card bills was a relic of the past. Now there were no credit cards and nothing to buy with them. Therefore, there were no credit card bills.

Ron thought about the sheeple all around him. Most of them were thrilled that there were no more credit card bills. That’s all they knew about the new system—and they liked it just fine. Time for those greedy banks to get screwed for a change, they thought. Of course, those greedy bankers had just stolen about $20 trillion in retirement funds, but the most of the sheeple didn’t have any retirement funds so they didn’t care. They couldn’t wait to go out and vote for the people who got rid of their credit card bills. If there would even be elections this year, which seemed unlikely.

The new reality that no one had real jobs anymore was a huge adjustment for Ron. He had started working when he was twelve by mowing lawns. Ron had to do something to keep his mind sharp now that he didn’t have his accounting job. Driving people around wasn’t really enough. So, he volunteered as an accountant for the FC.

Ron was a solid Patriot and hated the FC, but he volunteered for several reasons. First of all, he was now a little bit more of an “insider” and could find out where gas was being sold and things like whether a store had Pop-Tarts. His FCorps ID got him things others couldn’t get.

Second, he had been pretty vocal about being a Patriot before the Collapse. Now, though, he didn’t want people to think he was a Patriot. He could lose his FCard, or maybe even get sent to one of those God-awful TDFs. He had even been involved in the killing of the looters. Ron had fired at them before Grant Matson had saved his life. That had put Ron at odds with the Loyalists, like Nancy Ringman, who wanted to rely solely on official law enforcement. This made Ron an enemy of the Loyalists in his neighborhood. Ron needed to cover his tracks.

To do this effectively, he decided to be a gray man, by resisting the government in an under-the-radar, low-key way. Undetected. Gray men (and women) did not outwardly pick sides; they operated in the middle and blended in. Outwardly, they even seemed to support the Loyalists, although they were actually doing everything possible to secretly undermine and sabotage them. Ron could be a more effective gray man if he were doing an “inside job” as an FCorps member.

Specifically, Ron could learn things as an FCorps accountant and pass that information on to the Patriots. He was testing the waters with some of his friends who he suspected were also “gray” and might be working for the Patriots. He was slowly gathering information and would get it to the right people at the right time. He wasn’t in a hurry; he suspected this would last a long time.

He quickly realized that doing accounting work for the FCorps was not keeping his mind sharp. There was no real accounting to do, as the FCorps didn’t keep any meaningful records. Doing so would just show all the corruption. Just like everything else with the post-Collapse government, accounting was a charade. The government would assure everyone that there were stringent accounting and oversight mechanisms to make sure the relief got to the people, but there weren’t.

Ever since the day in mid-May when he first saw the graffiti saying, “I miss America” and “Resist,” Ron decided to make graffiti his gray man sabotage activity. Spray painting a slogan? That’s it? That’s what people might have thought before the Collapse. But even spray painting was dangerous now. That could get your FCard taken away, get you on the POI list, and maybe even thrown into a TDF.

Many people who read the “I miss America” messages realized that they did, indeed, miss America. It would make them think about how good things used to be and how much the government had screwed things up. They would begin to think that getting things back to the good old days meant getting the current government out of the way.

That’s exactly the reaction the Patriots expected from the graffiti. Now one more person was blaming the government, not the Patriots, for their miserable life and realizing the only way to improve things was for the current government to be replaced.

The graffiti made an impression on nearly everyone. Most people were Undecideds who were just trying to make it through the Collapse. Their main concerns were getting enough to eat and not getting robbed that day. Seeing the graffiti slowly made them realize that there was more than just worrying about eating or not getting robbed. There was a reason all these bad things were happening: the government. The graffiti showed them who was trying to improve things and who might have a better plan: the Patriots. It also showed the Undecideds that the Patriots were everywhere and the government wasn’t able to stop them.

So Ron got to work on his little project. The first thing he needed to do was get some spray paint. The authorities had already thought of this and were quick to make spray paint illegal. However, just like everything else illegal, there was now a thriving black market.

Ron got a can of spray paint from a friend, Matt Collins, who Ron drove to the black-market clinic when Matt threw his back out. Matt was an accountant—well, former accountant. Everyone was now a “former” whatever they did before the Collapse.

Matt had always been a pretty vocal conservative before the Collapse; not a social conservative, but more of a libertarian. He had even gone to tax protest rallies when that was still legal. If anyone was likely tied into the Patriots, Ron thought, it would be Matt. Like Ron, Matt became a gray man when the Collapse started, and had done all the things Ron had, to appear to be a Loyalist.

Both Matt and Ron even had a “Recovery” sign up in their yard. These were the yard signs that said “We Support the Recovery,” meaning the government’s recovery efforts of nationalizing the economy, jailing people for no reason, and stealing everything. These “Recovery” signs were just like the ones in the First Great Depression that said a person supported the 1930s “New Deal” programs. Many people in Ron’s Olympia neighborhood had “Recovery” signs up. In fact, everyone got one when they signed up for an FCard.

One day Ron took Matt to the clinic where he was seen by a doctor and got black market pain killers for some FCards. Matt said to Ron, “Thanks, man. If there is ever anything I can do for you.”

Ron really wanted a can of yellow spray paint – the Patriots’ color, matching the Don’t Tread on Me flag – and was willing to take a risk to get some, even though he was pretty sure he could trust Matt.

“There is one thing you could do for me,” Ron said.

“Name it.”

“A can of yellow spray paint,” Ron said, as he looked straight out the window while driving. “Sherri does arts and crafts, you know.”

“‘Arts and crafts’,” Matt said with a laugh. “That’s the best you can do?”

Ron was silent. This was serious business, and there was no time for kidding around. Ron, the Mormon accountant, wasn’t used to committing crimes like this. Matt sensed how hard it was for Ron to have asked for the yellow spray paint.

“Done,” Matt said. “My wife is into ‘arts and crafts,’ too.”

That evening, right before the 8:00 p.m. curfew, the doorbell rang. Ron got his revolver and went to the door. No one was there. He carefully opened the door, and sitting on the porch was a paper bag with “Arts and crafts supplies” written on it. Ron felt an enormous relief. Matt had been a Patriot. Then Ron had a moment of doubt. Matt was probably a Patriot. Or a cop. Ron shrugged. This is one of the risks a gray man takes. It couldn’t be avoided.

That night, Ron couldn’t sleep. At about 2:30 a.m., he quietly got out of bed and went into his home office where he had stashed some dark clothes. He changed into them there, grabbed a little backpack and put the spray paint can in there. He got his jacket and took his Ruger SP-101 .357 magnum revolver from the backpack, and shoved it into the pocket of his light jacket.

Ron quietly left his house. He felt so weird sneaking out of this own house, like a teenager going out to toilet paper someone’s house, only this little prank tonight could get him thrown into jail or maybe killed.

It was quiet in his neighborhood. There were a few gun shots every hour or so, far in the distance, but nothing like there was around May Day when the sound of gunshots in the distance was constant. No cars were out, as no one had gas.

There was a real danger out that night: criminals. They didn’t seem deterred by the curfew laws.

Ron reverted back to his hunting skills of walking silently and keeping near cover, like trees and bushes. He wasn’t walking in an exaggerated ninja way; that would draw suspicion. He was just walking very carefully, trying to be quiet so dogs wouldn’t hear him. Dogs were a person’s worst enemy when trying to sneak around.

He gripped his .357 in his jacket. He really, really, really hoped he didn’t need to use it, but this graffiti thing was dangerous. This wasn’t like the old days when a vandal would be given five hours of community service and fined $100. Now it was considered “terrorism.”

As Ron was sneaking around and fearing for his life, he thought about how people in the future would think spray painting graffiti was not exactly heroic. They’d have no clue what a risk it really had been.

Ron had picked out a great graffiti location the previous day when he was driving around. It was at an intersection about a mile from his house. Two busy roads with a decent amount of traffic—well, a decent amount now given the drastically reduced number of cars on the road. Ron walked up to the intersection.

There they were.

The big square utility boxes on two of the corners of the intersection. He looked at them and realized this was his last chance to chicken out. He could turn around and walk home.

Nope. Ron looked at those utility boxes and decided right then and there that he was a Patriot and would fight to the death. This was his way of fighting for freedom. “Fighting for freedom” had always sounded so corny to him. However, in this moment, he understood exactly what it meant. He was in a fight. And it was for freedom. There was no formal war going on now, at least in Olympia, but he was fighting for freedom in his own way.

Ron kept looking around and listening. He realized he was stalling himself. He was scared; really scared. He was trying to give himself another chance to chicken out and go back to his nice warm bed.

No way. He couldn’t stand by and let this continue to happen. The stealing. People going to jail for no reason. The killing. No more. As he removed the spray paint from his backpack, Ron surprised himself at how calm he was, despite the fear he felt running through his body. He walked up to the first utility box on the corner and laughed to himself that his hand couldn’t be shaky because, if his graffiti looked like scared handwriting, it wouldn’t show the confidence and defiance it was supposed to convey. He very calmly looked at the can of spray paint. He could see from the street light enough to determine which way the little arrow on the nozzle was pointed. He decided to do a test blast on the grass nearby. He hit the button and the sound of spray paint came out right where it was supposed to. Now he was ready.

Ron assessed the size of the utility box and decided how big to make the lettering. It wouldn’t be perfect, but that was OK. His first message was the one that had made such a strong impression on him, “I miss America.” He sprayed the “I” and then “miss” and below it “America.”

Ron felt a rush. It felt so incredibly good to actually be doing something to help bring these bastards down. To fight them for all the horrible things they’d done to him and his family and his country. To get even and hurt them, even a little bit by just spray painting a slogan. It felt so great.

Ron stepped back and quickly looked at this work. He went over to the second utility box and sprayed a simple “Resist” on that one. That was a good twin message for that intersection: remind people seeing it that they missed America and that, to do something to get it back, they needed to resist. It was perfect.

Ron put the lid back on the spray paint can, threw it in his backpack, put it on, and started running faster than he’d run in years. Adrenaline was an amazing thing. A person can truly run faster than they ever have when they have that pumping through their veins. He was flying down the street.

He wasn’t done yet, though. There were signs for the various other subdivisions along his path back to his own. He painted “Resist” and “We’re Everywhere” on each of them as he made his way back home. He spray painted a fence near another subdivision with “Tyrants fear us. The people cheer us.” He made that up on the spot and thought it sounded pretty good. It was painted in Patriot yellow so people would know who the tyrants feared and who the people cheered.

Ron purposefully didn’t paint the sign to his subdivision. On his way back from the intersection, he took a fake path back, as if he had come from another subdivision. This way, the spray painting of the signs of the other subdivisions would make it look like he came from another subdivision. He hoped some poor bastard in that other subdivision didn’t get falsely accused of this, but he had to do what he had to do.

The last subdivision sign he painted was one full of former state employees. That should throw the Freedom Corps off. Maybe they would start accusing each other of being a Patriot and start turning each other in. Ha!

Ron laughed at how great it felt to “neener neener” these bastards. He felt a little childish, but he was protecting himself and his family and fighting for freedom in a very real way. He felt elated. He was finally doing something instead of just sitting around complaining about how bad things were.

As he was half running, half walking back home, he realized he was getting careless. He slowed down to walk as quietly as possible. He would try to stay out of the street lights and stay in the shadows. He came into the Cedars and laughed when he saw that his own subdivision didn’t have any graffiti. He went a few blocks, saw his cul-de-sac, and then he saw his house. He was almost safe.

Bam! Bam! Bam! He instinctively ducked when he heard the gunshots. A dog started barking.

Ron grabbed his pistol and pulled it out from his jacket. He looked around. It was deadly silent, except for the dog. He realized he was out in the open, so he ran for cover behind some bushes. His heart was pounding so hard he thought anyone could hear it. He kept scanning around. So close to home! He had pulled all this off and was getting caught this close to home. He felt like a failure. He’d go to jail, his family would lose their FCards, or he might get killed. Now he might have to kill someone, or a bunch of people. OK. Too bad, but let’s get it over with, he thought as the jumped out into the open to see what was going on.

Nothing. There was nothing going on. He heard the shots again. They were several blocks away. He had been spooked by them and overreacted. Whew. He felt a little silly. Well, a lot silly, although he’d take being silly over being killed or captured any day.