299 Days: The 17th Irregulars

by Glen Tate

  Jeff was glad he had that five hundred gallon underground tank of diesel at the farm. It fueled his tractor and a few of the trucks that transported the guards from the other farms out to the guard station at Delphi Road, which was the only way in and out of the area. The diesel used to transport guards, and the one man per week for guard duty, was the “tax” the Prossers and their guests paid for their security. A very good deal, Jeff thought. Considering how badly other farm communities had it.

  Jeff looked out at his fields and mentally counted all the food they’d be able to harvest. There should be more than enough for themselves and some extra to barter with. But winter was coming. Would they have enough? Would his kids go hungry? What would it be like to see his children die from starvation? Would his guests have enough to eat? Would they get weak from malnutrition and come down with the flu or some other illness that wouldn’t’ be a big deal in peacetime but could be deadly when bodies had been weakened? He tried not to think about it, but he couldn’t get the thought out of his mind.

  The most interesting thing to happen out at the Prosser Farm happened at the Delphi Road guard station one bright and beautiful sunny morning.

  Ben was doing his week of guard duty when a young woman came walking up to the gate. She was short and had curly brown hair. She had her hands up and looked very nervous.

  The alert went up and the guards were ready to shoot her or repel an attack from another direction if she were a decoy. Things were tense. Ben aimed his shotgun with rifled slugs at her. He had never pointed a gun at a person before and it was a very odd feeling for him.

  She stopped when she got about fifty yards from the gate and just stood there trying to get up the courage for what she was about to do. She was shaking.

  “Is there a ‘Ben’ here?” she yelled.

  Everyone looked at Ben.

  “Ben who?” the guard commander yelled at her.

  “I can’t really say,” she yelled back.

  “We can’t help you unless you can tell us who ‘Ben’ is,” the guard commander yelled.

  She started crying. Ben thought he recognized that cry. He motioned for one of the guards to give him some binoculars. Ben looked at the girl.

  “Oh my God!” Ben yelled. “Carly! Come here, Carly!” Ben motioned for the guards to let her in.

  “You know her?” the guard commander asked Ben.

  “Yes, and she’s fine,” Ben said. “Let her in.”

  Carly was a former WAB intern. She worked there when she was in college before she had to drop out because of the economy. She was a great kid. A conservative. A fighter. She was a true believer that the government was corrupt and destructive, especially to small businesses. Her dad owned a little logging company and had been run out of business by the taxes and regulations.

  Carly, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, had been a key political strategist for WAB. She had this way of breaking complicated political and public policy issues down into simple terms that regular people could understand. Before the Collapse she would have had a magnificent career as a political strategist. Now she was officially unemployed.

  The guard commander yelled to the girl that she could come to the gate but to keep her hands up. She’d never had guns pointed at her. It was scary. She stopped crying when she realized that they were letting her in.

  As she got closer, Ben came running up to her. She had lost a lot of weight so Ben didn’t recognize her at first. She looked terrified.

  “Carly!” Ben said, thrilled that she hadn’t been captured. “What you doin’ here, girl?” They hugged. Ben could feel a gun in her belt.

  “I’ve come with a message for you,” Carly squealed with delight. She was extremely excited. She didn’t think this crazy mission would work.

  “How did you know where I was?” Ben asked. Now that their location was compromised, he was scared the WAB people at the Prosser Farm would have to move. Fast.

  “I was there when you guys were at the office talking about buggin’ out to Jeff’s farm,” she whispered. “I was outside the door. I could hear through it.”

  “But how did you know where the farm was?” Ben whispered to her. He didn’t want the other guards to know who he was or that Carly was from WAB.

  “Oh, I came out once for an office barbeque,” she whispered back. “Remember? That one two summers ago? Your boy ate that hot dog off the ground. Remember?”

  “Does anyone else know we’re out here?” Ben said, right as he realized he just gave away to her that Tom and Brian were also out there.

  “No, of course not,” Carly said, a little offended. “Why would I do that? I know what they want to do to you.”

  And my family, Ben thought. “OK, so no one knows?”

  Carly shook her head with pride. “Yep, I told our guys that I could get a letter to you and left it at that. I asked to be dropped off at the Black Lake exit,” which was one exit away on Highway 101 and about three miles from Delphi Road.

  Ben nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure he could believe that no one else knew where they were hiding, but he had to trust Carly.

  “A message?” Ben asked. “And who are your ‘guys?’” By now he had walked with her over to a place where no one could hear them so he was talking at a normal level.

  She nodded with glee. Ben started to realize how dangerous it was for her to come out there with a message. Walking around the countryside full of murderers, rapists, and robbers just to deliver a message. It must be pretty important.

  “From who?” Ben asked.

  Carly put her finger up to her lips as if to say “Shhh.” Ben’s curiosity was increasing rapidly. What was all this about? Was she going to pull that pistol and try to kill him? Why would Carly do that?

  Carly looked around to make sure no one was around. Then she looked Ben in the eyes, smiled, and whispered, “The Patriots want you to be the next governor.”

  Governor? Ben’s blood went cold. What? That was crazy. Did she just say that? He squinted and looked at her. He couldn’t understand what she just said.

  “What are you talking about?” Ben finally got out. If this was some joke, it wasn’t funny sending a nice girl out into a combat zone just to do some gag.

  Carly was brimming. “Yes, Ben, isn’t this great!” she said in a loud whisper. “You. The Governor. Super cool, huh?” Her youthful enthusiasm was such a contrast to something so grown up and serious, like being the governor.

  “OK, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ben finally said. Maybe she was high. But that didn’t make sense.

  “We want to have an interim government in place for when we win,” she said with a huge grin.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Ben asked.

  “The Patriots, silly,” Carly said with a “no duh” look on her face.

  “Who are the Patriots?” Ben asked. He knew that Patriots were the good guys, but he didn’t know who was speaking for them.

  “You know, us,” she said with that same “no duh” look.

  “Just a bunch of people in a room saying ‘We’re the Patriots’ or some organized group?” Ben asked. “Who, specifically?”

  “The Free Washington Interim Government,” Carly said. “That’s who we are. We’re the political arm of the Patriots. The Free Washington State Guard does the military stuff. The Interim Government—the people who sent me—are the civilian commanders in charge of them. We’re the government—not the one in charge now. The one that will be when we win.”

  “Is this some group of people claiming to be the interim government or are they for real?” Ben asked.

  “We’re for real,” she said. “John Trappford was our leader.”

  Trappford was the conservative state legislator from Eastern Washington who was the leader of the good guys before the Collapse.

  “He put the Interim Government together before they got him a month ago,” she said. She looked sad. “They killed him.”

  This was starting to seem plausible to Ben
. If Trappford put this group together, they were the real deal. And Carly was solid. She was a true friend. There was no way she was making this up. She started naming conservative legislators and others they both knew from their days at WAB who were part of the Interim Government.

  “How are you involved with this?” Ben asked.

  Carly explained that when the Collapse started she was at her parents’ house in rural Lewis County. Without any plan, she got in her little car and went up to Olympia. She knew that’s where she needed to be. Trappford was taking in conservatives from all over who were coming to Olympia for the big showdown. They stayed at his house in Olympia where he lived during the legislative session and they became a revolutionary cadre. They stayed up all night talking about how they would run things once the Loyalists were thrown out. They built up a network of political sympathizers and, as the Collapse got worse and the union thugs were out looking for them, they helped Patriots get to safe places. Finally, after Trappford went back to his Eastern Washington home and was assassinated, they went fully underground.

  They were mostly public policy people from think tanks and lived on a farm outside of Olympia, dubbed the “Think Farm” which was a play on the term “think tank.” The group didn’t have any contact with the outside world, except for the messengers who came and went. It was at this little farm where they planned out the Interim Government. They picked the temporary legislators and governor for after the military victory. They also planned the constitutional convention to rewrite the state constitution that they would hold once they had control. They would then hold an election to ratify the new constitution and elect the legislators, governor, and the handful of the other officials.

  “Totally libertarian,” Carly said. “We’re not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. We’ll have real controls in place to prevent the government from growing like it did,” she said excitedly. She started going over the details of the new government.

  Ben stopped her. “Hey, Carly, we can talk about that later,” he said. “I need to know that this group is legit before I go any further.”

  Carly smiled and reached for her belt. Ben stepped back and instinctively drew his shotgun at her.

  She jumped back and threw her hands up. “A letter,” she said. “I have a letter.”

  The guards had been watching Ben and Carly from a distance. When they saw Ben reach for his shotgun, they shouldered their rifles. When he found out she had a letter, Ben motioned to the guards that they could lower their weapons. Ben still had his shotgun halfway ready, but not pointed at her.

  “The letter is in my jeans,” Carly said with her hands up. “Sorry, but I couldn’t get caught with it.”

  “OK, you can get it,” Ben said. He was a little uncomfortable when Carly, who was now a very attractive young woman after all the weight loss, unzipped her jeans right in front of him. He started to turn his head out of respect for her privacy, but he realized she could still shoot him so he decided to keep his eyes on her. Above her jeans.

  She pulled out an envelope and handed it to him. It had some kind of logo on it that said “Free Washington Interim Government.” If these guys were goofballs, at least they had a decent logo, Ben thought. It sure looked official. Ben just looked at the envelope again and couldn’t really believe this was happening.

  “Go ahead and open it, silly,” she said with a flirtatious smile. She always had a crush on Ben. Now she was on a dangerous mission to recruit him as the next governor. She was so excited. She knew Ben was married, but she could still have her harmless little crush.

  Ben hesitated to open it. He had a feeling that, once he opened it, things would never be the same for him if what Carly was saying was true.

  Ben was happy to be hiding out on the Prosser Farm with his family. He was done with politics. Just look at what politics had done: armed guards, food shortages, and all the rest. He wanted to spend the rest of his life growing some food and pulling his week of guard duty every month. That was fine with him. He wanted nothing to do with this Interim Government or whatever it was.

  His curiosity got the best of him, though, and he opened the envelope and removed the letter. It was on fancy Interim Government letterhead that matched the envelope and had been printed on a printer instead of handwritten.

  “Dear Ben:” the letter began. It was dated June 1. It went on to describe how the Interim Government had come together and dropped lots of names that Ben knew, like John Trappford. It mentioned Carly and many other conservatives Ben knew from back in Olympia. There were messages from them saying things that only they would know.

  The letter said, “Russ Finehoff is working with us. He said that his dog, Sprucey, finally quit barking at the neighbor cat.” It was a reference to Ben’s friend Russ who worked for one of the few good legislators. Russ had Ben over for a BBQ one time and his dog, whose name Ben had forgotten, spent the entire party barking at a cat.

  They couldn’t be making up these details, Ben thought. This letter was legit. Or the government had tortured a lot of people and gotten little tidbits like Russ’s dog out of them. But the government was so inept and had their hands full right now that it was highly unlikely they went to all that trouble just to write a fake letter to Ben.

  The letter transitioned from friendly shout outs to serious business. It described how weak the Loyalists were, how many military units were defecting, how the Patriots were forming guerilla bands all over the state, and how the population was turning against the so-called “legitimate authorities.”

  “Why you, Ben?” the letter asked. “A fair question,” it said. “We know you and trust you. You are a Patriot. And you have thousands of followers from Rebel Radio.”

  That really caught Ben off guard. Other than Dennis’ observations around town of their slogans going up as graffiti, he had no idea that people were taking Rebel Radio seriously.

  The letter went on to describe how, after the military victory, the Patriots would set up an interim government. They would appoint temporary legislators, a governor, and judges. They would hold an election—at least in the territories they controlled—to ratify the temporary officials. They would then work on a constitutional convention to draft a new state constitution—with real checks on power. The letter went on to proudly state that they would adopt a “high five” constitutional provision. This was the provision Ben and the others had always talked about that would limit the state spending to a maximum of five percent of the state’s gross domestic product, hence the label “high five.” These were all things Ben and others had talked about many times over beers before the Collapse. Things they said they would love to do if they ever could.

  “Well, now we can,” the letter said. “It’s our time to fix things, Ben. We need you. We need you for governor. We’ve talked about it and talked about it, and no one can come up with a better person to be the Interim Governor. This will be the most important thing you ever do. People will remember it for generations. We need you.”

  Ben was stunned. The letter was so personal, with all those references to people he knew so well, and seemed to be written by someone who knew him well. He got to the end of the letter and saw who signed it.

  “John Trappford.” He must have written this a few days before he was killed. Ben looked at the handwritten note below the signature.

  “PS: You’re dead anyway, Ben. They’re looking for you. They’ll find you eventually—if they stay in power. You might as well help us prevent that from happening. John.”

  How could Ben say no to John Trappford? And Carly, who had risked her life to get this letter to him. And, Ben admitted to himself, that postscript about being dead if the Loyalists stayed in power was a motivating factor, too.

  “This is the chance we’ve been waiting for,” Carly said when she saw Ben was done reading the letter. “This is what we’ve always talked about. It’s time to do it.”

  Ben knew she was right. He knew he wanted to do it. He’d have to talk to L
aura, his wife. They had always talked about him running for office if the state ever got its crap together and was actually open to someone like him. As the Collapse started, they knew that getting elected was even less likely. Both Ben and Laura thought about the possibility of the Patriots winning by force and then utilizing the services of Ben and the other WAB people. But they never really thought through the whole part about people trying to catch them and kill them. It added a whole new seriousness to what used to be just a daydream.

  “I’ve got to talk to my family about this,” Ben said.

  “Of course,” Carly said. The people at the Think Farm had told her that Ben would probably say this.

  “How do I get back to you guys?” Ben asked.

  “There’s no real good way to do that,” Carly said. The people at the Think Farm had no radios because they could only use very, very high-tech encrypted ones. The Loyalist might not be putting too much effort into rounding up garden-variety POIs, but they would spare nothing to take out the Think Farm. The Patriots didn’t yet have any ultra-encrypted radios for them. They relied on messengers, which was less than ideal.

  “I will come back in a few days,” she said. She was not excited about making the trip out again with all the dangers, but a return trip would be much safer and easier. Besides, she told herself, she would be coming back with some friends; well-armed friends.

  Chapter 207

  Life in the Loyal Areas

  (July 26)

  Life was going really well in Seattle for Professor Carol Matson. Well, going as well as could be expected given all the terrorists and teabaggers trying to prevent the government from helping people. Carol still had her job – thank God – at the University of Washington teaching Freedom Corps volunteers Spanish, which was her specialty.

  Kind of. She was a world-renowned scholar of the literature of the Simon Bolivar era. But, in these times, there wasn’t a use for that now, so she taught beginning Spanish.