by Glen Tate
Chapter 219
Car Wash Josh
(August 3)
“AAG 3009,” nineteen year-old Josh Kohlman quickly wrote in his little notebook. He wrote down the time and date, too. He also wrote “every Wed. - lunch.” And then the big prize: “gold triangle.” He was thrilled to write that down. This would be valuable, he thought. Very valuable.
Josh closed up his notebook, put it back in the little Ziploc bag he kept it in, and stuffed it in the cargo pocket of his shorts. He worked at the carwash and was standing in the one place that the surveillance cameras didn’t cover. The Ziploc bag kept the notebook dry when all the mist and water was swirling around.
Now came the hardest part: doing his crappy carwash job for a few more hours until he could get all this valuable information to where it needed to go. Time inched along until, finally, the end of the day came and he was off.
Josh worked at the Olympia Eco-Wash, the only remaining carwash in town. The other ones had gone out of business, but the Eco-Wash was owned by a connected person who just happened to get all the permits necessary to operate. His competitors didn’t.
Because the Eco-Wash was the only remaining carwash in Olympia, many of the VIPs went there to get their new, shiny government cars washed. Of course, the very highest-ranking VIPs had security details wash their cars, but many of the second-tier VIPs had to wash their own cars, so they routinely came to the Eco-Wash.
That’s where Josh came in. He was a Patriot. He had his future stolen like everyone else in his generation. He grew up in the 2000s, when everything seemed fine. The economy was booming and his family and friends always had plenty, but when Josh was in high school, everything started to fall apart. His mom lost her job at the Washington Association of Business, which was where he had met all kinds of interesting people and learned about the Patriots.
Josh wasn’t bitter; he was determined. He didn’t whine about his future being stolen and didn’t want to “get even” with the people who did it. Instead, he wanted to end what was going on. He didn’t care how it ended, he was just determined to end it – even if that meant he had to work hard and risk his safety in the process.
Josh thought long and hard about what he should do to end what was going on. He was a peaceful young man and didn’t want to hurt anyone, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he couldn’t do anything purely peaceful. He couldn’t just vote for someone to change things. People voting for “free” stuff was what caused the mess. He couldn’t print up pamphlets because no one in Olympia seemed interested. He wasn’t prepared to join a guerilla unit because, well, he just wasn’t. He had the weird feeling he was placed in his present situation for a reason. But what good was a young carwash attendant to the Patriots?
Then it hit him. One day, he realized how many fancy government cars came to his carwash. He couldn’t believe how exposed they were: their license plates just sitting there, along with the dates and times they came. All Josh needed was information on the license plates to know who the drivers were. That information was a closely held secret, so once again he assumed he was useless at his stupid carwash job.
Then one day, he was talking to Eric Benson, who used to work at WAB with Josh’s mom. Eric was like an older brother to Josh.
“I have all this great license plate info,” Josh said, “But I can’t do anything with it.”
“I can,” Eric said with a smile. He knew someone in the Department of Licensing who was working for the Patriots. Eric didn’t tell Josh that; no need to provide information that could be tortured out of him.
“Dude,” Eric said, “you get me the license plates and the times they are usually at the carwash and I’ll take it from there.”
There it was, Josh thought. His role. The way he could help end this.
Josh started off slow at first. He had to figure out how to take down the license plates and times people came without getting caught. After a while, he noticed the one place the video cameras didn’t cover. Then he discovered something big.
The government people had parking passes for various parking lots. Most parking lots were for the rank-and-file drones, but some parking lots meant the driver had an important job. A gold triangle, for example, meant the driver got to park at the Legislature. The driver was either one of the remaining legislators (the handful of Patriot legislators had resigned after the Collapse and formed a government in exile) or a key staffer in the House or Senate.
Josh, who was a very smart kid, learned the parking pass codes from talking with people. He found out where they worked and then put the parking pass symbols together with their jobs. The Patriots had people working at the capitol who confirmed the parking pass codes.
Josh eventually got his hands dirty with some direct action. He worked with Eric to identify a state bureaucrat, Bart Sellerman, and Eric shot him in the carwash. The police, what was left of them, came out to the carwash two days later and took some pictures. Sellerman wasn’t important enough in the state hierarchy for anyone to think it was a political assassination. It was just another random killing, like the few others that took place on any given day. So taking pictures two days later was the entire investigation; that was it. Josh had been nervous that a killing at the carwash would bring attention to him, but it didn’t. This emboldened him.
After a while, Josh’s license plates, trip information, and especially parking pass codes, were having a huge impact. For reasons no one in the government could understand, VIPs were getting ambushed while they were driving around. The Patriots were smart enough not to hit the VIPs only while they were driving to and from the carwash. The Patriots had surveillance teams who, knowing the car and license plate, could shadow a car for a few days and learn the driver’s routine for the week. Then, a Patriot ambush team would hit the car on a weekend at the grocery store, or other seemingly random location.
The Limas assumed that someone close to the targeted VIP was working for the Patriots. This threw off the scent and caused the Limas to waste scarce investigative resources trying to figure out which person close to the VIP had compromised them. This, in turn, caused the Limas even more problems because innocent people connected to the VIPs were being thrown in jail, creating morale problems for the government. The Patriots even got some recruits from the innocent people thrown in jail under these wild goose chases.
It only took a couple of these ambushes for the mid-level VIPs to become terrified – and demand that they, too, get security details. The government couldn’t possibly extend security protection to more people. So many of the VIPs lost their vigor for working for the government. They started to question whether the government could protect them, which led them to question working for the government even more.
Many VIPs switched to private cars, although quite a few had been driving government-issued cars for so long they no longer had their private cars. But Josh could help with this, too. He was a friendly and chatty guy; he got to know his customers, so he knew when a person who worked for the Department of Emergency Management was now driving a different car. He took down the new license plate and got it to Eric. Now VIPs in private cars were being hit. This caused even more terror. Pretty soon, VIPs were resigning from their government jobs. This was the best outcome: the government was weakened and no one got hurt.
Josh became so valuable that the Patriots devoted scarce in-city armed teams to protect him. He didn’t even know he was under protective surveillance. He never noticed the “homeless” men in the parking lot of the adjacent vacant building near the carwash. Then again, homeless camps were everywhere, so Josh wouldn’t have noticed.
The Patriots even recruited a beautiful young lady to be Josh’s girlfriend. She drove up to the Eco-Wash in a hard top Jeep, telephone numbers were exchanged, and they ended up moving in together. Now the Patriots had a close eye on Josh for several hours a day. Josh quickly figured out what was going on, both with the homeless protectors across the street and the pretty Jee
p girl, but didn’t have any complaints. He was being protected, had a gorgeous girlfriend, and even got to drive her Jeep on the weekends. Not bad for a guy with a stupid car wash job.
Chapter 220
“Sorry. Nice E.”
(August 3)
Damn, I love my job, Eric Benson thought to himself as he was taking off her clothes. Then he caught himself enjoying it. A normal man might consider ditching the job at hand and just revel in what was about to happen, but I’m not normal, he thought. He was singularly focused on his job. He was fueled by hate, not pleasure.
Eric had always been different than others; a lot different. He had an overriding personality trait that might seem like a good thing at first, but it wasn’t. Eric could not stand people being treated unfairly. If he could control himself and just stick up for the little guy, he would have been an admirable person. But he couldn’t control it. The instant he saw an injustice, he would go from a nice, normal person to a raging avenger. The even scarier part was that he really loved the feeling of beating on a bad person. The feeling was intoxicating when he was hurting someone who was hurting an innocent person.
When he was a kid growing up in Chicago, he would always get in fights with bullies who were tormenting kids. This was an admirable quality. But there was a second, less admirable side to him: He would fight with teachers and other authority figures over minor inequities. If a teacher, perhaps innocently, handed out a punishment to a child Eric thought was innocent, he would jump up out of his seat and scream at the teacher. Then, when he was punished, he would argue loudly, and sometimes physically, that he was the good person here and the teacher was the bad one. Then he would get in more trouble. And the cycle would continue.
It got so bad that once, in middle school, he hit a teacher. This landed him in juvenile detention, which was the absolute worst place he could end up. Injustice and unfair treatment was a daily occurrence there. He punched counselors and a guard and got even more time piled onto his sentence. He spent most of eighth grade in “juvie” as they called it. Finally, he realized that if he didn’t control himself, he’d be in jail forever and would be miserable for his whole life even though he didn’t do anything wrong. Ironically, that wouldn’t be fair, he realized. He chuckled in his juvie cell when he realized this. That chuckle saved his life.
From that chuckle onward, he worked very hard to control his anger. At first, he failed more than he succeeded. Then, he started to learn how to talk himself into not getting angry. He would tell himself, “Don’t let them win.” He wasn’t controlling his anger to be a good person; he was doing it to be effective. “I can’t fight bullies if I’m in jail,” he would tell himself. He would talk to himself when he was getting angry, and usually talk himself down. It took practice, but he was getting the hang of it.
Eric quickly realized that once he got the anger under control, he would be unstoppable. He could right all the wrongs he wanted if he could get into a successful position in life. The more power he had, the more good he could do.
Eric thought about how he could do that. He was extremely intelligent, hardworking, good looking, athletic, and charming (when he wasn’t mad). Those were the qualities he needed to be successful, then powerful, then a righter of wrongs. That was his plan.
After that horrible year in the eighth grade, he transferred to another school and got a fresh start. He started excelling at everything. He went from failing grades to straight As, got on sports teams, and even became popular. His parents were amazed and relieved.
Eric kept working and working at being successful. He would have conversations with “Angry Eric,” as he called the dark side of his personality. He would tell Angry Eric to keep a lid on it just a little while longer until “Nice Eric” could get them into a position of power where Angry Eric could be unleashed to right wrongs.
High school was a great time for Eric. He was valedictorian, homecoming king, and a varsity football and basketball player. He got into a great college and was at the top of his class.
As college life came to an end, he had to decide what he wanted to do for a living. That is, how he could become powerful and then right wrongs. At first, he thought about going into business and getting rich. Then he’d be powerful. But just making money didn’t appeal to him.
True warriors want to be in battle. They want to be where the action is. Eric looked around American society trying to find where the injustice was. It was with the legal system, of course, which was a big pile of steaming and squirming injustice. It was a target-rich environment.
And, as corrupt as the legal system was, Eric realized that he could actually do some good things for people. In fact, the more corrupt the system was, the more he could help people who were getting screwed.
He got into law school very easily. There were plenty of opportunities to work on “justice projects,” but they were all for left-wing causes. Eric, who grew up in Chicago, always saw big government mistreating people. He also saw how the elites, who were often white, used minorities and the poor to keep their hold on power.
He looked at the liberal law students touting leftist causes and quickly realized they were junior examples of the elites who ran things. The rich and privileged kids just wanted to become the next generation of the rich and privileged. He wanted to be successful so he could help people, not turn into one of the elitists. He knew Angry Eric would explode and get out of control if Nice Eric tried to do that, so he took a different track than virtually any of his fellow law students. He started volunteering to help the small businesses that were being attacked by the government. He fought for a tow truck company owner who had the audacity to actually put in a winning bid for some city work – work that was supposed to go to a favored company. He usually lost these cases because the judges were corrupt as hell. But Angry Eric was being calmed by working on them.
Then something amazing happened. Eric actually won a case. Government had become so used to winning that they were getting sloppy. In one case, on behalf of a black beauty shop owner being harassed by state regulators at the behest of competitors, the state regulators actually spelled out what they were doing in an email. Then they turned it over in pre-trial discovery because they assumed they’d still win. However, the judge, who was black and whose mother had been screwed just like the business owner in Eric’s case, actually ruled for Eric’s client. Eric won. He beat the bad people. He had helped the little person.
The feeling was intoxicating. He felt years of pent-up Angry Eric finally breaking loose. He wanted to punish the regulators. He wanted to get them fired and seize their house to pay the judgment. He wanted to hurt them. Not physically. Well, yes, physically, Angry Eric admitted to Nice Eric.
He didn’t hurt anyone, but he realized that actually winning these battles was what he wanted to do. He loved it. He wanted more of it.
He heard about some business association in Washington State that fought these kinds of battles and actually won on occasion. He got on a plane and nailed the interview. It wasn’t long before he was a hard-charging attorney for the Washington Association of Business.
Washington State was another target-rich environment for fighting injustice. It was like Chicago, except the naive people of Washington State didn’t think their government was anything like “corrupt” Chicago. Washington State government might have been more subtle and less severe, but Eric could see that it was the same thing, just a different degree.
Eric had a few really good years at WAB. He teamed up with Grant Matson to win some cases and help people.
But something frustrated Eric: WAB, as aggressive as it was, wasn’t aggressive enough. More and more, Angry Eric was telling Nice Eric to take these fights from the courtroom to the streets. To start bustin’ some skulls. Go after union thugs, bureaucrats, and government lawyers. Nice Eric always persuaded Angry Eric that the time wasn’t right.
But it was getting closer to being the right time. Eric watched as all the pieces were falling int
o place as the Collapse approached. He watched as government got bigger and bigger. It clamped down on civil liberties more and more. He could see that government would be out of money soon. Very soon.
That’s when Angry Eric started to win some of the arguments with Nice Eric. “This will be our time!” Angry Eric would tell Nice Eric. “When there are no cops around, we can punch some fuckers in the mouth! They deserve it. They’ve hurt people.” Angry Eric would wait for Nice Eric to have a response; Nice Eric was having a harder and harder time doing so. Nice Eric was starting to agree with Angry Eric. As conditions in the days leading up to the Collapse worsened, Nice Eric increasingly lost the arguments.
The days surrounding the Collapse were the last straw for Eric. He couldn’t believe that, with all the leftists out rioting and trying to destroy the WAB building, the rest of the WAB guys would just sit there. Were they out to fight for the little guy, or just watch their beautiful office building burn to the ground by the very people out hurting people? Was all their political and legal bluster just bullshit? Or were they going to fight against the bullies?
Nice Eric finally lost it when he left the WAB offices on his last day. He pleaded with the WAB guys to go fight, but they wouldn’t. Eric stormed out of the office and finally let Angry Eric take over. He put his key in the car and said out loud, “OK, you win.” Angry Eric didn’t gloat. He just said, “We’ve got this. Let’s go.” Eric promptly went out and killed a state bureaucrat, Bart Sellerman, who had bullied one of Eric’s clients. It felt amazing. Angry Eric was delighting in it.
“We need more of that,” Angry Eric said to Nice Eric after watching Sellerman’s head explode in the car wash.
“Yes,” Nice Eric said. He was fully on board with the new post-Collapse plan for righting wrongs. It was about killing people. And loving it.