299 Days: The Change of Seasons

by Glen Tate

  The sound of the blade cutting into flesh and through bone made people throw up. Even Tim, the EMT, who had seen it all. Lisa kept sawing, trying to avoid any further damage. Tony had gone unconscious as soon as the pain meds entered his system. The tourniquets were holding. The leg was off. Now they were cleaning up.

  Lisa didn’t notice it, but the medical team was coming and going from the clinic room to throw up. When everything was done, she collected her thoughts and then she went outside and threw up. She went back into the Grange, smelled the blood and others’ vomit, and ran back outside and threw up again.

  But something even worse was in store for Lisa that day.

  Chapter 237

  Todd and Chloe

  (November 30)

  Todd’s wife, Chloe, was crying again. There is one sound men are genetically hardwired to pay attention to: their wife crying. No man could ignore it. Crying meant things were horribly wrong, and it was a man’s job to fix it.

  Except Todd couldn’t fix it. Chloe was crying again because everything was horrible. Food was getting scarce in their very upscale Bellevue neighborhood outside of Seattle. Crime was terrible. Their girls, ages eight and six, were scared of everything and just sat in the house all day worrying. Everything they knew from just a few months ago had changed. Just a little while ago, they lived in a happy and comfortable upper-income neighborhood. Now they lived somewhere that looked and seemed a lot more like Detroit.

  “What is it, honey?” Todd asked. He knew this would begin an hour-long rant about all kinds of things outside of his control, but he felt obliged to help her get it out of her system.

  “Thanksgiving,” Chloe said as she put away the breakfast dishes. “That was the worst Thanksgiving ever. A can of chicken? For Thanksgiving? Toast instead of stuffing? No trip to Hawaii like we’ve been doing since the girls were old enough to fly.” She put her face in her hands and started sobbing.

  Todd looked around his magnificent two-million dollar home. He would trade all of it to make Chloe stop crying if he could.

  Todd drifted in and out of paying attention as Chloe went down the list of all the things that were wrong. Todd had heard it dozens of times. He heard it at least once a day, whenever the girls weren’t within hearing distance. He was starting to dread when the girls weren’t around because he knew the cry fest would start. He wasn’t mad at her and didn’t think she was overreacting. He just wanted his wife to be happy.

  That’s what caused all of this, Todd realized: trying to make her happy. He had slowly come to realize that, which was making the ordeal that much harder on him. This situation could have been entirely preventable if he had just been willing to do things that made her temporarily mad on occasion. But, no, he couldn’t do that. He had to make her happy.

  He thought about all the things he’d done since they first met to make her happy. He got the MBA because she wanted him to. He got his job at the auto parts company and worked hard to climb the corporate ladder. They got a really nice house they couldn’t really afford. They had new cars every few years … that they couldn’t really afford. They went on fancy vacations because she wanted to. They put the girls in an extremely expensive private school. Todd made great money, but not enough for all that. It didn’t really matter though, because all of it made Chloe happy. He was proud to be able to make her happy. He prided himself on it.

  Pride. That was it, he realized as he stood there listening to her cry. Pride was what drove him to try to make her so happy, which led to the current hell they were living in.

  Pride was what led him to believe that they didn’t need to have a plan for the bad times everyone could see were coming to America. He had inklings about it and even suggested to Chloe that they get a cabin. She didn’t want to go “camping” as she put it. She wanted new furniture for their mini palace in Bellevue. He went along with it and she was happy.

  Not having a gun also made Chloe happy. He remembered talking with Steve Briggs, the manager of his company’s store in Forks, about a week after the Collapse. Steve told Todd that he needed a gun. “Chloe won’t like it,” Todd had answered. That was the end of it. If Chloe didn’t want it, it wouldn’t happen.

  “Dianna was raped!” Chloe screamed, as Todd drifted back into paying attention to her crying. Dianna was one of Chloe’s yoga friends who lived a few streets away. “In the middle of the day,” Chloe added. “No one could stop it. What’s wrong with everyone? Why is this happening?”

  “It will get better, honey,” Todd said, trying his best to believe it. “Things always get better.”

  “The girls haven’t been to school in months,” Chloe continued. “They’re falling behind academically. They’ll never get into a good college now.” Todd wondered if there would even be colleges after this disaster. He didn’t say anything.

  “If I eat any more mashed potatoes from that horrible mix,” Chloe said, “I’m going to puke. And that awful cornbread mix? It’s so gross. The girls aren’t eating that crap and are starting to lose weight.” She was right about the girls. Todd was scared that a nutritional deficiency was happening right when they were growing and developing.

  Suddenly Chloe stopped crying. She looked up at Todd and softly asked, “Why didn’t you do anything?”

  Todd had no idea what she was talking about. “Huh?” he asked.

  She started crying again and asked, “Why didn’t you get that cabin?”

  He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You didn’t want it,” he said, realizing that he shouldn’t be so honest.

  She screamed, “You should have got it, anyway!” She was furious. “You should have just done it. We’d be safe out there, away from all of this, if you had just been a man and done it. You should have taken care of us!”

  Those words stung Todd. He felt all the blood drain out of him. He felt shameful and defeated. It hurt so much because he knew she was right.

  His first thought was to argue with her and explain how she had told him not to do everything he had suggested.

  “Why didn’t you get a gun?” she yelled. “We need one now.”

  He didn’t tell her that he had suggested it, but she had told him no. A few weeks after the Collapse, he tried to buy a gun, but all he could find was a rusty 16 gauge shotgun with one box of shells. The guy was asking $10,000 in FCards for it. Todd had over a million dollars … in his bank account, but that was before it was confiscated and converted into a few thousand dollars’ worth of an FCard balance. Now all he had was mashed potato mix that his wife and girls hated.

  “Ken and Kim got a place in the country, a bunch of food for it, and some gold and silver,” Chloe went on, referring to a couple in their neighborhood. “They’re probably fine. You know why?”

  Todd was afraid to hear what was coming.

  “Because he was a man!” she screamed and then stormed out of the room.

  Todd just sat there. He was surprised with himself for not being mad at her for screaming at him to do things she had told him not do. He closed his eyes in shame and realized that she was right. He should have been a man and taken steps to protect his family when he saw a threat to them. It would have been so easy a few months ago. Now it was too late.

  Or was it?

  What if they could get out of Bellevue and go stay with Ken and Kim? Maybe he could redeem himself with Chloe and get her and the girls into a safer place.

  He started to feverishly think about how he could take them out to wherever it was Ken and Kim were hiding out. Lake Chelan, he seemed to remember Ken mentioning. That was about three hours from Bellevue.

  Why hadn’t he thought of this earlier? He asked himself. Duh, he thought: because Chloe would have screamed at him about not abandoning their beautiful house. She was the one who would look for any little sign of things getting better and start talking about how everything would be fine soon. He assumed suggesting they leave would have made her mad.

  Well, he thought to himself, now that Chloe was o
pen to the idea of leaving, and was even demanding that he “be a man,” maybe he should revisit the issue.

  Todd started to approach the idea of leaving Bellevue like the smart MBA that he was. He started to come up with a plan. He first defined the objective, which was getting the family out of Bellevue and to Ken and Kim’s. What would it cost? It would cost their beautiful home, he realized. While there were no roving gangs in their posh and secure neighborhood, there was no way they could be gone for long before their stuff would be gone. It wouldn’t be gangs, he realized; it would be his neighbors “borrowing” things. They would probably return some things if they came back home, but things would be taken.

  Todd looked at his home again. It was so beautiful. So perfect. But there was no way to keep things like they were. It was like Chloe: so beautiful and perfect, but no way for things to be like they’d been. Everything had changed and it was time to act accordingly. About six months after the Collapse, but better late than never, he told himself.

  “Constantly reassess the situation,” he remembered from MBA school. He was reassessing things now. About time, he thought.

  He was starting to feel much better. He could solve this problem now that he had permission from Chloe. He hated thinking about his wife giving him “permission” to save them, but he was being honest with himself. For a change.

  And quite a change it was. Todd found himself acting like he was a military officer planning a mission. He needed a map, because that is what military planners start with, he thought. And because the GPS in his BMW wasn’t working anymore.

  He went online – the internet still worked for things that weren’t “political” – and pulled up a highway map. The web page displayed an error message. He tried other web sites to find a map. All of the sites were taken down. Then he got nervous; if he were trying to access restricted web sites, the authorities would be alerted. They couldn’t do anything about it because there weren’t enough of them, but he’d get on some list. He didn’t want that.

  He wondered why maps had been taken off the internet. Of course, he realized, because the government didn’t want people to leave the cities where they could be controlled. So people couldn’t do exactly what he was trying to do.

  Todd really needed a map. Planning an escape without a map was impossible. He ran into the garage. He checked the glove box in his car. Yes! He had an old paper map in there. Thank God.

  He took the map into the kitchen. At first he was afraid Chloe would catch him looking at it, but then he realized that he had her approval now.

  He unfolded the map and quickly found Lake Chelan, which was in the very middle of Washington State, right in the middle of the Cascade Mountains. They would need to get out of Bellevue and through I-405, which went through the heart of the suburbs, and then get onto I-90 and go east into the Cascade Mountains. How hard could it be?

  Todd spent the next few hours making lists. To-do lists, packing lists, and lists of things he needed others to do, like having his neighbors watch the house while they were gone. He ended up with a pile of lists by lunchtime.

  Chloe came into the kitchen to find something for lunch. She knew all they had were those awful mashed potatoes and cornbread, but she was hoping she’d find something that she’d overlooked in the past.

  Todd decided that now was the time to tell her about the plan he’d been working on all morning.

  “I listened to you, Chlo’,” he said. “I’m going to get us out of here.”

  Chloe’s eyes lit up. She’d wanted to hear that for weeks now. Todd was finally manning up.

  He was gauging her reaction, and the look of relief on her face was what he was hoping to see.

  He proceeded to tell Chloe about his plan as if he were making a presentation to the board of directors at his company. He was very thorough.

  “Impressive lists, honey,” she said at the end of the presentation. “Thank you. I’m very proud of you. I didn’t mean those things I said this morning.”

  Todd smiled and hugged her. He knew that she did, indeed, mean those things, but he was very glad she said them. Now they had a plan. Something he should have done months ago. For the first time since early May, Todd felt relieved.

  When the girls came back from the neighbors where they were taking online elementary school classes, Todd and Chloe told them the plan.

  “Will there be bears there?” his youngest asked. “I’m scared of bears.”

  “No, silly,” his oldest said. “There aren’t any real bears in the woods anymore. Right, Dad?”

  “Right,” Todd said. “The bears are all hibernating in caves now that it’s winter.” Then he made a snoring sound. The girls and Chloe burst out laughing. They hadn’t joked around in so long. Todd really missed it.

  “You girls go back to studying and go to bed early,” Todd said. “We’re leaving early in the morning.”

  “Will there be real food at the cabin?” his oldest asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Chloe answered because she assumed things were much better out in the country. “The yogurts you like, juice boxes, carrot sticks, and the organic mac and cheese with the bunny shapes.” That about summed up all the girls ate before the Collapse. After she said those foods would be available, she wondered if that were true. Oh well. The girls needed to have some hope.

  The girls jumped up and down and started running around the house. Todd and Chloe were glad to see that, which, like the joking around about snoring bears, hadn’t happened in a very long time.

  “Things will work out,” Todd said. “I got a late start on this, but I’m going to make up for lost time.”

  Chloe started crying; happy tears this time. She hugged him and they kissed, something else that hadn’t happened in weeks.

  Todd finished his lists and coordinated with Chloe on the packing. They had to take all the girls’ favorite things and didn’t want to forget any of them.

  Hours later, Todd and Chloe crashed onto their bed and slept soundly, yet another thing that hadn’t happened in a long, long time.

  Their alarm clock jolted them awake the next morning at 4:00 a.m. sharp. It was time to start getting out of there.

  Chloe woke the girls and made them eat some cornbread. “That’ll be the last of that forever!” she said to them. They clapped and got into Chloe’s Range Rover. They were ready to go.

  “Let’s go out to the woods!” Todd said as they pulled out of the garage into the darkness of their neighborhood. As they left, Chloe looked at her magnificent house. A tear rolled down her cheek, but she wiped it off before Todd could see it. She didn’t want him distracted from what he needed to do. She should have been thinking that way months ago, she admitted.

  They drove a few blocks to the entrance of the subdivision. They slowed down for the guards, who were surprised to see anyone driving that early. The residents chipped in to hire them, paying them in gold and silver and other items that could be bartered.

  When Todd stopped the Range Rover and rolled down his window, his youngest yelled, “Hello, police helpers!” to the guards. Todd and Chloe had told the girls that the men with guns were “police helpers.”

  “Can I help you, sir?” the first guard asked. He kept his AR-15 hidden under his jacket because, in this upscale neighborhood, the residents didn’t like seeing guns. He was in his thirties and very clean cut. He had been on the Bellevue police department before most of his fellow officers quit reporting for work back in May.

  “We’re leaving to see my parents,” Todd said. He hated lying in front of the girls, but they had worked that out the night before: Daddy is going to tell some fibs when we leave to go the cabin in the woods. It’s okay for Daddy to do this, Todd explained, and he would explain why when they got there. Todd had no intention of explaining, but figured that the girls would forget all about it by then.

  “Where’s that?” The guard asked.

  “Wenatchee,” Todd said. That was near Lake Chelan, but Todd didn’t want the neighbo
rhood to know they were going to Lake Chelan because they’d figure out it was to Ken and Kim’s.

  “Sir, have you been out of the neighborhood recently?” The guard asked.

  That was an odd question, Todd thought. “Nope,” he answered. “It’s been a couple of weeks. I haven’t been out much because gas is hard to come by.”

  “That’s an understatement,” the guard said. “Do you have a full tank and gas cans to get to Wenatchee?”

  “We have almost a full tank,” Todd said. He’d filled up Chloe’s Range Rover a few weeks ago by selling his mom’s formal silverware. He hadn’t told Chloe. “That’s enough to get to Wenatchee.”

  “Maybe it was,” the guard said. He saw the little girls in the back of the SUV and decided not to be too candid with young, impressionable ears. He didn’t want to scare them. “But now things take a lot longer than before … all this.” He couldn’t bring himself to say “Collapse.”

  “Oh,” Todd said. “Like how long will it take? A couple extra hours?”

  “Please step outside the vehicle, sir,” the guard said like a cop. Old habits die hard.

  “Is everything okay?” Chloe asked the guard as she leaned over toward the driver’s side window to talk to him.

  “Oh, yes ma’am,” the guard said. “I just need a word with him,” he said pointing toward Todd. To calm things down, he motioned for Todd to roll down the rear windows, which he did.

  “Good morning, young ladies,” he said to the girls. “Who’s having fun this morning?”

  The girls said in unison, “I am!” He gave them a thumbs up.

  Todd got out of the Range Rover and went up to the guard, who motioned for him to come over to the makeshift guard station where the other two guards were.

  When Todd got over to the station, the guard said, “Do you know what you’re doing, sir?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Todd said casually. “I’m going to Wenatchee.” It was no big deal. He’d gone there dozens of times to golf before the Collapse.