299 Days: The Change of Seasons

by Glen Tate

Bill was paid fairly well in Texas dollars, the state’s own currency. Texas dollars were highly sought after all across the country because they were partially backed with gold, silver, and oil. Lots and lots of oil. Texas dollars were becoming the region’s reserve currency, much like the U.S. dollar had been the world reserve currency.

  Besides being backed by something real, Texas dollars were valued because they were part of the fastest-growing economy in the FUSA. Businesses were flocking to Texas. The trend started before the Collapse and accelerated after it. Not only businesses were coming, but so were talented and hardworking people from all over the country. Thousands of people a month risked their lives to get to Texas from Lima-controlled areas. The federal troops couldn’t keep people out of Texas – the border was too large, and the feds were spread too thin – but they could bottle people up in the cities. Once a person got out of the city, though, the only danger on the highway to Texas was all the roving criminals. And the difficulty of getting gas. But it could be done.

  Sandy was a nurse, but could only find part-time work. The problem wasn’t the need for nursing; it was people’s ability to pay for health care. There was no more Medicare, of course, and not even any private health insurance to speak of. Health care was a strictly cash-only business. Charitable free care was usually available for emergency injuries in larger cities, but routine and preventative treatments like MRIs were only for cash payers. Access to medical care was drastically lower than it had been before the Collapse.

  Sandy worked about twenty hours a week for a cash-only urgent care clinic in a strip mall. She arranged for a ride with the neighborhood carpool coordinators who made sure precious fuel was used to get as many people to work in as few vehicles as possible. Some days, when she couldn’t get a ride, she couldn’t go to work. She wasn’t the only one this happened to. It was common and accepted by employers. They had no choice.

  Sandy spent the rest of her time during the week getting groceries and, when she could, gas. The neighborhood would arrange for a truck full of residents to go to the nearest grocery store. Everyone went armed. There were not too many incidents. If trouble started, it was usually a person going crazy from a lack of medication, although robberies were not rare. There was a lot less crime now, in the winter, than there was at the beginning of the Collapse, which was largely due to the fact that most of the hardened criminals had been killed, either by armed citizens, the police, or more often, each other. The criminals who still remained were usually amateurs or very desperate people, who were far more dangerous.

  Food, gas, and utilities were about all Sandy and Bill spent money on. They didn’t have a house payment; foreclosure was impossible for lenders, so they just folded. Besides, all the money they loaned was in the old U.S. dollar, not the Texas dollar that everyone was using now. They no longer spent money on all the other things they did before the Collapse that cost so much. No movies, restaurants, vacation, cable TV, clothes, or a million other things. Food and gas were very expensive (utilities were not), but the money Bill and Sandy made covered it.

  She opened the refrigerator and got him a cold beer, which was now officially a luxury. It was Friday, after all.

  He sipped the beer and then took a couple of big gulps. It felt so magnificent to drink a beer. He now appreciated the little things that he used to take for granted.

  “What’s on the schedule tonight?” he asked Sandy.

  “Roberto and Karmen are coming over around 7:00 and then we’ll walk to the game,” she said, referring to their neighbors and best friends. They lived about a half a mile from the local high school.

  “If we win this one,” Bill said, “we’re in the state playoffs.” There might be a Collapse, but there was still high school football in Texas.

  Chapter 239

  The Five Amigos

  (November 30)

  Lieutenant Commander Travis Dibble looked at the picture on his phone. Memories. It seemed like it had been a hundred years since that picture was taken. It was taken during the Army-Navy football game of his senior year at Annapolis, which had only been five years ago.

  He looked at the faces. They looked so young and so fresh in their dress uniforms. They were so innocent and optimistic. The five faces were him, Steve, Zach, Vic, and Brent; the “Five Amigos” as they were known. A tight, tight group of young men who went through the most amazing experience of their lives together: surviving four years at the U.S. Naval Academy.

  Where were the Five Amigos now? He wondered. He looked at the picture and thought about each man, starting from the left to right, with himself the first down the line

  He was a Lieutenant Commander, the equivalent of a Major, in the Naval Department of the Washington State Guard and was actively fighting for the Patriots. The State Guard had a navy because Washington State had such a vast coastline and, quite frankly, so many FUSA naval facilities from which many sailors and naval officers defected.

  Travis had been promoted quickly in the Guard. In the old Navy, the FUSA Navy, an officer with five years’ experience would never have advanced to Lieutenant Commander, but this wasn’t the old Navy; the Patriots needed officers, and Travis was a very good officer.

  He started in the FUSA Navy in an aircraft maintenance unit. A year before the Collapse, he was transferred out to Everett, Washington, to serve on the aircraft carrier, USS Nimitz.

  A native of Ohio, Travis liked Washington State. There was no humidity and he didn’t even mind the rain. Then again, he didn’t live too much in the state because he was usually deployed on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific.

  Things were falling apart in the FUSA military even when he was in the Academy. He noticed all the indoctrination about “terrorists” – and not the foreign ones in the Middle East. The Academy taught that terrorists were increasingly domestic: the so-called “Patriots.” The upper classmen told the young guys to keep their heads down and not get involved in politics, especially not “right-wing” politics. Travis never thought much about it; he was a math and science guy and politics seemed strange. Politics was all bullshit so why worry about it?

  On his first deployment, Travis started noticing the gangs. Yes, gangs in the Navy. There were parts of the ship that a white boy just didn’t go onto. And there were white gangs, too. Contraband was available from them and officers didn’t dare discipline gang members. This troubled Travis. He was realizing that the Navy his father served in for twenty-five years wasn’t the same Navy he was in. But he did his job and was waiting for his time to be up so he could get out.

  Then the Collapse hit when he and his ship were in port in Everett. A few days before May Day, they were passed the word that civil unrest was coming and they were being recalled to the ship to augment the naval security forces. They would be issued rifles and then go out and establish a one-mile perimeter around the base. “You will seize civilian firearms in the perimeter,” he was told.

  Travis was no right-wing wacko, but he knew that the military couldn’t do that. He started to question what he was doing. As he was wondering why he was being ordered to seize firearms, the crisis was unfolding so quickly that he didn’t have time to think. He was just reacting. He was trained to follow orders and did it all day long. These were just another set of orders. Unusual ones, but orders nonetheless.

  Securing the base was an absurdly unorganized cluster fuck. No one knew what to do. People were issuing orders, only to have them contradicted by orders from higher-ups – and then contradicted again.

  Travis knew this was going poorly when he went to get his rifle issued – an old M16 from the 1980s taken out of storage – but they didn’t have anymore. He knew from the briefings that the base had plenty of rifles for the security forces and the others like him. When he asked the Marine armorer why there were no more rifles, the armorer shrugged and said, “A few are missing.”

  “Well, go get them, Sergeant,” Travis ordered.

  The armorer laughed. “I’d love to, sir,
but there are some guys on this base you just don’t mess with.” Gangs. The Navy gangs took the rifles. This definitely wasn’t his dad’s Navy.

  Travis was finally issued an M9 9mm pistol. That was it. He was sent out with a group of sailors, most of whom were maintenance technicians, to go clear and occupy the area around the base. Only a few of them had rifles and most hadn’t shot one since basic training.

  They stood outside in the cold on base all night waiting for the order to go. They finally got the order, advanced a few hundred yards and were then ordered to turn around. They spent the rest of the day milling around the base. That night, when they were tired and hungry, they were ordered out into the perimeter. Two of Travis’s men didn’t report for the muster, as a formation was called in the Navy, before they departed.

  Out they went into the darkness, slowly advancing behind the real security forces. They could hear gunfire and had no idea if it was from their side or the civilians.

  Then it hit Travis: “their side” and the “civilians” were different sides. This was not why he joined the Navy.

  It got worse. Around midnight, they heard a high volume of fire. Someone shot up the Navy security forces pretty bad. Travis’ men looked at each other and many of them decided this unorganized, dangerous show of force against their own citizens was a bad idea. They wanted to sleep, eat, and not be shot at by their own people. Within an hour, half of his men were gone. It was easy to hide in the darkness and confusion.

  Travis envied the men who went UA, the naval term for AWOL. But he was an officer. He had a duty and was held to a higher standard. He didn’t care about his career anymore; his motivation for staying was simply to not dishonor himself.

  By dawn, after being awake for twenty-four hours, and slogging through alleys and getting contradictory orders every block or so, Travis had enough. He looked behind him and saw only a handful of his men left.

  “I’m going to keep going,” he told his last remaining petty officer, “and I won’t turn around for a couple of minutes.”

  “Roger that, sir,” the petty officer said. “Thanks.”

  Travis nodded and started walking. A little while later, he turned around and the last of his men were gone. Good. Now he could take off, too.

  It took him several hours, but he got out of the perimeter and started walking toward his apartment a few miles away. He got there mid-afternoon, fell asleep on the couch and woke up a few hours later to the sound of sirens and gun fire.

  He had no idea what to do. He was UA (AWOL) so he couldn’t go back to base, but he had to do something. He couldn’t just sit in his apartment. There was chaos and fighting going on. He had to have a plan. The best one he could think of was to go over to his cop friend, Justin’s, apartment.

  Travis rang the doorbell and after a minute or two, he heard the distinctive sound of a shotgun being racked. “Who the fuck is it?” Justin yelled through the door.

  “Travis.”

  “Travis who?”

  “Travis Dibble, dude. Open up.”

  Justin opened the door. He’d been sleeping in the middle of the day, just like Travis had. He looked like hell.

  After cracking open a Rock Star energy drink, Justin started to talk. “We had a deal in my department,” he said. “If we called for backup and no one came, we could leave. That was when we couldn’t do anything more. That happened early this morning. Looting, carjackings, dumb asses cruising around looking for ‘action.’” Justin stared out the window. He wasn’t just tired. He was numb.

  Travis told Justin about the melting away of his naval unit and asked, “What do we do now?”

  “I have a friend,” Justin said. An hour later, they were in Justin’s truck heading to the house of an Oath Keeper buddy who was a Snohomish County Sheriff’s deputy.

  From there, Travis joined a Patriot naval unit. He went out on commandeered civilian boats and made contact with Patriot privateers, who were civilians with watercraft intercepting Lima and pirate ships and turning over a portion of the booty to the Patriots. He loved the work. He got to see a lot of action and had been in several firefights and open-water chases. The only downside was when he had to fight FUSA Navy vessels and personnel, which only happened once. He justified it by remembering the Navy gangs and the complete disorder and chaos from his night in the perimeter. This wasn’t the American Navy he’d joined; it was a bunch of thugs and idiots on boats. He had seen plenty of Lima atrocities out on the water, which made it clear to him that he was fighting for the good guys.

  Travis looked at the next person in the picture, Steve. He was from California, a surfer dude and computer whiz. He had the laidback personality and technical skills that made him the perfect officer to oversee young enlisted computer geeks. And the Navy had plenty of them. Steve was assigned to the Air Force’s Space Command. At first, when Travis heard of “Space Command,” he thought it was some made up thing from Star Trek. No, Steve assured him, Space Command was a real military command staffed mostly by Navy and Air Force “nerds,” as Steve called them, who worked on military satellites and communications.

  Steve was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Right before the Collapse, Steve had set up a secret, encrypted email system for the Five Amigos so they could keep in contact. Last time Travis had checked that email account, Steve and his wife were at her aunt and uncle’s in Idaho. That’s all Travis knew about Steve’s situation.

  The next amigo in the picture was Zach, who was from Florida and flew helicopters. He was fluent in Spanish because his mom was from Argentina, so he ended up in various Latin American countries flying training missions for SEALs and other special operations units training Latin American forces. Zach didn’t use the secure email, probably because of the sensitivity of his assignment and the primitive bases he worked out of. Zach’s wife and kids were in Florida somewhere. Travis had contacted her before the Collapse. They were fine, but she hadn’t heard from Zach in weeks, which was normal so she wasn’t worried. Travis hadn’t talked to her after the Collapse. How would Zach and other U.S. service personnel get back to America from foreign postings when a collapse was going on? Travis didn’t want to think about it.

  The second-to-last face was Vic. He was a good looking Italian kid from New Jersey. He was one of eight children. His father was the president of a junior college in Trenton. When relaxing with friends, Vic was very East Coast: the accent, the talking with his hands, the insistence on only the finest brands of clothing and other things, and his dislike of “camping,” as he called field exercises. But he had a heart of gold. He would do anything for his friends and family. He was very smart and could read people like no one Travis had ever met.

  Vic was a Public Affairs Officer assigned to the Pentagon; a very good gig for a fresh Academy grad. His job was basically public relations: getting the Navy’s story out via TV and the internet. He was often the “Navy spokesperson” who explained things on camera. He was a natural at it; he even toned down his East Coast mannerisms for the camera.

  Vic was the only Loyalist of the Five Amigos. In his last email on their secure email account, he explained that he was sticking with what he knew. “I’m an officer in the U.S. Navy and the United States still exists,” he wrote to them. “The Navy is helping people and I’m helping the Navy by telling these stories.” Vic never really got into politics because, as he explained, “In New Jersey, politics is nauseating.” Besides, he noted, “My wife and daughter are here in D.C. What am I going to do?”

  Travis thought about Vic’s situation. Sitting in Washington, D.C., it would seem like the United States was actually in charge. That area and the rest of the East Coast looked and felt a lot like the old United States. In fact, if a person didn’t know about the South and Mountain West “opting out” of the country, a person in Vic’s part of the country might think things were essentially okay.

  Travis, who loved Vic like a brother, thought it would be best not to tell him about his work for th
e Patriots out in Washington State. Travis didn’t think Vic would try to get him killed – the Limas didn’t have the resources to get him out on the open water even if they knew he was working for the Washington State Guard – but it was just best not to talk about it. Travis’s approach to Vic was like a dear friend who has done something horrible but forgivable and somewhat understandable under the circumstances. The topic was avoided.

  The last face in the picture was Brent, or “Cowboy,” as they called him. He was a real-life cowboy from Wyoming who grew up on a ranch. He herded cattle and even won some junior rodeos in high school.

  He was literally a rocket scientist and was aboard the U.S.S. Henry M. Jackson, a ballistic missile submarine with dozens of nuclear warheads thought to be in the Pacific. Travis hadn’t heard from Brent since a few months before the Collapse, but that wasn’t unusual because Brent couldn’t easily check his emails while he was aboard a submarine.

  Scuttlebutt had been flying around the Navy that some missile submarines had either defected to the Patriots or were “sitting it out.” Travis knew that the military leader of the loose Coalition of Free States and Patriot areas of Lima states, Gen. Warrilow, claimed to have control of at least some of these subs and could order them to launch on Lima-controlled U.S. cities. There was considerable debate whether Warrilow had control of these assets, whether they were still operational, and whether any Patriot subs would actually launch on American cities. Then came the Utility Treaty, which was the agreement between the Limas and Patriots requiring the feds to keep the utilities on in exchange for Gen. Warrilow not starting a nuclear civil war. If the Limas hadn’t thought Warrilow could deliver nukes on U.S. cities, they wouldn’t have made the deal. That was a bit unsettling. Travis wondered if Brent was onboard one of the Patriot subs.

  Travis looked at the picture again. They were so young and so innocent. Who could have imagined back then, at something as festive as an Army-Navy game, that some of them would be on different sides in a war? But it didn’t feel like they, the Five Amigos, were at war with each other. The sides they worked for were at war. It wasn’t personal.