299 Days IX: The Restoration

by Glen Tate

  Grant tried to call the kids, though the phones were a complete mess. The Limas took them down on their way out. The internet was spotty and Grant didn’t want to use it even when it worked because, for all he knew, he would be giving away his position to someone in Seattle who could get a Lima hit team out to his location.

  No, Grant would just sit there and wonder about his family from afar. Whether they loved him or hated him, or a combination of both. All he could do was write letters and give them to people who were going in the direction of Pierce Point. Since he was well known, and, although he hated to admit, because he had the power of life and death as the chair of the ReconComm, he could get letters through that others couldn’t.

  Grant wrote letters to his family describing all the good things that he was doing. He constantly downplayed the danger and aimed the letters primarily at the kids. He would tell Lisa that he loved her and missed her. He wondered if that just made her angrier.

  “Oh, if you love me so much,” he could hear her saying, “then why did you leave? And why haven’t you come home?”

  Every time he wrote a letter back home, he felt terrible. Those letters reminded him how he had left, how letters were necessary because he wasn’t there to say the things he was writing.

  He never got a letter back from them. Never, though he kept waiting for one.

  He would start to feel alone, like he was totally alone, the only person in the world. Then the Team would be there and would remind him that he wasn’t alone. He had the best friends in the world around him. He had dozens of people a day tell him how much good he was doing with the ReconComm. He would meet a few people each day for whom he had obtained pardons and they thanked him for literally saving their lives. It was powerful.

  And empty. He didn’t want strangers telling him how awesome he was. He wanted to be a dad again. He really wanted to be a husband again. He wanted the appreciation coming from his family.

  Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. It all kept coming back to that. Grant was making a sacrifice. It was the price he was paying to do the things he needed to do.

  As the Team was taking a break at a rest stop on the way to Yakima and standing around Mark’s truck, a soldier came up to Pow.

  “This is a letter for Lt. Matson,” the soldier said.

  “It’s Commissioner Matson, but I’ll get it to him,” Pow said. “Thanks.” He looked and saw the letter was from Lisa. It was likely the most important piece of mail Grant would ever receive.

  Chapter 324

  Nightmares

  (January 17)

  Nancy Ringman heard someone coming down the hall. She perked up. She had only been in prison for two weeks – two long, agonizing weeks – and already missed human contact. That was because she was segregated in the old High School building in Olympia, which now served as a makeshift prison for high-value prisoners. It was directly across the street from the Olympia State Guard Armory, formerly the National Guard Armory. It was extremely secure.

  She was segregated from other prisoners because word got out that she was the Clover Park Butcher. Most of the other prisoners were hardcore Limas, but some were Patriots who had committed war crimes. Nancy couldn’t be anywhere near them or they would kill her with their bare hands. And, as much as the guards and warden hated her for what she’d done, they wanted to her to stay alive for the trial. Televising that trial would be very important for the Patriots to win the hearts and minds of any remaining Undecideds. Nancy had confessed on video so the trial would be short and the outcome certain. But having her confess again on the stand was extremely important to the Patriots. The Governor personally called the warden and reminded him of this.

  Nancy had been having nightmares. In them, she saw the faces of the prisoners from Clover Park. They would ask her, “Nancy, why did you do this?” They would say, “Tell my daughter her daddy won’t be coming home, Nancy.” Sometimes they would ask, “Nancy, do you want another glass of wine?” Other times they said, “You were a coward for not shooting yourself.”

  Nancy’s mind had essentially shut down. She couldn’t cope with what was happening. She couldn’t eat or sleep. She knew she’d be hung soon. but she wanted to have her trial and the opportunity to publicly tell everyone how sorry she was. She had radically transformed from a month ago when she hated teabaggers and actually enjoyed killing them. A switch had gone off in her head. She didn’t hate anymore; she just felt guilty.

  “More letters for you, Ringman,” the female guard said. She pitched them under the locked classroom door that held Nancy inside, except for the three times a day she was handcuffed and let out to use the bathroom and eat.

  At first, Nancy tore open the letters and read them intently. But they were from victims of Clover Park and told her they hoped she died a painful death. She couldn’t read the letters anymore. She just stared at the envelopes on the floor of the classroom. She knew what they said. They said the same things in her nightmares.

  Once again, she looked throughout the classroom for a way to kill herself. Some rope, something sharp. Nothing. They had removed all of those things, of course. But it eased her mind for her to spend hours thinking of ways she could kill herself. It made the nightmares go away. For a while.

  Chapter 325

  The Aftermath

  (January 17)

  Pow was running to Grant full speed to get him the letter from Lisa. As he came up on Grant, Pow got the code word in his earpiece, “Tillamook!” It was the name of the Team’s favorite local brand of cheese and also the code for an immediate attack.

  “Tillamook!” Pow yelled as he grabbed Grant’s arm. “Now! Move!”

  Grant knew he was serious. They had practiced this. The Team instantly formed a small perimeter around the truck. As soon as Grant was in the truck, they jumped in, too. Bobby was already in the truck idling it, of course. The State Guard escort vehicles were scrambling around too, getting ready for a firefight or to take off.

  Dying at a crappy rest stop, Grant thought. What a shitty way to go. Not very glamorous, especially after all he’d been through.

  Grant had his AR, which he kept in the truck since a peace loving and forgiving public figure like the chair of the ReconComm shouldn’t be seen slinging a rifle. Grant was ready to fight it out.

  Silence.

  More silence.

  The radio crackled. “False alarm,” the familiar voice of the dispatcher said excitedly. “False alarm.”

  No one relaxed. The dispatcher could be wrong or, conceivably, could be in on a hit.

  “Marco Polo,” another voice said on the radio, and everyone relaxed. That was a code word for a true false alarm.

  In the all the excitement of the possible ambush, and because he hadn’t slept more than three hours in a row in the past few weeks, Pow shoved the letter in his pocket and forgot to give it to Grant.

  Grant went back to work. He was so used to reading reports when he was in the rear cab of the truck that he just went back to doing that.

  Grant had been saving a batch of reports for a time when he could really concentrate on them because they were reports about people he knew. This meant he couldn’t approve or disapprove the suggested action on their cases because he had a conflict of interest. His assistant, John Bollinger, did that. Regardless, he was really curious about what had happened to the people he knew. Now was the time he had to read them, so he dove right in.

  The first report was on Jeanie Thompson. Grant had always liked her. He felt sorry for her because she had compromised her beliefs to be a big shot in politics. It turned out she had been at Camp Murray all along with the old governor and then the new governor, Rick Menlow. He was the governor of Seattle now. How sad. Grant knew he was trouble when Menlow swept into power as a “reformer” and then wouldn’t fire any of the old people who were doing bad things. Whatever. That was typical.

  Jeanie had made it out of Camp Murray to a Patriot unit on the bridge on I-5 south of JBLM and north of Olymp
ia. She brought some friends with her.

  The report detailed how she had been taken out of any position of power because she was a Facebook friend with a POI, Grant Matson. She was relegated to menial jobs. Right before the attack on Olympia, all the important people fled Camp Murray and only people like Jeanie were left. She described in the report how she was approached by numerous people similarly left behind at Camp Murray and got them out to the Patriot lines.

  The people Jeanie brought with her were a treasure trove of intelligence nuggets. Code phrases, frequencies, locations of equipment and key communications facilities. And the defectors Jeanie led also confirmed several rumors about an impending counter attack. They also had information on Patriot prisoners the Limas had and described the crimes some of them had allegedly committed.

  Grant looked down at the recommendation box on the report. He knew what it would say. “Full Pardon” was checked and initialed by John Bollinger. Good.

  The next name that caught Grant’s eye was Nancy Ringman. Given that she had beaten Grant’s son back in Olympia, attacked his wife, and trashed his house, Grant was definitely not going to judge her case. He wanted to, though. He had assumed she was just a low-level Lima who probably wouldn’t be punished. He was relieved to read the report on her. It was sickening, but at least he knew she would be dealt with.

  The report detailed the Clover Park massacre and how she had admitted she ordered it. Grant knew she was a horrible person, but the football field incident was more than he imagined she was capable of. Then again, she always had the ability to insist that she was 100% correct and hate anyone who disagreed with her or questioned her. That mindset was necessary to follow orders like that, to never question them. The report said she was in the old Olympia High School prison awaiting trial and execution. Good, Grant thought.

  The next report he read was that of another person he knew, Eric Benson, a former WAB staff member, who was also, strangely enough, in custody in the old Olympia High School prison. Grant had to know what had happened to Eric and why he was in custody. Eric was a Patriot, Grant remembered, so why was he being held in the same prison with Nancy Ringman?

  It turns out Eric was a little too much of a “Patriot” – so much so that he could no longer be called one. He had always been hardcore, even angrier at the old government than Grant had been. Grant remembered the last time he saw Eric. It was at the WAB building when the riots were starting and all the WAB employees were evacuating. Eric came into Tom Foster’s office and yelled that WAB guys needed to go out and beat on the protestors. When no one would follow up, Eric stormed out.

  Eric had gone ahead and taken matters in his own hands. In the report, Eric admitted that he formed a small group. Grant didn’t recognize any of the names and wondered how Eric recruited them.

  Eric and his group started doing “overpass jobs,” according the report. In the first week of the Collapse, one of the members of Eric’s group would ride in a car down the highway with a little Motorola radio. The car would look for cars with liberal bumper stickers. The radio car would tell Eric, who was hiding on an overpass, the description of the lib car and its distance from the overpass. When the lib car got near the overpass, Eric would shoot the driver with a hunting rifle. Even if Eric missed, which was most of the time, the exploding windshield would cause the lib car to crash and either kill or injure the driver. They did four “overpass jobs.” Just having a bumper sticker, even a stupid one, should not be a reason to kill people, Grant thought. Grant felt a twinge of guilt because he had wished he could shoot some people with those bumper stickers, but Eric took it way too far and actually did it. At least four times.

  Later, about two months into the Collapse, Eric and his group hit gang gas stations. They would start to fill up and, when no one was looking, tie down the latch on the nozzle so the gas kept flowing. They would walk away with the gas nozzle with gas gushing out. Then they would shoot a flare gun at the spilled gas. The gas station would go up in a fireball. Grant wasn’t opposed to killing the gangbangers selling gas, but many innocent people were killed, too. Blowing up gang gas stations, Grant had to give Eric credit, did reduce demand for gang gas. But too many innocent people got hurt.

  Eric also admitted to a crime that Grant was silently cheering about. He had killed Bart Sellarman, the corrupt real estate licensing board monster that terrorized Ed Oleo in one of Grant’s and Eric’s cases back at WAB. The killing was a gruesome carwash slaying. Grant was ready to buy Eric a steak dinner for that one. Then Grant realized that this kind of vengeance was exactly what Grant was supposed to prevent, but Grant could smile. And the way Eric killed Sellarman. It was pure genius. Grant wished he could have seen that. Grant would never go into a carwash again.

  The final thing Eric did was attempt to infiltrate the Red Brigade. Grant was fine with that because the Red Brigade were communist terrorists who thought the FUSA wasn’t socialist enough. But it was how Eric did it.

  Right before the Collapse, Eric found out that the local leader of the various left-wing causes was a student named Maddy Popovich. She went to the left-wing nut job college in Olympia, the Evergreen State College. Eric started following her around. He even enrolled at Evergreen. He was determined to get her.

  Eric found out Maddy had a roommate, a young woman named Michele Tarrant. Eric found out where Michele hung out and got to know her. Pretty soon, Eric was sleeping with her. She introduced Eric to Maddy and he got to know both of them.

  Eric said he suspected, but admitted during interrogations that he could never prove, that Maddy was the leader of the local Red Brigade. Michele was not involved. She hated politics, as a matter of fact.

  One night, in Michele’s bedroom, Eric slit Michele’s throat. He admitted in the report that he really enjoyed it. He went into Maddy’s room and did the same thing. He really loved that, too, he admitted.

  It turns out that Maddy was a left-wing lunatic but not a Red Brigade member. When the interrogators proved to Eric that she was not a Red Brigade member, he shrugged to the interrogator and said, the report stated, “Whatever. A dead hippie. I did everyone a favor.” Eric fully expected to get a medal from the Patriots for slitting the throats of two innocent women.

  That wasn’t going to happen, Grant decided.

  Grant hated to see what had happened to Eric. For whatever reason, Eric had decided that the Collapse gave him a license to kill people he hated—some of whom he didn’t even know. The reports told of his confession about a “good Eric” and an “angry Eric,” his dual personality, showing he was obviously mentally ill. The people who were killed by the angry version of Eric were not Lima military or police or FCorps. They just had a bumper sticker of a politician he hated, or he suspected they were terrorists. Hating and then killing people based on their politics or suspecting, but not verifying, they were terrorists was what the Limas did. But so did Eric. In a sense, he became a Lima.

  The bottom line was that Eric had admitted to killing innocent people. Sellarman had it coming, but the drivers with liberal stickers didn’t. Maddy didn’t, and Michele Tarrant certainly didn’t.

  Eric, a so-called Patriot, had been the one who killed innocent people instead of the Limas, who were usually the ones who did. Eric needed to hang just like the Limas who did that. He would. The box “Deny Pardon” was checked and initialed on Eric’s report. Grant hated to see that because he knew Eric. Grant wondered if he had spent more time with Eric whether he wouldn’t have turned out that way. No, Grant told himself, Eric had some hatred of a certain kind of people and when society broke down Eric decided this was his chance to go out and kill people. Eric was just as guilty as the Limas, and in some ways, more guilty. As a person with at least some Patriot beliefs, Eric should have known better. Now he was going to die.

  Grant realized the political importance of hanging Eric. The population had to see the Patriots would not tolerate atrocities from their own side. The law applied equally. No matter if the guy you used to w
ork with at WAB was the chair of ReconComm or not. The guilty hanged. Period.

  Then Grant got a brilliant idea. Evil, but brilliant.

  Chapter 326

  Leaving Seattle

  (January 21)

  Prof. Carol Matson was living her merry little socialist life in Seattle … for a while. A few days after New Year’s Day, she noticed more and more harsh measures by the government. She also noticed the gangs seemed to be out more. Things were getting scarce again in the stores. But luckily, there were laws against hoarding, so Carol was confident that people wouldn’t be hogging things up for themselves. That’s what set Seattle apart from the barbarians in “New Washington”: people in Seattle cared about others, not just themselves.

  Then she got a knock at her door one night. She answered the door, which was dangerous with all the crime. But she could see through the peephole that the men at her door had yellow FCorps helmets. Whew. They were safe to let in, so she did.

  Once the three FCorps men were in her house, one of them asked, “Are you Carol Matson?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Is your brother Grant Matson?” he asked.

  Carol felt all the blood drain out of her face. Oh no. They were after her because of him. “Yes,” she said, meekly.

  “You need to come with us,” he said, as the other two grabbed her by each arm. They were hurting her arms and were yelling at her. She hadn’t even done anything wrong. Having a stupid hillbilly brother wasn’t a crime. Was it?

  They took her to a prison, an awful, dark, overcrowded, filthy place. She found out that she was being held because her brother was the head of the New Washington “Reconciliation Commission.” He therefore had the power of life and death over many important government officials who had been trapped in New Washington.