It was almost midnight in Forks and Steve Briggs was getting ready for tomorrow. It would be January 3rd tomorrow and would be another day in Forks of … surviving. But, in reality, his day tomorrow would consist primarily of just visiting with people. There wasn’t much to do this time of year in the near-constant rain and long periods of darkness; no gardens to tend, no decent hunting, and few fish in the rivers. There were things to repair, but usually no parts, and routine patrols to go on in town, but life in Forks meant doing a whole lot of nothing.
Surprisingly, this was just fine with Steve. The Collapse Christmas in Forks had been monumental. The whole town seemed to pull together. Carolers strolled through the streets singing Christmas carols. People gave each other meaningful, but simple, gifts. And there was that fabulous after-dinner moonshine sipping session after Christmas dinner at city hall. It was not a bad way to spend the winter.
People weren’t eating as well now as they were in the fall or especially summer, but the majority of people stored food from the times of the year when it was plentiful. Not all of them did, and some who did didn’t store as much as they should have. Everyone was losing weight, which wasn’t such an awful thing. Steve had to admit that country living before the Collapse put on the pounds. Big country breakfasts made sense when people worked hard physically all day logging or doing something similarly as exerting, but before the Collapse, that wasn’t exactly the way of life. People just ate like it was. When the Collapse hit, people became physically active in ways they had never been before, while no longer having access to a grocery store full of sausage, butter, and gravy mix. It became common for those XXXL shirts to start draping over men and women like an oversized blanket on their now-L frames.
Crime was still a sporadic issue, but there was no looting. Shooting people early on worked, as much as Steve wished it hadn’t had to happen. Now, with a couple months of the Collapse behind him, Steve could see things differently. The pre-Collapse shitbags in town (and there were quite a few) could be shitbags when the living was easy, when the EBT cards had money on them and the store had plenty of Doritos. Now it was much harder to be a shitbag. They got over their lazy lifestyles pretty quickly now that they had to actually work and no one just handed them anything. Oh, sure, it took a period of adjustment and some of the shitbags never adjusted, but they were quickly shunned by the community or, in some cases, shot when they were caught stealing.
Steve was especially happy to see some of the young people change their shitbag ways and … grow up and become productive. He had to admit it was hard to be a young person in pre-Collapse America and not give in to the shitbag lifestyle. They were told, starting in middle school, that it was okay to get “public assistance.” In high school, the schools were one-stop social service centers preparing the kids for a life of public assistance if that’s what they chose. And there were almost no jobs for them, so who could be surprised that so many got on the dole? He went from being mad at them to feeling sorry for them. It was so obvious that politicians created this. They got votes from people for “caring” and providing “public assistance,” and they got votes from young people, the few who bothered to vote, to keep free stuff flowing. Those “caring” voters and young voters were often just enough for the side proposing even more spending to win. Now, after the Collapse, it was so obvious to Steve.
The perfect example of this was Steve’s nephew, Phil McGuire. He drifted through high school without ever having a summer job or working after school, much to Steve’s chagrin. But it was rare before the Collapse for teenagers to work; they needed time to play video games and text their friends. Phil fit into this category perfectly. After high school graduation, he couldn’t find a job, but he didn’t really try to find one. He lived with his mom, Steve’s sister, and her boyfriend. When he turned eighteen, he was told about all the free stuff he could get, including the magical EBT card. It was free money and he didn’t have to do anything to get it. He spent the next few years on the couch at his mom’s house and having a carefree life.
When the Collapse hit, he was bewildered that he couldn’t sit on the couch and get everything given to him. At first, he was mad. Steve told him that life had changed, but “Uncle Steve” was just being his hard ass self, Phil thought.
But slowly, Phil started volunteering for various jobs. Steve took him under his wing. He had to teach Phil how to work. He had to teach him to get up on time, to wear work clothes, and to actually get a job done. Phil would constantly want to take a break after working a few minutes. He had no concept of finishing a job; he was just putting time in and thought he got credit for just showing up. “We don’t quit until the job is done,” Steve would have to tell him.
Phil improved considerably in the fall. By Christmas, Steve could tell him to do a project and it got done, always slowly and sometimes poorly, but Phil was finally putting in true effort. His transformation was complete when, after Christmas, Steve told him to split and stack firewood for an elderly neighbor lady and, to Steve’s pleasant surprise, the job was done before dark, with no supervision from Steve. Phil seemed much happier because, for the first time in his life, he was productive. He had finally grown up and was a man.
Like so many other things during the Collapse, the good, like Phil’s transformation, came with the other side of the coin, the bad, like all the people dying of simple illnesses that winter.
The big concern in town was the all the deaths from pneumonia and the flu. People were so run down, especially the elderly, and were cold and weren’t getting the nutrition they needed. All the stress from the Collapse also degraded their immune systems. Little colds were turning into full-on serious illnesses and there were no antibiotics. Steve was going to way too many funerals lately. Including that of Grant’s mom.
The talk at the latest funeral Steve went to was about how the Patriots supposedly took Olympia on New Year’s Day. Steve listened politely and was rooting for the Patriots, if the stories were true. But, Steve hated to admit, he didn’t really care. Whoever sat in some capitol building 150 miles away in Olympia wouldn’t affect whether people in Forks had enough to eat this winter or could treat a simple cold before it became pneumonia. Governments didn’t really matter anymore in Forks.
Chapter 313
Dmitri’s Rules for Gray Manning
(January 2)
In west Seattle, Ed Oleo had been staying under the radar all fall. He and Dmitri talked a lot about being a “gray man.” Back in the fall, Dmitri gave Ed a lesson in “gray manning” – lessons Ed was putting into place just before midnight on the day after New Year’s.
Dmitri was a gold mine of information about how to be a gray man, like he had been in the former Soviet Union. Dmitri’s people had gray manning down to a science, which, in large part, was why the Soviet Union collapsed.
The first rule of gray manning, Dmitri explained, was to be and remain gray – that is, to blend in and not alert the authorities that you are resisting them. A gray man or woman can’t do the resistance any good if he or she is in jail because he or she decided to spout off about politics or some other waste of time in a repressive regime. “There is no upside and much downside,” Dmitri said, using his favorite American businessman’s phrase, “to openly making political statements” during the Collapse. Several people in TDFs learned this the hard way. Anonymously making political statements, like the “I miss America” graffiti Dmitri and Ed were seeing in Seattle, was a different story, Dmitri explained. “Don’t let the authorities know it is you making the statement,” he would say. “Let them, and especially the general population, think it is everyone making the statement.”
The second rule of gray manning, Dmitri explained to Ed, was to not try to do too much. “It is not up to you,” Dmitri, “to take down the system. It cannot be done by one person.” Instead, Dmitri explained, “the system was built by many people, and needs many people to sustain it.” This meant, “It takes many people to bring it down.” Dmitri would laugh and tell Ed, “You Americans care so much about the individual. You think individuals can do anything. That is true of some things, but you are wrong about an individual being able to take down the system. It takes many gray men to bring it down.”
The third rule of gray manning, Dmitri said, was to use the system against itself. For example, if the system requires a person to submit an application to do something, like have a garage sale, then submit an application. The system will spend its resources processing the application. By spending a little time to submit an application, a gray man can cause the system to spend much more time and energy processing it. Don’t complain out loud that you shouldn’t have to have a permit to hold a garage sale, he would say, “Send in the application and let them work on it. Let all the problems they create for you become their problems.”
The fourth rule was to do everything possible to strengthen alternatives to the system. The best example was the black market. It competed with the official system, so the stronger the black market was, the weaker the system was. This was one of the things about gray manning that directly benefited the gray man: the black market often had things the system could not provide.
The fifth rule was to notice things.
“Just keep your eyes open,” Dmitri said, “and notice little things.” Dmitri gave examples like when the police changed shifts, when your neighbors came and went, when the stores had food and when they didn’t. “All of these things will help you make a plan to do things, like sabotage, and they are also useful pieces of information to tell allied forces when they arrive.”
“Sabotage is the next rule,” Dmitri said. “You know the phrase, ‘throw a monkey wrench?’”
“Sure,” Ed said, “it means to destroy something.”
“My people invented that phrase,” Dmitri said with pride. “It came from the industrialization period in the Soviet Union when resisters would actually throw a wrench into machinery and destroy it. It was impossible to know which worker did it. And it would take weeks to fix the machinery. This cost the system a tremendous amount and also stopped production for weeks. All for the price of a wrench, thrown into a machine anonymously.”
Ed said, “We don’t have any machines like that anymore in America, so what are our monkey wrenches?”
“Electricity,” Dmitri said. “America needs electricity to function, Disable the electricity and you have thrown in the monkey wrench. The final rule is keeping a mental file on everyone you meet,” Dmitri said. “Figure out which side everyone is on. When the time is right, you can deal with the people who support the government. But be sure they are really supporters. This takes time and patient observation. You’ll know who to target for that day when you have an opportunity to – how you say – take them out.”
Now, on the day after New Year’s, Ed was putting Dmitri’s lessons to use. He decided not to involve him because he didn’t want to get him in trouble. News had been trickling in that the Patriots had launched an offensive in Olympia on New Year’s Eve. This might be the time for Ed to strike, but only if the Patriots attacked Seattle. He was far too outnumbered to take on all the Limas in Seattle on his own. He could support a Patriot attack on his city, but he needed them to be on the gates of Seattle before his lone-wolf work would be effective.
Ed’s first idea was, when the time was right, to take his shotgun and use one of his rifled slug shells to shoot the electrical transformer at the nearby police station right about at the time they changed shifts. Then he was reminded of Dmitri’s second rule of gray manning: “It’s not up to you alone to bring the system down.” Shooting the transformer would be loud and he would have to travel by foot to get there and back with a shotgun in his hands. Bad idea.
Ed came up with a second plan. He realized that he had plenty of information on three of his neighbors. Most people in his neighborhood didn’t give a crap about politics. They just mouthed the correct things and put up the stupid “We Support the Recovery!” yard signs. But three neighbors were hardcore Limas. They were the FCorps block captains.
Ed got to know them and even did some home repairs for them for free. He wanted to be sure that they were truly Limas before he put them on his list. During his visits to their homes, he was doing more than repairing their homes. He was casing the places, figuring out where the locks were. He even replaced a lock for one of them, and managed to keep the second key. Now he could get in whenever he wanted.
Ed still had his shotgun. Now all he needed was for the Patriots to attack Seattle.
Chapter 314
Reaction in Pierce Point
(January 2)
In Pierce Point, New Year’s Day had been a big deal. People were stunned that at least one hundred Patriot guerillas had been training right under their noses and had gone into Olympia as part of the offensive. Right under their noses! Who knew?
Quite a few people, as it turned out. Before New Year’s, there were a lot of people whispering about the “rental team.” It was amazing that it had remained a secret as long as it did.
Dr. Lisa Matson was thoroughly depressed. She didn’t even go into work for several days. Her husband had left her for … some stupid war. A war? Leaving her for another woman she could sort of understand; men did that sometimes. But playing army with his little buddies? Leaving her for that was insulting.