“I’m not out there,” Jeanie would say to herself as she looked out past the barbed wire to the chaos and God-knows-what going on outside the wire. Even though she was no longer getting the top secret briefings, she knew that things weren’t going well. The Recovery was stalling. They had dodged a bullet early on. After a few weeks of total disarray, the government finally got food rolling into the stores and contained the riots. The relative calm of most people being fed had been going on for several weeks now. It was much better than the “crisis of the hour” mode they had been in at the beginning.
Despite this, Jeanie could tell that things were not going well. There were some all-night sessions in the briefing room with lots of yelling. She still got to eat in the DFAC, the dining facility, with all the others and people in the DFAC looked pissed all the time. They were tired—so tired their brains weren’t working, like they were on drugs—and they were worried. Deathly afraid. Terrified of how out of control the situation was. She even saw some of them crying as they ate. No one came over and comforted them. They just cried alone. People tried to ignore that it was happening.
Lately, people were withdrawing into themselves, no longer chatting or hanging out. It was almost like people were afraid to be seen with other people or were afraid they were being plotted against. Every few days, the police would arrest someone at Camp Murray for espionage. Apparently, the Patriots—she caught herself; the “teabaggers”—had spies right there in Camp Murray. Right there, where the Governor was! Jeanie heard that entire military units were getting arrested. They were not following orders to engage in combat. She couldn’t figure out if the units were actively supporting the teabaggers or just sitting out the fight. They had hastily built a military prison at nearby Ft. Lewis. It was a giant outdoor tent city with massive rows of barbed wire and, she had heard, even landmines. But, she also heard, sometimes whole units would just be let out under some kind of deal. It was all very weird and chaotic.
Jeanie didn’t want to go to one of those prisons, so she was very careful to follow all the rules. She constantly worried about the fact that one of her friends — ex friends — was a POI.
It was lunch, but Jeanie wasn’t hungry. She was too worried and distracted to eat. She just sat there in the DFAC watching people. They would just silently eat some food and then shuffle off like zombies back to work. Jeanie noticed that people were eating less. The stress was doing that. She also noticed that occasionally, a person would not show up for a few days in the DFAC, and then she would later find out that they were in the base hospital suffering from some stress-related condition. Sometimes they came back, and sometimes they didn’t. She was starting to wonder if the “hospital” really meant prison.
The longer she was at Camp Murray, the more she was beginning to believe that everything was a lie, and she had been one of the chief salespersons of the lies. At first, she believed everything she was telling the TV news, radio, newspapers, and internet sites. Then she started to question it a little. She’d only talk about the good news, because at that point, there was still some good news to tell. Slowly, though, the good news became more and more scarce.
A few weeks into the Crisis, she would have to make up the good news a little, then a little more until she was full-on lying about everything. “The Governor asked me to tell you how much she appreciates your work at the (fill in the blank of some stupid little government agency). Things are going well. Excellent, actually. The Recovery is taking off. We’ll have things back to normal in a few months. The Crisis has been an unprecedented event for the United States, but we’ve always bounced back from adversity before. We’re Americans.” Blah, blah, blah. She could recite that crap in her sleep. Sometimes she actually did.
Jeanie knew things were going badly when they had a meeting with all the staff to go over the evacuation plan. The National Guard colonel who gave the briefing said an evacuation plan was just a formality. They didn’t really expect to evacuate. But just in case.
Jeanine quickly noticed that there were definite tiers of people who would get out first, like the Governor and her immediate staff, of course. They would go by convoy to Ft. Lewis and then by helicopter to Seattle. No one told her that; she pieced it all together.
Next out would be the other officials, police, and federal agents. They would take a massive motorcade up Interstate 5 to Seattle. Then, after them, the last to go would be the expendable people, like her. No one told her that; she just knew it. They would get to ride up to Seattle in school buses and were assured they’d have an armed escort, but that was probably a lie like everything else.
Jeanie looked at her organic fajita wrap and fruit cup. One thing was going welclass="underline" the food remained top notch. They had the best of everything at Camp Murray. She looked out the window in the DFAC toward the surrounding area outside the wire. “I’m so glad I’m not out there,” she said out loud to herself. It was no longer weird for the exhausted and depressed people in that DFAC to mumble to themselves.
Jason, the sharp young staffer from the Governor’s Office, was also glad he wasn’t outside the wire. He knew much more about how bad things were. In fact, he knew more than anyone else at Camp Murray. Sometimes his assistant would hand him a note containing a coded phrase that told him he needed to get on the ultra-secure phone or internet connection at Camp Murray. From the secure phone and internet, he would get information and report back to Washington D.C. on what was really happening in Washington State. The federal government, for whom Jason secretly worked, didn’t trust state officials anymore. The Feds only trusted their own people like Jason to give them the straight facts.
Jason didn’t know where to start on his list of worries. He figured starting with the ways millions of people could die would work, as he sat in the DFAC eating lunch alone two tables over from Jeanie. The federal government had lost control of dozens of their nuclear weapons. Whole submarines were missing, but they couldn’t launch without a code from the President — at least that was the theory, but in all the chaos of the Collapse, who really knew?. The Russians and Chinese were not reassured. They said they would launch against the U.S. if a “stray” missile came toward them. They were serious. With some of the nukes in the hands of the teabaggers, and others for sale on the black market, who knew what could happen?
No one was answering at a few of the land-based missile silos left in the U.S. arsenal. One of the Legitimate units tried to investigate a silo in North Dakota and got cut to pieces by the personnel defending it. The silo was either a teabagger unit or they decided to freelance although they couldn’t launch without the codes. They did, however, have a nuclear device, and it was rumored that they could be detonated manually, without the codes. Maybe it was for sale. No one knew.
Aircrews had “lost” some of their nuclear bombs and air-launched nuclear missiles. They didn’t have the codes to launch them, but they physically had the weapons and, once again, there was the rumor that they could be manually detonated if someone knew what they were doing. And some of the people who had defected to the teabaggers knew how to detonate them. That was the rumor, anyway.
The scariest nuclear rumor Jason knew of involved the teabagger national military commander, Gen. Warrilow. Jason only got bits and pieces of this from his briefings, but what little he knew was alarming. Gen. Warrilow had informed Washington, D.C. that he had several operable nuclear devices and asked if they needed a test detonation to confirm this. He asked them to pick the location. Of course, they wouldn’t, so he picked a spot off the East Coast where the winds would take the radiation out to sea toward Europe. The Patriots sent the latitude and longitude in the Atlantic to the Feds and an hour later, a satellite picked up a bright ball of fire and steam.