She thought Grant misspoke about “nine months” of food. He was excited and must have meant nine “days” of groceries, she thought. It never occurred to her that he actually had nine months of food out there. Where would he get it? How would he pay for it without her knowing? Where would he store it? Lisa could not believe that he really had all that food out there.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. She was living in the “normal” world, where husbands don’t shoot people, where the neighborhood is safe, and where there would be no reason to have nine months of food at some cabin in the country.
Grant could tell that Lisa simply couldn’t process what was happening. She was extremely intelligent, but simply didn’t know the things he knew. He thought he’d try to live in her world for a few moments right then to see if that would work to convince her. He lowered his voice and spoke as calmly as possible.
“Let’s say this is all over in a few days and everything goes back to normal,” he said with a shrug. “Ron saw everything and he can talk to the police so I don’t need to be around to do that. After a few days, when everything is fine, you can tell your friends that you went out to your cabin because it was quieter. Call it a vacation. Tell them that I was freaked out after what I had to do with the looters.”
Lisa wasn’t listening to that last part where Grant was talking at a lower voice. He had yelled at her and she didn’t like that. All she was thinking about was that he was yelling at her, had just shot some people, and wanted to go to the cabin, which was weird. She just stared at him.
“We’re not going out to some country cabin,” she said as she crossed her arms. “This is our home. You need to go to police and tell them what happened. I mean, why do we need to leave here?”
The reasons were so obvious to Grant but he was aware that Lisa didn’t know all the things he knew. She hadn’t known about the armed evacuation of the gun store a few hours earlier. She hadn’t studied the LA Riots and the looting after Katrina. She hadn’t studied the Russian collapse in the 1990s or the Argentine collapse of the early 2000s. She didn’t know about the bankruptcy of the state and federal governments and what happens when tens of millions of totally dependent people are cut off from welfare. She didn’t know about how much the government hated people like Grant and what they would try to do to people like him. She hadn’t had conversations with a Green Beret about how to fight a guerilla war against a totalitarian government. He had been right about everything so far, about how the Collapse would proceed. He had the outside thoughts telling him things that always came true. She hadn’t heard, seen, or thought of any of this.
Because she had made it clear that she didn’t want to hear, see, or think about any of this. The more troubling things got, her response was to gravitate even more toward the “normal.” Toward insisting on the “normal” and trying to force the square peg of current events into the round hole of “normal.” Grant couldn’t talk to her about this. When he did, she put her hands up to her ears and yelled at him.
He was suddenly terrified. He realized the gap between what he knew about the reality of the situation and what she knew was huge. In a split second, it all came together. They had been living entirely separate lives when it came to what was happening. He realized he needed to tell her what was going on. The stakes were too high now to try to avoid upsetting her. Too late for that; shooting people had pretty much taken care of that.
He owed Lisa an answer to her question of why they needed to go. He calmed himself, to the extent that was possible, and started explaining in his nicest, softest voice.
“You ask a fair question, dear,” Grant said, amazed at how much he’d calmed down. “Why go? Because society is starting to break down, honey. Look at the evidence around you right now. We’ve never even had a crime in our neighborhood in the fifteen years we’ve lived here. No one has ever even called the police here. Now, tonight, we have a gang of God knows how many young thugs with guns charging Ron and me. They were trying to kill us. Don’t you see what’s happening? There are no police because they are fighting hundreds, probably thousands, of protestors down at the capitol.”
She smirked like he was exaggerating the number of protestors. Grant said, “Yes, dear, I saw cars and people on foot streaming there this afternoon. These people are angry, yelling, screaming, and demanding their programs back. I talked to a guy a few hours ago who said that it was a running battle at the capitol.”
“Who were you talking to?” she asked. He could tell she was trying to figure out if this was one of his weirdo conservative friends.
“A guy at the gun store when we were evacuating it,” he said, deciding it was time to come clean.
“Evacuating?” she asked.
“Oh, in all the mayhem,” Grant said, realizing how much he was going to get yelled at, “I forgot to tell you that my friends at Capitol City Guns called around dinner tonight and said they needed some armed guards while they emptied out their shelves. They’re hiding their guns. They know that armed gangs and looters will be coming to steal their stuff. Everyone wants a gun right now for protection.”
“Armed guards?” Lisa yelled. “You? What were you doing?”
This wasn’t going well. “It doesn’t matter now,” Grant said, hoping he could recover from this. “What matters is that people with things like guns are evacuating from the city and need armed guards to do it. With all the traffic jams, the semi trucks can’t get through. The grocery stores only have about two days of food, and that’s if people don’t freak out and stock up, which they will. Hell, they already are. The power went off in the entire western U.S. for a few hours. That wasn’t an accident. Whoever did that can do it again. And will. It might be the Red Brigade who just blew up Congress today.”
“You’re overreacting, Grant,” she said. “What are the odds that there is a terrorist attack, power outages, and the grocery stores are out of food? That just doesn’t happen.”
Grant tried to keep his voice down. “You’re right. That doesn’t just happen. But it just did happen. Honey…Congress has been blown up. The Senate office building, to be exact. Go check the news.” He handed her the TV remote control and continued, “You’ll also see that right after the bombing, the power was off for a few hours all across the West and on the East Coast. Don’t you see that this isn’t just another day? It’s a breakdown of things. Of everything. It might be temporary—God, I hope it is—but it’s happening. It’s happening, Lisa. We need to be ready for anything. Not just for our sake, but really for the kids.” Grant paused. He wanted to gauge how she was taking this in. She was just quiet. He decided he needed to say one more thing. They, or maybe just he, needed to get going on the bug out to the cabin so this conversation needed to wrap up.
“Honey,” Grant said, “for forty plus years of your life, nothing weird like this has ever happened to you. That’s good. I have seen violence and horrible things. I understand that really bad things can happen. But you’re used to things being normal. That’s…well, normal. Normal is normal. That’s fair.”
Grant pointed outside, toward where the shooting had been, “But this is the one time in our lives where normal isn’t there anymore. We need to take the situation as it is and deal with it. For the kids. For us. Let’s go out to the cabin for a little while until this blows over.”
Lisa was silent.
“You’re crazy and this is stupid,” she finally said. “You are overreacting. You just shot some people and you’re not thinking straight.” She paused.
“And I don’t like the implication that I’ve been wrong about things,” she said. “You are yelling at me and telling me I’m wrong and I don’t like it. I’m not going out to your stupid cabin just because there’s some protest.” She folded her arms. “I am staying here, and so are the kids. You can go if you want. Don’t ever come back.”