Jeanie could see that the state government really had no idea what it was doing. She was talking to media all day long, giving the state spin. Things will be OK, we’ll all pull through, people are helping their neighbors, terrorists are taking advantage of the disruptions, don’t be a hoarder, and listen to the government for further information.
Even though Jeanie was in chaos central at the state’s command post, she could see legitimate signs that not everyone was in a crisis. Oddly, most people were staying home from work, watching TV news, helping their neighbors, and eating the several days of food they normally had on hand in their pantries and refrigerators. It was not a complete breakdown of society. Things were bad, worse than anyone had ever seen in modern America, but not the end of the world. It was a partial breakdown with patches of normalcy.
Chapter 72
Closing the Parts Store
(May 7)
Steve Briggs was running out of parts at his auto parts store. He hadn’t seen a shipment in days. He was in the very isolated town of Forks, on the extreme northwest tip of Washington State, so he got his supplies in batches from a distribution company. The truck usually came on Tuesdays and Fridays. He hadn’t seen one in a week.
The internet was out, so he had to phone in orders to the distributor’s Seattle office. That seemed to take forever; he really missed the internet. The Seattle office seemed really shorthanded. The people he normally dealt with weren’t at work. He was on hold a lot. Each day, the Seattle office told him, more and more frequently, that they couldn’t get various parts from their California suppliers. He would have to make do with what he had in stock.
With the internet out, how could he process credit card orders? That’s how most of his business was conducted. He could accept cash, but he paid his suppliers via credit that went through the internet. He couldn’t just hand his distributor a bag of cash once the parts came.
He started wondering if he and everyone else had to start paying for things in cash, would there be enough cash to do this? People didn’t carry too much cash around anymore. They paid big bills, like a new clutch or car battery, with a debit or credit card. He did the same, like the year’s worth of truck insurance he just paid for. So if everyone needed a lot more cash, where would it come from? The bank didn’t have much. They kept some in tills, but a few days ago people started coming in and trying to get their money out of the bank. Besides, the bank had closed yesterday with the national bank holiday. So people only had the cash they had on hand. For some people, that was maybe $100. How would anyone buy things?
Then there were the prices. Everything was going up. It seemed like a 10% increase just from the week before. Now that everything seemed to being coming apart, prices went crazy. It wasn’t “inflation” in the sense of “this costs a dollar more than last week”; it was “I hear they have these, but they’re $100 now.”
Steve would have to pass these increases on to his customers, which would be hard. The unemployment rate in Forks was…who knew? It was always high, but it recently seemed way higher than usual. Many people in town had government jobs of some kind, with the game department or the environmental agency. Some teachers had been laid off. Two of the police officers had been laid off, too. About the only government jobs that were untouched were at the government utility that supplied power and water in town.
But no one was going hungry. Almost everyone had deer meat in the freezer. Plenty of fish, too. If an older person didn’t have any, neighbors and relatives would probably share, like they always had. Lots of people had gardens and canned. The one grocery store in town was already getting low on things, but that wasn’t terribly unusual. Since it was an hour to the next town of any size, if a semi took an extra day to get there, people would notice it on the shelves.
Steve was most concerned about the older people on prescription medications. The little drug store in town, run by his neighbor, Jerry, the pharmacist, was running low. Jerry said that some people really needed particular medicines, and he was going to go into Port Angeles to get some.
Given all that was on TV about the looting in the cities, Steve was also worried about crime. There wasn’t any increase in crime in Forks; at least so far there hadn’t been. There never were enough police to do the job, even during normal times. People relied on each other. They knew everyone in town.
Some folks in town were concerned about the few Mexicans who lived in Forks. Not Steve. He knew them because they came into the parts store. They were mostly hard workers; family men. Just like Americans used to be.
Another reason Steve wasn’t worried about crime in Forks, population 3,000, was that everyone had guns, though no one was carrying them. On the news, they had pictures of people carrying guns at neighborhood checkpoints. There was none of that in Forks.
The power outages weren’t that big of a deal. They were inconvenient, but not the end of the world. They had a generator at the small hospital and the old folks’ home. The internet being down was hard on the businesses like Steve’s and a few white-collar businesses, like the accountant and real estate office that couldn’t do any work.
School was cancelled because everyone was glued to the TV, and parents wanted to be around their kids. Steve was glad school was cancelled. He liked having the kids home.
Steve was beginning to get concerned because the gas station hadn’t had a shipment in several days. He knew the underground tanks were big and could last for a while, but if he couldn’t get parts, he knew that fuel supplies would be scarce because they both got to Forks the same way: semis. He wondered how long this would go on before things got back to normal. Then again, he had known this was coming. A country boy can survive.
Chapter 73
This Ain’t Paddy Cakes Anymore
(May 7)
Tom Foster’s home was near the historic district of downtown Olympia, within walking distance from the WAB offices. His family had been shut in their house for two days as the protests raged. They were nothing like the usual little protests they saw in the state capitol. These were more like mobs. It reminded him of the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999, but worse. Riot police, the smell of tear gas, broken glass everywhere, constant sirens. He’d been awake for most of those two days. He’d doze off for a few minutes and then wake up when he heard more sirens or yelling. He was starting to lose his grip on reality. He couldn’t tell what was real and what might be a dream from when he dozed off.
His family was handling it well. His wife, Joyce, was scared, but not saying so. Even before all of this, she had been afraid that some loony leftist would attack her husband. They got death threats every so often.
Tom’s son, Derek, was fifteen years old. He was a good kid, and looked exactly like his dad. Derek was looking forward to defending his house against the people who seemed to hate his dad. He had even started carrying a bat around lately and would love to use it.
Tom had his gun; a 9mm Sig Sauer handgun. He was so glad he’d gotten that. It seemed crazy at the time, but now he understood why he needed it. He could not have slept at all if he hadn’t had it.
They had enough food for a few days. They basically watched the place to see if anyone tried to break in. It wasn’t random crime they were afraid of, although that was a concern. They were afraid that someone in the crowd of angry leftists would realize that evil Tom Foster of the Washington Association of Business “hate group,” a group representing small businesses, was sitting right there. Mobs of union thugs had been “visiting” the homes of people they didn’t like. Tom had not heard of any mobs attacking the families, but there wasn’t a lot of specific news anymore. The news focused only on giant events like the Olympia protests and looting in Seattle. The national news constantly reported on the terrorists’ strikes, the regional power outages, and the Southern and mountain West states “opting out” of the federal government. Besides, even if the media found out that homes of “right wingers” had been attacked by the mobs, they probably wouldn’t report it. It didn’t fit into the media’s general theme of “concerned public employees and vulnerable citizens expressing their anger at budget cuts.”