“No,” Brad said. “Please don’t get out until we tell you to. Ever.” He seemed very stern and serious.
Brian nodded. Of course. He’d never had a personal security detail before. He didn’t know how it worked.
Brian noticed that one of the pick-ups was maneuvering to the left of the Suburban and another was on the right. The third one was behind the Suburban and the Hummer was in front. They started to move.
The trucks stayed alongside the Suburban until they got to the on ramp to Highway 101, which was only wide enough for one vehicle to safely travel. There, they peeled off and went to the rear. The Suburban accelerated with the Hummer in front setting the pace. When they got onto the highway, the left and right pick-ups zoomed past them and resumed their positions on both sides of the Suburban. Brian felt very safe.
There were no other vehicles on the road. The lights were off in most homes and businesses. The power was on, and some homes and businesses had their lights on, but most were dark. They were probably hiding out and trying not to draw attention from the bands of Limas and Patriots roaming the streets. Not to mention the gangs. They could be out in full force, Brian thought. What he didn’t know was that now the gangs were hiding. Last he knew, when he was still in Olympia, was that they were tough guys out strutting around and terrorizing unarmed citizens. There had been nothing for them to hide from. But now they were being hunted down and killed one by one by Patriots. They weren’t so tough anymore and weren’t showing themselves.
“Okay, Governor,” Tom said, getting into his new role as Chief of Staff, “What’s your first message when we get to your new offices?”
“I thank everyone for making this possible,” Ben said. “The EPU, the troops, the civilians. I let everyone know that I’m only the Interim Governor, that fair elections are our first priority once order is restored.”
“Excellent,” Tom said. They had worked together for so long it was easy for them to go over things like this.
“Brad, correct me if I’m wrong,” Ben said, “but we still don’t have Seattle and the surrounding metropolitan areas, right?”
“Correct, Governor,” Brad said, without taking his eyes off the road. “We have Olympia, all of rural Washington, and all of Eastern Washington. Seattle is a little patch of enemy territory. Once you get settled, one of your first meetings will be with your Commandant of the State Guard to get a briefing on the military situation. You are the commander in chief of the State Guard.”
Ben let that sink in. “Who, by the way, is my Commandant?” Ben asked.
Brad told him the name of someone Ben had never heard of.
“Oh, okay,” Ben said. “I guess he’s doing a good job since we’re going to Olympia.” It seemed odd to him that someone as important as his Commandant would be a stranger, but then Ben realized he wasn’t really in charge of the state. He had been picked to be the interim Governor but couldn’t leave the Prosser Farm. He trusted that the Patriots, probably the Think Farm, would be picking good people. Ben, while he was a leader, was not a control freak. That being said, he was still a little surprised that he didn’t know his Commandant. But they were putting the state back together on the fly, so he expected lots of seat-of-the-pants governing in the beginning.
The trip in to the capitol area went remarkably fast because they were speeding. The pick-ups on the sides were doing a great job keeping the Suburban perfectly shielded from attack although, with the highway empty, it wasn’t hard to keep pace like that. There were no cars to get in the way.
“Boom! Boom! Crack! Crack!” A line of red tracers went up from their right and over into some buildings ahead of them.
“Blue!” Brad yelled into the radio. They sped up. Everyone in the Suburban was scared, except Brad and Jerry.
“Yellow two,” a voice said on the radio. Brad relaxed.
“That was nothing,” Brad reported to the protectees. “Just some fighting, not aimed at us.”
In a minute or two, they were off the highway and onto the exit. They took the exit fast and raced through the red light at the intersection, knowing that being off the highway was a dangerous time because they would be moving more slowly and exposed to numerous buildings that made excellent cover for an ambush.
The street took them past the brewery which was blocked off.
“There’s your military headquarters,” Brad said to Ben, pointing to the brewery. There were vehicles and soldiers everywhere around it.
“We’re going there?” Ben asked. “To have me, you know, talk to the troops?” Ben was still trying to feel comfortable in his new role as commander in chief.
“No, Governor,” Brad said. “We want to keep your arrival under wraps for a while. We have this all planned out. We’ll get you in front of the troops, soon and often.” Brad’s protectees were usually elected officials. He learned early on that politicians like them loved to talk to crowds, even when it was dangerous. It made his job of protecting them harder, but it was part of the deal.
They went on the side streets around the brewery and down towards the capitol. The lead driver gave the passwords at the military checkpoints and they went right through. It was extremely well planned and orchestrated.
The rain had stopped but everything was still wet. There were burned out pick-ups and a few military vehicles. There were boarded up buildings, covered in graffiti, surrounded by trash and debris. They hadn’t been in Olympia for months. They had no idea how bad it had become.
“We’re cleaning up this garbage, right?” Ben asked. “Can we get some Loyalist prisoners to do that?”
“Look at you, Governor,” Tom said with a smile. “You’re governing.”
It hit all of them. They really were governing now, after all the bitching they’d done about the former government. Now it was up to them to get things done, to fix things. They finally got what they wanted: a chance to do things their way, the constitutional way. But now, any failures were on them. They couldn’t blame the “powers that be” any longer. That was them now.
They had inherited problems almost too vast to imagine. It was a civil war, although they never used that term because it didn’t fit very well. A “civil war,” everyone thought, harkening back to history, was a large army of blue and gray troops fighting big battles. This wasn’t that. It was a breakdown with one side trying to hold onto power and another side trying to clean things up. There weren’t large battles. Instead, it only took a slight nudge to topple a broken and battered government that could barely stand up. To call it a “civil war” was an exaggeration.
They also inherited a complete breakdown of the economy. Economy? What economy? Gangs stealing everything in sight wasn’t an “economy.” Handing out FCards, usually based on political loyalty, wasn’t an “economy.” Commandeering truckloads of food wasn’t an “economy.” The closest thing to an “economy” was people doing little tiny odd jobs to get paid in food or gasoline or ammunition.
But that would be the basis for restoring the economy. People, at least some of them, would still work. They would still trade things. That was how the American economy recovered after the devastating Revolutionary War. It would be the basis now for a complete rebuild. No more government-controlled economy. No more crushing taxes and regulation. The briefing binders in the Suburban were full of ways to make sure the government didn’t resume its old ways of taxing and controlling. And destroying.
“Winter kill-off,” Brian said looking at all the garbage, burned-out vehicles, and boarded up buildings. “You know, like a field at the end of winter. Everything, including the weeds, is killed off, which makes it possible to plant seeds that will grow in the spring and summer. It still takes constant work, making sure the weeds don’t come back, but you start with a clean slate.”