Eric also admitted to a crime that Grant was silently cheering about. He had killed Bart Sellarman, the corrupt real estate licensing board monster that terrorized Ed Oleo in one of Grant’s and Eric’s cases back at WAB. The killing was a gruesome carwash slaying. Grant was ready to buy Eric a steak dinner for that one. Then Grant realized that this kind of vengeance was exactly what Grant was supposed to prevent, but Grant could smile. And the way Eric killed Sellarman. It was pure genius. Grant wished he could have seen that. Grant would never go into a carwash again.
The final thing Eric did was attempt to infiltrate the Red Brigade. Grant was fine with that because the Red Brigade were communist terrorists who thought the FUSA wasn’t socialist enough. But it was how Eric did it.
Right before the Collapse, Eric found out that the local leader of the various left-wing causes was a student named Maddy Popovich. She went to the left-wing nut job college in Olympia, the Evergreen State College. Eric started following her around. He even enrolled at Evergreen. He was determined to get her.
Eric found out Maddy had a roommate, a young woman named Michele Tarrant. Eric found out where Michele hung out and got to know her. Pretty soon, Eric was sleeping with her. She introduced Eric to Maddy and he got to know both of them.
Eric said he suspected, but admitted during interrogations that he could never prove, that Maddy was the leader of the local Red Brigade. Michele was not involved. She hated politics, as a matter of fact.
One night, in Michele’s bedroom, Eric slit Michele’s throat. He admitted in the report that he really enjoyed it. He went into Maddy’s room and did the same thing. He really loved that, too, he admitted.
It turns out that Maddy was a left-wing lunatic but not a Red Brigade member. When the interrogators proved to Eric that she was not a Red Brigade member, he shrugged to the interrogator and said, the report stated, “Whatever. A dead hippie. I did everyone a favor.” Eric fully expected to get a medal from the Patriots for slitting the throats of two innocent women.
That wasn’t going to happen, Grant decided.
Grant hated to see what had happened to Eric. For whatever reason, Eric had decided that the Collapse gave him a license to kill people he hated—some of whom he didn’t even know. The reports told of his confession about a “good Eric” and an “angry Eric,” his dual personality, showing he was obviously mentally ill. The people who were killed by the angry version of Eric were not Lima military or police or FCorps. They just had a bumper sticker of a politician he hated, or he suspected they were terrorists. Hating and then killing people based on their politics or suspecting, but not verifying, they were terrorists was what the Limas did. But so did Eric. In a sense, he became a Lima.
The bottom line was that Eric had admitted to killing innocent people. Sellarman had it coming, but the drivers with liberal stickers didn’t. Maddy didn’t, and Michele Tarrant certainly didn’t.
Eric, a so-called Patriot, had been the one who killed innocent people instead of the Limas, who were usually the ones who did. Eric needed to hang just like the Limas who did that. He would. The box “Deny Pardon” was checked and initialed on Eric’s report. Grant hated to see that because he knew Eric. Grant wondered if he had spent more time with Eric whether he wouldn’t have turned out that way. No, Grant told himself, Eric had some hatred of a certain kind of people and when society broke down Eric decided this was his chance to go out and kill people. Eric was just as guilty as the Limas, and in some ways, more guilty. As a person with at least some Patriot beliefs, Eric should have known better. Now he was going to die.
Grant realized the political importance of hanging Eric. The population had to see the Patriots would not tolerate atrocities from their own side. The law applied equally. No matter if the guy you used to work with at WAB was the chair of ReconComm or not. The guilty hanged. Period.
Then Grant got a brilliant idea. Evil, but brilliant.
Chapter 326
Leaving Seattle
Prof. Carol Matson was living her merry little socialist life in Seattle… for a while. A few days after New Year’s Day, she noticed more and more harsh measures by the government. She also noticed the gangs seemed to be out more. Things were getting scarce again in the stores. But luckily, there were laws against hoarding, so Carol was confident that people wouldn’t be hogging things up for themselves. That’s what set Seattle apart from the barbarians in “New Washington”: people in Seattle cared about others, not just themselves.
Then she got a knock at her door one night. She answered the door, which was dangerous with all the crime. But she could see through the peephole that the men at her door had yellow FCorps helmets. Whew. They were safe to let in, so she did.
Once the three FCorps men were in her house, one of them asked, “Are you Carol Matson?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is your brother Grant Matson?” he asked.
Carol felt all the blood drain out of her face. Oh no. They were after her because of him. “Yes,” she said, meekly.
“You need to come with us,” he said, as the other two grabbed her by each arm. They were hurting her arms and were yelling at her. She hadn’t even done anything wrong. Having a stupid hillbilly brother wasn’t a crime. Was it?
They took her to a prison, an awful, dark, overcrowded, filthy place. She found out that she was being held because her brother was the head of the New Washington “Reconciliation Commission.” He therefore had the power of life and death over many important government officials who had been trapped in New Washington.
“We are proposing a trade,” her interrogator told her. “You for him.”
Carol wanted to get out of that awful place. She didn’t want the authorities to get her brother, though. But she realized that she had no power over the situation. Either she would be traded for him or not. It wasn’t her decision.
Then Carol started to think about how awful it would be even if she were released. Everyone would know that her brother was some high-ranking teabagger. She could never show her face again.
After days and days of waiting, word came back that there would be a trade. Of sorts. She was released and allowed to go to Olympia.
When she got there, Grant was waiting.
“Welcome home, sister,” Grant said as he hugged her. She hugged him, too. He looked different and she almost didn’t recognize him. He was thinner, had a beard, and had a gun. Everyone around him had guns. Didn’t they know that guns were illegal? And could get them sent to prison forever? Then she would remember she was no longer in Seattle.
Olympia, now under Patriot control, was fundamentally different than Seattle. Carol marveled at how there were no lines for things. In Seattle, she stood in line at every store and paid for things with an FCard. In Olympia, there were small businesses springing up. People paid with New Dollars, which was the currency of the southern and western states, and with some weird local currencies. They still bartered, but it was weird for Carol to watch people buy things with cash. It was all cards in Seattle.
Being in a Patriot city was very strange for Carol. She was in teabagger central. She expected to see Klansmen running around hanging blacks. That’s what she had been led to believe. She actually expected to see that.
After the initial shock of not seeing Klansmen, Carol’s next emotion was extreme indecisiveness. On one hand, she still feared the Klansman that she expected to see in that teabagger town. On the other hand, she was thankful for being out of jail and out of Seattle, which, she now had to admit, was crumbling. She could see with her own eyes, from the conditions in New Washington, that things were much better here.