Even if all the WAB people weren’t wanted by the government, crime was another reason to get out of Olympia. Dennis told them about the crime after returning from his trips into Olympia distributing the Rebel Radio CDs. It was totally out of control. Almost all citizens in Olympia were disarmed. They were mostly government employees—well, former employees now that the government officially ran out of money—and a surprising number of them didn’t have guns to start with. Most of those who did have them dutifully turned them in when they were ordered to. And, for some unexplainable reason, crime started going through the roof.
There was food in Olympia. The government semis regularly rolled into the city and the TV news would show dozens of trucks waiting to be unloaded. Feeding the state capitol was a priority for the government. They wanted to take care of “their people.” The government people had plenty of money on their FCards. After all, they were the ones deciding who got how much on their cards.
The people in Olympia thought they were the lucky ones. They had plenty of food and other supplies. Most had “jobs,” like working for the FC. They weren’t their old jobs where they got paid with money, but they got their FCards filled with credits and they had things to buy with them. They were happy. Some of them got “fringe benefits” from their jobs. That was the term that emerged for bribes. An FC member might get five gallons of fuel for “accidentally” not finding a person he or she was supposed to pick up. Fringe benefits were a significant source of spending money. They always were in every corrupt society. Now America had become one, too.
In contrast to the corruption and crime of Olympia, Tom’s family and the other WAB staff’s families were safe at the Prosser Farm. They had plenty to eat. In fact, they had surpluses. But, there were lifestyle adjustments that the WAB city people had to make, like getting up at the crack of dawn and wearing clothes they thought looked a little out of date. However, the clothes were functional and, besides, they weren’t going out for a night on the town. It didn’t take long for the farm clothes to feel normal.
The WAB kids were getting along very well. They thought the farm was some kind of vacation camp. They were learning all kinds of new things, like how to milk a cow. They got to run around and play without supervision. They liked playing on their own much better than having rigid schedules for soccer and ballet practices. They were playing like kids used to play before everything got suburbanized and over-scheduled.
Things weren’t perfect out there, though. Brian’s wife, Karen, did not love the farm; she was merely tolerating it. She was a good sport about it and tried not to let it show, but it was just so foreign to her. She worried about her home back in Olympia. Did those people who were trying to arrest her husband know where their Olympia house was, and were they trying to destroy it? But most of all, Karen worried about the kids. Sure, they were reasonably safe out there, but they weren’t in school and their academic progress would suffer. It was summer now, and they couldn’t be in school then anyway, but what about the fall? She didn’t want them to be behind when school started back up in a few months.
Karen believed school would start up in the fall after this “temporary” little crisis. She firmly believed things would be back to normal. She was having a hard time even believing any of this was really happening. Sometimes she wondered if everyone wasn’t overreacting. She had never been very interested in politics. Maybe her husband and the WAB people were just hiding out for no reason. It just didn’t seem logical that government people would hate them so much that they would hurt them. That just didn’t make any sense. Why would people do that? She’d never seen it or even heard of violence like that. This must be a big overreaction.
Another thing that wasn’t perfect was the lack of normal services, like medical care. Tom realized that a simple accident out there could be fatal. There was no ambulance to call. Even if it was only a simple cut, there were no antibiotics available. They were working all the time with tools and sharp things and they didn’t really know how to use them. That’s what scared Tom the most.
Tom missed beer. He loved microbrews and, before the Collapse, had a beer or two every night. There was no beer out there. There was some God-awful Budweiser available, but he couldn’t drink that. He really, really missed beer. He realized that he was actually missing the “normal” times when he could drink a beer at his house without people trying to kill him. That’s truly what he missed, but he focused on the beer. If he only had his beer, everything would be OK again.
The farms around the Prosser property were all along Delphi Road. It connected to Highway 101, the main highway into Olympia, which was about ten miles away. There were probably a hundred farms or houses along Delphi. The families got together at the old Delphi schoolhouse and decided to post guards at the exit from Highway 101 onto Delphi Road. That way, they could protect all of them with just one guard station. It was a pretty beefy guard station. They averaged about ten men and women on a shift. There were quite a few ARs and some AKs and lots of ammo, too. Those ole’ boys (and girls) had plenty of firepower.
The Delphi area residents formed a “bubba guard,” which was a neighborhood guard station. Since gas was so hard to come by, Delphi guards couldn’t just drive to the roadblock for an eight-hour shift and then drive back, so they decided on seven-day shifts with guards staying at the station, which eliminated the need for daily commutes to the guard station.
Each day for a guard was an eight-hour primary shift spent actively scanning for threats, which became mentally exhausting. So, the next eight hours was a secondary shift. The guards were still there and remained armed, but they were relaxing a little. They were in reserve if an attack started. They also helped with food preparation and other tasks. The third eight-hour shift was for sleeping. They had several donated RVs that served as the sleep quarters at the guard station. They had “hot bunks” which were beds that someone was sleeping in at any given time. The beds stayed warm from constant use.
Some of the area residents volunteered to feed the guards. (Other residents kept all the food to themselves, which caused them to be outcasts.) An unforeseen benefit from having people from the neighboring area spending seven days together is that people who had never spoken got to know each other. Community was starting from the ground up.
The Delphi Road bubba guard worked pretty well. There were three drunken hillbillies from one family who were quickly kicked off guard duty. Other than that, the guards got along very well. It felt like a small farming town out there, like it had been 100 years ago.
Tom grew to like guard duty. He didn’t at first; he had never been a “gun guy,” so he didn’t want to look stupid around all these country people who knew guns. He brought his Sig 9mm pistol and was loaned an AK-47 for when he was on primary duty. Some farm kid in his twenties named Justin showed him how to use the AK.
Tom had the operation of the AK down in about thirty seconds. Those things were designed to hand to anyone, even illiterate tribesmen in any part of the world, and have them know how to use them very quickly. He was much less nervous about looking like a “city boy” now that he was smoothly operating an AK-47. He slung it over his shoulder like a pro. Actually, he was just doing what he’d seen in the movies, which worked just fine.